“Stinky feet! Stinky feet! Get your stinky feet away from me!”

Martha heard it all the time. On the floor of her living room, from the back seat of the car, wherever her barefoot son and daughter were, so was the foot protest.

It didn’t really surprise her, but it dismayed her. She read Spock when she was pregnant with Charlie; she knew about sibling rivalry. She expected tension. But her children couldn’t seem to be in the same room with their shoes off.

Picture Jane at six, as Martha does, sitting on the floor watching TV in her own strange position: kind of a reverse lotus, heels by her hips so her legs make a W. Barefoot. Along comes three-year-old Charlie, flopping sideways onto the floor, propping his head up on his hand. His face is four feet away from his sister’s toes, but he yowls in complaint. Or Jane prone, chin on elbow-braced hands, when her brother stretches out on the floor so that his sock-clad feet approach within a yard: “Ee-yew! Get those away from me! Your feet smell like Aunt Betty’s Parmesan toast!” (Which toast upset Jane anyway, because she thought it smelled awful when it was heating but she admitted it was delicious to eat, buttered and warm. The whole visit to Aunt Betty’s house upset her, from the smell of the Parmesan toasting to the glow of the hideous wall heater in the bathroom to the midnight rumble of the water softening system. In the mid-1950s, in the San Fernando Valley, life was a far different, garage-oriented, ranch style than what she was used to back East.)

The irritation only increased after they moved to California. Land of sandals. The whole family was amazed at all the bare toes. They were accustomed to seeing feet only in the summer, near the water. In California everyone showed foot skin. Socks were a hard sell.

Martha knew then it wasn’t the smell. Jane had been at first squeamish about showing her feet (“…ugly toes! Oh look, Mama, how pale and bony…like chicken feet…”), but after they found her a pair of sandals she liked, and as soon as she got a little tan from the western sun, she no longer insisted on wearing socks and enclosed shoes. Charlie, for his part, took to going barefoot like a hillbilly. So Martha knew no one had smelly feet. Still the children objected to each others’.

Maybe Martha should have read some Freud in addition to Spock, because the thing about the feet came from Jane, and it was partly about sibling rivalry but mostly about sex and incest.

Jane definitely did not enjoy getting a brother. She was born to be an only child, and while she remained the pearl of her father’s eye, her father wasn’t a notable in the family. Her mother, impatient and pretty, was the nucleus of their suburban home, and her mother fell in love with infant Charlie. In Martha’s eyes, three-year-old Jane shot from baby to child overnight, while she was in the hospital birthing her boy. She came home and diverted her attention from toddler daughter to newborn son. Charlie needed more. He was born with crooked feet, and the doctors put casts on him when he was only six weeks old. Jane was taught early to notice her brother’s feet.

She wanted to hate Charlie, but he was too cute. And as he grew he became too honest, attractive, fair and good to dislike. She had to find his feet repulsive or she would have been attracted to him. But she was middle-aged and Charlie was dead, before she realized that. In Jane’s memory, the anti-foot mania was started by Charlie. As an adult, understanding it, she figured that it must have originated with her, the older sib. But Charlie was enthusiastic in sharing the aversion. They hated each others’ feet.

All kids mature in fits and starts, but Jane never got to be coltish. Charlie grew in a graceful attractive way, but Jane’s feet and nose reached full measure before she started her adolescent lengthening, so she wore size nine shoes when she was five feet tall, and she was convinced she was ugly until she was twenty-one.

The first and only time she bowled (she was eleven), she got a score of forty-seven. But that’s not why she forsook the game. It was the loud size 9 on the back of the rented shoes, proclaiming rearwards her deformity every time she paced the lane to roll the heavy ball. Charlie of course was a natural bowler. Even though the casts hadn’t fully repaired his feet, even though he had almost no arch and he pronated on his right, he looked adorable at the bowling alley. He scored high enough to be invited to play on a team.

He grew tall and handsome and well-mannered, while she became gawky and strident and mad. Charlie found Jane attractive, but they had established their wonderful natural barriers; they bickered and baited and stayed away from each others’ feet. Both of them were sexual, especially if compared to their responsible inhibited parents, but they didn’t experiment together. Jane taught her girlfriends how to masturbate; in deserted cavelets behind their high school or in empty houses when parents were away, she and her friends Gail and Gwen read to each other from the dirty books and magazines they stole from their fathers. Charlie meanwhile did what peri-adolescent boys tend to do: he took instruction in projectile ejaculation from the red-haired older boy who lived in the neighborhood.