Sputterpub's Blog

Jane complained to her mother about her marriage. Martha counseled her to try to work it out with Alan. Jane began wearing better clothes and tried to be gracious. Alan didn’t notice but other men did.

By the time Jane stopped growing at seventeen, she was five foot six and wore size eleven shoes. She didn’t buy heels until she experienced the dullness of Alan and loveliness of John Jerra pumps.

They were plain strapless shoes, not too pointy in the toe, with three inch heels that got stuck in the silicon grout between the sidewalk bricks on Market Street. But they looked so good and felt so comfortable that she bought them in five colors and learned to tiptoe on those bricks. For the first time in her life she felt like she had pretty feet. She wore shorter skirts. She moved with more confidence.

One day she walked by the shoe store and saw the pumps, her John Jerra pumps, in a perfect shade of forest green. She owned a new dress that begged for those shoes; she had to have them. She went into the store and learned that the closest they had to her size eleven medium was a ten narrow. She asked the clerk to stretch them, and she bought them anyway.

She decided to wear the new shoes and dress the following day. She had an important morning meeting at work and was then to lunch with Charlie at his favorite restaurant.

The shoe stretching was not sufficient. She got through the meeting, but by the time that was over her pain was excruciating. She limped into her office and pried off her new pumps. The problem was that most of the nail on her right big toe came off with the shoe. Beneath her nylon she was bloody.

She couldn’t wear the new shoes to lunch. She didn’t have others with her. She had to go to the restaurant via her place, which meant she was late for her date with her brother.

And lived to tell about it. Charlie knew about the restaurant from one of his outlaw buddies. He had so many friends to drink and smoke and gamble with, some of them were bound to be real criminals. It probably wouldn’t have surprised Charlie to learn that his favorite restaurant was a likely place for a violent act, if he thought about it. But Charlie didn’t think about it. Sitting at a table, drinking Johnny Walker Black Label over ice, waiting for his sister, Charlie didn’t think about anything as the three men in dark clothes filled the doorway and then sprayed the place with bullets from their automatic guns. Jane in her old comfortable black flats was still two blocks away from the restaurant when her brother breathed his last.

Three months after Charlie’s death, a woman showed up with a four-year-old son. Her name was Kathy and she had a story everyone believed about an affair with Charlie. The boy’s name was Kevin and he even looked like Charlie. Kathy thrust Kevin into LeAnn’s arms and ran away. Literally. No one ever saw or heard of her again.

LeAnn wasn’t having any of Kevin. She said she had to get on with her own life. There was no one for it but Jane and of course Martha. That’s how Jane got to be Kevin’s mom.

Nowadays, in the new millennium, many women are wearing slide shoes. Toeless backless things on platforms of various thicknesses. They have to shuffle a bit, or risk kicking off their footwear. They all paint their toenails, and many wear silver toe rings.

Jane’s surprised by the style of showing so much foot. Again. She thinks feet are in general ugly. Fundamentally lumpy. Contorted by use.

She and Kevin are walking side by side down a street in the financial district. They’ve been talking about silly slide shoes and bright colored nail polish. Kevin is fifteen and he looks remarkably like Charlie. Jane is now fifty and she looks a lot like Jane. Kevin has just been explaining how important the big toe is for balance. He learned that in his martial arts class. Jane understands, remembering. When Charlie died and even months later when Kevin came into her life, Jane had an injured big toe. She discovered then how important that toe is for walking. She recollects how exposed and vulnerable it felt.

Kevin and Jane look at the feet of women walking toward them in slides, big toes lifting with each stride, big painted toenails facing upward while all the other nails scrunch forward and down. Aunt and nephew observe those feet. Alike repulsed.

There’s a picture of Jane and Charlie at ages eighteen and fifteen. It was taken on a family vacation and they are in swimsuits on a dock by a lake. Their father is a blurred shadow in the background, which everyone in the family agrees is perfectly symbolic. Jane and Charlie look like an attractive young couple, dark-eyed, dark-haired, healthy. In typical fashion Jane is standing with one foot crossed over the other while Charlie is flat-footed confident. She looks directly into the camera, a little curious and impatient. He gazes sideways like he’s searching for fun.

