On my mother’s seventy-fourth birthday, in the $480 balcony seats I’d saved for since April, a stranger in the row behind us propped one naked heel beside my elbow and told me, “Use the other one, sweetheart, and quit bothering me.” I didn’t call the usher. I waited for intermission, and by then the balcony was staring at him.
Mom had wanted to see this musical since 1991, when she gave her own ticket away so I could go on a school trip instead.
So this was supposed to be her night.
Twenty minutes into the first act, something damp touched the back of my arm.
I turned my head.
A heel. Five toes. Resting on the velvet between me and Mom like it had paid for the spot.
The balcony at the Lyric is steep, so the row behind practically sits in your hair.
The smell came next. Old gym bag and corn chips.
I twisted in my seat. He was maybe forty-six, a tan quarter-zip, a gold watch, his loafers lying on their sides under my chair.
A woman next to him was scrolling her phone with the brightness all the way up.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Your foot’s on my seat.”
He took one earbud out. Earbuds. At a musical.
“It’s on the armrest,” he said. “Not the seat.”
“It’s my armrest.”
“It’s a shared armrest. Check your ticket.”
Mom put her hand on my knee. That hand meant let it go, Ilana. Forty-seven years of that hand.
“Could you please put your shoe back on?”
He smiled at me the way some men smile at a waitress who brought the wrong order.
“My feet swell on these long shows. Doctor’s orders.” He nodded past me. “You’ve got a whole armrest on that side. Use the other one, sweetheart, and quit bothering me.”
The woman with the phone laughed through her nose.
He put the earbud back in. Then he spread his toes, slow, so I’d be sure to see it.
I faced the stage.
I pulled my arm into my lap.
Mom leaned over. “Honey. It’s fine.”
It was not fine. Her elbow was two inches from it.
During the big number right before the end of act one, the whole row leaned forward and his heel slid off the armrest and landed on Mom’s shoulder.
She flinched.
On her birthday, my mother flinched.
I twisted back a second time.
“Get your FOOT off my mother.”
“Jesus, lady.” He pulled it back, barely. “It’s a foot. It’s not like I stuck it in her popcorn.”
An older man on the far side of the aisle, in a brown cardigan, said, “That’s revolting, pal.”
“Everybody calm down,” he said. “It’s a show, not church.”
That was when I quit talking to him.
“Fine,” I said. I said it the way Mom says it.
He leaned back, very pleased with himself.
By the second ballad his head was tipped against the wall and his mouth was hanging open.
The foot came back up. It stayed there, a hand’s width off my sleeve, sockless and twitching.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I opened my purse.
I keep everything in that purse. Bandages, a sewing kit, three kinds of mints, a receipt for a 2019 oil change I have never once needed.
I leaned toward Mom.
“If he stirs, keep him talking. Ask him anything.”
“Ilana Ferris. What are you doing?”
I told her, very low, right into her good ear.
She just looked at me. Then she pressed her program over her mouth and her shoulders started to shake.
“I raised a monster,” she said. “Happy birthday to me.”
It took me under a minute.
He never stirred. His girlfriend never looked up from her phone.
After that I folded my hands and sat through the rest of act one like a perfect angel.
The curtain came down. The house lights came up.
He woke with a snort, stretched, slapped both thighs and got up to find a drink. He didn’t bother with the loafers.
He got four steps up the aisle.
A woman on the end in a red scarf glanced at him, glanced again, and grabbed her husband’s arm.
A teenager two rows up started laughing so hard he had to sit back down.
Then the people behind HIM turned around.
Somebody held up a phone.
The usher at the top of the stairs, a skinny kid with a flashlight, stopped and put his whole hand over his mouth.
The man stopped too. “What?”
Nobody said anything.
His eyes went to his own foot.
The color started at his collar and climbed all the way to his hairline.
His girlfriend said, “Oh my God. Manoj.”
He spun around on the steps and found me in the crowd.
“YOU,” he said. “WHAT DID YOU PUT ON ME?”
The loafers
Lipstick, mostly.
All five of his toenails were red. Mom’s red. Cherries in the Snow, the tube she bought at the Walgreens on Tuesday and handed me in the car because she doesn’t carry a purse anymore. I’d put it on thick, the way you’d paint a fence.
