Your boyfriend has never been a foot guy, but when he came back from New Orleans with some ecstasy you both took it and he spent a sweaty hour in his cavelike bedroom sucking your toes. You have never been a foot girl, but at that moment you understood every fetish in the world, the unexpected glee of the tongue on that little white crevice of skin between your toes, the tickle that floated up your body into your spine and became a dreamy burst of air in your brain. You opened your mouth to say stop but instead you said yes. The fat four-inch scars on the tops of your feet were hypersensitive; it was like he’d put his tongue inside, deep, past the tissues and the blood vessels, up and down the long gnarled bones.
After he finished you lay there with spit cooling on your feet, the window open to the punch of spring air, your whole naked body twisting into goosebumps.
“What are those scars from again?” he asks, hauling himself up face-to-face with you, his eyes huge and magnificent.
•§•
Ever since you were a kid, your feet have given you problems. Flat feet, corrective shoes, bunions. You had special, expensive insoles made for your normal middle-school-kid sneakers. You had excuses for gym—no running— and the other kids made fun of you but secretly were jealous of your spot on the bleachers, ankle crossed over knee, wide flat foot shaking with the rhythm of the foot-pounded gym, which was humid and foggy with teenaged sweat and exertion. You’ve never worn high heels before. Your feet don’t fit into the constraints of normal women’s shoes.
At age twenty-two you have a double bunionectomy. It’s the last year you’ll be covered under your parents’ insurance, and they insist. Dr. Vito is the podiatrist; when you go to his office for a visit, he places his hand on your thigh and squeezes, right in front of your parents. He’s bald, with a big beard and a New York accent. You like him.
Recovery from the surgery is hard. You quit your job at Goodwill; you leave your boyfriend-at-the-time’s apartment to come back and live with your parents and be taken care of. It is harder than you’d expected, walking on two sore feet. You can feel your cut bones grinding. Blood soaks the tops of the bandages in parallel lines. Crutches don’t help; you have no good foot to lean on. Here you learn about pain and how to separate yourself from it. Here you learn about Demerol.
It takes months but you learn how to walk again. Without the bunions your feet are narrower; you get excited about shoe-shopping. You move back in with boyfriend-at-the-time but find he has been cheating on you. You cheat on him, too, with an older man at a Holiday Inn Express. The older man pays for the room and you stay there all night, bathed in air-conditioning, a welcome relief from your box-fan-cooled ghetto apartment. The older man buys you dinner from Steak ’n Shake and you sit in the freezing room in the middle of the bed with your giant strawberry milkshake, feeling like a princess.
The bandages are still on your feet but the older man doesn’t seem to mind. He may even like it. You could care less about the sex; as he’s on top of you, you raise your long legs into the air, admire the new streamlined shape of your foot beneath the Ace bandage. You curl your toes, expecting pain, feeling nothing much.
•§•
“Embryos develop head-to-foot,” you say to your boyfriend. A fetus like a little fuzzy peach is what you’re thinking of, finger- and toe-buds all tiny and exquisite. “The hands come first. The head. The eyes. Feet are last. Not so important.” You didn’t answer his question. You’re still thinking of the fetus, her giant unblinking eyes, miniature thumb in not-quite-mouth. His hand is on your belly. “I want to get pregnant,” you say to him.
“You will,” he says. He wrangles you into a wrestling position; you’re pinned down, you can’t move at all. “But not today.”
It’s almost like you don’t have feet any more. He tasted them and turned them into air. The drug is coming on heavy now; you’re sweating, exhilarated. You see tiny babies, big-headed, half-formed, swimming towards you like ghosts. The pitter-patter of little no-feet. More like a swish, a slide, the trail of the hem of a nightgown across a floor as someone comes to kiss you goodnight, or to wake you up for a walk, late night in the purple dark, toes digging into spring mud, feet finally fully formed into something to carry you away.
