Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (10 page)

I knew I was breaking one of the cardinal rules the day I walked barefoot down the hallway of UCLA Lab School. But what the heck, I’d always wanted to feel the white speckled linoleum floor beneath my feet. I wondered if I could still grip a spoon off the floor with my toes and put it in my mouth, like I did when I was a ten-year-old wannabe contortionist. It would be tough, but I was convinced I could do it until I saw Judith Kantor, the librarian, heading in my direction. I immediately put on my concerned-parent face as I rushed over asking her about Duke’s recent reading choices. What did she think of Rick Riordan, I asked, hoping she wouldn’t glance down and see my Sally Hansen plaid toenails. Judith immediately launched into the pluses and minuses of Riordan’s popularity. She paused for a second, then recommended Jack Ganto’s
Dead End in Norvelt
. I kept up with a lot of “Oh, I see, yes, right. Right, of course! Right. That’s such a great idea. Absolutely.” Judith excused herself, saying she would email me a list of other recommendations. As if that wasn’t enough, Norma Silva, the principal, suddenly waved hello. I waved back and made an immediate right turn into the janitor’s closet, where I counted to sixty before going back out. I hurried to the Redwood Forest playground, where my toes rejoiced as they crunched through the redwood mulch. I sat on one of the kids’ swings and pushed my arms back and forth as my feet flew through the air. It was perfect. That’s when I spotted
Duke playing dodgeball with his friends Zeke, Cassius, Evan, Atticus, and Ben. “Hey, Duke,” I called, waving. Duke looked over, saw me, made a face, and ran away. When I went up to him he acted like he didn’t know me. When we walked to the car he lagged three yards behind. In the car, he refused to sit shotgun. Finally I said, “What’s up? What’s wrong?”

“Mom, how could you?”

“Could I what?”

“Come to school barefoot?”

Okay, I thought, here we go. It’s over. The day I prayed would never come had finally arrived. I’d embarrassed Duke in front of his friends. But the weird part, the part I couldn’t understand, was, why my feet? Why not my overbearing personality, my Bozo the Clown clothing choices, or my decrepit age? But no, I’d had the audacity to run through UCLA Lab School’s Redwood Forest barefoot.

Did this mean the days of “Cheeks, my cute little pie, my precious, you are my only squeaky in the whole wide world” were gone for good? What would I do without “Your cheeks are so soft I want to touch them for a morning snack. I want to bite them and crunch them, too. Say yes, and I’ll activate your cheek”? I hoped it didn’t mean he’d stop serenading me with “Cheeks” to Justin Bieber’s “Baby.” Did I really have to face the fact that Cheeks’s feet were suddenly cringe-worthy?

As a little girl I squished sea anemones with my toes in tide
pools. I loved the hot black pavement against my bare feet as we walked to Earl’s Hamburger stand. It was endlessly fun to dig through the sand as hundreds of crabs wiggled around my toes. When I climbed the cliffs of Divers Cove, I never fell. I almost convinced myself I had flying feet, like Mercury, the swift-footed Roman god. Every other aspect of my body, including my brain, was hesitant, but not my feet. Never my feet.

Duke used to like to go barefoot, too. But now that he’s almost thirteen, his feet have begun to find themselves inside shoes more often than not. I guess the point is … Duke is growing up, and he doesn’t want to draw attention to his feet or, most of all, his mother’s feet. I understand. I have to face it. Duke is changing. Hey, when I reached those teen years I changed, too. The difference is, I began to frame my feet so they would become part of what I considered great design. That meant I fell in love with shoes.

Even then I knew there was a problem. The problem with shoes is they’re worn on feet, and feet are not positioned close enough to the head. That means to be properly viewed, the body must be seen from head to toe. I remember wearing the most spectacular pair of creamy two-toned brown-and-beige Tony Lama cowboy boots in
Annie Hall
never to be seen on film. Even to have been partially visible would have required a medium close-up of Annie Hall sitting with her boots on a
table near her face, or even better, a close-up of Annie Hall cleaning her Tony Lamas in her kitchen sink.

