Crooked Toes
Learning to embrace family quirks
When I was 9 or 10 I decided I would never, ever wear sandals without socks, because I had such ugly feet. I can distinctly remember walking into the front entrance of Roaring Brook School in the morning, fresh off the bright yellow bus, looking at all the other girls’ pretty sandals and thinking I could never wear the kind with a thong between the toes, because I would have to wear socks to hide mine. In those days elementary-school girls often wore sandals with white ankle socks, so this by itself wouldn’t have made me peculiar in the fashion sense. What gives me pause now is realizing that at such a young age, I had already fallen into the habit of automatically comparing myself to everyone else, always to find myself wanting, deficient in some way.
I thought my feet were exceptionally ugly because I have crooked toes. My big toes and the next two curve towards the outside of the foot, and the two smallest toes curve the other way. The middle two are longer than the big toe, and the pinkie turns in so that the nail is almost vertical. The toe next to the pinkie is shaped just like a question mark on the right, a reverse question mark on the left. There are spaces between all but the two smallest toes, which fit together like puzzle pieces. To tell the truth, my fingers are also somewhat crooked, but since fingers are longer it’s much less pronounced, so although I’ve never been vain about my hands, I’ve never been actually ashamed of them either.
I got my crooked toes (and hands) from my birth father. My feet are exactly the same as his, toe for toe. We must have compared or discussed them at some point, though I don’t remember that particular conversation. I only lived with my father in California till I was seven, when my siblings and I went to live with our aunt, uncle, and cousins in New York state. We were formally adopted a couple of years later. I often wonder what other traits I might have inherited; if toes can be replicated so closely, the same must be true for brains and other less visible characteristics.
My adoptive father also had famously ugly feet. It’s a family joke that when he fell off a ladder and broke a toe, the first thing the doctor said on seeing them was “Is this normal?” Dad was also famously self-confident, and I can’t think of any other traits we share; even our ugly feet were ugly in completely different ways. My adoptive mother, on the other hand, has perfect feet. They are small — at five-eight, she wears size six shoes — and her toes are small and straight and neatly aligned like a doll’s, instead of every which way like mine. I remember some amazing lace-up boots she had, and the silver sandals she loved because their four-inch platforms made her six feet tall. That was when I was in high school, and about the most self-conscious person on the planet. All the cool kids wore “waffle stompers,” a hiking-boot-like style that was popular in the mid-1970s. My mother said they were too expensive, and bought me “desert boots,” which she said were also in style, but they always felt like second-best. They’re back in style now as “chukka” boots and I still hate them. Shoes are linked to self-esteem in my mind to this day; I often dream that I’m shoe-shopping or searching for a lost or forgotten shoe.
I myself would never wear platforms. As a matter of fact, I won’t wear any shoe with a high heel. I don’t like walking in them, it makes me feel as if I have hooves, so at some point I just decided never to buy another pair. (It certainly simplifies shopping!) I can’t wear any peep-toe styles because my long middle toe sticking out makes it look like I’m “flipping the bird.” I don’t like lace-up shoes either, not even sneakers, I feel like my feet are stuck in little prisons. I prefer shoes that are easy to slip on and off, which is to say, shoes that are easy not to wear most of the time. My most fashion-conscious college friend, the one who said you can tell everything about a person by their shoes, once told me that all the shoes I like “look like loafers.”
When I was pregnant with my first child, my feet hurt all the time. It was a very hot summer that year, I was unemployed, living in a fourth-floor walk-up studio in the East Village, trying to find a new apartment and a new job at the same time. As my due date approached there were only two pairs of shoes I could still wear, my Tevas and some cheap black-and-silver sandals. My son just graduated college, but I’ve never gone back to my previous shoe size. Of course nowadays I do wear sandals without socks; I even paint my toenails in bright, crazy colors — never natural or neutral tones.
Everyone says my firstborn is the one who looks like me, and the younger one is just like their father, but it’s my younger child who has my toes. It’s one of the first things I noticed when he was born. Toe by toe, his feet have the same quirkiness as mine. I was astonished one day when my husband asked me why I hadn’t mentioned our younger boy had a broken toe. I said “He doesn’t, his toes are just crooked like mine, I can’t believe you’ve never noticed that before!” He’s also got my tendency to daydream, some of my introversion, and the color-blindness that runs in my family. When he was younger, I sometimes worried that he seemed to accept second-best too easily beside his confident and accomplished big brother, but unlike me, he’s never been afraid to march to his own drum. He’s confident in his own opinions and never seems to compare himself to anyone else. I hope he never does.
