High Maintenance

This spring, I donated to Dress for Success a box of high heels that I—over decades—almost bankrupted myself for: four-inch sandals with leafy vines that twine up your leg, five-inch leopard pumps I could lurch about five feet in. The money I spent on them might have freed me to retire by now.

And had the high heel never bulldozed its way back into popularity, in the nineteen-fifties, thanks to designers like Dior, who never suffered a woman’s social mandate of daily wear, I wouldn’t be visiting a pricey podiatrist. Add on the four-figure plaster foot cast, which gets tossed at year’s end, because the bastards know your beleaguered and bunioned foot will keep spreading like yeasty dough. The neuroma between metatarsals will inflame more nerve endings. (For the uninitiated, a neuroma is like a stone in your shoe that you can’t shake out.)

Before I taped up that container of shoes, I stared into its abyss. Wasn’t I perpetuating misery by passing these along to hobble my sisters-in-arms/-feet? The vision of my young foot that came made me misty.

While the rest of my physique is mediocre by the laxest standards, I started adulthood with an exemplary foot. My toes tapered evenly, and my high arch was ballerina-worthy. I even copped a job as a foot model for an exercise sandal. Yes, I am bragging.

By sixty, those feet had gnarled up like gingerroot. I don’t grieve my less than pert tatas. When my ass lies down on the back of my leg, I think, Oh, rest, you poor thing. Given new bra technology and some spandex, I can squish stuff in and—spray a little PAM on me—still slither into a size 4. But standing for an hour in heels sets red lightning bolts blazing off my feet.

And no one warned me about this! In the health-and-booty-obsessed age I came up in, every woman enjoined me to take care of my teeth and skin, heart and bones. But no one detailed how those stilettos—named for a dagger—would irreversibly cripple me. (Yes, there is a surgery sometimes involving metal and screws which no one I know had any luck with.)

Only one loafer-wearing detractor, in long-ago Puritan Boston, scolded my spikes: “If God wanted you in those, he’d have made your feet different.” Yet, I said, He made my legs look like this in them.

For I was a slave to the desire that rules our libidinal culture. And an elongated foot and leg just announces, Hey, y’all, there’s pussy at the other end of this. Yet every pair of excruciating heels also telegraphs a subtle masochism: i.e., I am a woman who can not only take an ass-whipping; to draw your gaze, I’ll inflict one on myself.

Hope came from a lunch with the style prophet André Leon Talley. He predicted that flats were rushing into fashion. “As smoking is to human breath, so the stiletto is to a woman’s stride.” Soon, I spied a fashionable writer I know at a gala in wingtips, then Michelle Obama in kitten heels—both women plenty tall. I just wasn’t ready to scuttle around at belt level in clodhoppers.

Then, this past Fashion Week, Victoria Beckham was snapped on the runway in sneakers, claiming that she “can’t do” heels anymore. Weensy Beckham, once photographed on a treadmill desk in a needle heel, had come to my rescue.

Thanks to her, a woman’s comfort finally meant more than her significance as a brood sow. I hobbled out to buy slides, then shipped off my old tormentors. Parties no longer meant popping anti-inflammatories and slipping heels off under a tablecloth. My feet rejoiced. I snagged every taxi I loped after, took subway stairs at a sprint.

But recently I spotted Beckham jammed into spikes again. Traitor! Then, at a soirée, a concerned friend asked, “What’s with the shoes?” Looking down, I suddenly saw myself shod in large loaves of rye bread.

Oh, womenfolk, as we once burned our bras could we not torch the footwear crucifying us? How about this Independence Day? Our feet and spines will unknot, and high heels will fade from consciousness along with foot-binding and rib removal to shrink your waist. The species may stop reproducing, but who the hell cares. Come back, Victoria. Your sisters await you. ♦