Chapter Five
I feel bad about my feet
My reconnection with Jane was one of my rare family inheritances that did not disappoint. Most of them—mystery money, spiritual agita, bad genes—wound up being more burden than windfall. But the one I feel worst about is my feet. I feel bad about my feet. They are unsightly things, flappy and textured like the bumpy sides of Ping-Pong paddles. They are the anatomical equivalent of deli meat that has been left out too long. They are, in a word, fetid.
Of all my foot problems, the worst and most obvious is onychomycosis, aka “ringworm of the nails.” If there is a more horrid-sounding combination of words than “ringworm of the nails,” I don’t know what it is. The first thing you need to know about this condition is that ringworm isn’t actually a worm. It is so named because physicians coined the term ringworm in the fifteenth century to describe the circular red rash they found on patients. They thought it looked kind of wormy, so they named it ringworm, the better to horrify all future generations.
The actual cause of ringworm is fungus. As a term, fungal infection is not much better than ringworm, calling to mind jungle rot, poisonous mushrooms, and the sorts of black mold that cause people to burn their own homes to the ground. Fungi are not evil by nature; like all living things, all they want is to survive. They do this by feasting on keratin, the stuff that makes toenails and hair and rhino horns. (No word on whether rhinos get “ringworm of the horn.”) Fungi eat keratin with the same reckless abandon with which I consume Taco Bell. As such, once they took up residence on my feet, they ensured themselves a steady food source as long as my body continues making toenails, which it will for a long time because, in all modesty, I am a toenail-making stud. The result is that my nails are thick, yellowed, and caked with chalky white stuff that has the powdery consistency of Cheez-It dust.
Once I asked a doctor about medical treatments. He told me that such a treatment exists but suggested I not take it because the medication could damage my liver. Plus, he told me that many times the fungus (properly called dermatophytes) just returns, anyway. What about the topical stuff they sell? He shrugged and said it didn’t work. What should I do? He suggested I live with it. So live with it is what I have done.
Eric was the first to contract it, which means my present condition is his fault, just as all my problems can ultimately be laid in the lap of another. This was during our early teenage years when we shared a bedroom, and somehow his fungi migrated to my toenails. The stuff is allegedly contagious, yet I have never spread it to my wife, despite the fact that I have had considerably closer physical contact with my wife than my brother.
Until that point, my body and I had basically been simpatico. Yes, I’d had chicken pox, which left a couple small indentations on my nose, but nothing I would have pointed to as a definitive physical flaw. The toenails changed that. Then came the zits. Then came the flab and thinning hair and all the rest. But the toenails were first, and as such, they deserve the honor of being the first body part about which I felt actual shame. The first time I worried about what other people would think should they see them, because I have never outgrown the playground fear of other children pointing at me and laughing.
Something as simple as woebegone toenails can actually have a profound effect on the way you conduct your life. I have spent many hours trying to conceal my feet from unprepared eyes. Every trip to the seashore is a carefully choreographed sequence of walking to the beach, removing my sneakers, burrowing my feet beneath the sand while shuffling toward the water, and then engaging in artful misdirection (“Look at all the seagulls!”) as I arrange myself at our beaching spot before plunging my feet back under the sand for the duration of our stay, the way leaky nuclear reactors require entombment in concrete. Were unsuspecting beachgoers to see my feet, it would be like Jaws in reverse, hordes of people running into the water to escape. If an actual great white ever roams the shallows where I am sunbathing, it’s a real question which fate the beachgoers would choose to suffer, my toenails or the shark.
During my single days, I conducted entire relationships without my partner once seeing my toenails. I did this with strategic lighting, cunning sheet dispersal, and the occasional besocked lovemaking. In fact, while shooting a love scene in a movie called Wet Hot American Summer, a movie about camp counselors, I suggested that my sex scene with People magazine’s future Sexiest Man Alive Bradley Cooper be shot with the two of us wearing tube socks. Although I pitched the idea for its comedic effect, the real reason was to avoid anybody seeing my feet. Thankfully, the director agreed, or else the movie would have made even fewer dollars in the theaters than it actually did, which was already very close to zero dollars.
