On a Saturday morning, a few weeks before the first day of kindergarten, my mother instructed me to walk across the living room so she could study me. She pushed her black, upswept rhinestone-studded glasses against her eyes and leaned forward, vigilantly assessing my every step. "See that”—she said to my father, having caught me in my tracks. See how that left foot of hers keeps turning in.” Her voice was shrill with excitement, the same excitement she flaunted every morning upon completing the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, the same excitement that infused her when hands clad in rubber gloves, she hunted down the gap in the kitchen wall where the ants were coming in. Energized by her own murderous intent, she’d swab it with sticky arsenic jelly so lethal she had to sign for it in the pharmacy.

My mother was in an industrious mood this morning, the mood in which she tried to repair things—to defrost the refrigerator, to fix the broken leg of a dining room chair, to come up with a plan to pay back the bank loans my father kept taking out. She was determined to fix what she could fix because so much around her was unfixable—namely my father. His anxiety and hypochondria, rapacious consumption of food and sleeping pills and tranquilizers, threatened to spiral out of control at any moment.

Even less amenable to my mother’s corrective impulses were my father’s congenital defects—malformed hands and limbs, with three fingers on one hand and only two on the other, one short arm that did not rotate, and a stunted leg that required a built-up shoe. Although my mother encouraged us to take these deformities for granted, to not talk about them, to not even see them, their undeniable presence made my mother’s remedial impulses seem all the more desperate.

Distracted as always, his 280 pound mass splayed on the sofa, legs spread wide apart, one foot jiggling on the floor, my father twirled one of his thick black curls in his two-fingered pincer hand and, to please my mother, raised his head a bit in the direction of my feet. He lifted his eyebrows as if to consider the problem before him, and then shrugged. How could my mother be so worried about my being pigeon-toed, he was probably wondering, when my imminent school exposure carried the far more cataclysmic risks of polio and measles and playground injury? Why did I even need to go to school with all those other children? My father had encouraged me to think of myself as a little adult, above the petty interests of the neighborhood “tots.” He represented himself as the perfect playmate, still in touch with the joys of childhood but without the dangerous physical rambunctiousness of boys my own age. They were bound to “roughhouse” me, he warned, and fragile as I was, no teacher would be able to protect me. He could practically smell the ubiquitous, deadly germs multiplying on the other children’s dirty little hands.

My father would have preferred it if I could have just stayed home with him. Having me out of his sight made him nervous, and even though just about everything made him nervous, its presence still called for every possible remedy.

“Gordon, are you looking? Please pay attention.” My father turned his eyes a little more directly to my feet, and then looked deeply into my own eyes, his mouth
turning up as if he were about to give away the punchline to one of his
innumerable dirty jokes. Let’s humor your mother together, he seemed to be saying.

"Come back the other way now," my mother instructed, poking my father on the arm, and saying, “Look, do you see what she’s doing?” She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. I wasn’t doing anything as far as I could tell. "I'm not turning,” I argued, looking down at my own feet, now conscious of every step, walking ever more determinedly across the room. A turn was something that altered one's course. To turn right at the bottom of our hill was to go to the bakery and the post office, to head left was to go in the direction of Pasadena and the dreaded doctor's office. I am not turning, I thought. I am no turner. I am walking perfectly straight across the living room carpet. Didn’t I arrive exactly where I intended, my feet propelling me reliably forward, one step after another? I wanted to defend the integrity of my walk, but I suspected that my mother knew something—saw something that I could not see.

The dawning realization that other people could see something in me to which I was blind myself had begun to insert itself uncomfortably into my consciousness. The summer before kindergarten my mother took many photographs of me, as if it were crucial to document me on the threshold of some irreversible transformation, as if to capture some pre-school innocence that would be lost forever.

One day, she found me in the backyard, a cowgirl pointing a black plastic toy gun at the camera. I imagined myself to be as imposing and fearsome as the cowboys on TV. My brown skirt, trimmed in fake leather fringe, bore the stamped image of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, with Trigger rearing up powerfully behind them. The camera did catch something about to be lost: within months, the dye would begin to flake off the skirt and Roy and Dale and Trigger would be left in flaky fragments, only a ghost of their images remaining. But, in the photograph, their likenesses are preserved bright and crisp, and my cowgirl hat is red.

But when the picture came back from the developers, what my mother saw in it was not the brave imposing cowgirl, not the self that I thought I was, but something else. “Isn’t she adorable,” my mother said to my father, shaking her head and handing him the photograph. “Cute little punim,” my father said. The person they saw wasn’t brave, wasn’t fearsome, wasn’t mighty; she was cute, adorable, harmless. There was a gap between what the camera had made and who I felt myself to be.

