The Merchant of Venice Beach Read Online Free PDF

replied, “and a suede-soled shoe is lighter and easier to dance in for long periods of time.”
It took Suzanna a moment to let go of her character-shoes dream, but since her character-shoes dream was only about a week old, she found she could easily replace it with the new, more-dance-centric suede-sole dance-shoes dream. Because, make no mistake, she planned on dancing for long periods of time!
She asked the skeleton to show her some suede-soled dance shoes that would lend themselves to sensuous salsa.
“What color?”she asked.
Red? Too showy. White? Too virginal.
“Black!” Suzanna said.
“You don’t want black.”
Suzanna left Dante’s Dancewear a little more unsteady and a lot less sure of herself than when she had arrived, but she had to congratulate herself. She had bought her dance shoes.
They were beige.
Apparently, in the dance world one referred to shoes in the singular. You bought a “shoe” and somehow your other foot magically got shod. According to the skeleton, one did not want a shoe that stood out. One wanted a shoe that blended in. Suzanna argued that the whole point of dance lessons was that she was damn sick of fitting in. The skeleton replied that she wanted her form and her self to stand out, not her feet.
“Beige hides footwork mistakes,” she said.
So Suzanna bought beige.
Suzanna clicked off the alarm in her Smart Car and hid her clandestine purchase in what passed for a trunk in the vehicle that passed for a car. Suzanna wondered briefly if the hot dance instructor would be impressed with her wise choice of a beige shoe. She looked down at her iPhone calendar—she’d find out in less than four hours.
The rest of the afternoon passed by in a blur. The sink stopped up in the tea shop, and this filled Fernando with anxiety. Suzanna and Eric knew from experience that the best thing to do in situations like this was to distract Fernando and get him away from the problem before he decided to take matters into his own hands. He was inclined to do things like poke wooden spoons down the drain, trying, as he put it, to “shove the problem out.” After exchanging a knowing look with Eric, Suzanna sent Fernando to the computer to look up an exotic white tea she thought might be interesting for the shop. She then manned the book nook while Eric fixed the plumbing.
The sink took longer to fix than Suzanna had thought it would, and by the time Eric was washing up (and the water was happily splashing down the drain), Suzanna was desperately eyeing the wall clock in the bookstore. After all her careful planning, was she actually going to be late for her first lesson?
Fernando popped back into the tea shop kitchen to admire Eric’s handiwork, and Suzanna stuck her head in to say that she had closed up the bookstore and was heading out for the evening. She withdrew as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to have to lie to them.
“Where are you going?” Eric asked, before she could escape.
“Just out to . . .. buy some new bras.”
That shut Eric up, but Fernando’s ears perked up.
“Oh? I’ll go with you. That last bra you bought gave you uniboob. I’ll come as your consultant.”
“Thanks, Fernando,” Suzanna said. “But I’m meeting some of the girls.”
Suzanna saw them exchange a confused look. There were no “girls” . . . and the boys knew it.
Suzanna grabbed her keys and ran down the gravel path to her car. She felt terrible about lying, but they had driven her to it!
By the time she drove across town, Suzanna’s nerves over lying to the boys were replaced by nerves about walking into the dance studio for an actual lesson with her dream man. Clutching her beige shoes to her chest, Suzanna took a deep breath and pushed open the door. She had made up her mind.
There was no turning back.
She sat on a bench along the back wall and put on her dance shoes, sneaking a peek at the other feet in the room. She noted that a high number of the women were wearing black shoes. Suzanna felt