The beloved Tony Lamas are still in my closet next to a pair of Doc Martens, near six pairs of platform shoes circa 1980. These shoes, as well as my brown patent leather lace-up oxfords, my saddle shoes from
Interiors
, and the high-heeled Converse black-and-white high-tops given to me by my friend Johnny Gale, the hair colorist, are stacked on one side of the closet. I still wear the Florsheim Imperial men’s shoes, size 8D, that went with my long Ralph Lauren camel-hair coat. Across from the men’s shoes are the boots, which take up most of my closet. In the nineties I bought a gorgeous pair of riding boots I couldn’t pull over my high arches. I’m still waiting for the day they collapse. I’ve kept my old Fryes, and even a pair of butch Caterpillar hiking boots. I love my chunky black patent leather boots with yellow and black polka dots from the disco era, too.

People can trash high heels all they want: they’re impossible to walk in, they serve no purpose. This is completely unfair, and frankly not true. Never forget that Marilyn Monroe played baseball wearing heels. Ginger Rogers danced backward in them with Fred Astaire. And Pamela Anderson was booted off
Dancing with the Stars
wearing—that’s right—a pair of high heels. Look, maybe “high-heeled beauty is pain,” maybe it’s expensive, but every woman needs one pair of genius high heels. I have a pair of seven-inch Christian Louboutin Red
Medicines. That’s what I call them, because that’s what they are; they’re red medicine. They’re like a great glass of Layer Cake cabernet with ice. When I wear them I’m a contender. I’m a six-foot-two stilt walker, not some five-foot-seven excuse for a woman.

Once in a while a gal owes herself this kind of fix. In 1997 I saw a pair of orange herringbone Prada pumps in
Vogue
. I had to have them. As everyone knows, a pair of Prada anything is not cheap. So take my advice, slow down, way down, before you swipe your credit card. One more piece of advice: Don’t be impulsive. Here’s another: When in doubt, stick with black. Black will never disappoint. And always remember to accessorize. Don’t be timid. Paint those toenails and sticker them up. Embrace your arches. Don’t shy away from toe rings and ankle bracelets, either. Learn to take compliments. I haven’t, but you should. Compliments linger. Someone once compared my legs to Lucille Ball’s great gams. Like I cared. She was old. Now it’s my turn to be old. If someone said the same thing to me today I’d be overjoyed. One more tip: Save your shoes. Save them all. Mark my words, you’ll revisit wearing them sooner than you think. Plus, they’re stimulants. Like music, they can take you back to certain moments, certain people, certain memories. I remember Dad’s arches lifting into the air as he dove off the cliff at Dana Point. I remember seeing Pina Bausch’s barefoot dancers pound a stage covered
in dirt. Once I subscribed to CHARforce’s Sexy High Arches website to see its Celebrities Assorted Slideshow honoring Meryl Streep’s and Kate Hudson’s and other actresses’ outstanding high-arched feet. I wish I’d made the cut.

These days I’m not making the cut with Duke either. He’d never once said a word about my shoes, or my feet for that matter—not one thing—until that fateful day in the Redwood Forest. Was his humiliation provoked by Zeke or Atticus and the rest of his gang of six? It’s hard to say. Was it because I broke a school rule, was that it? And, most important, at least for me: Was Duke ever going to forgive me? Was this mortification going to fester in his memory bank forever?

A week later I asked Duke if he wanted to go for a Sunday evening jog around Drake Stadium, on the UCLA campus. He was up for it. I wore my North Face parka. As always, it dragged across the track, and, as always, I carried a mug of Layer Cake cabernet with ice. I never jog without a chaser of red wine on the rocks. This time I didn’t wear my Nikes. I deliberately went barefoot. Sure enough, Duke insisted I put my shoes on. When I asked why, he refused to elaborate. And there you have it. The onset of puberty. The end of childhood. I guess it’s time to say goodbye to my bare feet, at least in front of Duke.

My podiatrist, Dr. Hakim, has also informed me that my barefoot days are over. If I choose otherwise, he assures me, I
should be prepared for more broken toes and ankles, and bruises and sprains. He threatened me with stories of nails lying in wait and, worse—far worse—staph infections that could lead to my demise. Of course, he had no idea I’d been a wild child on the cliffs of Laguna Beach, a pioneer rolling down the sand-duned banks of Death Valley. He couldn’t possibly know how much fun it was to howl in laughter at Woody, a.k.a. the White Thing, as I watched him step out of the shower onto a dozen clean white towels. The day he wore shoes as we held hands on an idyllic sandy beach in Puerto Rico did me in. Who wants feet that only know the feel of a satin sheet, or a soft slipper, or a sock? Poor Wood, he’ll never know what he’s missing. I’m proud my feet are not always shrouded in camouflage, or cloaked in protective gear, like every other square inch of my body.

