My left foot... a footwear memoir

The let-down: Grishko Elites that
never quite worked for me

When I was a very little girl, I had an LP album (to play on my Fisher Price turntable) that someone had no doubt picked up for me at a yard sale. It was dated, already, in 1974. The only songs I can clearly remember from the album, which was a mix devoted to "dance music," are "Windy" by The Association and "Don't Go Out into the Rain" by Herman's Hermits. What has stayed with me far more clearly are the shoes worn by the girls on the cover of the album, a bunch of stylish teenagers of circa 1968. The baby-blue pearlized-leather Mary Janes with block heels filled me with a kind of Proustian longing totally out of place in a six-year-old, while the spiffy white patent booties with bows (bows!) on the back of the ankle made me tremble with desire. Above all, the girl in the pink and red plaid mini shift dress, green tights, and bright red patent low-heel pumps seemed to embody all that was chic.

So, footwear has captured my imagination for a long time. Even when I haven't had money to spend on shoes, I have carefully curated my shoe rack; in high school I had two pairs of the same pointy-toed Mia flats, one grey, one black, that I polished weekly, and took to the shoe repair shop the minute it looked as if I had worn through a heel tap. I also had a beloved pair of black lace up boots with a round toe that were just dainty enough that they weren't combat boots, just butch enough that they weren't prairie-girl. I must have had those resoled four or five times. I still think of them with a pang of sadness at their inevitable demise (a snowy day in Williamstown sealed their fate).

Any ballet dancer knows the central and vexing role that shoes can play in life; the right pair and you soar, the wrong ones, and you feel as if you have blocks of wood on your feet. The foot-shoe relationship in ballet is so intimate that the materials of the shoe, leather, canvas, satin, elastic, almost become an extension of the skin. I think that's why so many dancers prefer to go barefoot inside their shoes, peeling back their tights for class and rehearsal, and modifying them to bare the toes for performance. The shoe embraces the foot, and the foot gives the shoe life.

In Alexander McCall Smith's fantastic and quirky "Number One Ladies' Detective Agency" series, the assistant detective and typing-school valedictorian Mma Grace Makutsi has a relationship with shoes that I really get: her shoes talk to her, sometimes in a friendly way, and sometimes in a bullying way ("You're such a liar, Boss," her shoes said, disparagingly). I have never had an actual conversation with a pair of shoes, but I certainly know the personality of certain shoes; some are easygoing, some more exigent, a few pairs real prima donnas.

Every shoe has a story, and a few of mine have really good stories, so I thought that I would take a page from Grace Makutsi and let some of my favorites speak.

Do not let my dainty appearance fool you. I am tough as nails. The grownup bunhead came to me after a series of soft-shoe misfortunes. First there was that perfect pair of (very expensive) Bloch Neo Pros, beautiful leather shoes with a neoprene heel, that fit like a gift from the gods. She took them to Kalamazoo, of all the places on earth! She was doing her "hotel room ballet" routine (you don't want to know), and then she had to rush off to give a talk about who knows what? dead animal skins? and when she came back to the room one of those damn shoes was just gone. Vanished. Never to be found. After that, there was a manky pair of "stretch canvas" slippers that had to be constantly sewn up where they split out at the seams. And after that, a pair of leather slippers that just never stretched and made her toes cramp up. Then, believe it or not, she managed to buy another pair that were too small, my half-size-smaller sisters. After about six months of bruised big toe nails she finally figured it out and brought me onto the job. I can't give her banana feet, but I sure look a lot better than most shoes, and I stand up to all the abuse (sweat) she can dish out.

 Yes, that is a Jane Austen band-aid she is wearing, and it figures, doesn't it, since she seems to have a predilection for rather Jane-ey shoes. Though me, I am not an Englishwoman. Rather, I am French, more Emma Bovary than Emma Woodhouse. Pricey too -- she used to walk by the chi-chi little boutique on Solano Avenue in Berkeley and peer in the window at me. Then at some point, maybe around 1996, she overcame her scruples and shelled out an unthinkable sum to Monsieur Robert Clergerie. She was an unemployed graduate student, so what was she thinking? Perhaps she was thinking, "Her heart was like the soles of those shoes. Wealth and luxury had rubbed against it and left upon it something that would never wear away."

Pounding the streets of London on an unusually hot summer day, she stepped into the cool fastness of Liberty, thinking she would buy a handkerchief as a souvenir. Somehow she found me, instead. She claims she had no idea that Liberty even sold shoes. So it happened that she was wearing me the next day, when the Underground stopped at Embankment and everyone had to leave the train and the station. Nobody knew why, but everybody knew that the reason could not be good. Soon enough, the facts were established: July 7, 2005 -- 4 bombers, 52 dead, 700 maimed and mutilated.  From where we stood, on Great Russell Street, at about 10 am., it was only a few blocks to Tavistock Square. I felt the ground leap under my soles when the bomb detonated.

Winter in Paris is not so romantic. The streets are crowded and damp. The metro smells of wet wool and sweat and stale grease. Behind the plate glass of shop windows, however, glows the promise of a different world, where everyone walks on swathes of midnight-blue velvet and soft jazz music purrs in the background while a blue-black Rhone wine slides silkily down one's throat. Purple shoes (she admonished herself) are not practical; neither is living in the Marais with two young children; neither is thinking you will write a book about a book perhaps twenty people have read since 1550. All the more reason to do it!

I really have no idea what that French pussy-cat means when she says purple shoes are not practical. Let's say you are going to New York City in the summer and you need a pair of shoes you can wear to Lincoln Center but also all over the Village, and that go with your plum maxi-dress for the theater, but also your jeans, and you need to be able to wear them for an entire week, much of it on your feet, at a technical art history seminar. Purple patent leather ballet flats that pack flat are just the thing. Also, I am not at all out of place in the dressing room at the Joffrey School when you go there to get your butt kicked in an "intermediate" level class.

My left Sorrel pack boot asked me why I hadn't included her in this essay, when she and her mate are indeed my oldest footwear friends; my dad bought them for me at the Army-Navy Surplus store across the street from the Federal Building in Seattle, where he worked. He thought I would need some serious winter boots since I was going away to college in the snowy Berkshires. As it happened, Sorrels were a bit de trop -- the standard winter boot (and Williams was a very conformist place) was the L.L.Bean 9-eyelet duck boot -- but I never had the heart to tell him so, and I stomped around in winter days in my ridiculous mountain-woman clodhoppers. They grew on me, though, and I hadn't the heart to tell them that they are simply not that photogenic anymore.

The only pair of shoes older than those snow boots that I still own are my last pair of teenaged pointe shoes. And that should tell you something.