I knew he wasn’t going to have “plenty” to say about my Mary Janes because he wouldn’t waste a syllable on anything as trivial as fashion. This was strictly a mother-daughter issue. My mother told me I had enough shoes and that I was turning into a very greedy little girl, and you know what happens to greedy little girls?
While she painted a very dark picture of my future, we noticed a skunk in our backyard. It had built a den not far from where we played croquet, preventing us from channeling our frustrations through competitive sport. For the next several days, my mother rapped on the kitchen window and screamed, “Get out, you pest!” Sensing no danger whatsoever, the skunk continued to ignore her, and because my mother was afraid it would soon take over the house—she tended to endow animals with human qualities—she called the Andover police. In all fairness, she hadn’t expected a firing squad. The policemen explained that skunks are rarely seen in daylight during the summer, unless they have rabies. The skunk had to go. To this day, I can still hear them shouting, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” It was not a clean kill. The skunk staggered around our croquet set, before collapsing, dead, over a wicket.
I became hysterical, and to calm me down, my mother offered to buy me a Popsicle. “I just saw an animal being killed before my very eyes,” I cried. “You think a Popsicle is going to make that image go away?”
“Then what would?”
I pretended to think for a few seconds. “Hmmm,” I said. “White Mary Janes?”
A few hours later, with my new shoes and a celebratory Popsicle, my mother told me I should be grateful to the skunk, whose death had not been in vain, though the animal did blanket the neighborhood with a noxious odor. It was a small price to pay for such beautiful shoes. As I was admiring the way the white leather blended seamlessly with my white legs, my mother casually dropped a bombshell: “You were born with twelve toes, you know.” Before I had time to process this bizarre piece of information, she ran into the kitchen to answer the telephone. The street was abuzz with rumors that she’d killed someone.
Twelve toes? Where did that come from? While I could understand her calling me the prettiest baby in the hospital nursery—except for a boy with an unusually large head, I was the only baby—but twelve toes? That’s not something mothers usually brag about unless they live in parts of Asia, where extra digits are considered good luck, but in Andover, twelve toes aren’t necessarily bad luck. They’re just not a big advantage.
Simple things like nursery rhymes suddenly become darker and more complex. What’s a mother to do after the fifth little piggy goes “wee wee wee” all the way home, and she’s stuck with a sixth little piggy? Does she send it off to market again? Pretend it’s a Siamese twin? And what happens when the baby gets older and learns that 5 + 1 doesn’t equal 5½ or, if the mother is in total denial, 5?
I came home from the hospital minus two, so I was spared the math problems, but the story, as I soon discovered, didn’t add up.
“So, about those twelve toes,” I said when she returned from explaining to the elderly woman next door why her rhubarb smelled “off.”
“What are you talking about?” my mother replied. “I never said you had twelve toes. What I said, if you’d listened carefully, is that you were born with jaundice.”
My mother was a master at blurting out things and then developing temporary amnesia.
I was pretty sure that I hadn’t confused a condition that causes yellow skin with a birth defect that results in extra digits. Even if my mother had used the medical term for jaundice, which is icterus, it still sounded nothing like twelve toes. I took a closer look at my little toes. Why did they have identical scars? “Corns,” my mother said. “We all get them.” But babies don’t walk far enough to develop corns. They take a few steps and then go boom to the kind of wild applause they’ll probably never hear again in their entire lives.
The sudden revelation of my missing toes brought out the inner detective in me. I was a major fan of Nancy Drew books, which my mother bought for me the minute a new one came out. My mother read them too, though she made me promise never to tell anyone. “I’m just a kid at heart,” she’d say.
Whenever my mother slathered herself with baby oil and went outside to “work” on her tan—most women treated tanning as an actual job—I attempted to solve The Mystery of the Twelve Toes. My first stop was the family photo album, which my father had started when I was born and kept up regularly throughout the years. It sat on the bottom shelf of the living room bookcase, wedged between Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War and Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
With an old magnifying glass I’d discovered in the basement, I immediately struck gold. A photo marked First Day Home from Hospital showed me kicking up my bare feet on my parents’ bed. My mother’s index finger extended into the frame, pointing at my left little toe. Using the magnifying glass, I began counting. One, two, three . . . ten. If two were removed, why didn’t I have bandages? And who cut off the toes? The obstetrician? A nearsighted mohel?
