NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP ... there would be new shoes in the morning. New shoes and an old dress white as new. White and starched as angel wings and hair perfect as heat and grease could press it to her skull. There would be hands to hold as she rose up from the curb onto the one step which took you from Homewood Avenue, which was nowhere, to the door of the church wide as heaven. Hands she'd need to steady her across the threshold, the tall, red doors, from cement to the velvet cushioned wobble of God's purple carpet. Always unsteady as she passed to His world. Like that first step off the moving stairs in Kaufmann 's Department Store downtown when you think you might be falling and the hard cold floor rushing up to crack your knees and elbows. At the door of the church her mother's hand, the hands of Miss Goings in her soft white gloves to help her through. She might lose her breath, her heart would stutter but she wouldn't fall. Old Miss Goings in her starched nurse's uniform. Her hand was like petting a rabbit. Miz Goings smelling like Johnson's Baby Powder who'd say, My sweet girl or Bless you, Darling daughter or just Sugar so the wide doors did not swallow you or slam in your face. New shoes pinched your feet sometimes. Too big, too small, too much money, too ugly for anybody. The white ladies who sold them would stick any old thing on your feet and smile. But sometimes when her feet were in new shoes she couldn't feel them at all. She floated, unsure whether or not the shoes were still down there, stepping when she stepped, wondering if she'd lost them, brand new and costing money nobody has, lost them a long time ago because that's how they felt. Like the shoes didn't belong to her when they were new and shiny because she wasn't new and shiny like them. She was nobody, nowhere, dream ing about a little girl in new shoes she'd never own, shoes that wouldn't be down there if she looked to the end of the white socks at the ends