footloose (in which our heroine is down at heel)

The other day, I had a crisis.

There I stood. Dressed and sunblocked and glossed and powdered and ready to go out into the world. Cellphone charged! IPod present and accounted for! Keys located!

Now all I needed was...shoes!

I stood peering into my closet.

I picked up a pair of slingbacks. No go: the inside of the front toe area hit right on a blister on my left foot I’ve been babying along.

I tried on a pair of espadrilles. And promptly tipped over. To the right.

I considered a pair of flat black slides. Simplicity itself. Didn't look great with my skirt, but (a glance at my watch) one couldn’t have everything, could one?

They cut into my skin straight across the top of my foot.

In desperation, I turned to my triedest and truest: a pair of ancient Nine West slides, black with chunk heels and red soles (!). Square, ratty, dated. But I can walk in them! For hours! Without crying!

The right slide felt a bit...odd. A bit...shaky. I stepped down and turned it over. A crack, a veritable crack--a through-and-through, right beneath the place where other people with normal feet have arches!

I contemplated. I put the shoe back on. I wobbled a bit. The shoe did not, at that moment, right there, actually split in two.

I threw a pair of Dr. Scholl's in my bag for backup, scooped up a fresh box of bandaids, and headed on out.


I am aware that there is a rumor alive in the world that all women love shopping for shoes. That shoe-shopping is the ultimate Girlfriend Activity (as in, "girlfriend, let’s buy shoes!" squealed over the brunch table at one's Best Friend Forever, who’s a bit down over her boyfriend's defection for a Gear model, the discovery she has breast cancer, the death of a pet, or similar. B.F.F. will immediately shake her hair back, slap her hand on the table, and cry, "You’re right, girl! Let’s go!" as she hastily swallows the remains of her mimosa). Studies, in fact, have been done proving that shopping for shoes is, for women, an instant cure for depression, hives and certain less virulent types of STDs.

Well.

A year or so ago, I went shoe-shopping with one of my sisters, visiting from out of town. She wanted little summer shoes; I wanted little summer shoes. Perfect! Off we tripped to Soho to find little summer shoes. And (in the fifth store we hit!) there they were: my dream summer shoes. Adorable little kitten heels (sexy, but not in a pay-me-first kind of way). Rounded cutaway at the toes (very forties pinup!) The tiniest bit of toe cleavage (very big that summer. Toes were the new breasts--did you know?). The exactly right sheen, in black or red or white, for summer pedicures. (Not that I had a summer pedicure. But for these shoes, I would! I would!).

I slipped them on, holding my breath, and stood. They glistened, on my feet. I saw my summer life transformed. No longer would I be a sweaty, frizzle-haired puddle of a human being, dragging damply down the melting summer streets of Manhattan! No: in these shoes, I would be...sultry. I would glow. I would sashay, discreetly. I would be Jane Seymour, Rosalind Russell, one of those girls. I envisioned flirty little skirts, Betty Page hair, bright red lipstick, fabulousness. My little kitten heels would tap-tap-tap down the summer pavements, and people would no longer swerve to avoid me as though I were dressed in an Army-surplus tarp and pushing a heavily laden shopping cart. Instead, they would turn, watch my hips, my calves, my hair, my feet as I sashayed on, smiling faintly to myself. I would be like one of those women at the end of What Not to Wear, except that I would not be dressed in anything involving high-waisted black pants or a blazer buttoned under the breastbone. When I entered a store, no one would presume I was there only for the air conditioning, or follow me around to make sure I didn’t drip on anything, or offer me a Kleenex. "How can I help you?" they would say, and they would mean it. Steeee-eam heat!

I was spinning this way and that before the mirror, considering buying a pair in each color, when my sister appeared. (This would be my tall, thin, gorgeous, popular sister. Oh yes. I have one of those.) She surveyed me and my feet critically. "You have weird-looking feet," she said. "You shouldn't wear open shoes like that. Maybe they have jellies?"

Pop!

I looked down. I saw blue veins like the Alaskan pipeline, running crosswise and lengthwise and diagonally across the tops of my feet. The bones flexed and moved, under the translucent flesh, skeleton-like. (If I were a Victorian lady, translucent skin on the hands and feet would be...ethereal. Desirable. Sexy, in that weird Victorian saint-fetish way. But sadly we are not, despite Foucault, all Victorians). On my left ankle, just above the adorable kitten heel, hung the detritus of four bandages, all in various stages of self-removal and thus no longer hiding the blisters from a well-worn pair of summer shoes which had without warning decided to grow teeth and turn against me without pity. The remains of a pedicure from six weeks ago chipped off my toenails, redly, bit by bit. It looked, overall, like a moment from Dawn of the Dead had arrived at my feet. I wondered they didn't rear up and bite my sister's smugly smooth and tapering little ankles.

