SPUR

“I’ve got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle...”

That was the only line she knew, so she assumed spurs were like charm bracelets. She watched her mother stand in front of her dresser and lift the top of her satin jewelry box. First were earrings, giant beaded clip-ons, then one of her watches and finally her spurs. Her mother would lift her hands in the air as if donning surgical gloves, shaking them so her spurs slid down her arm. Like loose coins, like an ornament falling from the tree, they’d delicately jingle, steely jangle then the grace of jingle again. She’d find her mother’s spurs on the kitchen table in the morning. She’d slide them on, surprised at their weight, and fan out her fingers so the spurs wouldn’t drop to the floor.

When her mother realized her ignorance, she told her about bracelets. “Spurs”, she said as she pulled out a chair and lit a cigarette, “go on your shoes.” She left her mother in the kitchen and snuck upstairs to examine her father’s shoes. She thought of the way he rolled change in his pocket, a habit proving he liked things that jangle. Surely, she thought, her father would have spurs. She inspected his soles but found them free of noise, his steps were bags of potatoes not sleigh bells, not spurs.

She stayed up late to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and Sammy Davis Jr. His were the only shoes she knew that made noise. The next day, she went out to the garage to her father’s toolbox. She opened the lid and a shelf unfolded to reveal a cardboard box with thumbtacks. She arranged some on the garage floor in a pattern the size of her feet and carefully stood on them all at once. She worried the spikes might sink through and prick her toes, like an Indian lying on a bed of nails. When she felt them sink into her rubber soles without reaching her, she rocked back and forth.

She started to walk, slowly at first, like she was wading through water. The tackheads made an awkward clack, clack, clack. Soon she began to shuffle her feet, scatter them over the ground like jacks, like there was music. Her spurs began singing a song about her legs. They twittered. writing notes in chalk on a blackboard. Click, click, click.

She would put spurs on all her shoes. She took out an old class poster she’d made (Birds of Florida) and laid it face down on the floor. Using her shoes as guides, she outlined each foot and marked where to set tacks. The heads would rest on the ground with the sharp points sticking in the air like umbrellas abandoned in the street. Maybe there was a secret pattern to spurs, an ancient way of arranging tacks which enhanced the effect. There would be a chart in National Geographic next to pictures of primitive shoes. Maybe an article, under S for Spurs, in her World Books. Here is how Aztecs made Spurs.

She walked out of the garage to the kitchen where her mother was still sitting at the table, coffee cold and her third cigarette. She tried shuffling silently across the floor, hoping her Spurs wouldn’t mark the linoleum. She wanted her Spurs all to herself, at least now, until she was confident their power was real. Her mother watched and squinted slightly as if trying to hear a telephone far away.

“Why are you walking like that?” she asked. Her eyes scanned her daughter’s body until they rested on her small shoes. She froze in front of her mother, feet flat on the floor, the thumbtacks mute as snails under a rock. She forced the soles of her feet to press them against her body like keys in her pocket.

“I’m doing something.”

Her mother seemed ready to doubt her answer, raising her eyebrows as her cigarette smoke snuck around looking for the truth. Finally resigned to the statement (she was, after all, doing something) she smiled slightly and cut off her questions like stray limbs off a tree. This is going nowhere, she decided, and ended the wandering with a swift clip.

“Can you love anything?” her daughter suddenly asked. She loved Spurs. She loved the way they jingled, jangled, jingled. She wanted Spurs all the time. She wanted to pretend to listen while she shook her Spurs in her pocket.

Her mother paused like a gypsy reading a crystal ball, her young daughter stiffly waiting for an answer. She had stopped reading this girl’s mind but even in the face of questions about Love, she felt she was still hers. Always, that’s what Love felt like. You could lock the door and take the key where you wanted, feel it pressing into your skin while waiting in line at the bank, in a store, smiling and nodding to people passing by. Love is a door to a house.

“I suppose.” she finally replied, still unsure of what they were talking about. “After all, I love you”, she said before rolling her eyes. “Come here.” As her daughter walked over to her waiting arms, to wrap her and take her back, she could hear the faint clicking of the clock on the stove.

1:46:49 PM    sro home /