Excerpt from Part 2, Chapter 1

A few days after my swaying legs' recollection and digestion of the 9/11 memory, crossing Houston on Elizabeth street, I felt my walking legs become vivid. The pavement's rigid cold shot through my boots into my feet, whispering up my legs to tap my thoughts; a catalogue of impediments (from the Latin impedire, literally 'to entangle the feet') displayed: foot binding, tight shoes, high-heeled shoes, toe shoes. The ballet dancer's pink satin pointe shoe aims 'just so' at the center of the planet expressing, in all its accuracy, snobbery and arrogant accomplishment. A friend once told me the story of a Royal Ballet ballerina who informed her diplomat husband that, as she was slated to dance Swan Lake three nights hence, she could not stand in spike heels at his embassy dinner that evening; her feet must be respected. I certainly empathized with her plight. Many times before ballet class I looked down at my toes. They were long, as if they could wind around a branch or press hollow stripes into sand. I wrapped them in a beard of lamb's wool and tucked them into a tapering pink 'box', the name given to the tip of the toe shoe, or pointe shoe. The box was made of satin hardened with layers of shellac; breaking in a new shoe meant smacking it repeatedly against the floor. Once in this pretty pink casing, my toes crushed together for an hour and a half of unnatural labor until finally, unsheathing them at the end of class, I peeled wool off the bloody blistered skin. My toes cowered, shocked. A day-mare.

Toes had their nightmares as well. Often in summer, wading in Vineyard Sound, harmless bitty fish would nip my heels, but one time, in shallow water at low tide, the tickle at my Achilles tendon proved to be a foot-sized rock crab huddling alongside my pallid flesh, its pinchers scissoring like a knife and fork in the menacing rhythm of gluttony. That night, a surprise of razors peppered my buoyant, silky sleep, and my feet, perambulating their own nightmares, paced under the covers, wringing their toes in fear of being excised at the ankles to roam lost and alone in wavering watery murk.

As for more commonplace yet surprisingly sadistic shoes, my elegant blue leather party pumps came to mind. I bought them at a thrift store to which they'd been consigned because of a tiny spot marring the left bunion. After gluing four glittering turquoise rhinestones over the blemish, I had absolutely fabulous shoes: asymmetrical, subtle, sexy. In the course of an evening, however, they'd blister my toes, screw my calves tight and inflame the fascia in my metatarsals. Once home, before putting down my bag or removing my coat, I'd kick them off, irritated with being snagged on a fantasy of what looking sexy would bring me, then weighing the reality of what it had brought. I'd placed the pumps side-by-side, mulling over the well-worn wish that beauty could feel as good as it looks.

During practice, remembering my feet in their blue loveliness, I realized that I'd worn those shoes not to be attractive to others, men in particular, nor for any current romantic interest, but for my father, the man in the kitchen forty years ago. I reframed my dream: let pleasurable feeling be beauty. What a sweet sudden spark of clarity! I'd never before imagined that my comfort or pleasure could be perceived as beautiful.