To her credit, Martha did not leave me upon first seeing my feet. Maybe she’d already resigned herself to moderate revulsion after seeing the rest of my unclothed body. Or maybe True Love can triumph over even toenail fungus. She has never once vomited when I removed my socks, and only several thousand times has she looked at my feet and asked, “Why don’t you do something about that?”
She’s right, of course. I really should take care of it. Any associated liver damage will pale in comparison to the joy I will surely experience strutting the world shorn of footwear. Grass upon my feet! Sand between my toes! The squish of warm animal turds underfoot! Even with a diseased liver, it would be a far better life than the one I am leading, a life of desperation and podiatric subterfuge.
So yes, I feel bad about my toenails, but the rest of my feet are not much better. The toes themselves each have a sprinkling of unsightly hair, and a mossy ruff of foot hair runs along the flat plane from my first and second toes to the foothills of my ankles. One may pluck toe hair, of course, as I sometimes do in the shower but, like locusts, it returns, in ever more virulent numbers. Why do feet need furry protection, anyway? We are not hobbits. Moreover, why do we even need toes? They seem so anachronistic, unsightly throwbacks to a time before the advent of cotton poly-blend socks and memory-foam sneakers. Sure, they help to keep us upright, but isn’t there some more attractive solution to the vexing problem of bipedalism? We deserve better than these creepy, wriggling foot digits. We deserve modern, space-age toes, toes that glow in the dark and provide Wi-Fi connectivity. Maybe Apple can start designing toes.
As if my toe hair and nail fungus were not gross enough, the bottoms of my feet are also abhorrent. They have the same crumbly texture as the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Cracked and peely, they are more snakeskin than human. I have no idea why the undersides of my feet should produce so much white and flaky derma. I already have dandruff on my head; why do I also need it on my feet? Sometimes I pick at the dead skin, drawing off long strips of people jerky, which I ball up between my fingers and flick to the floor like foot boogers. This activity only ends once I have accidentally peeled away some live skin, bloodying myself, and giving me painful foot lacerations that leave me limping for days.
God, I hate my feet.
I am not alone. Lots of people hate their feet. Feet are one of the most disliked body parts, along with legs and butts and noses. Even mostly naked Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Chrissy Teigen, possessed of a perfect body hand-forged from equal parts steel and Marshmallow Fluff, confessed to hating her own feet when I asked which is her least favorite body part. “Seriously,” she said. “It’s in my contracts that I will not show my feet.”
I mention this to prove the point that even beautiful people hate their feet, but more importantly, to let you know that I am friends with a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.
(On Twitter.)
(But still.)
Why do so many people hate their feet? My guess is it has something to do with their general lack of élan. Nobody has ever remarked, “Say, look at the classy set of feet on that dame!” They might give such a compliment to her legs or eyes or bazongas, but her feet? No. Even ballerinas, the classiest dames of all, bind their feet in thick reams of duct tape, yet still
their feet end up as bloody messes. Feet are simply unbeautiful, their functions too utilitarian, the tasks they are called upon to perform too menial to garner much love.
(I am, of course, discounting the opinions of foot fetishists because fetishists, by nature, derive sexual satisfaction from those things, like feet and automotive tailpipes, that the rest of us do not.)
As I write these words, I am alone in my house, the kids in school, Martha at work. Our floors have radiant heating, and I ought to be enjoying their warmth barefoot, but I cannot bring myself to do so. Even when there is no danger of anybody besides me seeing them, I still cannot bear to keep my feet unclothed. What if I should happen to look down and see my toes, the ten of them splayed upon the ground like so many defrosted fish sticks? No, my feet must stay locked away, the way families used to hide crazy relatives in the attic.
