Sensible Shoes

You are old. Yet, when confronted with the possibility of climbing a bell tower in an Italian church, you always say yes. This is true whether there is sign saying “100 steps” or 36, or 300. You also say yes to the panoramic terrace, usually about 40 additional steps, by which the signs mean not units on your apple watch but stairs, worn to slickness by fellow climbers over hundreds of years. You know, because this is always the case, that when you get to the top of the first set of, say, 100 steps and pause, panting, under an enormous bell made out of canon balls in earthquake country, that the second flight will be narrower, and will wind many times around a crumbling but somehow still slippery central pole. The view from the “panoramic terrace” will be exactly the same as the view from the campanile. You will see trees, mostly olive trees and those depressing firs that someone imported from Italy onto the Rice University campus to die. You will see innumerable domes and church roofs sparkling blue and copper in the sun. You will not be able to identify any of them for certain. “Santa Maria,” you will say, because the odds are with you. You will, if you crane you neck, see the restaurant which you bypassed because it was too early to eat lunch in Italy even though you were—and always are—ready to eat. You are very hungry now, especially when you remember that there were lasagnette with eggplant on the menu you bypassed. These are two of your favorite things, and lasagnette have become something of a joke between you and your husband since an Italian woman at the next table at your last hotel spoke ill of the local focaccia Ragusana, of which the waiter was so proud. “It’s layered,” she said. “Like Lasagnette.” You watched him deflate and dreamed of lasagnette—individual portions of lasagne oozing with béchamel contained, one might say framed, by many layers of chewy pasta.  It is a long way down, and also up, as you pause to take a picture of your husband under the bell. He has a camera that takes real pictures that have to be downloaded. You have an iPhone with a permanently dirty lens, but you can see your pictures right away and post them on Facebook where they ares sometimes liked and sometimes loved.

You are wearing inappropriate shoes, not high heels really, but wedge sandals. Although you have feet so small that your family make fun of them, they are too big for the second flight of steps and catch on the worn stone edges of each stair. Your feet are sweaty and slide within your shoes.   You have to wear sandals because you are an old lady and old ladies in Italy never wear shorts. That’s what your mother said and it is still pretty much true 50 years later. You have seen one woman over 40 in long shorts and you were a little shocked. Besides it is hot and your dress can flap in the breeze. It is at this point—although sometimes he waits until you are safely down—that your husband offers fashion advice. He has seen many women (he does not remember how old they were) wearing dresses with sneakers. He uses the phrase “sensible shoes” which triggers years of acrimonious intra-feminist debate that you have suppressed until this moment. French feminism. American feminism. Danger feminism and Pleasure feminism. Which is which? Your brain reels as you painfully descend the stairs. More immediately, you resent your husband in his truly excellent sneakers and his thoughts on women’s clothing, which extend also to the giant purse you are carrying with your iPad in it because you carry your iPad everywhere in case you are stuck somewhere with nothing to read, which would be almost unbearable. Going up to the bell tower, you haul your bag and set it on the step above you, one at a time for 36 (or perhaps it is only 34) steps. Your husband carries the bag down for you, almost sprinting in his sensible shoes.

Once you land at the bell tower level it occurs to you that you have the perfect shoes for such outings: Sketchers in the shape of Mary Jane’s made like sneakers. You thought of them at the time as water shoes for clambering over the rocks in the Mediterranean, but now you see their potential on land. You packed them in your husband’s suitcase, an arrangement on which your mutual, conjugal, packing depended, an agreement that over the years has formed the backbone of your travel and perhaps your marriage: always one thing of yours in the big suitcase so you can take a smaller one that you can carry by yourself. That intimate balance is threatened later in the day when your husband reveals he can only find one of your sensible shoes. Your anger is disproportionate. After all, you were raised in a family where no-one was blamed for accidents, even when your broke the art nouveau bevelled mirror by crashing into it riding your bicycle indoors. You are angry at yourself for being angry. You are on the point of recovery when your husband finds the errant shoe, inexplicably under the ornate Sicilian bed in the hotel that was once a monastery, the one where the focaccia might have too many layers although you don’t think, having ordered it to comfort the waiter, that there are layers enough. You put your Sketchers in a special bag in the car so you will always have them near you, so you can say a full-throated “yes” to climbing the next bell tower. When, at your new hotel, in the most beautiful nature reserve ever, six dogs conspire to steal your fancy sandals, you think perhaps that your husband is behind it all, or at least that the dogs represent some kind of sign that you should be wearing the Sketchers, which you now realize are a little smelly, every day. You pry one stolen shoe that from the mouth of the biggest and least adorable dog, and your husband wades into the bushes and, after a long search, finds the other one, less fancy than it was but still wearable.