Beatle Boots

Beatle Boots

It was Saturday, our go to town day. Mama went into Anthony’s with a list: jeans and lace-up boots for my school age brothers, plaid shirts and socks for my father, white blouses and anklets for me, and new underwear for all six of us. She told me to take my youngest brother, then six, to the dime store. His birthday cash rattled in his pocket as we moseyed down the sidewalk. He said he wanted to buy a model airplane, his first. “I’m big enough now,” he said.

Chewning’s Shoe store was on the way, and Jimbo stopped to look at the treasure chest in the window. Mr. Chewning let kids pick a toy from the chest. Our parents usually shopped at a department store. Chewning’s was reserved for special occasions or baby shoes. My youngest brother was no longer a baby, but he eyed the toys just the same.

I caught my breath. In the corner, on the highest display, rested a pair of ankle boots, the same ones featured in Chewning’s ad in Sunday’s Roswell Daily Record. Nineteen ninety-five. Ladies sizes 5-12. They were just like the ones some of the girls on American Bandstand wore. A patchwork of multicolored suede: eggplant, olive, mustard, cranberry, and tiny squares of navy, all pieced together with zigzag stitching, finished with black leather laces and one inch stacked heels. Beatle boots.

The year was 1966, and I was in the sixth grade. Puberty had just struck, delivering incredible growth spurts, the appearance of pimples, a training bra and various other female paraphernalia. I went from fifty to eighty pounds in an instant, was nearly five feet tall, and ready, I thought, to move on to some footwear more adult than my twice-yearly, alternating between black-and-white or brown-and-white, or if one of my grandmothers took me to Chewning’s, the occasional Sunday-best black velvet pair of lace-up Oxfords.

At school I endured comments about my outdated shoes. Saddle Oxfords were heavy and had slick leather bottoms. They slowed me down on the track. I couldn’t run around the bases on the softball field without slipping before it was time to slide. The kids teased me every time I fell.

Mama said they were practical because I could wear them with both dresses and jeans. Grandma said tennis shoes were bad for my feet. What did I care about practical or healthy? All I wanted was to beat Betty in the 50 yard dash, and maybe, just maybe, get Billy, the new boy in our class to notice me.

Most of my girlfriends had big sisters or brothers who went to high school. They gottheir older siblings’ fashionable hand me downs. They wore Keds so stained that they coated them with liquid white shoe polish. White Keds went with everything, too, I told my mother. Why couldn’t I have some? When one of my friends started wearing a pair of lime green sneakers to school instead of black velvet oxfords, and Billy sat with her on the bus, I tried to hide my two-toned Oxfords under the seat.

Those suede boots would elevate my status. Nobody at East Grand Plains School had a pair, and I hadn’t seen any of the teenagers on the bus wearing them. The girls would be jealous, and maybe a boy would sit by me. No more saddle Oxfords. No more teasing.

I found last Easter’s black patent Mary Janes in the back of my closet. Too small. I tried on my cowboy boots. The smelled like barnyard. I dreamed about the Beatle boots and how I would look.

I started a full-court press, begging Mama and both my grandmothers. I had to have those boots. I cut out pictures from Seventeen magazines, scoured the Sears catalog, and emphatically told Mama that I was no longer going to wear ugly shoes. She told me to do my chores.

My aunt came to visit and gave me a pair of her old Keds. I was in heaven. I got out the white shoe polish. The sneakers were okay, but my toes got cold when I rode my bicycle and when I had to put the sheep in the barn after school. They would, though, be wonderful for basketball. I wouldn’t have to play in my socks. I polished the brown and white oxfords, put new laces in them, and wore them to school, carrying the Keds in my bag. I tried to ignore the teasing.

A few months later, I went into Chewning’s with my grandmother. Grandma had bunions. She tried on pair after pair of shoes before she found one that would fit. Then she asked Mr. Chewning to measure my feet. He kept a box of index cards on which he recorded each child’s shoe size and the date of purchase of every pair of shoes. “Six and a half,” he said, marking my card. “Ladies size.”

Grandma pursed her lips, reached into her purse, pulled out a square of newspaper, and handed it to him. As he unfolded it, I recognized the ad for the Beatle boots.

“They’re what all the girls like,” he said.

She looked down at my scuffed Oxfords.

Mr. Chewning disappeared behind the red brocade curtain into his library of shoes. I paced. It felt like forever before he returned with a box under his arm.

“Young lady, I have your size in that shoe. Would you care to use a stocking?”

My grandmother reached into her purse, this time withdrawing a pair of nylons. She rolled one and showed me how to put it on. I slipped my foot into the ladies size six-and-a- half patchwork suede lace-up Beatles boot with a one-inch heel. Laced up, I gazed in the mirror. What would the kids on the bus say tomorrow? I beamed.

“Well, I declare.”

“May I wear them home?”

“Yes, but don’t wear them to the barn.”