COLD FEET

by Molly Morrow

HISTORY
          In the spring of 1942, the Colonel Motoo Nakayama marched some 72,000 Filipino and American prisoners-of-war across the Bataan peninsula, 60 miles through the dust to a prison camp in San Fernando. These were young men, dying men, and dead men too exhausted to fall. Their bones could hit the ground and make no real sound, just the quiet sifting of sand. 54,000 marching corpses made it to San Fernando, that’s 54,000 prisoners and 18,000 ghosts-of-war. “We are not barbarians,” said the Colonel, but there’s a trail of over a hundred thousand footprints, give or take the dead men who left no trail, and that’s a lot of time to redefine yourself. And a lot of time for rain and for the seasons to erode history, mud pooling up in the trail, the outline of toe and heel softening until the trail is gone. The war went on, the Japanese lost; the mawmag came out at night and made its home in the damp earth where someone’s ghost had walked. In the springtime now, on April 9th of each year, there is a Philippine national holiday to honor the men who marched. All ghosts-of-war, all footprints. I suppose people get the day off from work.
          Or take Chief Joseph, who in 1877 walked 1,400 miles with the weight of his tribe on his back as he fled from General Howard and his Christian cavalry. That’s 200 born warriors and 500 makeshift soldiers snaking almost all the way to Canada on foot with the calloused U.S. army on their trail in standard issue boots. That’s 700 Nez Perce, or the same number of footprints as there were miles to make them. That’s Chief Joseph’s father’s American flag burning on Idaho soil, that’s Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, that’s why he said he would fight no more, forever, but he didn’t say anything about walking.

ANATOMY
            There are 26 bones and 33 joints in the human foot and over a hundred different muscles, ligaments, and tendons. There are scars and calluses from shoes that don’t fit properly, and grass stains so dark that your heels look black, and sometimes there is that ripe smell of sweat and canvas. If your mother drank when you were in her womb, there might be an abnormally large space between your first and second toe. If you wear high-heels during the day, you will obtain a slight bump that protrudes from the ball of your foot, sometimes in a sideways direction, called a bunion. If you are a ballet dancer, then you are familiar with the nervous habit of picking at loose toenails as they bruise, until they eventually slough off with all the ease of a wilting bouquet. The nails grow back better than they were before, like an octopus growing steroid-laden arms. The bottom of the foot is threaded with nerves as thick as pencil lead and laced with so much feeling that you cannot legally tattoo yourself there. Some are wildly ticklish there. Others are most frustratingly not.
         Of course, this is just your run-of-the-mill operation. There are those who are born with more or less in their feet. Philippe Petit went for a walk on a three-quarter inch high wire strung between the Twin Towers, a quarter mile above Manhattan. His stomach had settled in his toes and consequently he had no room in them for gravity. James Devine’s feet can tap 38 taps per second, which makes him the world’s fastest dancer. When I was not yet old enough to comprehend the strangeness of her skill, I watched my mother slip a cigarette between her second and third toes and lift her foot to her mouth to smoke it. She had learned to strengthen those toes because the gap between her first and second was too wide to be of any use.  

GEOGRAPHY
          Around that same age was when all this with the feet began, I guess. As a girl it seemed to me the highest reflection on one’s character when one was able to walk barefoot down a driveway. When Anthony leapt from the roof of his pink mobile home and hit loose gravel without wincing, that is when he became a King, and the master not only of all neighborhood ceremonies from that day forward, but also of my elementary affections. Mobility was crucial, and a kid couldn’t afford to be limited by her terrain. Sometimes the game was way out in the crop fields, too deep in the manure to wear your shoes because your mother would kill you if you wrecked them. Nighttime brought insects out from under the porches and drunks out from the taverns, and any respectable kid didn’t need a flashlight. You had to know the town, and to know the town you had to have a good, well-learned pair of feet. When I could finally sink into a flowerbed and allow the earthworms to weave between my toes, that’s when I joined the ranks of Anthony and his older brother Andy, who ruled the alleyway behind our house. When I chased Mandy Robbins through land mines of two-by-fours with the nails pointing up through the grass, when Chris Skinner’s boy taught me how to curl my toes like a chimp’s around tree branches, and then how to curl my toes when he shot me with a water gun – that’s when all my baby teeth fell out and I could fall asleep without my father’s stories. These were small triumphs in the pursuit of epic girlhood. My feet knew the rough beams in the lumber yard and the soft mud of the slough, they knew the scalding plastic of playground slides, they gained slow splinters and blisters, and bore the scars of an acrobatic wisdom: the first-hand knowledge of the neighborhood and all of its imaginary jungle gyms.    
            
INTIMACY

         I know it is because of my feet that the concept of my nakedness has never been synonymous with feeling vulnerable. The feet are as bad as it gets, and once they’re out there, it feels redundant to worry about the other things. I remember being naked in front of my first lover and wondering if it were possible for the arches of my feet to blush. Feeling out stale particles of junk food mashed into the carpet. The adrenaline that made me stand and shake like a flamingo, one foot rubbing up and down along the bridge of the other. If I’d had wings and a beak I would have traded them for a pair of boots to hide in. The small silence of my breasts, the low grumbling of my belly, the giggling of my hips that feel too narrow to be a woman’s – they are hard to hear over the incessant second guessing of my feet.
         Thus, the ideal woman would have feet exactly opposite to mine, small and dainty and smooth all over from years of pedicures and bath salts. I know instinctively that my feet are mine, but that they are also my father’s – they are shaped the same, cut from the same pale ivory marbled blue and pink, a little too large for my legs. Even if I had not abused them and hardened them as I did, I know they would still be rough, and there would still be a callus on my heel because that is my father’s callus, molded from the heavy steps he takes and the way his ankle bone scrapes against the back of his shoes. To peel off my socks is to face my family and all of my flaws and hope my lover will not notice the scabs.
         To be intimate, then, is to bare one’s feet to another and let him replace your shame with his admiration.
         The ideal love, if love can ever be called such, would be one in which the lovers could hold each others’ feet and read them like palms, even if it was all nonsense. Your soul is there, one lover would say, and kiss you on that spot, and know that just then there had been a transfer from lips to sole. Here, in the pretty, blank spaces above your heels, are the long stretches of your childhood and here, along the mountain of your ankle, are the bang-ups from your adolescence. The lovers would bend and stoop to kiss each other’s toes, knowing that such naked strangeness was only a sign of comfortable devotion – nothing more. There would be no question as to why your toes were freezing cold, and thus you would not have to explain about your poor circulation, how your blood was lazy and slow and that’s why your fingers and toes were always pink while the rest of you was white. There would be no rehearsal, no lost toenails, no swollen ankles. Indeed, there would be no exchange at all, as if for once your feet could finally stop squirming and shouting out your history in fits and starts. You would fall asleep with your feet tucked under you, the way you always pictured a woman would sleep if she felt safe, and for once you would forget all about them.

Molly Morrow is a freshman at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, where she is thinking seriously about teaching English as a second language, learning to cook something other than canned chili, or perhaps becoming the next Pablo Neruda. She cherishes the opportunity to share her work with you. This is her first publication.

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