lisa avoids the western wall of her bedroom until the last moment, so that the sight might strike with inspiration. It isn’t a big room, so it is not a big wall: eight feet by eight feet, and every inch covered in shoes bought over the years in budget or secondhand stores. Featherlite spectator pumps in cherry and spice. Two-tone Customcraft with toes like garden spades. Champagne satin peep-toe heels, like a pile of fallen wedding chiffon. Three-inch Town & Countrys, brilliant red: wearing them looks like your feet are softly layered with rose petals. Relegated to the margins are the dirtied strapless mules, sling-back sandals, plastic penny loafers, and ugly nubucks of nostalgic value only.

Each shoe hangs upon a tiny nail that she, common renter, had no right to insert. Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the only insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night. Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.

She sits on the bed to put them on. It is like a knight shoving his hands into a pair of steel gauntlets. As she wiggles the toe for fit, she lets her eyes stray across the slag heap of old LPs. Most of them were bought used years ago, and nearly all carry memories of joy pressed, right along with the music, into the polymer plastic.

The Voice of Frank Sinatra: the morning she helped a school crossing guard free downy brown chicks from under a sewage grate. Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump: the day she saw a clobbered baseball, rare as a red-footed falcon, pop out of Memorial Stadium and ricochet off a fire hydrant. Bing Crosby’s Stardust: the afternoon she and Giles saw Stanwyck and MacMurray in Remember the Night at the theater below, and Elisa lay on her bed the rest of the day, dropping the needle on Bing and wondering if she, like Stanwyck’s good-hearted thief, was serving a sentence in this harsh life, and if anyone, like MacMurray, would be waiting for her the day she was freed.

Enough: It’s pointless. No one’s waiting for her and no one ever has, least of all the punch clock at work. She puts on her coat, grabs the plate of eggs. The curious smell of cocoa is undeniable as she exits into a short hallway cluttered with dusty film cans holding who knows what celluloid treasures. To the right, the sole other apartment. She knuckles it twice before entering.