Flat-Footed

While we were living in Quito, my mother took me to the doctor for a checkup. At the end of the visit, as we were walking out, he called us back. “Señora,” he said, pointing downward in my direction, “the child has flat feet.”

“Flat feet! How can this be?” my mother gasped.

“Very simple: she is growing too fast for her bones, and her feet cannot support her weight.”

I was not an obese child, nor have I at any point in my life been described as tall. Nevertheless, I had flat feet.

“But do not be concerned,” the doctor went on. “We will make her some orthotics, and every day without fail she must walk on tiptoe for a minimum of five  minutes. And the most important thing is, she must wear lace-up boots that go all the way up to her ankles, for support. Fortunately,” he said with a smile, “the child is female, and soon she will be wearing high heels, which will take care of the problem.”

At age eleven, my first pair of stilettos was many years in the future, so in the meantime my mother went into high gear to save me from flat-footedness. She got the orthotics, and every evening she would time my five minutes of tiptoeing. I found this merely boring—but the boots! They were big and brown and ungainly, and I was sure that I was the only female from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego to wear them. They looked exactly like the ones worn by futbolistas, with their thick, hairy legs (in that era soccer players were by definition male). The uniform shoes at my school were blue-and-white saddle oxfords, and I had to get special dispensation to wear the disgraceful brown boots. When not in uniform, my friends wore demure mary janes for which I would have gladly pledged my future firstborn.

I realize that these days it is cool to pair combat boots with cocktail dresses, but in 1955 I felt my nascent femininity was being erased by my footwear. Those were the years when acne and body hair made their first alarming appearance, but no pubertal outrage caused me as much misery as those arch-saving boots.

After three years of orthotics, boots, and tiptoeing, we moved to the U.S. My mother was extremely reluctant to let me adopt badges of American womanhood such as lipstick and make-up, but I took advantage to the Ecuadorian doctor’s theory about high heels to get her to let me wear heels as soon as I turned sixteen.

To make up for those humiliating boots, I took to high heels with a vengeance. I began with moderate stacked heels and progressed to kitten heels. But when I slipped my feet into the first pair of stilettos, I knew in my soul that I had found the shoes I was meant to wear. Remember when, sometime in the 80s, women took to walking to work in suits and tennis shoes as a sign of liberation? Despite my feminist convictions, I found myself unable to follow their example.  Instead, I wore my stilettos (“shoes of death,” my children called them) 1.5 miles to and from the campus where I taught. I wore high-heeled sandals in summer, high-heeled boots in winter, and high-heeled slippers (albeit not stilettos) in the house. And when my husband and I took up ballroom dancing, like Ginger Rogers I did everything my partner did, but backwards and in heels.

What became of my flat feet? After all the work my mother put into them, no doctor ever mentioned them again. But what did the ugly boots do for my character, if not my feet? They obviously didn’t kill me, but did they make me stronger? I have always had reservations about Nietzsche’s pronouncement. A child brought up in an overly strict environment may well turn into a debauched adult, and that is just what happened to me, at least with regard to footwear. Now that my stiletto days are over, I mourn their absence. Not only did the shoes of death make me look taller and therefore thinner—in a strange way they made me feel powerful and assertive. After all, if I could walk, think, and talk with my toes at a ninety-degree angle from my instep, was there anything I couldn’t do?