Right then, I had an image of dancing feet, and I recalled with some repulsion Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes. It’s the story of a little girl who receives a pair of beautiful red dancing slippers that she can’t stop thinking about even during church service. The shoes eventually take over her life, forcing her to dance until her feet bleed. She can’t remove them, so she visits the local executioner and asks him to chop off her feet.
“You cried when you read that,” my mother recalled. A gigantic cumulus cloud had settled over the backyard, and she had come indoors for some iced tea and to check on the progress of her “color.”
“Gee, I wonder why?” I said. “The girl winds up with two stumps for feet and then dies in the end.”
“But she goes to heaven.”
“So you think I’m like that vain little girl and as punishment I imagined that someone chopped off my toes.”
“I’m not saying that exactly. But didn’t this toe obsession of yours start with those white Mary Janes?”
2
The Dog Ate My Mules
Reinhold’s Shoe Store on Main Street was my favorite place in town. It had a vending machine that dispensed brightly colored gumballs, and another packed with exotic trinkets, such as mini trolls, rubber spiders, and rings that glowed in the dark. Its biggest attraction was a strange-looking wooden cabinet that my mother warned me never to touch because it might explode. It was called a shoe-fitting fluoroscope, and until the early 1950s, it could be found in 10,000 shoe stores across the United States.
The machine used X-rays to take pictures of a person’s foot inside a new pair of shoes, allowing the salesmen to see the bones and soft tissue. Though the method was deemed essential for a “scientific fit,” customers were exposed to twice the recommended dose of radiation every time they placed their feet directly on the X-ray tube. After people began to worry that tight shoes were less of a problem than radiation-induced cancer, the fluoroscope was phased out.
Reinhold’s kept theirs as a reminder that “fitting” shoes was more important than “selling” them, and to that end, the salesmen were never without their Brannock Devices. Named after inventor Charles Brannock, it’s an aluminum contraption that you rarely see in adult shoe stores and never in high-end ones, where fashion trumps fit. This would have broken Brannock’s heart. The child of a shoe store owner, he’d become obsessed with creating an accurate foot-measuring device in the mid-1920s while a student at Syracuse University. His hobby made him somewhat of an oddity at Delta Kappa Epsilon, where he kept his frat brothers up nights making a prototype from an Erector set, but the Brannock Device eventually became the standard measurement tool.
The concept of measurement was based originally on the foot, which sounds so obvious, until you realize we’re talking about the actual human foot. With limited tools at their disposal, our ancestors used whatever was “handy,”
including, of course, their hands. The human foot was roughly twelve inches, so a foot equaled—twelve inches. According to the Anglo-Saxons, an inch was three barleycorns, and a quarter of a barleycorn was a poppy seed. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, this antiquated method is still the basis of shoe size today. At my current size, I’m twenty-seven barleycorns and six poppy seeds, or 9½.
Prior to the Brannock Device, feet were measured with a simple measuring stick that focused purely on length. Brannock introduced the radical idea of width, from AAA to EEE. I was a triple A. The salesmen always complimented me on my slender feet, not realizing they might have been a whole lot wider with two extra toes. But no matter the size or configuration, Reinhold’s had something for everyone. After carefully measuring each foot, one of the bland-looking salesmen—they all wore variations of beige and brown—would disappear into the storage room, climbing a ladder to reach the top shelves. Five or ten minutes later, he’d emerge with so many boxes you couldn’t see his face. Like Prince Charming, he’d kneel down in front of you, take your foot in his hand, and with a long metal shoehorn, he’d slip on the first of a dozen selections. Out of boredom or bad taste, he’d occasionally come back with something totally inappropriate, such as the silver lamé marabou mules that he claimed were the “latest thing for the boudoir.” My mother, who’d been chatting with a friend near the fluoroscope, glanced over as I paraded up and down in the backless high heels. “Take those off immediately!” she said. “They look ridiculous!” The salesman quickly shoved them back in the box and disappeared into the stockroom.