That’s how they grew up: Jane awkward/angry/impatient and Charlie easygoing and eager to be happy. Both of them got rather large feet, but only Jane was bothered about it.

Large feet, dark hair, well-shaped. They looked like each other to Martha but no one else saw it; everyone focused on the gender differences, and Jane’s curly hair, and Charlie’s glasses. Their father died…first he faded away as a personality in the family, growing quieter as he aged, shorter and paler…then he got lung cancer from his incessant Marlboros, and the cancer and the doctors chipped away at his body until he finally gasped his last one morning, at home in a hospital bed, ninety-two pounds light and colorless as his laundered sheets. Their mother was by then well-connected enough to get a job at the oncology center. Jane and Charlie were in college.

They shared a two-bedroom apartment near the north side of campus. They’d tried different roommates but they liked living together better. Each had an active independent social life, anyway. Charlie was as easygoing as ever: never without a beer, a joint, a cigarette, and a woman. Jane was practical and less carefree, but even she engaged in more than one romance. She had a sexual relationship with her boyfriend Alan. But she also had a flirtation going with Gary in her Greek class. He was a brilliant linguist with a tall firm body, and he confessed to Jane that he had a major thing about feet. Gary didn’t think his attraction rose to the level of a fetish, but he was fascinated with a shapely foot, and he found Jane’s foot shapely. He told her she drove him a bit crazy when she wore the flats with the cutouts that showed toe cleavage. He confided in her that he had a girlfriend named Sandra, whom he loved and admired, but he thought Sandra’s feet were ugly, and that was a big problem for him.

Gary’s confession had a dual effect on Jane. It made her consider her feet as something someone could consider lovely, which was strange and wonderful. And it creeped her out. She felt self-conscious, inhibited to the point where she just didn’t wear those flats. She loved to study Greek with Gary, but she tended to hide her feet from him.

Jane and Charlie got married within weeks of each other. Martha stood up for both of her children during the summer of 1975. She thought Jane and Alan had a good chance; they divorced four years later. Martha was less optimistic about Charlie, but he stayed with LeAnn (unfaithfully) for the rest of his life. It was Gary and Sandra she should have put her money on: they remained married and relatively happy, once Gary learned how to put his fantasies on a shelf and ignore his wife’s feet.

Jane missed living with Charlie when she got married. Alan was a nice man but he wasn’t her brother; no one could get her to lighten up like Charlie. Alan bored her.

Charlie found LeAnn boring too, but she was a good wife. She kept a home for them, ran all the errands, provided a warm atmosphere. She didn’t ask questions when Charlie stayed out weeknights till nine or ten. So Charlie went from work to drinks with friends, told jokes and laughed and sometimes spent a little time with people he shouldn’t have spent time with, but he never made plans and he always came home. He never wore shoes in his house. He strode barefoot through the place in drawstring pants, beer in hand.

“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.

She examined her hands as she waited for the pharmacist, and they looked ugly to her. This is not normally the case: Terry is attractive enough, no raving beauty, but she has the most extraordinary skin. Fine-pored and golden like an Indian child’s, soft as a cloud. Everyone notices it, most comment on it, many touch it. In fact Terry gets touched a lot. It usually annoys her. But it generally gives her pleasure to look at her own skin. The back of her hand is normally a comfort to her. At that moment, to her fevered eyes, her veins stood out like blue gopher tracks. Her skin looked dehydrated. She took LSD once in college; that’s the only other time her hands looked so ugly.

She paid for her prescriptions without thought and won’t remember that later, but she was deep into metaphysics as she left the pharmacy. Dodging among the shoppers and vendors, the panhandlers and the strollers with strollers, she said to herself that it didn’t matter if you’re an evolutionist or an – ahem! creationist, either way the behest is to be fruitful, multiply, propagate the species. Either way, the behest has been fulfilled. She said to herself that people shouldn’t have babies. Terry didn’t know how to apply that insight but she thought it was probably significant.

