Cheers, Mate

Canvas the Joint
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I’m going to London in nine days, and given that circumstance, I decide that I desperately need new vacation-style walking shoes to transverse those dirty city streets. That I transverse the dirty city streets of New York every single day of my life in all manner of shoe — inappropriate and not, painful and otherwise — seems somehow irrelevant to this situation. I become fixated. I set high retail expectations. These shoes must:

• Have real structure without being sneakers
  
• Be flat
  
• Assume some semblance of comfort
  
• Be slip-on, for airport security
  
• Be waterproofable, for the inevitable London weather
  
• Be cute, for my sanity
  

Fueling these criteria are a number of factors ranging from my general foibles to my shockingly flat feet. How flat? Let’s just say that you can’t get a needle between me and the floor. This has destroyed the continuity of many a glittering city night for me while I carry, change, and carry, change again from the subway, to the cab, to the party, and back. It’s really quite lame. But it’s what I deal with, and I want no such interruption on my vacation.

So I shop. I do so with the understanding that these criteria severely limit my choices, and that shoes fitting them often straddle the dress/casual line in totally horrifying ways. Yes, we’ve all seen those Mary Janes with the Goodyear soles. Mostly, though, my fantasy shoe is low, casual, and doesn’t instantly brand me as TOURIST in blaring letters. After all, our day trip is in Paris. I take the subway to 34th St. anyway, feeling hopeful.

Shopping at 34th St. on a sunny spring Saturday is a free-for-all, a bass-thumping, whining, messy smash-and-grab full of tourists and harried salespeople and tipped-over displays. The Aldo store swarms with women, half indecisive, half limping around on one stiletto heel or one platform boot.

Fitting my ironclad criteria in a roudabout sort of way are a pair of canvas slip-ons with a sweet little heart print on them. They are — I will concede — silly, and don’t quite spell understated European refinement, but something about them is appealing in a late-eighties-shopping-mall kind of way.

When I ask, the sales associate will simply not give me the other shoe to try on. In fact, he will not get me any shoes at all from the back room. He tells me to try on the display shoe, which is a full size off. (“Those shoes run really strange anyway,” he tells me.) If it fits, he’ll get me the mate and bring it behind the counter so I can buy the pair. I ask again, just to make sure that I have heard correctly, and I have: I am discouraged from trying on both shoes at the same time before purchase. I am pressed for time and because of it, this strikes me as something other than ludicrous. I listen to the guy. Even worse, I buy the shoes.

Is it any surprise at all then, that upon removing them from the box and sliding them on my feet, that they don’t fit? They are gigantic. Nothing, not even Dr. Scholl’s Massaging Gel Soles, will fix it.

I return them at another Aldo store downtown, away from the tourists, with my brain switched on. When I try on this time, I insist on putting both shoes on my feet at the same time. And the consolation prize isn’t a bad one. In the time since I bought the first pair, there’s a new shipment of canvas shoes. They are not quite refined or stylish, but they’re comfortable and whimsical. I buy them, along with an $8 can of waterproofing spray. I am ready to globetrot. I will match the phone booths.