My mother was a stickler about quality at a good price, and in those days, that meant only one brand: Stride Rite. In 1919, the company started out in a converted stable in Boston, not far from the city of Lynn, which was then the shoe capital of the world. While the wealthiest women went to Europe for custom-made shoes, companies in the United States, catering to a large and diverse population, were forced to offer multiple sizes, colors, and styles that weren’t available from European mass-marketing companies. As a result, America owned the ready-to-wear shoe business until the 1950s, when shoe manufacturing, like other industries such as wool processing, were caught in the post–World War II industrial decline. By the 1970s, highly respected firms such as Delman and I. Miller, which had hired Andy Warhol to do its shoe illustrations, fell into bankruptcy.
Whenever my mother bought a pair of shoes for me, she sometimes bought a pair for herself, but she’d usually return them. Despite the Brannock Device and the ministrations of the very attentive salesmen, the shoes never fit once she got home. Her feet were totally normal too—a size 8B. I could never figure it out. She’d get frustrated and say, “Dear Lord, help me,” and then go back to Reinhold’s. I think she missed the fluoroscope. There was something comforting about knowing the salesman could see the skeleton of her foot inside her shoes. Without that, she had to rely on her own intuition, and when it came to her feet, it consistently let her down.
“At least you got shoes,” she’d say. My mother was competitive as well as indecisive, which usually gave me the edge. I was an only child for nearly seven years and my father’s job as a bank examiner kept him on the road much of the week. As a result, my mother and I spent a lot of quality time in front of our new Magnavox TV. Since she didn’t like to cook, we ate Swanson TV dinners on special TV trays while watching Father Knows Best or Lassie. We usually wore lounging pajamas, which we didn’t wear to bed because they were only for TV viewing. To up the glamour quotient, I suggested to my mother that she might want to buy the silver mules since they matched the aluminum TV dinners, but she was distracted by the blizzard in our Magnavox. Even before global warming, it “snowed” in the weirdest places, such as inside Mrs. Cleaver’s kitchen or Lassie’s farmhouse. When that happened, you had two options: You could either wait for the weather to pass or fiddle with the rabbit ears, a delicate operation that required a sure hand and a gentle touch.
“Darn it,” my mother said. “It’s still snowing. Now we’ll never find out if Lassie is going to rescue that little boy stuck in the mine.”
Even though I was thirty years younger and considerably less worldly, blizzard or no blizzard, I had a strong hunch that Lassie would rescue the adorable kid. Patience, however, wasn’t my mother’s strongest virtue. Neither was TV repair. Getting up to fix the picture, she yanked the rabbit ears so hard one of them broke off. She blamed me for bringing up the mules when I should have been focusing on Lassie. Now I’d wrecked the TV and we’d probably get electrocuted. “You better turn it off,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
Sometimes my mother was so impossible I felt like tearing out my hair, but with my pixie cut, I didn’t have a lot to spare. “It’s your fault,” I said. “You don’t even know how to work rabbit ears.”
“I do too.”
“Do not.”
Our rivalry intensified when my widowed maternal grandfather came to live with us. “Bumpa” was a very special person with a high tolerance for bickering. He also suffered from tinnitus and had trouble hearing. Bumpa was an excellent cook, a skill he learned somewhere along his versatile career that included being a merchant marine, a butler, an opera singer, and a music teacher at the Brooks School, in North Andover. With my father starting his new job at the Arlington Trust Company and my mother giving birth to my sister Emily, we were now officially “a family.” Which meant no more TV dinners.
