A few weeks ago, I was at Saratoga Springs when I said, “I think I need to sit down.” People close to me react to this statement with alarm. It usually means I am:
about to faint
having an asthma attack
hurt myself many hours ago and didn’t say anything
In this case, we were at Saratoga Springs, at the racetrack, where many horses abound, so excusing myself to a horseless locality was met with grave concern. What had happened was that I – sometime after changing from my cute, photo-only heels into my cute, walkable flats – whacked my right foot really hard against a concrete step.
And I sort of, uh, mangled my baby toe a little?
I didn’t say anything at first because my primary directive is to always choose pretty over practical. In most scenarios, I choose the least-painful adorable footwear I can get away with, and hope I do not get blisters until the end of the day. When I know I’ll be doing a lot of walking, I try to bring a backup pair of shoes that I know are comfy, just in case. I even did that at Saratoga! But then, somehow, at some point, I banged my foot against a very hard surface, and within minutes, my right foot was throbbing with pain. I felt a searing sensation along the outer edge of my toe, and a prickly sting as my foot swelled.
Still, I played it cool. I said I needed to sit for a little bit, and then I sat for the remainder of the day, hobbling out to the car in the evening, where I changed into flip-flops. When I slid off my ergonomic Mary Janes, the pinky toe on my right foot was swollen, crooked, and blood-blistered. I touched it. It felt like a water balloon full of pudding and loose teeth.
My instinctual first move was to photograph my “meat toe,” as I was now calling it, so I could show my mom and my best friend Chloe. Chloe provided an iMessage diagnosis of “definitely broken.” My mother, upon seeing my mangled toe, expressed her sympathy, and then said, “The good news is, you’re more like your momma every day.”
My mother has also broken her share of toes. The little ones, especially. She has developed a cavalier attitude towards toes that I inherited and agree with wholeheartedly. “Who needs them? Especially after they get all crooked,” she said.
There are many similarities between me and my mother. One of them is our feet. When my parents met, my dad told my mom, “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, from the ankles up.” When I was born, more than one person, upon seeing me in my infancy, turned to my mother and said, “Oh, God, she has your feet.”
That’s me in the photo above. Today, my feet look like that, but bigger. My toes (like my mother’s) are long and bony, with extremely rounded tips. Think extraterrestrial. Their length lends them a prehensile quality that is equal parts convenient and unsettling. We have somewhat narrow heels, capped by very sharp ankle bones that jut out on either side of the foot. This invokes the image of a cartoon cat with a scheming canary lodged in its throat, stretching horizontally, refusing to be swallowed. We have pale skin and ropey blue veins. We get regular pedicures to perform our best attempt at normalcy. On more than one occasion, my pedicurist has called over a colleague to point and whisper about a strange abnormality they’ve spotted on my feet.
My feet differ from my mother’s in two significant ways. I walk on my tippytoes (always have!) (no clear explanation), so my arches are higher. And I have much larger ankles. The latter is likely a result of the former, or at least, that’s my theory. I learned my ankles were unusually big when, in fifth grade, I was standing in line to use the bathroom next to a boy named Lane. I had always liked him because we shared the same birthday, which, in my mind, meant we had an inextricable bond. As we waited against the wall of our elementary school, he caught my eye, smiled, and asked, “Why do you already have cankles?”
A “cankle,” or a “calf ankle,” is generally attributed to swelling – often from pregnancy, salt consumption, walking a lot - and sometimes associated with serious health issues – lymphatic problems, circulatory issues. But then there are the truly gifted, like me, who have big sturdy ankles from birth. My mom is the most beautiful woman on the planet from the ankles up. If you’re looking at me, you should start just below the knee.
For many years (especially FIFTH GRADE when I was TWELVE!!!!!) the reality of my weird feet/weird ankles filled me with embarrassment. But over the last several months, I’ve started caring less and less. I think some of this is due to hours spent on Reddit and TikTok and Instagram looking at plastic surgery content.
Initially, when I saw women listing out all the procedures they’d had and creating “fix-it wish lists,” my instinct was to tally up which parts of myself I could have enhanced by science. Maybe they could take fat from my face and put it in my feet! Maybe they could take out some of my ribs and use it to make me newier, bigger, shinier teeth! Maybe I needed to get my eyebrows lasered off and tattooed on!
But then I developed a sort of face blindness (not to be confused with my other face blindness, which prevents me from ever recognizing anyone in any movie). I saw women painstakingly catalog their “flaws,” creating new taxonomies for shapes of masseter muscle and forehead slope. And it all sort of started to blur together. Really? THAT’S a problem for your face? That tiny little ghost of a nasolabial line is worth $500 to smooth out? But I like it! I like when someone’s face has lines! If Calista Flockhart and Nicole Kidman let themselves age, maybe I could tell them apart!
I have also spent a considerable amount of time on foot fetish forums, doing the opposite of this practice. I have tried to determine what foot-admirers like. What makes them tick? Which celebrities have the best feet? Are there redeeming qualities of my feet that I haven’t noticed due to proximity? I thought that, maybe, if I took off my feet’s glasses, they would actually be a supermodel.
What I learned is: people are weird about what they like. Not that liking feet is even, necessarily, that weird. What I mean is, people who strongly prefer one famous actress to a different famous actress on the basis of feet alone aren’t very good at articulating why. There is no algorithm of arch angle, nail bed size and heel width that adds up to a golden ratio of universally beloved feet. It appears to be, like anything else, a matter of personal preference.
I don’t know why I assumed this would be different, or why it took me so many instances of reading “I think her toes have PERSONALITY!” to get it through my brain. The good news is, I have untangled the crossed wires in my brain that made me afraid of people seeing my feet. There is nothing a 12-year-old boy could say to make me feel bad about them. They sure are feet, I’ll tell you what.
When the blood blister on my meat toe came off, I sent Chloe a video (she was delighted and very satisfied). The area underneath is healing up nicely, with scrubbed-pink skin like a newborn baby’s. It is definitely more crooked than before, in an opposite direction of the rest of its brothers. I can’t wait to get a pedicure and see if they like my new toe.