Work It, Own It
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As an amputee, buying shoes is not a simple matter and never has been. I wore a man’s foot until I was in my teens, because prosthetic companies did not make feet specifically for women or girls. My parents bought two pairs of shoes — one sometimes two or three sizes bigger than my other foot. As a child, this only bothered me when it restricted my activity level. Aesthetics were not my concern.
But when I hit puberty and my girlfriends started to wear high heels, “the shoe issue” as it was known in my family, began. During those years I grew so fast that a plank of wood was placed between my foot and the wooden shank of my artificial leg on a regular basis — this created a strange “scar” where the plank had been affixed and then painted over. The bottom half of my leg looked like an art project made of paper mache. At the time, this was absolutely unbearable.
That I could not wear heels with my pegged jeans and neon tunics and tie-dyed leggings seemed an impossible indignity as a teenager in the 80s. My mother would leave me alone for two minutes in the mall and find me, half an hour later, wandering through the shoe section of the biggest department store, checking out my right foot in a pink, high-heeled glittery sandal. Littered around my feet were piles of delicate, four-inch stilettos that I would never wear. After Mom helped the befuddled saleslady pack up the boxes, she’d say, “Let’s go home, honey.” In the car on the way home, I would wail, “If only I had TWO LEGS!” like any other beleaguered teenager girl who would give anything — anything — to have the body that she desires. I wanted to look like a girl, and looking like a girl meant adding inches to your height and definition to your thighs and calves in heels.
(As if adding insult to injury, I also have the smallest, thinnest, leanest right foot imaginable. It looks good in every shoe ever made by any designer at Nordstrom’s. My foot seems perfectly crafted for stilettos; a foot that would look fabulous with red-painted nails tottering around the streets after a great dinner date in the West Village, not unlike a typical photo spread in a fashion magazine. My roommate recently photographed my right foot in a gold silk Gladiator-style Gucci sandal that she hoped to sell on Ebay. My foot looked fantastic.)
Throughout the teenage years, my devoted father spent a good chunk of each of his morning helping me put on my left shoe. This was a ritual for us before dawn, when my father left for his bus-driving job — a job he took to help pay off my artificial leg. How many fathers would spend twenty sweaty minutes affixing a Doc marten boot or a pink neon flat with a long-handled shoe horn to their teenage daughter’s left foot while she snapped gum in his face and pleaded with him (not very nicely) to hurry up? Fully dressed, I went back to bed for a few hours.
Each time an outfit was purchased for a special event — a graduation, a wedding, a holiday — my mother would look at the dress or ensemble I presented her with at the department store and ask the question I dreaded: “But what about shoes?” Usually, they were flats, but even this is not as simple as it sounds. Flats that reveal the top part of the leg (which is covered in hose) are out of the question if there is a grass stain or a spot of dirt on the artificially sculpted toes. The cosmetic hose must be pulled tightly over the foot to avoid bunching, an effect my mother referred to “elephant skin.” And then this question, always this, whether it’s mini-skirts or a-lines or shirt-dresses: how much to hide and how much to reveal? My Midwestern mother taught me always not to reveal too much, but to accentuate what you have: long hair (brush it!), a small waist (get the right jeans!), lovely facial features (always wear makeup, but never too much). As an adult, these are tactics I continue to repeat: cleavage-revealing blouses and designer jeans and long hair: my signature style.
Yet the shoe issue is still with me. I grow weary of explaining to shoe salespeople why I need a shoe horn. I try to ignore their looks of curiosity and pity mixed with downright annoyance as I pull and tug that expensive leather mule onto the very unpliable flesh of my left artificial foot. And as any fashion obsessed female worth her salt realizes, it’s the shoes that often make the look! So, what do you do? What your mother always told you to do: flaunt what you have. I have dragged along an extra large suitcase in order to take a leg with a heel-height adjustable foot to wear with my suit. Gucci should have made a cute and trendy “leg bag” along with handbags and flats — a fashionable way to tote your most valued and expensive accessory. As thrilled as I am to have the ability to wear heels, I never wear them with short skirts, because I don’t like the crease that develops between the foot and the ankle. Other amputees are not so concerned. Sports superstars like Aimee Mullins and Sarah Reinertsen flaunt their difference in ways I admire but could never emulate.
This fall I had photos taken for my book jacket. The book, Poster Child, is about coming to terms — however uneasily — with an unconventional body. It’s about questioning cultural standards of beauty while acknowledging that women in this culture will always be defined by them. It’s about claiming a unique image of beauty and then attempting to live it without shame or fear. This, of course, is easier described then done. I decided to conduct an experiment. For the first set of photos I wore a short, strapless dress that was cinched at the waist; it made the most of my chest (padded with a super push-up bra), my waspish waist. The deep brown color was a nice compliment to my red hair. I thought to myself, “This is my body,” and smiled as genuinely as I could into the camera. Afterwards, as the photographer and I flipped through the digital photos, I was surprised at my reaction. Yes, the two legs were two different colors and I was wearing flats when heels would have looked better, more feminine. I didn’t look normal, but I didn’t look half bad either. I looked like myself. The smile was real. I was seriously working those Payless flats.
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About the Author
Emily Rapp is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir. She was born in Nebraska and grew up in Wyoming and Colorado. Born with a congenital defect, her left foot was amputated at age four, and she has worn a prosthetic limb ever sincvve. A former Fulbright scholarship recipient, she was educated at Harvard University, Saint Olaf College, Trinity College-Dublin, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry. She has received awards and recognition for her work from The Atlantic Monthly, StoryQuarterly, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow. She was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University and was recently awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Women Writers. She is a core faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University-Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.
Photo by Michael Powers