"I bet jellies are really good for walking in New York," said my sister. "Or sneakers. Do they have sneakers?"

My feet are difficult. They turn in; they tip over towards one another; they are skinny at the back and fat at the front instead of the other way round; they have strange and wacky bunions; they are flat. They absolutely balk at any heel higher than an inch and a half, regardless of occasion or quality of shoe (you know that thing your mother and Patricia Field always said about quality heels being different? It's a lie).

As far as my feet are concerned, adorable little summer shoes are the enemy.

For much of the year, I wear boots. Lots of boots. Low heels. Low maintenance. Low pain level.

But it was ninety degrees and sunny in New York City, and I have neither the legs nor the temperature control for boots with my little summer skirts when it's ninety degrees outside. (Every time I pass one of those skinny blonde faceless little eight-feet-tall girls in a trapeze dress and adorable little calf-height boots and no thighs, I offer up uncharitable hopes about potholes and dripping ice-cream cones and puddles.) And my last wear-'em-every-day pair of summer shoes (which I loved loved loved--good unskiddy soles; rope wedges; brown leather round the foot with lots of open bits; supercomfy) had unceremoniously broken in half (perhaps they were a little short in the last. But my toes curl anyway). The two grimy old men in the filthy little shoe-repair shop round the corner looked at the two halves sadly. "You could maybe send them back," one said hopefully, kindly. "Defective."

So last weekend, my One True Love and I gamely set off in search of a new pair of flat, versatile, neutral, I-can-teach-in-'em-or-go-to-the-beach-in-'em summer shoes. (Ever since the Tragedy of the Red Platforms, we have agreed that it is best if I do not undertake shoe-shopping unaccompanied. And I get depressed when I shop for shoes with other women. So often, they actually buy shoes that fit.) Having finally learned my lesson about those cute little Soho shoe shops with the shoes displayed on vitrines like precious objects, we headed straight for the belly of the beast: Bloomingdale's. On lower Broadway. On a Saturday. During a Sale.

(Just a little sale. We’re afraid of the big Bloomingdale's Shoe Sales. Women come out of those things scarred and battered, broken for life, clutching half of a pair of Size Three espadrilles and muttering to themselves.)

I was braced for the worst. My One True Love immediately began looking for an empty chair; I scanned the room (rife with Outer Queens princesses and NYU students and uptown girls and frazzled-looking groups of middle-aged women. And a bus tour. From Detroit. With t-shirts). I began my circuit, on the lookout for anything not blingy. And there--a miracle!--right there, among the spangled sneakers and twelve-inch heels and flipflops bearing diamonds and emeralds and pearls between the first and second toe--lo--there were the perfect summer shoes. They had no kitten heels; there was no sheen; they did not require a pedicure. But they were a pale and neutral brown, suitable for black ensembles and those with colors. They were flat. They displayed no toe cleavage. They were Versatile. Hallelujah!

Now, granted, they were a little teeny tiny bit loose in the heel. But that's why God said, on the eighth day, "Let there be heel wedges with self-adhesive backs suitable for cutting to the shape of any shoe!" And the saleswoman gave me a handful. For free.

And also, they were a teeny tiny bit tight around the base of the toes (do you call that the first knuckle of the toe? Do toes have knuckles?) (anyway). The saleswoman drew breath. I looked at her. She looked at me. We both looked at my toes. My husband was busy looking at two skinny girls trying on Paris Hilton-appropriate heels in which they would, with any luck, break their skinny little ankles and perhaps their skinny little noses (falling on their faces) and so was not paying attention at this crucial moment.

We undertook the ritual exchange. "They'll stretch, for sure," said the saleswoman, nodding with sage conviction. "Oh, I know!" I replied, going for that crucial hinge between eagerness and world-weary shoe wisdom. "It's just, I want to make sure they’re going to work for me."

The saleswoman didn’t miss a beat. "I'll get those heel wedges for you right away," she said, spinning on her well-shod heel. "You can meet me at the cash."

back to the rabbit hole...