When the kids were younger, I used to play “This Little Piggy” with them, that rhyming game when you go toe by toe explaining what each “piggy” was doing: going to the market, eating roast beef, being denied roast beef, etc. Both of my kids had perfect little feet: pink, soft, and squidgy. I used to like playing that silly game with them just before bed, especially the last part when the final little toe goes crying, “Wee, wee, wee all the way home,” accompanied by tickles that ran up their legs and onto their bellies. One night when she was maybe three or four, my daughter said she wanted to do the piggy game on me. With some reluctance, I took off my socks. She stared at my thick, yellowy toenails for a second and asked me what was the matter with them. I told her my toenails were sick. “Okay,” she said and proceeded to grab them, one by one, counting off all the little piggy activities until she got to the last one, and we laughed as she tickled me wee, wee, wee, all the way home. When we finished laughing, I told her she had better go wash her hands.
People love hands. We put diamonds on them. Not so with feet. The best jewelry feet get are three-dollar toe rings that turn green in the shower. Feet are the hand’s trailer park cousins. Where hands are held and celebrated and soaked in rosewater, feet are ignored and stubbed against bed corners and scrubbed with rough pumice stones. Even I, hater of feet, believe they deserve better, squat monsters though they be. Feet are the body’s blue-collar guys, the ones keeping us upright when we haul our fat asses off bar stools at the end of the night. They should write country songs about feet. But they don’t, because even guitar-strumming cowboys who love everything American hate American feet. That’s why they cover them with cowboy boots. The only Americans who don’t cover their feet are hippies, and the only thing people hate more than feet is hippies.
Chapter Six
Sponsored by Yoplait
Little by little, Mom’s body started falling apart. Although she had a brief respite of good health after her scare with the tumor, within weeks she found herself back at the doctor’s office with a couple of internal hernias.
Hernias don’t seem like a big deal because most of the time they’re not, although they sound downright harrowing when you find out what they actually are. A typical hernia occurs when the intestines poke their way through a hole in the abdominal wall. I once had a hernia of my own, a golf-ball-size lump that popped out of my groin one day like a particularly upsetting jack-in-the-box. When I pushed on it, I was actually pushing on my own intestines, as if I were an extra in the opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan.
My mom’s hernias were of a different and more dangerous variety. An internal hernia occurs when some organ, usually the bowels, loops itself through a hole in a tissue wall. The protrusion created from this goes inward instead of outward, hence the “internal” designation. It’s an uncommon condition, generally the result of severe trauma. Left untreated, an internal intestinal hernia can kill you. So why was my mom experiencing an ailment that more commonly occurs after a gunshot wound?
When she asked, her doctor said, “Like we told you, the internal radiation we gave you could destroy your insides.”
The treatment for her cancer could destroy her insides?
Mom did not recall her medical team telling her any such thing but, then again, she is the same woman who doesn’t remember what God Almighty told her either, so who knows if they warned her or not? Not that it would have mattered, she says, because even knowing the risks, she wouldn’t have refused the radiation, explaining to me, “What was I going to do? Say I don’t want to take the chance of having a couple internal hernias—I’ll just die?”
Upon cutting her open to treat the hernias, they discovered, as predicted, that her insides had been “eaten away.” Tissue had been damaged, turning her guts into vichyssoise. Not good. Nor did her medical team provide much reason for optimism. They told her that her condition would continue to get “worse and worse and worse.”
That year, Mom begged us all to come down to Florida for Thanksgiving, believing it would be her last. I love my mother and I love Thanksgiving, but I hate Florida so much that even under the circumstances, going there seemed like a lot to ask.
But, of course, we went. What’s left of my mother’s family dutifully assembled in her pop-up community: Martha and I, my brother and his wife, our sister Susan, Mom’s brother and his son, along with Sandy’s parents, daughters, and their respective spouses. We gathered to celebrate the holiday, to be with my mom, and to savor the fragility of life. The food was terrible.