In the end, I love shoes, but I love my feet more. My feet—the feet Bertram Ross, Martha Graham’s heroic lead dancer, once told me were “fine examples of the perfect arch”; the feet that walked my sobbing body down a narrow hallway in
Reds
to my husband, John Reed, dying on a hospital bed; the feet that recently stood on our neighborhood bluff as the space shuttle
Endeavor
passed overhead on its final flight; the feet that tingled in fear as I stood holding hands with nine-year-old Duke as we looked over the edge of the observation deck at the Empire State Building.

Oh Duke, your only Chubby Roll of Cheek Dough Mom hopes you’ll remember how much fun it was to jump into our swimming pool feetfirst. I hope you won’t forget running barefoot through the waves as you, Dex, and I stood on the beach witnessing Laguna’s hurricane-force storm of 2007. Maybe. Maybe you’ll remember our screams of laughter laced with fear as a nine-foot wave hit our feet on the deck of the old wooden lifeguard station in Fisherman’s Cove. I wonder … I wonder if you’ll remember me running barefoot in the mulch of the old Redwood Forest toward you, my only son. If so, maybe you’ll forgive me for embarrassing you, with a shrug of the shoulders and a laugh. It was life, right, Duke? It was two bare feet transporting my body to you.

After renovating fifteen homes, I’m well acquainted with the subcontractors who don’t show, the hardware that takes nine months to receive instead of the six weeks guaranteed, and the nightmare of opening up a wall only to find a dozen new stumbling blocks. After working for eighteen months on my last renovation, a Mission revival in Beverly Hills,
my contractor, Ben Lunsky, was finished with my endless interruptions: “Wait a minute—what if we …” or “How about we try this?” or “Hey, Ben, I’ve got an idea.” It all came to a head when I pulled him aside saying, “You know, we’ve got to cut costs, Ben. Things are getting out of hand. We need to—” Before I could finish, he blurted out, “Look, what can I do? Sorry, Diane, but you’ve got to face it. You’re custom all the way, and you always will be!” I’d been around the block. I knew “custom” was short for “change-order queen.” Ben wasn’t wrong. On the eve of the recession we somehow managed to finish the house. Duke, Dexter, and I lived in it for a year, sold it at a loss, and rented Meg Ryan’s Spanish-style home in Bel Air while I pondered a more reasonable approach to my housing obsession.

It was the end of an era. My serial renovation days were over. No more hunting down unattended gems, buying them, piling up expenses with an endless supply of “new ideas,” and selling them at a profit. No more. That’s what I kept telling myself, but like any other junkie, one day I had another “new idea,” a big one. It came to me as I was pinning a cool image tagged as “staircases” by c ktnon, a graphic designer on Pinterest who has a couple million followers. At that moment, I decided the only way to get over being called “custom” was to embrace it. What could be more custom than building a new house? I justified the fantasy by telling myself I would be
taking on a housing experience that demanded a practical approach. It would be a “how to” learning endeavor. And maybe in the end, if I did my homework and stuck with a budget—if I minded my p’s and q’s, whatever that means—I could build a sensible dream house from the ground up for the three of us. So I bought a half-acre lot on a street called Riviera Ranch Road in Sullivan Canyon.

Shortly thereafter, a young couple purchased Meg’s house. They weren’t interested in extending the lease. Their lawyers notified us that we would need to leave at the end of the month. In a panic, Aileen Comora, my broker, and I looked at dozens of long-term rentals, and every house on the market. I was seriously freaking out. Plus I’d already invested the bulk of my savings in the unbuilt dream house, so I couldn’t exactly go hog wild. Several homes had the stamp of previous lives within their walls. As nice as they were, I couldn’t live in the residue of someone else’s life. When we saw a clean, bright two-story spec house in the Palisades offered at the right price, I passed. I dismissed it as cookie-cutter. There was no way Duke, Dex, and I would fit into a developer’s dream of the Connecticut Family Lifestyle. Another couple of weeks went by with no new possibilities. Aileen convinced me to take another look at the spec. It faced a public plaza in a neighborhood of nice but not exorbitantly priced houses. There were California bungalows, adorable haciendas, and a
few Cliff May knockoffs built in the 1960s. They reminded me of my early California days, with Mom and Dad. What the heck … Duke, Dexter, our dog Emmie, and I had to live somewhere. Time was closing in. So I bought it. I did. I bought the brand-new opposite-of-custom Connecticut farmhouse one block from a sliding bluff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.