Worse, my feet seemed the most shameful embodiment of this gap. In the photograph, they assumed their indelible, irremediable resting posture: my left foot turned inward and crossed almost completely over the right, turned inward so far that it threatened to trip its mate.

Being pigeon-toed soon became a symbol of everything that was wrong with me. I had been the baby with colic who, in my mother’s words, "wouldn't stop screaming," the “hysterical toddler who felt every little thing,” the “Princess and the

Pea," the “cuckoo girl” who continued to be afraid of everything. At five, I still ran in terror, my hands over my ears, convinced that my body and brain were about to be exploded by the sound of the teletype machine that opened the evening news. I believed that the television puppets Beany and Cecil lived behind my bed and reached over my headboard every night to give me shots and whisper threats in my ear. When my mother pulled out the bed to show me that no puppets resided there, I became all the more convinced of those puppets’ magical powers given that they could disappear at the sound of her voice.

My mother cited these idiosyncracies with both fondness and disavowal. In my mind, they were what prevented her from loving me without reservation. Paradoxically these flaws, always crying out for her maternal ministrations, seemed to be what made me lovable at all.

“I fell in love with a crazy man,” she said, What did I expect—normal children?”

I wanted to be more like my mother but did not know how. Later in the kindergarten term, there would come a fad where all the little girls and their mothers wore matching dresses. Inspired by Mexican dancers and made out of crinkly paper-thin crepe, the dresses came in bright shades of turquoise, orangey-red, and yellow. With full skirts broken up into three tiers by horizontal bands of ric rac trim, these dresses made the mother-daughter duos wearing them look flamboyant, festive. My mother condemned their garish, cheap, carnival appeal. She would never wear a dress like that, she said. I loved the dresses, and grieved, knowing even then that she and I would never match.

“I don’t see any improvement,” my mother said to my father, as I continued to march self-consciously around the living room. “I wonder if those corrective shoes are doing anything. Maybe she needs a new prescription.” A decision was made to take me downtown to get new shoes for school. To entice my father to go along, my mother promised we’d go out to eat afterwards. To participate in any task that did not provide immediate gratification, my father needed a reward.

On the way in, I lingered in front of the store’s big display window. It held blue and white saddle shoes, pink cowboy boots with scroll work accented by embedded glass jewels of scarlet, yellow, and emerald green; shiny patent leather red mary janes. Something in my chest pulled me toward those shoes, I pressed my body up tight to the glass to get as close to them as possible. But this was longing without expectation: as far as I was concerned these shoes might have existed only in the window. My shoes were special shoes, high-topped white oxfords outfitted with metal plates to correct what was wrong with me.

The salesman had a crew cut, and wore a white shirt and narrow tie over a lanky frame. Sweat stains rimmed his underarms and cigarettes marred his breath. Children in their stockinged feet raced around the store, giggling and chasing each other. They screeched and hollered, beat at and broke the nearly childsize figure-eight shoe-people balloons that stood up on cardboard shoes of their own. The salesman had to make his way through an obstacle course to reach us. By the time he got there, he had waited on one too many strong-willed children. He wiped his brow with a thinning, grayish handkerchief and smiled, "Hi there, kiddo," he said.

His forced joviality did not fool me, I could sense the impatience and annoyance he was trying to hide. He could be a very mean man, I thought. As he reached, no-nonsense, for a steel contraption to measure my feet, I began to cry and to hide myself behind my mother's body. When he tried to take off my shoes, I broke into a howl. I knew from past experience that all he wanted to do was to push the edge of the measuring device up against my foot. All I had to do was stand up on it. But something about the look of that cold, hard, steel implement in his hands, my captivity, and his demand reminded me of the doctor’s office. As a result of my father’s vicarious hypochondria, I’d already had too much contact with stethoscopes, reflex hammers, and metal examining tables. What if this time the measuring hurts, I thought, rather than just feeling cold and hard? What if the mean salesman pushes down too hard on my foot and “roughhouses me?”

My screaming made my father agitated. “Ev, I’m parched,” he said, and went out the door in search of a soft drink. My father could not tolerate being thirsty. “He just needs to measure your feet,” my mother said. “See how all the other children are getting their feet measured and none of them are crying?” I wanted to be like the other children, so sat down and allowed the salesman to measure my feet. “Look how much bigger your feet have grown,” he said, and then disappeared into a back storeroom from which he emerged with a pair of shoes identical to my own but in a larger size. I walked around the store in them while he and my mother observed me.

