Those shoes gave me athlete’s foot. I never took them off, except at bedtime. They didn’t breathe. Summer and winter, my feet smelled and swelled and rubbed against those shoes. I kept and shared that itchy rash with eighty other victims. Maybe that’s why I still dread trying on shoes. For a long time after I entered the convent, I still couldn’t believe I was wearing them. I would look down at the floor and be caught by surprise. “Who is the old woman dressed in my feet?”
I had been wearing the religious habit and its matching grandma shoes for five years when it happened. One Sunday during a family visit, I held my three-year-old nephew on my lap. When I slid him to the floor, his little frame already too heavy, he landed on my habit, which was fanned out on the floor before me. When I tried to stand up, I couldn’t. “Patrick, you’re standing on my dress,” I said, as I coaxed him to step off the front of my habit. I chose the word “dress” deliberately, knowing the word “habit” wouldn’t be in his toddler vocabulary.
He did step back, but not before staring back up at me. “You’re not a girl,” he said.
I gasped: “Why do you say that?”
He pointed to the floor and said, “Girls don’t wear man shoes.” Then he said it again: “You’re not a girl.”
I assured him I was, indeed, a girl. But how would he know? I had hidden my girl under the long black cloak of self-denial, covered her up even down to my feet. At twenty-five, all signs of womanhood were gone. His childish statement rang in my ears. It still does.
Decades later, I remember the shoes. They didn’t breathe.
