We’re in the balcony of the theater in Stratford. It’s May 1974. I’m twenty-one years old, visiting England for cultural enrichment. This trip should be heaven—it is mostly heaven—but it also includes a production of King John. Even Shakespeare, I’ve learned, could have an off day. During intermission, the lights are up, and I’m sitting next to my new friend Michelle, who I am about to discover has a phobia. Behind her, an oaf in our group named Barton exhales a huge yawn, stretches himself, and lays a foot in the gap between our seats. It’s a big foot, out of its shoe, out of its sock, and even to me it’s as shocking and grotesque as a cold, dead fish. But to Michelle the foot is evil. She shrieks. Fortunately we’re a few rows back from the rail of the balcony. Otherwise I have no doubt she would swan dive to escape the obscenity of that foot.
Many years later, visiting my parents, I remember Michelle’s hysterical reaction. My mother is already well into dementia. My father, eighty-eight years old, is mentally razor sharp and still physically strong. Except, these days, for his leg. I’m here to look at the leg. I’ve invited myself to lunch, which he prepares, limping from the kitchen to the dining room table to lay out soup, lunch meats, bread, cottage cheese, and mixed fruit.
“We’re doing okay,” he says. A cane leans against his chair in the living room. He’s determined to take care of my mother, to keep her out of assisted living as long as possible, even to the end, even if it kills him.
“Have you had it looked at?”
“I took some aspirin last night,” he says. He carries water glasses to the table. “That helped some.”
My mother comes to the table and sits down. She’s been looking for some girls in the other room, some girls that exist only in her mind. She smiles at me—a conspiratorial smile that suggests we’re sharing a little joke. When my dad sits down we say grace and eat. Throughout the meal, he reminds her of her business. Finish your soup. That’s your bread. Would you like some more cheese?
We save the leg for dessert.
And it’s a doozy. After lunch, he pulls up his pant leg and shows me his swollen limb. It’s the color of a rotting plum. At the end of the leg, looking like it could explode any minute, is my father’s foot.
As body parts go, the foot doesn’t get much respect. We lavish care upon hair, call eyes the windows of the soul, and look with awe upon skilled hands. Breasts, legs, and even butts are the objects of desire, the stuff of fetish. Feet, also fetish-worthy, get some attention. On the other hand, with their thick slabs of scaly calluses, their hideous toenails so like hooves and horns, feet link us to the animal world. Feet remind us we are of the earth. Humble feet take us on this journey through life. We owe them greatly, yet we look upon them only when we have to.
There are feet, one might say, and there are feet. In Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson stand with their backs to the camera, discoursing about the degree of intimacy and the erotic import of foot massage. If you take the time to look, you might see that Uma Thurman has a fine foot. “They flee from me,” Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote, “that sometime did me seek / With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”
I have a friend who wears a tiny gold ring on one toe. In flip-flops, she has a comely enough foot, but in the end, it’s still just a foot. I have never heard anyone rhapsodize about feet. In high school, a kid I knew always said, “I like a girl with nice teeth.” Not feet. Teeth.
Like many people, I’m blessed with moderately prehensile toes. But is that a blessing? At a picnic, I can pick up a fallen napkin with a bare foot. But who would then dab their lips with that napkin?
When my kids were infants I often put their bare feet in my mouth. About the time they started walking, I stopped.
Some years ago I accompanied my son to a birthday party. He was in elementary school. The party was on a winter weeknight, at a roller skating rink. We drove through ice and slush, arriving a little late, and once inside we were greeted, as always, by the unmistakable, pervasive smell of feet. While my son skated with his friends, I sat with moms and dads. One dad was a podiatrist. He was a cheerful, nervous man who worked hard and planned, he said, to retire at fifty.
That night when it came time for pizza and cake, the skating area cleared. I tied on rented skates and started doing laps, enjoying the exhilaration of having wheels fixed to my feet, enjoying the music, the speed on the straightaways, the centrifugal thrill of counterclockwise curves. On one of these curves—why I don’t know—one skate betrayed me, and I went down, hard.
You know when your bones break. I knew. I felt a quick, hot pain and broke into a cold sweat. Mostly, I noticed a sudden loss of function in my left hand. I rolled off the floor—can you limp on skates?—toward pizza and cake.
“I saw that,” the podiatrist said. He sat me down. He took my hand in his, gently palpated the area. He put my arm in a sling and iced the wrist. He laid an ice pack on the back of my neck and told me the name of a wrist man to ask for at the hospital. I remember leaving the rink and its footy smell that night, gaining the cold fresh air. Someone drove me to emergency.
I never again put wheels between my feet and the ground.
My father has a long episode. Infection, antibiotics, swelling, and a tender, terrifying foot. Then he recovers. He gets back on his feet. He takes care of my mother. He walks up and down the stairs of their home. He takes my mother to the grocery store, where they slowly make their way up and down aisles. He drives to the podiatrist.
The podiatrist who held my hand gave up feet and retired some time ago. After England, Michelle walked in her Earth shoes out of my life and never came back. How many pairs of shoes have I worn out since then? The feet go on. Poor, underappreciated feet. They are puffy and irresistible as dinner rolls on babies. Bulbous with bunions and corns, they are fungus farms on the aged. Feet are gross and great.
When we approach the edge of the water, it’s a lowly toe that goes first. We await its verdict. It’s all right. We can go.