And stuck to the bottom of his heel with two of my bandages, crossed in an X, was the 2019 oil change receipt. On the back, in the same lipstick, in letters as big as the paper would hold, I’d written DOCTOR’S ORDERS.
When he climbed those steps, his heel had been showing it to the whole back half of the balcony.
Now he hiked his foot up behind him to read it, hopping on the other one, and that was worse, because the people below could read it too.
The teenager two rows up said, “Doctor’s orders,” out loud, and his whole row lost it.
I bent down and picked the loafers up off the floor under my chair. I don’t know why. They were still warm. I set them in my lap and held on to them like they were mine.
“Give me those,” Manoj said.
I didn’t.
The man in the brown cardigan started clapping, slow, by himself, and quit when nobody joined in.
Manoj came back down the steps on the side of his foot, trying to keep the receipt off the carpet, and stood over our row. His girlfriend was half out of her seat with her phone against her chest.
“I want a manager,” he said. “I want her name, I want her seat number, and I want her out of this building.”
The usher was already coming down with his flashlight. Behind him came a woman in a black blazer with a radio on her hip and a face like she’d already had a night.
She looked at his foot. She looked at the shoes in my lap.
“Ma’am,” she said to me. “Bring those. And bring your mother.”
The 1991 cassette
You have to understand what those seats cost, and I don’t mean the $480.
In 1991 the touring company came through downtown for two weeks in March. Mom bought one ticket in October, thirty-eight dollars, and kept it in the bread box behind the rye so nobody would bend it. She didn’t buy two. She was going by herself. It was the only thing I ever knew her to buy just for her.
Then in February my eighth grade class announced a trip to Washington. Three hundred dollars, deposit due in a week. My father’s hours had just been cut at the plant. I didn’t even ask. I left the permission slip on the counter and went to my room.
Mom gave the ticket to Julianna from the bakery counter where she worked. Julianna pressed forty dollars into her hand in the parking lot, and Mom pretended not to take it, and the forty went on top of my deposit.
I went to Washington. I bought her a snow globe of the Capitol with my own money and she kept it on the windowsill until the water went yellow.
The week I left, she bought the cast recording on cassette for $9.99. She played it in the kitchen every night for years, until the tape stretched right in the middle of the act two opener and the trumpet went wobbly. After that she hummed the wobble too. She said it was her favorite part.
That’s my mother. She takes the bent version and says it’s the good one.
She has a hand she puts on my knee and a word she says. The hand means let it go. The word is “Fine.” When she says it in that one low voice, it means the thing is already decided, and you’re going to find out how. She said it to our landlord in 1994 about the heat. Two days later a man from the city was in our basement with a clipboard.
So tonight I had her in the good seats, row D, and she had her program open before the lights went down. Mom reads a program the way other people read a will. Cast bios, donors, the ads for the steakhouse, the house rules in tiny print on the last page.
“Footwear must be worn in the auditorium at all times,” she read to me, and patted my arm. “In case you were planning on it.”
The row behind us was empty then. “Nobody behind us,” she said. “We lucked out.”
He came in ten minutes into the first act, in the dark, his girlfriend lighting the steps with her phone. He kicked his loafers off before he even sat, and Mom turned halfway around in her seat.
“He’s putting something in his shoe,” she said, like it was the strangest thing she’d ever seen a grown man do.
Now the woman with the radio was waiting at the end of our row.
Lourdes
The lobby was full of people with plastic cups of wine, and every one of them turned around when Manoj came through the doors on the side of his foot.
The woman with the radio walked us to a bench by the coat check. Her name tag said LOURDES, HOUSE MANAGER.
“Okay,” she said. “Somebody tell me.”
Manoj told her. He told it for a while.
He said he’d been asleep. He said he’d been sitting quietly in his own seat minding his own business and this woman, me, had put her hands on him while he was out cold. “On my body,” he said. “Without my consent. That’s assault. That’s literally the definition.”
“Your foot was on my mother,” I said.
“For one second. By accident. The whole row moved.”
Lourdes held up a hand. She had a clipboard now, from somewhere, and she was writing.