She heard a crowd of birds at that moment, and it disoriented her. Usually she saw them when she commuted home; at each end of the Transbay Bus Terminal entrance is a big common pine, and hordes of small dark nondescript birds flock from one tree to the other chattering every dusk. Terry had never noted the loud crowd at any other time. But there they were, gathered in the Market Street foliage, mid-morning on a winter day. Soundalike birds above and lookalike folk below.

She smiled to herself as she thought that, and simultaneously caught the eye of a toddler, in a stroller, to the left and just ahead of her, looking backward. The baby reacted as if Terry were smiling at him; he grinned at her. He was absolutely adorable.

He was being pushed by a young, light black woman. She could be his mother or his care-provider; she looked to be in her late teens. The baby was also light black: amber-toned with curly hair and liquid chocolate eyes. He had sweet nectarine cheeks and he gazed at Terry with unmitigated love. Looking like her baby would have looked.

Terry was mesmerized. She walked a little faster, moved a little closer, smiled again at the baby and was pulled again into the warm orbit of the answering grin. The baby’s mother/caretaker wasn’t paying attention; she pushed that stroller ahead of herself, mindlessly. They were all approaching an intersection, and they had the green light and walking figure. The stroller was the first thing into the street.

But there was one of those City-irked drivers, impatient to make the right turn on red. Looking to the left where other cars would be, never to the right for the pedestrians who had the green.

The driver was starting to accelerate through his right turn, peering only to the left, as the stroller was pushed into the path of the car. Terry’s leap was automatic; before she could articulate her act even to herself, she swooped to the baby and lifted him in the stroller as she tried to spin back out of the car’s way. Her right hip was clipped and she lost the stroller as she went down, but it and the baby landed back on the sidewalk. The baby got a bad jolt and a scrape on the arm.

Terry’s hip, femur, and tibia are broken. Her right leg was so badly abraded that she’s going to need a skin graft. But the little boy is fine. Terry’s in a hospital bed right now, with hypersensitive feverish skin that would be responding to every thread of the boiled sheets if it weren’t for the morphine in her system. As it is, she feels the exquisite sensations but she finds them interesting. She’s waiting for her fever to cool and her bones to knit. She’s pondering how her skin will be harvested from one part of her body and grafted onto the wound area.

She’s almost ready to receive the members of her family. She knows both her mother (aunt) and her aunt (mother) are waiting, and that there’s no way to avoid full disclosure about the abortion. She’s thinking she might try to distract herself by returning to those ideas (true insights, she remembers) about the overpopulation of the planet. But right now, Terry’s laying back on the flat pillow with hot tears tracking down the sides of her face, humbly glad that baby will be okay.

“Doesn’t matter.” Terry could hear the doctor drinking tea or coffee or something while they talked. “All the antiseptic procedure in the world doesn’t always prevent. Fact is, we were introducing foreign objects into your body. Probably picked up something on the way in. So you have an infection. I’m going to call in a prescription for antibiotics. And a cream for the vaginitis you’re bound to get from the medicine. I want you to pick up the medications and go home. Now.”

“But other than the fever I feel…”

“Now Terry. Seriously. You underwent surgery and you have a complication. I’m your doctor and I’m telling you to go home and rest.”

Terry complied. She read the pharmacy phone number into Dr. Goldstein’s ear, and she informed her supervisor that she had to leave work. She went to the bathroom again, endured the rasp of soft cloth on her fevered skin, and was so spacy that she dozed off while sitting on the toilet. Thoughts of her gone lover and her flushed baby. Her son. Terry somehow knows the fetus had been male.

Edward isn’t really gone. He’s right where he always was, to the left and down the corridor from her work area, twenty years older than she, twenty tiers higher in the company, married, black, and now frightened of her. As unavailable as if he were dead. There was no way she could have borne the baby. Not in her family.

The woman Terry calls “Mom” is really her aunt. Her biological unwed mother Norah had her at seventeen, and Norah’s older sister and husband took little Teresa and raised her as their own. The world knows her as Terry O’Brien, daughter of Colin and Peggy, but she is really the bastard offspring of Norah Halloran and some nameless guy from some degenerate party.

