Betty complains constantly about her feet. New shoes, she claims, cause her agony. (She has always taken pride in the fact that she wears a narrow size. Now she insists on the same size, though her feet have swollen.) During fittings, she cries out. Fellow shoppers stare at me, fearful she is being attacked. I point at the clerks, mouth, “Shoe people,” in a shocked stage whisper.
In my mother’s mind, no pair is right; nothing feels good. Her feet are tender, and when I attempt to guide them carefully into her Mephistos, she behaves as if she is being tortured. She can no longer bear even the slightest discomfort of any variety. For several years, despite our efforts at malls across the region, we have found no footwear that does not cause her pain. At Saks in St. Louis, a clerk pulled out a pair of flats by Jimmy Choo. “Listen,” I begged her. “We are not talking Sex in the City here.” She glanced at me as if I had blasphemed. I bowed my head, chastened.
A pile of rejects grows higher by the couch. Betty refuses to put them on or try to break them in, relying instead—even in winter—on the beat-up sandals and her ancient Mephisto “runners.” This morning, after the call from Waikiki, she brought the newspaper up over her face and stuck her feet under the coffee table when I reached for a pair of the new shoes. As I withdrew, I caught her peeping out from behind the paper quite satisfied with her obstruction. I wondered if my 12-step group might pass some sort of humanitarian injunction allowing me to ingest one tiny Xanax on an emergency basis.
. . .
This was the beginning of the War of Shoes. Since man first staggered across the earth, wars have been waged over God, land, money, freedom. This will be a battle for control over one small territory that remains my mother’s own: her feet, a dry landscape below the region of swollen ankles, a terrain coursed by rivers of fragrant lotion, of callused patches, broken veins, errant toes. On this field of battle I have vowed to lay my body down. Withdrawing to my bed, I planned future maneuvers. My hostages, I decided, would be stowed in the crowded confines of my bedroom closet.
If I were starting a Betty Museum, I would make an exhibit out of the sandals with their worn, thin straps and soles indented with my mother’s dark footprints. These shoes are relics; they sum up our last years here on this planet. I treat them kindly; they have served us well, through weather in all forms and days of challenges, through so many moods and ups and downs. In my bedroom, I tucked them into the closet on a high shelf. There would be repercussions. But this was war.
. . .
At the city office, located in the old elementary school, where I had gone to pay a bill, I made a quick detour into the historical society, located in this same building, to reread a few of my favorite items, including the tale of Ella Ewing, an eight-foot-four-and-a-half-inch “giantess,” who traveled with P. T. Barnum, sharing the bill with a twenty-three-inch-tall Russian dwarf called Peter the Small. Her shoes are displayed at the state capitol. Bending the rules a bit, the woman behind the desk allowed me to borrow a clipping about Ella’s life.
My family, our friends, all our days reside on these shelves. For several months now, I have tried to piece together my mother’s life, the past she will never mention.
According to my grandfather’s obituary, Joseph William Baker, whom I never knew and who was rarely discussed by his children, disposed of his first business, a hardware store, in order to enter World War I. The fighting ended before he could report for duty and he started over from scratch, opening the lumberyard in Madison and working hours that extended from before sunup to long beyond the fading of daylight. He took a wife, Margaret, often called Marge or, later, Mammy. Photographs reveal a young woman with a wistful face and thick, pinned-up braids who taught at country schools to which she rode on horseback, even in the rain, through the trees and bean fields.
The first child of Margaret and J.W., a son named Harry Clay, was born in Madison in 1921. On August 4, 1922, my mother—Betty Baker—arrived. A few years later, there was another son, my uncle Bill.