"What are we going to do about that wayward foot?" my mother said. “If the shoes don’t do it, she’ll probably grow out of it anyway,” the salesman said. My father returned, supporting three enormous paper cups of soda under his chin, but didn’t sit down. "Want a drink, baby?" he asked me. "Evvie, do you want a drink?; I’ve got seven-up, root beer, and punch.” He put down two of the sodas then downed the third in a single pass, dribbling soda down the front of his burgundy wool sweater vest, and concluding with a loud belch.

I walked back and forth across the carpet, happy to have my mother’s complete attention even if it took a flaw to hold onto it. When my mother and I made no move to pick up our drinks, my father made waste of another soda before finally casting his attention to my feet.

Immediately in a panic, he rattled off questions. "Do they hurt anywhere? “There are no rough seams in them, are there? Are they cutting into you?” The word “cutting” evoked the image of a knife’s blade piercing the sides of my foot. The shoes were a little unyielding; they didn’t feel quite like my old ones. I focused hard on the question of whether what I was feeling was pain. Pain and the prospect of pain filled my awareness. I can feel my feet, I thought. Is feeling the same as pain? I could feel the stiffness of the new shoes, the softness of my white socks, the air on my skin, the blood surging through my legs—suddenly I could feel everything. “They look like they fit to me,” my mother said. “Are they comfortable?” Comfortable? How could I even contemplate comfort when my father’s alarm had thrust me into the dangerous zone of imminent pain?

“I can’t tell,” I said.

“They're not so big she's going to trip and fall down in them, are they? There’s lots of stairs at school.” My father pleaded for reassurance from the salesman, from my mother, from me. When the salesman pinched my toe to see how close it was to the end of the shoe, I jumped. “Owwh,” I said, relieved to find the certainty of pain at last. My outburst seemed to release my father from the grip of his own worrying. He slumped down on his chair, spent by his own anxiety, and consumed the last soda.

My shoes were sent to the factory for the corrective metal plates to be inserted. In the days afterward, I anticipated their arrival, listening for the doorbell and the UPS man. New shoes meant a new start. My feet were growing; I was growing; there was hope for redemption. When my shoes finally arrived one Saturday afternoon a week later, I was allowed to unwrap them myself. The box was covered in brown paper tied up with twine, and under the paper was a shoe box tied with string, and inside that box was white tissue paper, and underneath the tissue paper were my new shoes. The metal plates were invisible, hidden somewhere deep inside, just the way what was wrong with me was hidden.

I took my new shoes and crawled under the dining room table with them, putting my nose inside them, inhaling the rich, sharp, pungency of the leather. My new shoes appeared so white, so substantial, so pure. Their laces, which looked as if they had never been tied before, were just as white and still in possession of their plastic tips.

I put my hands in my shoes and walked them around under the table. I put my mouth right up to the soles that were clean and unscuffed, having never touched the ground. This was a daring act that I knew I would never be able to repeat once I had worn the shoes. The bottoms of shoes were among one of the most dangerous surfaces in my father’s universe, since they came into contact with all the other dirty surfaces. It was imperative not to touch them, nor get your mouth near them, nor get them anywhere near food. If I touched my shoe and something that had gotten onto the bottom of my shoe from the ground got onto my hand, and then I put my hand into my mouth, I might die.

I regarded my old shoes. The leather, the laces, the holes the laces went through, seemed tawdry and pathetic by comparison. Soiled, sullied, gum stuck to their soles, irremediably scuffed, encrusted with layer upon layer of the chalky bad-smelling "nurse's white" my mother used to "clean them up,” they seemed unsalvageable. And yet they also felt like a part of me. Sorry for all they had been through, I decided to hide them away in the back of my closet where they would be safe but I wouldn’t have to look at them. Then I transferred my affection completely to my new shoes.

Wearing them, I could be as clean and white as they were, as innocent of the past, as full of possibility for the future. "Tighter," I demanded, as my mother tied the laces. "As tight as you can make them. Tighter. Tighter. Tighter." They felt like secure little houses for my feet. I wanted them so tight that I could almost not feel my feet in them, so tight that my foot could not possibly turn when I was wearing them.

On the first day of kindergarten I put on my new shoes along with a new black and white polka dot dress. The notoriety I achieved by crying all day overshadowed attention to any other aspect of my attire or demeanor. But within a few days, after the other children had anointed me with the nickname of crybaby, every other aspect of my dress and deportment came under their scrutiny. As they established their hierarchies, determining who should be popular and who should be ignored, who should be tortured, and who should be avoided, my shoes became the object of much interest.

