Party Shoes

Almost exactly 90 minutes into the party, my feet begin to ache. I look down to assess my shoes. They smile up at me sensibly. In my 20s at a party I might have been looking at a pair strappy suede “camouflage pumps” featuring what I hoped were highly unmilitary splotches and tiny olive-green heels. In my 30s, I might, looking down, have seen purple silk sling-backs, exactly the same shade as a favorite jacket that I had  dyed to match during my first heady trip to the Houston Galleria when I first pronounced myself a Texan. Tonight, I am sporting (if that is indeed the word) a pair of Vionics, whose very name suggests technology rather than aesthetics. This particular pair tries hard to qualify as party shoes, with their wedge heels and their somewhat desperate recourse to patent leather. Their sensibility—no, their sensibleness—is betrayed by, among other things, what the woman in the “walking store” called their “soft and forgiving arch.” What I am to be forgiven for—foot-wise—is not clear, but I am grateful for their mercy.

It is not, then, my shoes that are causing my pain, which persists even when I slip them off hoping no one will notice that I am barefoot and shorter. In any case, what I am feeling is different from what I experience when I decide, as I sometimes do, to try wearing the few cute shoes that I cannot bear to throw away. This pain is also  a twitch, as if my feet are itching to escape out the front door, into my waiting car, and home. I capitulate. I say goodbye to my hostess, look in vain but not overly long for my host, and leave. It has been 93 minutes of party time, about 87 of which I enjoyed tremendously. As I drive home I notice that my feet have stopped hurting.

There are several explanations readily available to me, several diagnoses that have nothing to do with shoes or even feet. One of them is that I am an introvert. Although introverts apparently come in many shapes and sizes, as expressed by groups of four letters, the identity of “introvert”—and it is a powerful one for many people—is part of a binary system. One is an introvert or an extrovert. Introverts like me, who are actually quite social, and much more social than my introverted family, only reify this binary: I seem like an extrovert, but am an introvert underneath, really a invert, an introvert in essence--down to the soles of my feet.

“Introvert” does explain something about me.  It helps me to understand why my preferred form of social interaction is a form of parallel play, where there is talking followed by periods of quiet time. It explains the almost addictive need to spend time reading, the ability, resented and perhaps also admired by my children when they were young, and by my mother all of our life together, to block out everything outside the book, or later, the iPad. The term does not, though, entirely explain my eagerness to create, sustain, and nurture social networks. It does not fully account for the energy I derive from the more people-focused aspects of my work like teaching or even attending meetings—if the latter, they must not go on too long. Perhaps the “too long” is the key that returns me safely to introversion. Perhaps I have a clock somewhere inside me that registers the accumulative length of human interactions. Perhaps that clock is in the soles of my feet.

“Introvert” or “Extrovert.” I am, of course, suspicious of binaries, and of our culture’s seeming need to organize human life around and through them. Just now that impulse seems to focus on bathrooms, whose names (“Men” and “Women”) and icons (that familiar but not terribly representative figure in the A-line dress, and the stick figure with distinct legs) aim to keep people in their gendered place. Those icons beget icons, also paired like the heterosexual and presumably highly reproductive creatures in Noah’s ark. In a Mexican restaurant I was in a few days ago, the two genders were represented on the bathroom doors by a sombrero and a frilly dress, both empty of human bodies. In another restaurant, one door was labelled “Pointers” and the other “Setters.” It is a testament to the power of gender binaries that the latter is even legible to people in a state of some urgency. There are, after all, male setters and female pointers in the world of real dogs. “Introvert” and “Extrovert” do not, of course, line up in their content with gender, but they take their place in a serried row of binaries, each supporting and making legible the one behind it. Although there are not, as far as I know, introvert bathrooms with, say, single stalls, and extrovert bathrooms designed on an open plan for easy social encounters, in this fraught time of transphobic gender sorting, all binaries remind me of bathroom doors.

There is one binary, though, that not only is intuitive for me, but whose terms have hardened and separated with time. In my 20s I realized that I was far more comfortable in the identity-conferring role of host than as a guest. When I am hosting (with a few extreme exceptions, no doubt, many of them having to do with high heels) my feet do not hurt: 90 minutes pass and I do not notice. I do not want to leave my house in mid-party, or urge my guests to do so. I do not always have one (aching) foot outside the door.

Often, I latch on to this identity as host and mull it over. One of my Christmas blogs is— forgive the food pun—such a mulling over. Sometimes, like today, I think about the other half of that binary: the (to me) more rakish and riskier identify of “guest.”

I am, I think, a bad guest. It is not that I spill things, or refuse to RSVP. I (usually) know what fork to use at fancy dinners and am happy to eat with my hands if others are doing so. I know to arrive a little after the specified time but not so late as to disrupt the flow of the event. I have no food restrictions.  I never bring flowers without a container, or wine to events where I know alcohol will not be served. If it seems welcome, I help clear the table or to set things out. If someone wants the rice stirred, or the broiler carefully watched, I am your woman, your good guest who will predictably turn bad.

As with all binaries host/guest is both powerful and insufficient. The slash that keeps the terms apart ultimately draws them together. I need to make a distinction between attending dinner parties, where my feet sometimes don’t hurt at all, and cocktail parties, where, sitting or standing, pointing or setting, the physical discomfort is almost inevitable. I don’t think what I experience is an inability to have conversations with strangers: I am happy to follow my own advice to my children and to ask questions. I am almost always interested in the answers. If I have to, I can step into the breach and tell stories. When all else fails, usually with men of a certain age (gender binary warning here!) I have recourse to the topic of professional sports. 

Perhaps it is not what I can talk about but the question of how long to do it. Before the pandemic, when this skill would have been relevant, my friend, who identifies as an extrovert of a particular four-letter type, promised to teach me how to work the room at a party. “No more than two minutes,” he said. As a serial monogamist, a repairer of friendships, and a reader of Victorian novels, I am uneasy with situations that do not require (or indeed support) commitment. Perhaps I want to flee cocktail parties because I can’t do leaving at a small scale. Not “I need to top up my drink,” but “I am outta here.”

Perhaps it is not my Victorian desire for commitment but my equally Victorian work ethic that is the problem. I am most comfortable in other people’s houses when there is something for me to do, some small task, something to do with my hands besides nursing the one or two glasses of wine I can drink on a single occasion. I am happier on the rare occasions when someone has sent me around with a tray of canapes, but isn’t that cheating? Isn’t that— hosting?

Or perhaps the issue with cocktail parties is not (or not only) lack of work, but lack of the parallel play I mentioned above. Dinner parties, it seems to me, are a form of such play. Like infants in a preschool classroom, dinner party guests move in and out of socializing, but are comforted and energized by being in each other’s presence, in company. They can be quiet in between intense encounters. There is time for stories, for nuance, for arguments to bubble up and be resolved, for alliances to form and shift and shift again. There is almost something you can do with your hands, even if it is crumbling bread or wearing your napkin as a hat. You don’t leave people at a dinner party unless there is a crisis at home or a really big argument; if you leave to help in the kitchen, or to go to the bathroom, you come back. The conversation will likely have moved on; you can enter it or not. If you are lucky, there is always someone who wants to be talking at a given moment. Sometimes that person is you. You can slip your shoes off under the table, secure not only that no one can see you doing it, but in the sense that other people’s shoes—loafers, sneakers, kitten-heeled pumps, will also be lying quietly under the table, not touching but present—and perhaps parallel— to each other.