9 1/2 Narrow (3 page)

“The dog has something caught in his throat,” she yelled. “He's choking to death!”

Had he found the toes? She picked him up and we raced off to the vet's office, while Buff kept making horrible choking noises. My mother was afraid he'd expire in our new white Ford Fairlane. It had a bright-red interior, which really wasn't my parents' style, but my mother didn't have the patience to order a more subdued color from the car dealership. “Now I'll think
blood
every time I get into this car,” she said, “and we'll have to go for a trade-in.”

“He's not bleeding,” I said, wanting to clarify his medical condition. “He's just choking.”

“Oh, Miss Smarty-Pants. I guess you're a doctor now.”

The vet took us immediately, even though a hamster was next in line. Its tail had been stapled to the cover of a Popeye coloring book, and if I'd had to guess who did it, I'd have picked the boy with the mother who kept saying, “If Hammy dies, you will NEVER get another pet again. Do . . . you . . . hear . . . me?”

“What has he been eating?” the vet asked, prying open Buff's mouth and looking down his throat with a little flashlight. I thought it best to keep the “toe theory” to myself.

With a tiny instrument that looked like tweezers, he pulled something out. “There, I've got it,” he said. I closed my eyes.

“What is it?” my mother asked. “It's all sparkly.”

I imagined a baby toe with iridescent nail polish.

“It appears to be a feather,” the vet says. “Was the dog chasing birds?”

Buff had obviously found my mother's new marabou mules, perhaps mistaking them for an exotic species of tulips.

When we got home, my mother went upstairs to her bedroom and held up the slippers. With the vet's bill, the mules were the most expensive pair of shoes she'd ever owned and now she couldn't even return them. “Without the feathers, they look like any old ordinary pair of slippers,” she complained. Actually, they looked worse, because Buff had left teeth marks on the satin.

The next time we went to Reinhold's, the salesman said, “I guess the mules worked out. You didn't bring them back.”

Pleased that she could finally give him a positive report, she gushed, “Yes, they were wonderful.”

“Were?”
he said.

“Our dog ate them,” I explained.

“It happens,” he said, disappearing into the stockroom to get my mother a brand-new pair.

The Killer Podiatrist

W
hen I was young, “sexiness” was equated with bullet-shaped breasts and killer stilettos.
Stiletto
is Italian for “little knife,” and during the Renaissance, it was the weapon of choice for assassins, who could easily hide the needle-pointed blade among their robes before inflicting a mortal blow with a single, well-placed thrust. Over the years, stiletto shoes also have been used as murder weapons, although the end result has never been as clean or as swift. In April 2014, a Houston woman murdered her boyfriend by striking him twenty-five times in the head with pair of cobalt-blue stiletto pumps. Though the boyfriend had given her $1,500 Louboutin stilettos, she used her $50 knockoff versions, thereby preserving the resale value of the originals.

Stilettos came into vogue after World War II, when women left their jobs and returned to their traditional roles as wives and mothers. During the war, the U.S. government and Hollywood conspired to create the “pinup girl,” distributing glossy photos of Betty Grable and other stars to boost the morale of the boys overseas. In the most iconic photograph, Grable is in a white bathing suit, wearing high heels and flaunting her famous legs. After
Esquire
magazine
published a calendar of Alberto Vargas's images of scantily clad women in heels, the pictures were reproduced on the “noses” of military bombers. As a result, high heels became good luck charms, fetish objects, and something ordinary women needed to wear in order to compete with the idealized pinup that helped us win the war.

Many designers had been working on ways to reinforce the fragile stiletto heel with steel pins encased in wood or plastic, but Roger Vivier, Christian Dior's footwear designer, is widely given credit as the shoe's inventor. In 1947, Dior created the New Look, which featured an ultrafeminine silhouette, with opulent full skirts and cinched waists. After the deprivation of the war years, the clothes gave women a way to mitigate the memory of rationing. With materials in short supply, they'd had to wear sensible platforms made of cork or wood. Now they could embrace sexy shoes, and the stiletto, with its slim silhouette, was the perfect complement to the fuller skirts and dresses.

My mother had a pair of black stilettos that she saved for cocktail parties and my father's college alumni functions. She carried a gold mesh bag with a rhinestone clasp, and before leaving the house, she'd spray her neck and wrists with her favorite scent, My Sin by Lanvin. I thought the name very risqué. It came in a black bottle with a gold top, and on the front was a picture of a mother and daughter that was based on a sketch by the French illustrator Paul Iribe. I'd forever associate the perfume with my mother's racy stilettos. After the parties, she'd usually limp into the house with the shoes in her hand. “Never again am I going to wear these things,” she'd say, but of course she did. It gave her an extra excuse to see her foot doctor.

