Shoes and Sleep

MK has come up with all kinds of schemes to insure that we don’t have jet lag on our first day in Rome. Her first scheme involved a slowly rotating clock, a gentle introduction to European time. This was supposed to start two weeks ago, with a bedtime one hour later each night, until she would be going to bed at noon every day and wakening, refreshed at 8:00PM. According to her calculations, this would be analogous to going to bed at 9:00PM in Italy, and awakening at 5:00AM.

When she first proposed this to me, I started laughing. I do this time adjustment thing for a living. Every week, I spend my first night at work wondering why I did this to myself, and then the next day, I collapse into bed, feeling like a piece of summer roadkill in Arkansas. I think I’m a bit of an expert in jet lag, as all night shift workers are. Our first nights at work and our first days off are always painful for us and for our families. Just like these years with W at the helm (“Good job, Brownie”), there is no way to avoid the pain. I’m not sure if MK ever noticed, but I’m a little snappy after only two hours sleep. I’m sure Rome will be just lovely with two exhausted lesbians hitting the Trevi fountain for a little pick me up.

Since MK has to work for a living—during regular business hours—her first plan to adjust her sleeping patterns gradually was abandoned. Thre’s something a little hinky about showing up for work at 9:00PM, even if you are the boss. Her latest scheme involved staying up all night last night, and then there was supposed to be some sort of early to bed plan for tonight, although I was unclear on that.

Personally, I think we should just stay up all night again. But as Doris Day said, “Que Cera, cera.” At this point, I’m just hoping to make it onto some plane with my xanax, valium and ambien ready to go. Like all good night shift workers, I take sleep where I can. Just call me a sleep slut, the Sienna Miller of Snoring.

As for packing, it appears that we are meeting our goal, which has been revised to one large carryon bag per person, one carryon backpack per person and one checked bag that we share. MK has the Rick Steves carryon bag—for MK, it’s All Rick, All The Time—and I have what’s known as the Mother Load Mini. We have space saver bags, which seem to belch air like Jackie Gleason after a plate of cabbage, and both of us managed to pack the aforementioned layers without incident.

Shoes have been quite a challenge for me, though. For those that don’t know, I have an interesting foot. Shaped a bit like a duck’s, it has toes that spread out as wide as the ball of my foot, which is quite wide. MK spends a great deal of time making fun of my toes, which are all one length, furthering the impression that I might be related to Donald and Daisy. Shoes have never been easy, but I thought I was set. For years, I wore Birkenstocks—they are the exact shape of my foot—and sacrificed style for comfort. That is the essence of lesbianism anyway, right? A few years ago, I discovered Keen shoes, which are both attractive and comfortable.

But I needed shoes for this trip that would be suitable for rain, which even the cutest Keens are not. To find such shoes, we braved the mall for a shoe expedition on Sunday. I know that most women would be in seventh heaven at the possibility of hitting a mall during a big sale weekend. For MK and me, though, we thought that perhaps we had entered some circle of hell that Dante failed to mention, the one with the screaming children, the mass of humanity, the inability to find parking, except in the lane in which I was supposedly “driving.” When the clerk bites, when the couples fight, when I’m feeling poor, I simply remember my favorite mall, and then I try to find the door….

Anyway, first stop was The Walking Company. I grabbed four pairs of men’s Merrell’s, hoping to get a pair of walking shoes for under $100 in the right width. I have the misfortune of wearing a women’s size 8 ½, which is a men’s size 6 ½. Actually, only boys have feet that small. But men have feet as wide as mine. The sales clerk grabbed the shoes from my hands and told me, “We don’t carry Merrell’s in women’s sizes.” She put the shoes to the side and assumed a pitying look. I explained my difficulty—I need a shoe that will feet my EE foot in size 8 ½. “I dunno,” she said. “We’re going to Europe,” I pleaded. She said, “I’ll try to find something.”

Back she came with four boxes of shoes—three pairs did not fit at all. I think they were made for women with size 5AA feet, and the clerk brought them to me as some form of private amusement. Nothing like watching the stepsister try to shove her way into the crystal slipper.