“Did you touch him,” she said to me.
“Yes.”
Mom sat down on the bench and crossed her ankles.
The man in the brown cardigan had followed us down. He stood a little way off with his cup and said, “I saw the foot. On the lady’s shoulder. I said something at the time.”
“Nobody asked you, Mister Rogers,” Manoj said.
Lourdes looked at the cardigan man, then back at me. She had the face of a person who has had this exact conversation, about different body parts, a hundred times.
“Ms. Ferris,” she said. “I believe you about the foot. But I can’t have patrons putting hands on other patrons. If he files a complaint, it’s an incident, and the policy is removal. No refund. I’d have to ask you both to go.”
My stomach went to the floor.
So I tried to fix it. I opened my purse and got out the bandages and a little pack of makeup wipes and held them out to him.
“I’ll take it off,” I said. “Right now. I’m sorry. Let’s just get through the night.”
He looked at the wipes like I’d handed him a dead bird.
“Oh, you’re sorry now.” He turned to the room. “She’s sorry now, everybody.” Then to Lourdes: “I want her gone, and I want it in writing.”
The second chime
The first chime went off. Five minutes to act two.
Mom looked up at the speaker in the ceiling.
I knew what was in act two. Everybody who had lived in our kitchen knew. The opener. The trumpet part. The one she’d hummed the wobble into for thirty-five years.
Manoj had his phone out and was holding it up at me sideways. “Say it again. Say you’re sorry. I want it on video.”
His girlfriend was standing by the coat check. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at her own phone, scrolling, then stopping, then scrolling back.
“Manoj,” Lourdes said, and the way she said his name stopped me.
She knew it. She hadn’t asked for it.
“We’ve talked before,” she said. “In May. And in August, I think.”
“In August your bartender shorted me a pour, and you comped me, and that was the right call,” he said. “This is the same thing. This is worse. I come here every month. I want comps on the next three shows for my trouble, and I want this woman written up and walked out.”
Lourdes didn’t say no.
She looked at her clipboard. She looked at the clock over the bar. A man in a theater’s lobby who comes every month and complains every month is a man somebody higher up has already told her to keep happy. I could see her doing that math.
I could feel Mom’s hand coming toward my knee.
And I could see how it would go. I’d say sorry into his phone. He’d get his comps. Maybe Lourdes would let us back in if I groveled right. Maybe not. Mom would say it was fine.
I looked down at what I was holding.
His loafers. I’d carried them the whole way down two flights of stairs and never put them down.
The left one was heavier at the toe. Something white was folded down inside it.
Row M
I didn’t give them to him.
I stood up and held both loafers out to Lourdes, sole side down, like a waiter with a tray.
“These are his,” I said. “When he sat down, he put something in the left one. My mother saw him do it.”
Manoj took a step. “Those are my shoes.”
“Then you can have them back,” Lourdes said, “in a second.”
She reached two fingers into the left loafer and came out with a folded square of paper. She opened it on top of her clipboard.
Two tickets. The old kind, the cardstock the box office still prints if you pay at the window.
She read it to herself first. Then out loud, slowly, like she wanted to be sure she had it.
“Upper balcony. Row M. Seats one-oh-one and one-oh-two.”
Row M is the last row. It’s up under the lights, where you can touch the ceiling.
We were in row D. The row behind us was E.
“Those are old,” Manoj said.
Lourdes turned the ticket toward him. “It’s tonight’s date. It’s printed right here.”
“Those were empty,” he said. “Nobody was in those seats. What, I’m supposed to sit in the nosebleeds staring at a ceiling fan while there’s two good seats sitting there going to waste? Come on. You’d do it.”
Behind him, his girlfriend had stopped scrolling.
She was holding her phone down at her side now, screen still lit.
“You said you upgraded us,” she said.
He didn’t turn around.
“You said, I know a guy here, babe, I got us moved down.” She said it in his voice, a little deeper, the way you do when you’ve heard a person say a thing a hundred times. “You said that. In the car.”
“Not now,” he said.
“I paid for those. The Row M ones. I bought them on my lunch break.” She looked at me, then at my mother, then down at his foot, the red toes, the receipt hanging off by one bandage. “You told me that lady was in your seat.”
