OR
FEELING AS FEMININE AS ERNEST BORGNINE
By Heidi Johnson-Wright
Rubik’s Cube blasted into American pop culture when I was in
high school. I still remember the first time I held one. I loved it the way I
love Piet Mondrian’s paintings: for its mesmerizing, aesthetically pleasing
geometry.
That is, until I tried to solve it. I’ve never had a knack
for math and I wouldn’t know an algorithm from Algeciras, Spain. I made several
tries in earnest to line up the same color on each side. But when I got close
to lining up the white squares on one side, it threw the yellow side out of
whack. I failed miserably. It served the remainder of its life as a paper
weight. Today, the only “Cube” I love is the 1998 film in which six people are
inexplicably imprisoned in a booby-trapped system of boxes.
Which reminds me of my relationship with shoes. (Yes, dear
reader. This particular blog entry is much like a Simpson’s episode, starting
out with one apparent plotline and veering over to something completely
different.) You see, because of my 40+ year battle with rheumatoid arthritis,
my feet and ankles are a disaster. Consequently, trying to find a pair of cute
shoes that I can walk in is as exasperating as trying to align color facades on
a cube.
First off, I take a small shoe size: size 6 American, size
35 or 36 Italian. But my tootsies are really wide. Sometimes I can squeeze into
medium width, but “wide” width is preferred. The next problem is my ankles. I
had them fused into a fixed position back when Jimmy Carter was still in the
White House. This means my feet are like Barbie’s; I must wear shoes with a
heel or I will fall over.
In my case,
every pair of shoes I own must have a heel height of 2.6 inches: no more, no
less. (Sometimes if the heel is only a tiny bit too low, I can cheat with a
small wedge inside the shoe to raise me up.) The putrid icing on top of this
stinking cake is the fact that I can’t reach my feet with my hands. So I need
shoes that I can slip on and off by myself. No ties or buckles.
Shoe shopping is typically an exercise in exasperation. Like
the squares on a Rubik’s Cube, everything must align just so. When I find the
right size, the heel height is often too high or too low.
If I can align both
size and heel, the shoes are probably too narrow. When I get lucky and align
size, width and heel, my hopes are shot down by shoe strings or buckles.
“Cloven toes” are also a deal killer.
Truth be told, I do own a pair of low-heeled cheetah print
Manolo Blahnik mules and a sweet pair of Emilio Pucci slides. I save them for
special occasions. The remaining pairs are fit only for a bingo hall or a
skateboarding half-pipe. No six-inch stilettos; just clodhoppers. About as
feminine as Ernest Borgnine in a pair of SAS waitress wedges.
So I pretend. When I’m doing my adapted aquatic exercises, I
work a runway walk along the stripes painted on the pool bottom. For a few
moments in my mind, I’m a fashion model in a pair of Prada flame heels
strutting along the catwalk.
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