Chapter Ten

Mom Needs a Pedicure

At 71 my mother wrote to my father a plaintive poem: “Lover Boy of mine/Am I your valentine?” She was never to know just how lovingly he cared for her to the end.

One day my sister arrived at our parents’ house on a visit from Southern California and, eagle-eyed, immediately spotted a flaw in my daughterly duties. “Oh my god! Mommy’s got Fu Manchu toenails! Get the Box!”

For decades my parents had kept a small cardboard box in their bathroom cabinet, its shiny black flip lid decorated with an image of a red rose. Inside were a pair of ancient, blunt-tipped tweezers, worn-smooth emery boards, metal nail files, and toenail clippers: my father’s arsenal of tools for giving Mom her weekly no-frills pedicures, which he’d been doing for years. By the time Mom was in her late 80s and well advanced into Alzheimer’s, he’d moved the box to the living room--Mom’s bed had been relocated there, pushed up against the picture window—and set it under the scratched maple coffee table, where it would be handier.

On my twice-weekly visits from San Francisco I’d manage to ignore everything that I didn’t want to face: the dust bunnies under the furniture, the pervasive stale smell, the weird rattling noises from the heater.

And Mom’s terrible, tortured toes.

The Pedicure Box was always in plain sight, so I’d assumed that Dad, now approaching 90, was still regularly hunching over, wielding his utensils, as Mom’s bare and vulnerable feet rested trustingly in his lap--a ritual so familiar to me it barely registered. But when my sister pointed out Mom’s nearly-inch-long toenails, I realized that just as the changes taking place in Mom’s brain were so slow and incremental as to be nearly indiscernible in real time, so too my parents’ decades-long rituals—the shared bedtime baths, the little kisses exchanged throughout the day whenever they passed each other, the pedicures—were disappearing unnoticed if you weren’t looking for them.

Not that Dad was shirking his responsibilities; he’d been caring for his beloved wife for years now. Clearly, it was I who was shirking mine.

Mom had size 5 feet, with high arches, outsized bunions, and hammertoes. According to family lore Mom was moved from foster home to foster home as a kid, nobody caring enough to see that she got new shoes, so her growing feet became stunted in shoes too small for them. Dad of course added his own theory, blaming the high heels Mom had worn on the adult-education circuit when she lectured on gestalt self-therapy, the psychological technique she’d invented to heal her own childhood traumas and went on to teach to others.

By the time she was in her 70s Mom’s feet were so deformed that even her reliable Dr. Scholl’s duck-bill shoes with custom orthotics were painful. At that point Dad took charge, ordering specially designed orthopedic sandals from a Dutch cobbler in San Francisco. Purposely crafted a size too big in order to avoid pressure on the tender bunions, they nevertheless failed to quite meet Dad’s approval. A self-appointed expert on feet and a whole host of other body-related issues, he always insisted on tweaking them. (Jury-rigging was Dad’s specialty; the house was virtually held together with duct tape, repurposed paper clips in pretzel-like configurations, and, of course, Superglue.) Every pair of Mom’s sandals bore the marks of Dad’s bargain-basement creativity, all plainly visible, once causing a friend to gasp, “What in the world happened to your shoes?” He chiseled out raggedy peepholes for the bunions to poke through, adding strips of sponge in crucial spots and elongating the straps with whatever scraps of leather were on hand so that they’d be loose. Dr. Scholl’s styrofoam toe separators--Dr. Scholl was worshipped as a god in our house—and plain, thin white bobby socks, the cuffs neatly folded down, completed the footwear. Mom clomped around in those sandals, clownlike and clumsy, rain or shine, summer and winter. In the evening, toe separators and socks intact, she’d slip into a pair of man-sized blue terry-cloth bedroom slippers.

When, in her early 80s, Mom began to lose the ability to care for herself, Dad’s natural urge to micromanage kicked into high gear. He took over responsibility for her false teeth (another relic of childhood neglect), the minutia of her eating and sleeping and toilet habits, the precise number of faded old blankets she needed (folded just so with the pink one on top). And her feet.

