A Just 'Cos Post

I look at my feet and wonder whose feet I got; my mom’s or my dad’s. I never knew my father and my mother died when I was 16 and I don’t really remember her feet. I have a very clear memory of her fingernails – I tried to bite them once in church. My nails were bitten down to the quick and I was bored. I looked at her hand a long time before I reached over and held it. I interlaced our fingers and looked at her nails some more. They were long enough that I could put my tongue under them, you know, if I wanted to. I realized I did. I wanted to put my tongue under one of the nails and then I wanted to chew it off.

I slumped down to try to get closer to her hand. I considered bringing it quickly to my mouth and taking as fast a bite as I could but I really wanted to slowly gnaw it off. I could already feel it in my mouth. I’d play with the detached nail with my teeth and tongue. I couldn’t wait any more. I twisted my head down looking up at the priest and brought our hands up to my face.

I didn’t even get the nail completely between my teeth before she pulled her hand away. She gave me a dirty look. I’d seen that look before; it was the “you did something seemingly sweet to get something self serving and weird” look.

So do I have my father’s feet? I never met the man so I don’t know his face little alone what he jammed into his shoes. I think my mother’s toes were thinner. So maybe I got these fat toe pads from dear old dad.

My grandmother claimed that I must have gotten my temper from my father because no one in her family acted like that. I think just having emotions was beyond my grandmother’s family. Her mother, my great-grand mother, was a look of reproach. I used to think it was something I had done that I couldn’t remember or that it was because I was born without the appearance marriage. Then there was a moment that I realized that it wasn’t because my birth had brought embarrassment upon our family or as an infant I had knocked a beloved heirloom into the fire with pudgy flailing arms, it was that I had been born without a penis. I was useless because I was a girl.

It still seems strange to me to hate something about a person that they were born with. I was an in-y instead of an out-y so I was to be condemned. She had promised her daughter, my grandmother, her car when she died, but several years before she died she had my grandmother sign over the car to my grandmother’s brother. She left nothing to her daughter except a feeling of unworthiness and confusion.

We even called her Nana Carleton, (Carleton was her last name) as if she was too good to be called something more endearing. Grammy or the like would not hold the respect that she felt she should have. I’m happy to report that as I got older I took no shit from the old bitch. If she asked in a “tone” if that was what I was going to wear, I would say, “Yes, it is; what’s wrong with it?” If she were going to insult me, she would do it in a straightforward way and to my face. I was stronger than her, I didn’t back down to her, I could see her as the fool that she was.

God, I hope I don’t have her feet.