My mother's podiatrist was considered a “lady killer.” He looked like George Clooney, but since nobody knew what George Clooney looked like back then, everybody compared him to Cary Grant. Why such a drop-dead gorgeous guy opted to spend his life around bunions and hammertoes was a total mystery. He also gave pedicures. Though he didn't apply polish, he did all the nasty stuff, like treating ingrown toenails and shaving corns.

His office was in a white Victorian house at the end of our street, not far from the center of town—convenient because Andover was in the throes of foot hysteria, an ailment specific to the female population. I don't recall ever seeing a man at the podiatrist's, but men rarely went to doctors unless they were gravely ill. The only ones my father ever saw were members of his Sunday doubles tennis game. Since the doctors are all dead and he's alive, he feels totally vindicated in having kept their relationship to the serve-and-volley kind.

My mother always dressed up for the doctor, wearing her favorite mink poodle pin on a purple tweed jacket. She usually dragged me to the podiatrist's along with the mink poodle, and I'd be stuck in the waiting room with nothing to read but old copies of
Yankee
magazine. I remember one column, “Sayings of the Oracle,” which answered readers' boring questions, such as “Why are bridges covered?” and “Why do dogs eat grass?” At least Mrs. Godfrey, my mother's hairdresser, left copies of
Photoplay
and
Silver Screen
in baskets near all three hair dryers so clients could read about the fabulous lives of the stars.

Despite swallowing mouthfuls of gelatin capsules, my mother's toenails didn't grow fast enough to warrant weekly visits, so I was called into service. Orthotics had suddenly become popular owing to the development of lightweight thermoplastics that molded easily to the foot. Up until the 1960s, people who needed extra support had to make do with pieces of laminated leather that were often bulky and uncomfortable. This, however, was a vast improvement over the Whitman brace, a rigid, heavy metal arch support that a Boston orthopedist had invented in 1905. It ultimately proved to have little value because it was so uncomfortable, patients couldn't walk in it.

“I think you need orthotics,” my mother said while I waited impatiently for my nightly foot massage.

“Why? My feet don't hurt.”

“If you wear stilettos, they will.”

“But I don't wear stilettos! I wear Stride Rite tie shoes.”

“Well, don't blame me . . .”

It was useless to argue, so the following week I had an appointment with the podiatrist. Before I even had a chance to consult with the oracle, he instructed me to take off my shoes and walk up and down the corridor adjacent to the waiting room. My mother had recently told me that I had poor posture and that I should practice walking with a book on my head. She'd read in one of Mrs. Godfrey's magazines that it was standard practice at the John Robert Powers Modeling School. For several weeks, I'd been using Webster's Dictionary, and the top of my head felt sore.

“Could you walk more naturally,” the doctor said. “You look like a robot.”

I was hoping he'd say “model,” and I was mortified. After he watched me walk a few more times, he brought us into the examining room, where he told me to take a seat on the table. He then began to stretch and flex my feet, poking my heels and rotating my ankles.

“Did you ever have any injuries to your feet?” he asked.

“When I was born I did have . . .”

“Jaundice,” my mother interjected. “She was the yellowest baby you've ever seen.”

“I meant any
foot
problems,” he said.

My mother gave me the death stare, so I said, “No problems.”

After he finished examining me, we went into his office, which was decorated with framed anatomical drawings of feet. Sitting down at his desk, in front of a foot paperweight, he said, “Your daughter has overpronation.”

My mother gasped. “Doctor, is it curable?” She always leapt to the worst conclusions, and in this case,
incurable
meant fewer appointments with him.

He smiled, flashing perfect white teeth. “It's not that serious,” he said. The doctor explained that my foot rolled inward more than the ideal, making it difficult for the foot and ankle to stabilize the body.

“Do you do any athletics?” he asked.

During the winter, I went ice-skating with my friend Ginny at the Phillips Academy skating rink. Outsiders called Phillips “Andover” to distinguish it from Phillips Academy in Exeter, but since we lived in Andover, we called it Phillips to distinguish it from the town. For an annual membership fee, nonstudents were allowed to use the rink whenever the Phillips hockey team wasn't practicing.

“I skate at Phillips,” I said, hoping the doctor would be impressed with our connections. There was a long waiting list to gain membership.

“Skating is hard when you overpronate,” he said.

I was a good skater and suddenly saw my chances of starring in the Ice Capades slipping away.