The lobby monitor
The second chime went off. Two minutes.
Manoj faced her then, all the way, and I got to see the face he’d been keeping for her.
“Are you serious right now? Are you seriously doing this in front of people? You got a free upgrade. You sat in a good seat for an hour. You didn’t complain about it then. You were on your phone the whole time, like always, like you do at everything I take you to.” He jabbed a finger at the floor. “So sit down, be quiet, and let me handle it. You’re embarrassing me.”
She didn’t sit down.
He swung back to Lourdes.
“You know what I’ve spent in this building? You know how many times I’ve been here this year? I’m the one who got assaulted. She painted me. In my sleep. This stuff doesn’t come off. I’ve got a meeting on Monday. I’ve got to wear shoes to that, you know. This is a two-hundred-dollar quarter-zip and there’s lipstick on the cuff. And you want to talk about a seat? It’s a seat. It was empty. Nobody lost anything. Nobody’s even sitting there now.”
“I was,” Mom said.
That was all she said.
He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.
Lourdes folded the two tickets in half and handed them to his girlfriend, not to him.
“Sir,” she said. “You were in seats you didn’t pay for. You had your shoes off in my auditorium, which is printed on the last page of the program your neighbor was reading. And you put your foot on a seventy-four-year-old woman. I’m not comping you. I’m asking you to leave.”
“She touched me.”
“She did. And I’m dealing with that too.”
The girlfriend looked at the tickets in her hand. Then she put her phone in her back pocket.
“I’m going back up,” she said. “Row M.” And she walked to the stairs by herself.
He called her a name I won’t write. Half the lobby heard it. The cardigan man said, “Charming,” into his wine.
Manoj sat down on our bench, the very end of it, and tried to jam his foot into the loafer with the receipt still on. It wouldn’t go. He peeled the receipt off. The bandages took some hair with them and he made a sound like a stepped-on cat. He got the shoe on. The lipstick smeared up the inside of the leather.
He went out through the glass doors into the cold with one shoe on and one in his hand.
Then Lourdes turned to me. She wasn’t smiling.
“You don’t touch a patron in my building, Ms. Ferris. Not ever again. I’m writing your name down.” She did. She spelled Ferris with one r and I let her. “And they’ve closed the doors. We don’t seat during the opener. You can go in after the first number.”
The house doors were shut. Inside, the orchestra came in.
There’s a TV monitor over the bar so latecomers can see the stage. Thirty-two inches, maybe. Grainy. The sound comes out of a speaker in the ceiling, a little tinny.
That’s where my mother saw the act two opener she’d waited on since 1991. Standing by a bar, in a lobby that smelled like popcorn and spilled chardonnay, next to a coat check.
I started to say I was sorry.
Mom put her hand on my knee. Then she lifted it, and pointed at the screen, because the trumpet was coming.
“Shh,” she said. “This is the part I know.”
Mom’s kitchen
The Sunday after, I drove over with a new tube of Cherries in the Snow. The first one was a stub. I’d used most of it on a stranger’s toes.
She put it on at the kitchen table without a mirror, the way she always has.
The program was on her fridge under a magnet shaped like a pear, open to the last page. She’d circled the line about footwear in ballpoint and written the date beside it.
We sat on her love seat, her elbow on one side of the armrest and mine on the other. Nobody’s foot anywhere.
She’d dug the old cassette deck out of the hall closet. It still works if you hold the play button down a second longer than you think you need to.
The act two opener came on. The trumpet went wobbly right where it always had.
She hummed the wobble.
When it ended, she reached across the armrest and put her hand on my knee.
“Again,” she said.
I got up and rewound it.
If your mom ever gave up her ticket so you could go, take her somewhere good this year, and sit where you can keep an eye on her shoulder.
For more family drama with money, marriage, and boundaries tangled together, read “My Brother Offered Me Half A Million Through My Tow Truck Window” and “I Ran The Night Desk Where My Husband Brought Her Every Thursday, Then He Put Our House Up For Her Car”. And when family treats your home like it belongs to everyone, there’s “I Gave Dad My Door Code For Frozen Pipes. He Brought His Bowling League.”.
