RUBIK’S SHOES, or Feeling as Feminine as Ernest Borgnine

Rubik’s Cube blasted into American pop culture when I was in high school. I still remember the first time I held one. I loved it the way I love Piet Mondrian’s paintings: for its mesmerizing, aesthetically pleasing geometry.

That is, until I tried to solve it. I’ve never had a knack for math and I wouldn’t know an algorithm from Algeciras, Spain. I made several tries in earnest to line up the same color on each side. But when I got close to lining up the white squares on one side, it threw the yellow side out of whack. I failed miserably. It served the remainder of its life as a paper weight. Today, the only “Cube” I love is the 1998 film in which six people are inexplicably imprisoned in a booby-trapped system of boxes.

Which reminds me of my relationship with shoes. (Yes, dear reader. This particular blog entry is much like a Simpson’s episode, starting out with one apparent plotline and veering over to something completely different.) You see, because of my 40+ year battle with rheumatoid arthritis, my feet and ankles are a disaster. Consequently, trying to find a pair of cute shoes that I can walk in is as exasperating as trying to align color facades on a cube.

First off, I take a small shoe size: size 6 American, size 35 or 36 Italian. But my tootsies are really wide. Sometimes I can squeeze into medium width, but “wide” width is preferred. The next problem is my ankles. I had them fused into a fixed position back when Jimmy Carter was still in the White House. This means my feet are like Barbie’s; I must wear shoes with a heel or I will fall over.  In my case, every pair of shoes I own must have a heel height of 2.6 inches: no more, no less. (Sometimes if the heel is only a tiny bit too low, I can cheat with a small wedge inside the shoe to raise me up.) The putrid icing on top of this stinking cake is the fact that I can’t reach my feet with my hands. So I need shoes that I can slip on and off by myself. No ties or buckles.

Shoe shopping is typically an exercise in exasperation. Like the squares on a Rubik’s Cube, everything must align just so. When I find the right size, the heel height is often too high or too low. If I can align both size and heel, the shoes are probably too narrow. When I get lucky and align size, width and heel, my hopes are shot down by shoe strings or buckles. “Cloven toes” are also a deal killer.

Truth be told, I do own a pair of low-heeled cheetah print Manolo Blahnik mules and a sweet pair of Emilio Pucci slides. I save them for special occasions. The remaining pairs are fit only for a bingo hall or a skateboarding half-pipe. No six-inch stilettos; just clodhoppers. About as feminine as Ernest Borgnine in a pair of SAS waitress wedges.

So I pretend. When I’m doing my adapted aquatic exercises, I work a runway walk along the stripes painted on the pool bottom. For a few moments in my mind, I’m a fashion model in a pair of Prada flame heels strutting along the catwalk.