“Doctor, is there anything you can do about this condition?” my mother asked.

“Your daughter could get orthotics,” he said. “I'd be more than happy to fit her. But personally, I'd recommend fencing.”

I wasn't sure if I'd heard correctly.
Fencing?
As in Robin Hood
?
Or
fencing
? As in barbed wire?

He went on to explain that he'd been on the fencing team in college and the sport was excellent for strengthening feet. “It's all about the footwork,” he said, getting up from behind his desk to demonstrate a lunge. This was more action than my mother had seen in any of her prior visits, and she was practically swooning. With a pretend sword in hand, he began thrusting and parrying. It was quite a display. As a huge fan of swashbucklers, I immediately pictured myself as a female Errol Flynn. I was beginning to like the podiatrist more and more.

“Would you be the one teaching her?” my mother asked. If he said yes, I knew I'd be suited up in a fencing jacket and knickers in no time.

The podiatrist put down his imaginary sword. “Oh, no,” he said. “When would I do it?”

“On weekends?” I offered.

“I'm afraid not.”

The doctor said that if we were serious, we could call his office and he'd give us a few names.

Walking home, I told my mother that I hoped we'd be able to find an instructor because I could feel my foot rolling inward and that if I didn't have fencing lessons, I'd probably have to give up skating and wind up in a wheelchair.

“Fencing lessons?” she said. “Your father is going to have
plenty
to say about that.”

My father was now head of the mortgage department at the Arlington Trust Company, where most of the people he gave loans to were known either to him or to other people at the bank. If anyone ever defaulted, which they rarely did, his job was on the line. “The best way to gauge a person's ability to pay a mortgage,” he'd say, “is by looking them directly in the eye.” The bank was located in Lawrence, which had once been a thriving textile center but by the early 1960s was beginning a downward slide that would continue for the next fifty years. The mills were being shuttered, leaving miles of abandoned redbrick buildings and thousands unemployed. Breaking up the dreary skyline was a spectacular clock tower that resembled Big Ben, but the clock had stopped running in the 1950s, a potent reminder that the city's prosperous days were behind it.

The bank was about twenty minutes from our house. Except on Fridays when he worked until nine
P.M.
and on the nights he had board meetings, my father would arrive promptly at six
P.M.
for a six fifteen
P.M.
dinner. It was amazing how much trouble my mother could stir up in such a short time.

“Patricia wants to take fencing lessons,” she called to him from the other side of the powder room. “Don't you think it's totally ridiculous? She'll kill herself.”

“Supper's ready,” my grandfather announced. My sister, Emily, who was then four, was excavating her meat loaf for bones or gristle or other significant fossils. She later toyed with the idea of being an archeologist, so maybe she had a gift for analyzing remains, but we considered her an unusually picky eater.

She was also a genius at inducing my gag reflex at the dinner table. “Stop poking at your meat,” my mother said. “Just put it in your mouth.”

My sister held up something on her fork. “It's part of a cow's ear,” she said.

“I think I'm going to throw up,” I said.

“Just take me out feetfirst,” my grandfather muttered.

My father bolted down his food so he'd have a chance to read the newspaper before tackling the bills.

“Oh, by the way,” my mother said, “the doctor says that Patricia's a pronator. Something about her feet not supporting her body and she may fall over and get a concussion.”

I had to admit the concussion bit was a nice touch. I wish I'd thought of it.

“But fencing?” she went on. “It's crazy. Who on earth takes fencing lessons?”

“Lots of people,” I said. “Like the guy who plays Zorro.”

“Can we talk about it later?” my father pleaded. He'd been home for only fifteen minutes, and one daughter had discovered an ear in her meat loaf and the other had foot problems that hadn't existed when he left for work ten hours earlier.

My father had excellent feet. During the five and a half years he served in the Army during World War II, he was known as one of the few soldiers who “never fell out of a march.” I suspect it was more determination than anatomy.

After dinner, I did my homework while Emily watched. Now that she was no longer a baby, we shared a bedroom, and with our nearly seven-year age difference, we weren't ideal roommates. Though Emily was quiet, she loved getting attention and often did it at my expense. When she woke up in the morning, she'd rock back and forth in her bed so that her already squeaky frame squeaked even louder. When she wouldn't stop no matter how many times I'd tell her to “quit it!” I'd call my mother. “Emily's making her bed squeak,” I'd say. Of course, Emily by then was “sound asleep,” her head resting on her folded hands, looking like a little angel. The minute my mother would leave, the squeaking would begin again. This went on for months without my mother catching Emily, who continued to perfect her timing and angelic pose.