Three shoe salesman incidents are seared on my brain, and unsurprisingly, two involve nudity. At 16, I needed a job to help finance a school trip to England. Why I thought, why anyone thought, I was qualified to sell ladies’ shoes is a mystery. I worked Thursday and Friday nights and all day Saturdays at the Foot Pad, a tiny shoe store plopped in the middle of a large department store. I remember the day I received a five cent raise to reach $1.95 per hour.
Incident One
I was working alone one afternoon, dusting the glass shelves which held only right-foot size sevens, listening to the canned mall-music. A raven-haired, 25-year-old braless beauty in a flowered print sleeveless shift stopped to browse, bending low to grab a shoe. I faked dusting as I eyed her with my superhuman peripheral vision, and was rewarded when her right breast popped completely out of her dress. I don’t know what it feels like to have breasts (an ignorance I intend to maintain), but I would think that one would be aware if one’s bare breast was set free. Wouldn’t its unrestricted weight be noticeable? Wouldn’t it feel cooler from exposure to the air? The woman seemed not to notice, and continued browsing. Obviously, I wasn’t going anywhere, and I openly stared at her, mouth gaping. She stood and faced me, handing me a shoe.
“Do you have this in a size six?”
I looked directly at her breast, a beacon to my desires. It was large, the largest I had seen as a teenager. Don’t judge me – remember, I was only 16 that day at the Foot Pad. I don’t know how much time passed, but the woman finally realized I had neither responded, nor looked at her face. She glanced down, discovered her exposure and immediately……did nothing. Not a shriek, not a coverup. She looked up, looked me right in the eye, and smiled. When my face had completed its conversion to firetruck red, she casually tucked in her breast. I went to the storeroom to find her size six and to recommence breathing.
Incident Two
Late one Friday night, a lumpy woman, continually fussing with a lock of hair which stubbornly fell across her face, rushed into the Foot Pad.
“Yes, can you help me, I have a formal dinner to go to tonight, I need black shoes, open toe, perhaps two straps, something like that,” she said in one long sentence. Before I could respond, she pulled a shoe off of the display and continued, “Oh, this one is nice, and I think it’s my size, let me slip it on, yes that’s good, can you get me the other one, I think I’ll take them.”
I went into the storeroom and found the box with the matching shoe covered in tissue paper. The woman handed me the shoe she had tried on and I placed it in the box with its match. As I rung up her purchase, she said, “Thank you so much, I’m in such a rush, I’ve never bought a pair of shoes so fast before, but I have to run home and get ready right now. I might just make it. Bye.”
I felt very good about myself, helping the woman prepare for her fancy night out. This feeling quickly dissipated the next day when she returned to the Foot Pad in a fury to show me that the shoe I retrieved from the storeroom was not in fact the match to the shoe she had grabbed from the shelf.
Incident Three
A 30ish woman in a short dress asked to try on a sandal. She sat down and waited for me to retrieve her size from the storeroom. I placed the shoebox on the carpet and knelt at her feet to help her try on the sandal. I buckled two straps for a comfortable fit, and without looking up said, “How does that feel?”
The woman did not immediately respond, so I raised my glance, only to see, to see…..uh-oh. While I had been fiddling with her sandal, the woman had spread her legs quite wide, and I assume she knew that she was as panty-less as Britney Spears exiting a sports car. What was she thinking, what was her plan? I wouldn’t say that I quickly glanced away, but to my credit I soon stood up and pretended that nothing was amiss. I can still see details of this woman’s dirty bits in my mind, but I can’t for the life of me remember if she bought anything that day.
What weird job have you had?