"Baby shoes," they began to taunt me in a singsong one day on the playground, "The crybaby wears baby shoes." I began to sob, validating the appropriateness of my nickname. They could see they were getting somewhere so they began to skip sideways around me, pointing at my feet and chanting, "baby shoes, baby shoes, crybaby wears baby shoes." I was caught off guard yet again. I had not anticipated how my new shoes, the shoes my mother had bought me, the shoes that were supposed to fix me, could become the source of a whole new order of public shame.

This forced me to turn my attention to my classmates' feet. They weren’t wearing shoes like mine, none of them were wearing shoes like mine, I realized. They were nonchalantly wearing those shoes from the window: the red patent leather mary janes, the rubber-toed, bright blue keds, the cowboy boots with scroll work and embedded gems, and blue and white saddle shoes, and brown t-straps. Furthermore, their feet did not turn in them; their feet were straight and strong and perfect.

When I came home from kindergarten in tears, and reported the abuse, my mother grew silent. By the next Saturday she must have decided that the ever dimming prospect of the shoes actually correcting my pigeon-toed gait wasn’t worth the psychological cost of the other children's derision. She took me back downtown and bought me saddle shoes. The very ones in the window. Dark blue and white, the white as pure as the white of my oxfords, the navy deep and true.

At first I felt naked in shoes that broke below my ankle: everyone could see my white socks. But as I walked around and around the house in my new shoes, my head down, admiring them, I started to warm to the effect. I regarded my feet in those shoes as if they were some other child’s feet—they looked just like any other child’s feet—or did they?

Within weeks of acquiring my new saddle shoes, those shoes that had seemed so perfect in the shop window, began, as a result of their proximity to me, to lose some essential aspect of their luster. I became ever more discriminating in comparing them to my peers’ shoes. A connoisseur of saddle shoes. Saddle shoes should have white eyelets where the laces pass through, not blue ones like mine did. The edges where the blue part of the shoe crossed over the white should be rounded, not cut with an angular seam. The rim of the brown soles had to be absolutely evenly brown, not marred by a tiny speck of tan. I had become as adept at discerning my shoes' fatal flaws as my mother was at finding mine.

But after a while, it wasn’t just a matter of my shoes not matching up to those of my peers; my aesthetics grew increasingly more rarefied. I could imagine what a perfect saddle shoe looked like, but eventually there was something fatally flawed about every shoe I saw. The right saddle shoe—the perfect saddle shoe—had become an unreachable ideal. I was like my mother after all—a critic—who wouldalways find a way to deem what existed in the real world as less than perfect, so that normalcy and the object of desire remained just out of reach.

Of course, my mother could not simply give up on fixing my pigeon-toed stance; she had to come up with other remedies. She enrolled me in after-school tap and ballet class. I adored the black patent tap shoes, the pink ballet slippers, the fluffy tutu, all the accouterment of the activity. Ballet seemed to offer the magical promise of a direct reversal: if your feet turn in, we will turn them out. "First position," the teacher intoned with her French accent. "Feeet turned out." I deliberately turned them out as far as I could, attempting to find the polar negation of their natural tendency. I practiced the positions at home, over and over again in front of the mirror, proclaiming, "Feet out, feet out," stretching out the long e's to match the teacher's pronunciation.

But I was among the smallest, least coordinated girls in dance class. Fine when we stood at the barre and simply clacked our tap shoes back and forth and made noise, as soon as we moved into more complex sequences of movement, I lost the thread. The teacher moved me to the front row, right under her eye and that made me all the more self-conscious. When I realized that I was a step behind, and then several, that in others’ eyes, I was not the poised, graceful, agile girl that the costume deserved, I simply stopped trying. The greatest humiliation would have come, I reasoned, from being seen trying and failing. There was far less humiliation in appearing not to care.

Whenever I had the slightest sore throat or runny nose or stomachache, my father insisted on my staying home from school and from dance class, anyway. After a while I’d missed so many dance classes that it was futile to ever return. My father said, "Don't make her go, Ev," and my mother, exhausted, did not object.

I kept my new dance shoes, of course, and continued to put on my own performances in the privacy of my bedroom. There I was not only a great ballerina but also a circus aerialist. I wrapped one of my mother's scarves around my waist as a talisman, and walked the tightrope high above the crowd's heads. I never faltered, walking in an absolutely, perfectly straight line, without twisting, or trembling, or turning, for even a moment. The packed audience, including my mother who beamed with pride in the first row, held their breaths in awe while they watched me. When I was finished, they broke into a roar.