Read Online Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner - Free Book Online Page A

upcoming school year. Then wewent to Hengerer’s Department Store to buy back-to-school clothes and Mother’s winter outfits. On this occasion we dined in Hengerer’s tea room, where I ordered “the-cow-jumps-over-the-moon” from the children’s menu. This translated into a grilled cheese sandwich cut into eight parts, potato chips, and a tiny white pleated paper cup of cole slaw. The beverage was chocolate milk, which I assumed was the “over-the-moon” part of the meal.
    After lunch while our food was settling (digestion was a big issue in my family) we needed to do sedentary shopping, so we trekked up one flight to the shoe department. “Our” salesman was Mr. McTeer, and if perchance he was at lunch we patiently waited for him, relieved when he dashed off the escalator in his clan tie and rushed to our sides saying, “It wouldn’t be Labour Day weekend without the McClures, now, would it?” First we were x-rayed by standing erect and putting our feet under a large grey box that whirred and we could see our foot bones glow in green. (Mr. Wolfson, our scientist neighbour, said that he thought x-ray machines in shoe stores were bad for people and were actually giving us a bit of Hiroshima in every x-ray exposure; my father said that Mr.Wolfson didn’t even cut or weed his lawn and voted for Adlai Stevenson so he was hardly an authority.) Then our exoskeletons were measured with a black metal foot which marked length, and width was measured by a piece that extended out of the side of the metal foot like a slide rule fanning A, B, C, or, God forbid, D. Our arch height was never neglected and we placed our feet on a dark purple foot pad which gave a carbon imprint of our foot, leaving a white spot indicating our arch location and height. Armed with an exact size and arch angle, Mr. McTeer went straight to work. I assumed that behind his curtained stockroomHengerer’s had thousands if not millions of shoes in every size, width, and sundry arch angle and only Mr. McTeer could summarize this information and choose the right pair.
    For me we always bought Stride-Rite shoes, saddle shoes for school and Mary Janes for parties, and my mother bought pumps and clutch bags to match her new outfits. Mr. McTeer carefully held her new tweed under the light and then found the perfect matching shoe. Mother said it was crucial to get shoes to fit because she never returned an item to a store. She said doing so was a “shifty practice.”
    Mother had her hair done once a week with a “standing appointment” and then preserved the hairdo throughout the week with a stretchy band that expanded around her ears and tied with a grosgrain ribbon above her forehead, like the one Lucille Ball wore in I Love Lucy when she was cleaning the apartment. When she went out she protected her ‘do with a see-through plastic rain hat that folded into a comb-size case that went into a small compartment in her purse lining designed for just this purpose. When our robin’s-egg-blue Chevy Impala convertible top was down she wore a matching blue net hood that tied under the chin. She refused to take part in other activities that could ruffle her hair. By the time her next appointment rolled around, Mother’s hair would be flat on the sides and coming to a sprayed point on the top of her head. I never once saw Mother wash her own hair or attempt to manage it in any way. If she had an important meeting inconveniently placed between appointments, she called Mary, the hairdresser, for an emergency “comb-through.”
    She wore seamed stockings, which she donned by sitting on the bed and kicking her leg in the air like a Rockette so she couldsee in the mirror opposite whether her seam was straight. She never graced the outside world without being bound in a girdle and a “long-line bra” which reached from breast to waist and was held together by what seemed to be hundreds