The fourth was the most comfortable shoe I’ve ever worn. It was also the ugliest. Coming from a woman who likes Birkenstocks, that is saying something. In fact, here’s a link to the ugliest shoe on Earth. http://www.finncomfort.com/collections/prod_detail.aspx?style_sku=82015

Check out the price. Yup. $305 for something your crippled grandmother would eschew. The Walking Store was offering them at the bargain price of $285. I told the clerk that I couldn’t see paying $285 for a pair of shoes—politely refraining from saying that I wouldn’t pay $285 for a pair of shoes that I’d be embarrassed to wear in a senior citizen home—and she gathered her four boxes and harrumphed away from my cheap ass.

“Nordstrom’s?” MK asked. Sure. Why not. We were already in screaming toddler hell—why not plunge right into snotty women with too much makeup hell?

Once in the shoe section, I grabbed two pairs of shoes and thrust them at a clerk, telling her my size. A few minutes later, a gentleman with an Italian accent came back with some miniscule elf shoes in his hands. “Yoooou wanted dese?” he asked, thrusting them at me. “Size 8?”

“Size 8 ½,” I said.

“No 8 ½. Dese will fit. You try.”

So I tried. My feet spread themselves out quite nicely in my Cinderella masquerade outfit, with my toes clearly touching the ground on either side of the footbed.

“See? They fit perfectly!” my Italian friend said.

“Uh, my toes are on the ground.”

“That is how the shoe is made.”

“They don’t fit. My feet are too wide for these shoes. “ I bent down to take them off. As I hung over my feet, I asked, “Do you carry men’s sizes that are small enough in length to fit my feet?”

Mr. Italian said, “Excuse me!?”

MK, thinking that he couldn’t hear me, since I was talking to my feet, said, “She wants to know if you have men’s shoes that are small enough in length to fit her feet.”

He backed up, horrified. “I. Don’t. Sell. Men’s. Shoes.”

I looked at him. “You can’t wear men’s shoes!” He narrowed his eyes at me.

“Why not?”

“They won’t fit!”

Never mind that the women’s shoes didn’t fit.

MK asked, all sincerity, “What is your concern? Is there something about men’s shoes that we should know?”

Mr. Italian brought his chin to his neck and his nose flared. “The fit! The fit! The fit!” I thought we might have been on Fantasy Island for a moment.

“What about the fit?”

“Your feet are women’s feet.”

“But my feet LOOK like small men’s feet.”

He surveyed my wide, blunt toes, the squat ball of my foot. “No, they look like women’s feet. They are women’s feet.”

“They’re wide like men’s feet.”

“Your feet are not wide.” He looked again. “No, your feet are not wide.” I have waited almost 50 years to hear anyone say that to me. But somehow, as I was contemplating 15 miles a day in shoes too narrow, the words didn’t sound as good as I had once dreamed they would. It was kind of like being told that I was a skinny little thing after a bout with malaria.

He was clearly disgusted with me, and my unwillingness to subject myself to foot torture. He began to look determined. “I will get you shoes that fit. I will go get them now.” He walked away, muttering. Apparently threatening to purchase men’s shoes is enough to send a Nordstrom women’s shoe clerk into a wide shoe frenzy.

Soon he was back with two pairs of shoes, both of which appeared to be made for pygmies with Lilliputian feet. I squeezed one onto my big toe, wincing, and then handed it back to him. “Won’t fit,” I said.

He did some Italian version of a snort, turning away. If he could have washed his hands in the air, he would have. “Uh, thank you,” I said, and he gestured toward the men’s shoe department, across an aisle. “There is the men’s shoes. That is where you can buy men’s shoes,” he said, walking away.

Well, allrighty then. I am hoping this doesn’t mean that the Italians in Italy will treat me with the same sort of disdain. It is not my fault that my feet look like cement blocks shoved onto the ends of my legs. But I will have you know that the men’s shoe department at Nordstrom supplied me with a nice pair of North Face Sno Cat shoes, waterproof for Venice floods and Roman rains, in size men’s 7EE. $58, out the door. And Richard, the non-Italian salesman in men’s shoes, told me that I wasn’t imagining it—my feet are wide. Told you, Italiano Man.