These Red Shoes
Saturday July 17, 2010:
“It’s my dead father’s 88th birthday,” I tell the gathered women. We are in Springfield Park, hackney. Inspired by a rethinking and reworking of the Red Shoes fairy tale in which the young girl finds power and release, we are gradually adorning a pile of shoes with a range of colorful acrylic paints. The sun is shining and a sharp paint-drying breeze is blowing.
I continue to speak of my father, his life, what being forced to fight in the second world war did to him, his ambition to write and to improve himself, his discontent with his dull humdrum low paid low status job, his souring mood and deepening depression.
He retreated into bitterness, to sneering at and belittling my twin brother and my mother. I, his little girl, was mostly exempt from his contempt. I think of how the red shoes in the original story confined and punished and feel the connection with his life.
My fingers crusted with already drying red acrylic paint, I daub the smooth, shiny patent heels. Their curves, I stroke gently, massaging in the paint with my fingertips, lovingly, tenderly as though soothing sore feet.
The little girl in the original story loses her feet and has to dance on bleeding stumps. What agony must that have been? And what damage did these shoes I paint do to the woman who wore them? I imagine her, tottering unsteadily along the uneven pavements, her body thrown forward, her hips jutting in order to balance her gait, her back curved and aching.
My long hair swinging around my shoulders, I dance on high narrow heels. I marvel at the fancy footwork, ride the unsteadiness of my feet as I twirl and pirouette. As long as nobody stops me, I won’t fall down, I think, dancing on and on.
I pierce the shoes through the lace holes with wire. I hold up my shoes. They dance and jiggle on the wire.
I’ve never danced on gleaming stilettos that bit the tender foot like a knife. I’ve danced on clumpy platforms, I’ve clomped down steep hills in them, my ankles turning, hair and bag of books flying as I tumble down like a limp rag doll.
I sit on the ground and feel the stiffness growing. I massage my sore ankles before shifting, slowly lumbering up onto my feet to turn and help to make a bigger circle of women. We’ve mostly finished our painting, and now it’s time to eat.
A tripod of shoes tip-tap, heel-toe-heel-toe in the breeze, glimmering defiance in every color of the rainbow in a dance of rage and freedom.
How can anyone run away wearing these shoes? I say to myself as I examine the dangling painted shoes. So many are narrow, confining, demanding that the foot is angled callously, impossibly, pushing the toes into the ground viciously, compacting joints that in years to come will scream with pain.
How can anyone dance for joy in these bitter, narrow shoes? Who first decided that women should wear high heels like these?
I hear my grandmother moan that it hurts to walk barefoot, her toes pinched and pressed, the pain of her swollen big toe joints throbbing. And I hear other women demanding the right to wear such shoes, arguing that surely a feminist perspective should allow women the freedom of wearing what they want. And I think how incredible it is that those women are asking to be bound, indeed demand it as a right!
Freedom aside, patriarchy has dictated that women’s feet be confined, whether in broken boned foot-binding or impossibly high heeled narrow shoes. How can you dance when your feet are bound? How can you run away when they are so crushed?
Later . I turn on the radio in my kitchen. They’re talking on the woman’s hour Omnibus about high heels for men! I rub at the red paint on my fingers. Oh will my hands ne’er be clean? I’m red stained but not guilty.
