The Spiked Heel

“There was no need for the hose,” Griff repeated dully.

“Come on,” McQuade said, “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

McQuade was smiling, and Griff told himself he could not kick someone in the teeth while he was smiling.

“All right,” he said, and abruptly his trembling stopped.

He went downstairs with McQuade, but he was troubled.

Maria Theresa Diaz worked in the Packing Department. Her job was to take the finished shoes, insert sticks into them to preserve their shape, put them into a Julien Kahn box together with tissue paper, and then close the box and put it onto a rack with other similar boxes, a rack which would then be wheeled by a runner to the chute leading down to the Stock Room below. Maria was a good girl, and she averaged something like forty-five dollars a week before taxes. She knew that Julien Kahn shoes were very very expensive. She knew she could never hope to afford a pair, and in her shyness, and because she did not speak English very well, she had never applied for the discount available on a damaged pair of shoes.

She had often dreamed of dancing in Julian Kahn pumps. The red ones were especially pretty, and once she had tried on a pair and her feet had felt very good in them, and she had lifted the hem of her working smock and looked at her legs, and even her legs had seemed fuller and more feminine in them. She had taken the shoes off hastily before the foreman saw her, but she had never forgotten how they’d looked.

She had been packing “Flare” all morning. She had grown used to the feel of the Swisscraft straw under her fingers, had grown used to the bright gay scarlet of the shoe. Her fingers had itched with the desire to try on a pair. All day long, she had packed the shoes, putting them on the rack, waiting for the runner to wheel the rack away, and then beginning on a new empty rack. A half-full rack stood alongside her bench now. She could see the boxes, row upon row, standing on the shelves of the rack. She could plainly see the one marked 7A. She wanted desperately to pull that box from the rack and try the shoes on. Her chance came sooner than she had hoped for.

There had been some sort of commotion up on the eighth floor, and now everyone was talking about it, something about a fire hose being turned onto two of the workers, and some talk about calling in the Union, talk like that, but everyone was saying it, so it must have been true. Mr. Gardiner, her immediate superior, was all excited about it. He was a shop steward, and he did not like Management to treat Labor this way, and he was sore anyway about this cut in overtime, and he went storming off the floor, and it took her several moments to realize he was gone.

The girl next to her was busy at the stamping machine, putting the sizes and all those other numbers on the boxes. Maria looked at her quickly, and then turned to see if any of the runners were in sight. Hastily, she pulled the 7A box from the rack and opened the lid. She slipped off her own shoes, a pair of house slippers which she wore at the factory because she had to stand all day. She did not know where to put her own shoes. She certainly didn’t want to leave them on the floor where they could be seen. Quickly, she took the red Swisscraft straw pumps from the box and slipped her house slippers into the tissue paper in their place. She put on the red shoes, and then she lifted her skirt and looked at her legs and her feet, and she felt this great expansion inside her breast, this femaleness that suddenly spread within her like a warm draught of wine.

“…not going to get away with this, you can bet on that!” the voice said, and she looked up quickly and saw Mr. Gardiner was back on the floor and walking toward her. She reached down to take off the pumps, but then she realized Mr. Gardiner would surely see her, and she didn’t know what to do for a moment. She stood petrified, and then she reached for the lid of the box putting it on quickly, hiding the telltale house slippers from sight, hoping Mr. Gardiner would not look at her feet. Mr. Gardiner walked over to her.

“Come on, Maria,” he said testily, “what are you standing around like a nincompoop for?”

She hesitated for a moment, her lip trembling.

“Come on, come on, let’s go,” Mr. Gardiner said, and Maria reached for the box with her house slippers in it and hastily put it back on the rack. She intended taking it off the rack again the first chance she got, but Mr. Gardiner did not move away.

“A fire hose!” he kept saying, over and over again. “They’re not going to get away with that one, not by a long shot.” Maria kept packing shoes and putting them onto the rack. When the rack was full, a runner came for it, and she watched him from the corner of her eye as he wheeled the shoes to the chute and sent them downstairs. Mr. Gardiner walked away then, going over to talk to the foreman.