For all the sons out there who fetishize their mother’s recipes for meatballs or matzo ball soup or macaroni, let me express my envy. When I was growing up, my mother’s best dish was store-bought Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. She speaks now as if she used to spend all her time in the kitchen preparing healthful, delicious menus. The truth, however, is that for most of my childhood, our dinners were a rotating selection of three dishes: linguini with canned clam sauce, cold tuna salad mixed with elbow macaroni, and broiled chicken served with peas. Anything else we consumed required microwaving. Mom and her previous partner Elaine kept our freezer stocked with frozen fish, frozen chicken nuggets, frozen pizza, frozen French toast, frozen Tater Tots, and frozen shaved-beef sandwiches known by the optimistic brand name Steak Tonight. By the time our family assembled in Florida for what we believed could be Mom’s last Thanksgiving, she had given up any pretense of cooking whatsoever. Dinner was uninspired takeout served on paper plates and eaten with plastic utensils. Sure, Mom may have believed herself to be dying, but c’mon, lady, mash some damned potatoes.
Mom and Sandy’s relationship was new enough that I still felt awkward around them, and especially around Sandy’s children, neither of whom I knew, both of whom were also newly wed. All these new families coming together. The entire weekend felt like a trying-too-hard movie on the Hallmark Channel. It had everything: the lesbian couple, their various children with their various interfaith and/or interracial partners (Sandy’s daughter’s husband was African American), and even the spunky Down syndrome daughter, all celebrating the life of the matriarch in her final performance, sponsored by Yoplait.
The worst part about the weekend occurred when Mom took Eric and me aside for a private, teary soliloquy about how much she loved us. It was one of those squirmy talks Mom has occasionally subjected us to throughout our lives when she’s feeling sentimental. Not yet having children myself, I couldn’t comprehend her strange desire to pour her love on us all at once, the way football players dump Gatorade on their coaches. Why she couldn’t just leave well enough alone? Why did she have to say things?
Now that I am a father, though, I know exactly what she was trying to do; she wanted to convey the full depth and breadth of her love for us in case something tragic should happen before we met again. It was an impossible task. There’s no way to compress the enormity of a parent’s love for her children into a strained and mawkish five-minute conversation in a Florida town house; besides, I don’t think anything of merit has ever been said in the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale. And for all of her fumbling effort, she needn’t have bothered—we already knew.
Whatever failings she believes herself to have, Mom has always told us she loves us. We heard it every day growing up. She hugged us and reached into the backseat of the car while driving to give our legs painful love squeezes. She could yell, too, with the best of them, but even while facing her fury over failing grades or unmade beds, I never felt unloved. I took being loved for granted, and I think any success I have in my life is at least partly attributable to that simple statement.
Some people worry about becoming their parents when they become parents themselves, but I took a couple of Mom’s parenting lessons to heart. For one thing, I try to make my kids read every night before bed. I don’t care what they read, but they are supposed to spend at least half an hour before bed reading something. Also, I make them run errands with me on occasion, taking one kid or the other, even though I know they will be bored waiting on line with me to buy stamps or roaming the aisles of the supermarket. Mom did this with us, and now I know why: Spending time together one-on-one is good. Plus, they’re usually able to wheedle some piece-of-garbage snack out of me as payment for their time. But the most important thing I do is tell my kids I love them. I tell them every day, several times a day.
“I love you,” I say to Elijah as he leaves for school every morning, and when I close the door to his room at night. His response, if he responds at all, toggles between “Yeah” and “I know.” My daughter Ruthie is still young enough to respond with an enthusiastic “Love you, too!” but I know already the day is fast approaching when she will withdraw from my affections just as Elijah already has, as I withdrew from Mom’s when I was his age, not because I loved her any less, but because loving my mom felt so uncool. Regardless, I know they hear me. I know because I heard Mom all those years, even when I was ignoring her, even when I was giving her the metaphorical and literal finger; after all, telling a parent to fuck off is one of the great joys of adolescence. I did it a lot.
Navel Gazing Page 5