Page 84 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

It was an eight hour drive up and back to visit his mother
in the nursing home, yet Harry never stayed for more than 15
minutes. The two of them were never close, though he had
tried over the years to build some kind of rapport with her. He
fought the impulse now to let his own guilt alter the relation-
ship. This isn’t the time to look for where the feet grow, he told
himself. He looked at his watch. Time to go. He leaned over
and kissed her on the cheek.
“See you soon,” he yelled into her ear. She continued to
stare ahead. Harry walked down the hall, and out into the fresh
New Hampshire air.

4. Completion

Harry was never the type to finish things. Even when he
was young, he liked to start projects: hi-fi’s, model airplanes,
piano lessons. It made him jealous to think of all his friends
who were accomplished at what they did. Harry preferred to
take things apart, and at this he always seemed to excel. “Always
looking where the feet grow,” his mother would say, grabbing
the disassembled parts of his newest toy away from him.

At first, Harry didn’t know what the old Yiddish expression
meant, but gradually as he found himself turning objects over
to look at the underside, he began to understand its mean-
ing. As he grew older, he realized that because of his mother’s
maxim, he was among a minority of men who loved feet. As
a teenager, when he read in the Kinsey report that there were
actually men who kissed women’s toes, he knew he had discov-
ered the secret to the female psyche.

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