The Nun Shoes

I remember the shoes – heavy black grandma shoes with square toes and heels like building blocks.  Weeks before I entered the convent, my mother and I had sat in Potters, one of the few stores still selling support shoes in 1960.  I tried them on with laughter, dread and disbelief. I was seventeen.

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.