Now that my sister was pointing out the lapse in my daughterly duties, I was obliged to finally confront Mom’s feet myself. Squeamish me, they were the last things I wanted to look at: gnarled as the roots of the old oak tree in the front yard that regularly blocked up the indoor plumbing, bunions jutting out like jug handles and big toes crossed over the second toes horizontally. Above: the rest of my mother’s body. Legs that I’d once envied for their slenderness, now stick-thin. Collapsing spine, pancake-flat breasts that had slid down her short torso, swollen knuckles, nose too large for the now-sunken cheeks. Faded eyebrows, thinning grey hair. My sister had discovered my secret: that of all the dreary responsibilities I’d assumed—paying bills, keeping caregivers happy, shopping for cans of The Secrets of Psyllium (“promotes regularity”) and adult diapers and latex-free gloves, and much more—the one thing I truly did not want to deal with was this: my mother’s decaying body, once shaped just like mine, our features so similar that people always told us we looked alike.

By this time, caring for Mom’s feet had become a three-person job. My sister and the caregiver clipped and scraped, working in sync. Mom shrieked; a visiting family friend tried to distract her with songs and stories. I watched, cowering, from a safe distance. Henceforth, decreed my sister, one of the caregivers—the most competent one--would cut Mom’s toenails and soak her feet regularly. I was to make sure the caregiver was doing the job and help out if necessary.

“I’ll call to check the progress,” warned my sister.

“But Dad is the one who tells the caregivers what to do,” I whined. “He’s adamant about being the boss.”

“He needs our help now,” my sister responded sternly. I looked at Dad. He was sitting quietly in the corner, holding his transistor radio up to his good ear, oblivious to the flurry of pedicure-related activity around him. She was right.

On my next visit I sat down beside Mom on the couch, teeth clenched, to inspect her toes. She didn’t protest when I gingerly removed her socks. The skin of her feet, and the nails, were yellowish. That’s probably Mom’s normal color, I told myself. The nails didn’t look too long—they weren’t starting to curve, anyway. Thank God. They were jaggedly cut, though. So what? No one’s going to see them. The skin between her toes looked white and flaky, but--isn’t that just the lint from her socks? I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch them and find out. Another day, perhaps…

My sister called: “Have you been checking Mommy’s feet?”

“I’ve looked at them a few times.” By which I meant: once, and hastily.

My sister’s voice, calm and reasonable, was in my head a lot by that point: You can’t be fastidious any more. Circumstances have changed. But part of me insisted I am who I am. Part of me always insists I am who I am. And that too is a part of me that’s just like my mother.

On each visit I’d embrace Mom lightly in greeting, then sit slightly apart and gaze at her, so wispy and limp in an armchair, in her bathrobe, staring out the window at nothing. It seemed her whole life had been a struggle for mental and physical health, from migraine headaches to late-onset alcoholism to that mysterious weeping that I’d hear as I lay awake at night as a child. But she had not complained of foot pain in several years. In fact, now she no longer noticed when she was hungry or sleepy or had to go to the bathroom—she who’d always been so obsessed with, so eager to discuss, the most minute details of her bodily functions. Even her troubled childhood, which had haunted her right up to the onset of Alzheimer’s--a panorama of characters, places, and events that I knew as well, it seemed, as she did--no longer existed for her. In this final stage of her illness, she’d at last arrived at the sense of peace she’d always sought. You could call it a blessing of sorts.

Now is the time, I thought during those last months, to take her in my arms, so tiny and helpless, like a baby. But then there was the stringy, sour-smelling hair, like a physical barrier that separated us, and the blue-veined thighs, and the face, strangely taut, mask-like, almost wrinkle-free. And those feet: a miniature and more twisted version of my own—because bunions, it turns out, are caused not by shoes but by genetics.

Ultimately I hired a house-call podiatrist for regular monthly appointments and put the Box, full of old, rusty utensils, in the trash bin. After she died, I threw out all the cracked orthopedic sandals in her closet, each one sculpted to the shape of her tiny feet.