Terry knows and loves her Aunt Norah, who is really her mom, and who hasn’t yet married. Norah had a second child, a son, when she was nineteen, Terry’s biological half-brother Guy, but he was raised as her cousin by her other aunt, Colleen.

That’s how Terry’s Catholic family handled illegitimacy: by intrafamily adoption.

There was no way Terry could have brought a mixed race infant into that stew. She couldn’t tell her aunt (mother) about the abortion, but she did confide in her mother (aunt). Norah would have insisted on raising the baby (she thought the family owed her an infant), and Terry couldn’t have endured that or a continuing relationship with Edward.

She tried to shake herself alert on the toilet. She looked at her watch. She’d only drifted for a minute or so. She rose, carefully pulled her clothes about her, and left the bathroom and the building at about ten forty-five.

The streets of the financial district seemed strange to her. Less crowded than at morning, noon and quitting time, but with more shoppers. A sea of strollers and carriages with children in them, and even some small dogs on designer leashes. Terry felt woozy and sleepy and wished she had Edward to lean on, but he was gone and their baby was gone. She didn’t regret her decision, but she felt sorry for the baby who wouldn’t be born. She had hated the dreadful waiting from the time she knew she was pregnant till the embryo was big enough to remove, feeling her body prepare for something that wouldn’t happen. She felt sad and weary, in need of sex or support or both.

When Terry has a temperature, her skin becomes exquisitely sensitive. It’s as if all her nerve endings prick up like hairs, perpendicular to the surface of herself, and vibrate with the loud sensations of air currents and soft fabrics.

Until she was nearly twenty she thought it happened to everyone. She figured skin hypersensitivity was a regular symptom of fever, like appetite loss and sleepiness. She’s sure she talked to her mother (aunt) about it, and also to her aunt (mother), but they must have shined her on. Terry is now twenty-five.

Her normal body temperature is around ninety-seven and a half. Even at ninety-nine degrees she begins to find it unbearable to pull her underpants down her thighs to use the toilet. This is a benign genetic condition, rarer than a sneeze-response to sunlight or the inability to smell freesias, and it’s how she knew, today, that she had a fever.

She was at work when she became aware of it. She rose this morning feeling weird, sure, but she expected that. It was like having a hard period, and not as bad as the hideous drippiness after cervical cryosurgery, with a bit of spaciness mixed in. Terry felt crampy and a little high. She had no appetite for breakfast but she was never hungry in the morning; today she skipped even her grapefruit juice. Her legs felt tingly on the bus ride in, reminding her of that phantom feeling she sometimes got when she stayed up too late, falling asleep in her chair and forgetting where her body was, stretching her feet out just to locate her deadened legs.

It wasn’t until she stopped in the ladies’ room before entering the office, when she pulled her soft panties down so she could release all that coffee-engendered commuting urine, that Terry knew she was ill.

“Whoh…” she breathed out through her mouth at the irritating/delicious sensation of white nylon on hot skin. “I must be warm.” She raised the back of her right hand to her forehead and guessed she was up a degree. She would have panicked a little if she knew the reality was one hundred two point eight.

At first she didn’t call the doctor. She checked her phone messages and sorted the mail, warmly, dreamily. But when she got dizzy picking a paper clip up off the carpet, and after two co-workers commented on her flushed face, Terry figured she’d better take care of herself. She phoned the gynecologist’s office and was surprised when the advice nurse put her right through to Dr. Goldstein.

“Well, you’re post-operative, Honey,” the doctor explained. “Of course I want to talk to you.”

That startled Terry. It was just an abortion. It had its effect on her, sure, but that seemed mostly emotional. To Terry it had been a procedure more than an operation. Post-operative? She described her symptoms to Dr. Goldstein.

“You have an infection.”

“But it was so simple, and I was well-scrubbed.” Terry can’t forget that scrubbing. Brisk and business-like. The farthest you could get from erotic. But she must have been inflamed or something. That scrubbing, under the influence of intravenous Valium, was a memorable experience.