They’re Just Shoes, Jamie
I slide my feet in — first one, then the other. It’s been so long since I’ve worn heels that my toes act confused as I squish them into their assigned seats. I feel silly walking around my house in them, clomping down the hall to protect the hardwood. I haven’t bothered to change out of my yoga pants and worn-thin t-shirt, which gives this affair a whiff of playing dress up, play-acting at a life I no longer live.
They are just black snakeskin pumps. But they have a hint of a platform that transforms my height from average to formidable. They make my feet look smaller and my legs look longer and my life look put-together. They are what fashion magazines used to call “day to night” shoes, which can be worn to both a job interview and a date, though the likelihood of either in the near-to-medium term is grim.
I maybe stretched the term “need” when I pushed my card across the counter. the pair in the bottom of the shoe rack that are four years old, impossibly scuffed, and coming apart at the seams. My job prospects being what they are, I could’ve been more judicious about putting money down for them. But after months of austerity and practicing my self-denial reflex, it felt good to be impulsive and self-indulgent. I need a new pair,, I tell myself, they’re just shoes. This is a lie, of course. A haircut after a breakup isn’t just a haircut. A new convertible after a divorce isn’t just a car.
The shoes remind me that there’s a me in here somewhere who belongs in boardrooms, whose honest opinion is sought by those who can afford the firm’s fees. Hello in there, professional Jamie. You’re not lost, or gone. It will be the right time eventually, and when it is, you will have new shoes! I let my corporate, professional self out of her oubliette sometimes — let her teeter around the patio in heels, and make believe.
As I round the corner on a year since I last had any reason to put on work clothes or work makeup or work shoes, the whole enterprise begins to feel more desperate. More applications, more emails, more LinkedIn messages. I try to do it at night, so my family doesn’t see how long it takes to muster up the courage. The dark hides the mist in my eyes every time I open another posting that requires me to create a profile, submit my resume, and retype everything on my resume into tidy forms. Rinse and repeat. Night after night.
In the days when I had financial freedom and fungible income, the shoes wouldn’t have attracted a second thought. It would’ve been a given: of course you need them, and they’re on sale. That life, where I left my own apartment in my own car and put down my own credit card for things feels so far away, it might as well be Mars. Sometimes late at night, when no one’s awake and I can pitter-patter around the house in whatever shoes I want, I think about how far that life is — for better and worse — from the one I’m living now. It feels silly.
I probably look like a baby giraffe, without the ease and confidence of the woman who moves in these things like it’s second nature. I catch a glimpse of my lycra-clad legs looking impossibly long as I shut the door behind me. No doubt this is part of why heels are conventionally required in so many places, none of which have need of me. Another hot twist in my gut, I should be doing more applying instead of teetering around my house in shoes I bought but don’t exactly need. I feel like a fool. I probably — certainly — look like one.
In the dark, in shoes not yet broken-in, I give myself room to breathe. And when I start to feel the familiar twinge of toes contorted into a space designed to be too small for them, I take them off. The immediate relief of cold, flat tile crashes over my bared soles. I tuck them away in the bottom cupboard of the shoe rack, where they’ll wait for me until my life expands enough to have need of them. I am trying to forgive myself the small indulgence. They’re not an example of my failure to be fiscally responsible, or an opportunity to self-flagellate about the state of my life. At least, they shouldn’t be. They’re just shoes.
