Boots or Hearts

The other night while I was making dinner (notice I don't say, "cooking") I did something I rarely do, because the mere act makes me feel pathetic: I turned on the TV to keep me company. I really ought to know better; there's nothing on post-news and pre-prime time but games shows and reruns of long-dead sitcoms. This time it was the former — Hollywood Squares. I hadn't known that was still running. Or is it not so much still as again? Retro is in; everything old is new again.

Star Jones was asked the question, "If a woman has a lot of shoes in her closet, chances are she is what?"

The answer was, "overweight."

I own 38 pairs of shoes and 17 pairs of boots. How fat does that make me?

Ironically, I'm thirty pounds lighter than I was two years ago when I started building my modest footwear collection. The same winter my Long Term Relationship started to unravel, so did my best-loved black boots, and the thing about boots and hearts is that when they start to fall apart, they really fall apart.

I had, at the time, four pairs of black boots and one man. Once, when all five were in the closet at the same time, the X was heard to ask — rhetorically I can only assume — how many pairs of black boots do you need? Because I take a perverse joy in responding Socratically to such questions, I replied, "One pair is for the snow and cold, the low-heeled low risers are for wearing with pants, the shiny high ones are for wearing with skirts, and those," I paused, gesticulating dramatically, "are the fuck-me boots you bought me for Valentine's Day. So, fuck you."

The day after he left I threw the low-heeled boots away. There was not a thing wrong with them. But as my hero Nicole Kidman wryly opined to David Letterman after Tom Cruise was fool enough to unravel her boots, "At least now I can wear heels." Nothing says "fuck you" better than an Oscar, does it, Nic? Maybe a Pulizer. We'll see.

Half way through my first semester at McGill University, I spent two months' food, rent, and clothing budget on a pair of red boots at Pegabo. They were not only the cat's meow but its whiskers and claws, too. Flat soles, pointy toes, scrunchy wide tops — the most "in" a boot could be in that year, and the most expensive boots I've ever owned. Utterly impractical. I couldn't possibly justify owning them. I was terrified my mother, the keeper of the purse strings, would find out, but I was willing to live on Kraft dinner until graduation, if I only I could have those boots.

Winter came, I had my boots, and I was dating a musician named Norman. Dating, of course, being a euphemism for fucking. We had exactly one date in four months — he took me out for dinner on my birthday, which, I have to admit, was fucking sweet of him. He was, truth be told, a very sweet man. Wholesome: his mother was a school teacher, his father a Presbyterian minister. Virginal, even, or so I thought. Which is why I dared him, one night while I was driving him home to the suburbs after a downtown party at a mutual friend's, to stop at my place on the way. We were both twenty two and I seriously thought there was a good chance he was still a virgin.

Turns out he wasn't.

The day in late March when he broke my heart it was just above freezing; the snow was turning to slush. I walked home in my red boots, and ruined them.

These days, my preference runs more toward go-go boots and men who aren't Irish Catholic. My new mantra is, I'm done with the fuckin' Irish.

Last summer, I found both. A pair of fabulous red go-go boots and a six-foot-three computer engineer of Scottish descent. At last, I could wear even my highest heels and he still had two inches on me. Big enough to pick me up — something no man has been able to do since my father when I was ten.

He took me dancing at The Starlight Room in San Francisco for my birthday. Flew me out there first class on a 747. We stayed at the classiest hotel on the highest hill in the city. We walked for hours along the most romantic beach in the world. And for those three days, I was Cinderella.

Cinderella is about shoes, after all.

In the next story, Postmodern Sass gets stood up and misses a wedding.