Life With Objects

“You’re ugly.”

I didn’t look up. I was putting on my shoes and socks. Class was over. Cartwheels were easy, but I was already worrying about next week’s lesson in round-offs when Gina kicked my foot.

“I said you’re ugly.”

I finished folding over my white bobby sock before standing. Gina stepped in front of me. She was small for a third grader.

“Don’t you want to know why you’re ugly?”

I thought of all the things I didn’t like about myself: my big lips, my thick wavy hair that always curled in loops around my face when I got hot.

Gina was your typical bully. I was typically quiet and never had had a bully of my own before. I chose to ignore her and move on to the carpool line.

“You’re wearing baby socks.”

One of the two boys in the class snickered. My pale skin turned pink and prickly, something else I disliked about myself. I made being embarrassed more embarrassing by blushing in blotches.

“Are you a baby?”

I didn’t need to look around to know that all the girls had slipped on their knee-highs. I had wanted to wear knee-high socks too.

“No,” my mother had said. “Tennies and knee-highs are not worn together.”

The following week I went straight to the gym bathroom. I pulled my plain white bobby socks up as high as they could go. They slid back down. So I licked my hands and rubbed the skin on my legs to make the socks stick to me. But they only covered half of my pasty-white shins and looked baggy. I took off my shoes tucking my socks into the tips.

In class Gina pointed at my legs. “Chicken legs.”

We lined up along the white cinder block wall to practice our cartwheels. Gina was first. She was getting a running start when my leg had a spasm, a sort of growing pain. It twitched and involuntarily stuck straight out clipping Gina’s shin as she ran past. Airborne for a moment she flew freely, before belly flopping onto the gym mat.

A timeless silence hung in the air, as my future passed before my eyes. Then the cries rang out and the tears fell.

As Gina left the gym with her mother, I considered how wrong my mom had been. Gina looked perfectly triumphant in her blue unitard, pink sweater, yellow Keds, and rainbow striped knee-highs.

A part of me unknowingly left with Gina and her socks. Following her out the gym door was my path to round-offs, back handsprings, handstands and eventually cheerleading. My confidence with boys, positive body image and natural leadership skills that would culminate in my high school popularity, exited as well. My third grade mind couldn’t comprehend the future loss I was to suffer as the glass door closed in front of me.

That was my last gymnastic class. If only I had worn knee-highs.

My favorite socks were Easter socks: thin, delicate white, folded down once to show the lace trim. I wore them with black patent leather shoes, the kind with the strap that could swivel from front to back, so that you could wear them with it, Mary Jane style, or without it – grown-up style. I pulled on the white petticoat, the one my mother had stayed up late finishing, and buttoned over it the flowered dress. The three eyelet ruffles of the petticoat peeked through at the bottom, and I admired the effect in the bathroom mirror, balancing carefully on the tile step surrounding the sunken-in tub. That was the only way to see yourself entirely in my house – we never had a full-length mirror. My feet felt new and slippery like baby seals, the straps of my shoes carefully turned back. My father saw it first, when my uneven steps announced my arrival in the kitchen.

“Better put the straps on your shoes,” he said. “They’ll fall off your feet otherwise.”

I looked at my older sister, already dressed in her flowered dress, although hers didn’t have a petticoat like mine. Her shoes were white, but the strap was folded back, and they had a heel. She looked so adult sitting there in her Peter Pan collar and her white shoes. I couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been grown-up. She glanced at my feet over the funnies section of the paper. Her white Easter gloves sat, folded perfectly, next to her tiny purse. Mine were balled up in my hand, creased now from sweat.

“Better put the straps on your shoes,” she said. But I was eight; I was far too old to wear the straps across my feet like a baby. I wanted heels on my shoes, I wanted to be able to wear shoes that didn’t attach to my feet like barnacles, shoes I could kick off on the swings and watch arc through the air and tumble end-over-end when they landed. I wanted shoes that would make that feminine click-clack on the wooden floor in our foyer. I wanted shoes like Cinderella wore in the cartoon, small and black, and I wanted to be able to slip my feet into them the way she did, without contending with tiny irritating buckles.

I sat on the step in the kitchen and slipped off one shoe, then the other. The thin patent strap looked innocuous enough as I pushed it forward, then opened the gold buckle. My left foot buckled safely in with barely a protest, and then my right. It felt safer, somehow, that little strap, than a seatbelt or a locked door.