In addition to his cooking skills and various other talents, Bumpa was a master storyteller. Though born in Ireland, he’d long ago dropped his telltale accent for one that made him sound like John Gielgud in Hamlet. The bottom drawer of his bureau was devoted to his “memorabilia,” which included pictures of exotic-looking women he encountered prior to his marriage to my English grandmother. “Who’s this?” I asked about a dark-skinned woman with a head scarf and hoop earrings. “Oh, just a gypsy who lived in the next village,” he said. Apparently she “read” the back of people’s feet instead of their palms, and then, for an extra fee, she’d throw in a foot rub. “I learned the technique at her feet,” he joked.
Bumpa was a brilliant masseur and my mother and I fought constantly over which of us would gain his attention. After dinner my mother would say, “Dad, my feet are killing me,” and then I’d say, “My feet are killing me,” and soon we’d be demonstrating whose feet were killing them more by limping around like Tiny Tim. Out of deference to her seniority and acting skills, Bumpa usually let my mother go first.
I kept a close watch on the clock, and after the allotted fifteen minutes, I’d say, “Time’s up,” and then it would be my turn. My mother claimed that Bumpa had “healing hands,” which made it sound as if he could cure the lame. He used a special green liniment from the local barbershop. It contained menthol and peppermint and made your feet tingle for hours. Sometimes my feet tingled so much I couldn’t fall asleep, and then I’d request a nonmentholated food massage just to calm my nerves.
Bumpa kept the liniment in his closet next to the wooden foot roller he used to strengthen his arches and maintain flexibility. He was religious about his “daily constitutional,” which could last for hours, especially when a neighbor invited him in for tea. He’d tell stories to anyone—the newspaper boy, the garbage man, the guy who sprayed weed killer on the lawn. If the subject of opera happened to come up during a discussion of trash or herbicides, he might even sing a few bars from La Bohème. This embarrassed my mother no end. “Dad, just stop it!” she’d say. “He’s here for the dandelion spores, not a concert.” Bumpa had a sweet temperament, so he’d never get angry, though occasionally he’d mutter, “Just take me out feetfirst.” He was referring to the old wives’ tale about the importance of carrying the dead body out of the house with the head facing away. Otherwise, the spirit would look back and beckon another family member to the grave. Bumpa was full of superstitions, although he’d never heard the one about extra toes bringing good luck.
Then again, he’d never heard about my extra toes.
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“Mommy,” I said.
“Then it must be true.”
After I explained that she’d subsequently denied it, he said, “Then I guess it’s not true.”
“What’s true—the extra toes? Or no extra toes?” Now I was getting exasperated.
He heaved a big sigh. “Just take me out feetfirst.”
One day, my mother came home with a pair of marabou mules. She’d returned a sensible tie shoe that was too tight across the instep, and the salesman convinced her that maybe she’d have better luck with something a little less rigid, something “for the boudoir.” Since our lounging days were behind us, I felt she’d missed the boat on that one, but perhaps she was trying to recapture the glamour of our TV dinner days. She wore the mules a few times, but her feet kept slipping out of them and once she nearly fell down the stairs. “I could have killed myself,” she said. “All because of these stupid mules. I’m taking them right back.”
That was good news. Whenever she left the house, I’d use the valuable time to snoop through her personal belongings. To my disappointment, she wasn’t a woman of mystery, and I didn’t find adoption or divorce papers or any evidence of my missing toes. If I’d been Nancy Drew, I was sure I’d have come up with a diary, or a broken locket, or an old copy of Gray’s Anatomy, with the page turned down on “The Foot.”
Nancy and I both had dogs, but as detectives, they were total duds. Hers was named Togo and, depending on the book, he was a fox or bull terrier. Either way, he was useless. Buff, my cocker spaniel, had a mischievous streak that no one but me found endearing. His favorite pastime was digging up my mother’s flower beds. One afternoon, to distract him from the tulips, I let him loose in my parents’ bedroom to see if he’d pick up any suspicious scents. Eventually, I went to practice piano and forgot about him. My mother returned home while I was playing Rondo Alla Turca, and I heard a scream from upstairs.
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