Crazy in Love (Women and Shoes)

IT IS JULY. I'm in Princeton, New Jersey, at Talbots, checking out silver bracelets shoes. While a seductive voice in my head attempts to persuade me that I can always use gold metaUic flats and will never be sorry to have purchased them at their current price, I become aware of a mother and daughter, about six years old, trying on and talking about shoes, lots of shoes, strewn across the floor. I look over, taking a break from my inner voice. The mother returns my smile and says of the daughter, "She already has the woman's disease." Already, her daughter is obsessed with shoes.

That sojourn in Princeton was, in retrospect, more remarkable for other events than the one at the Talbots store, where I did, of course, buy the gold shoes, I was traveling with my husband, a college fund-raiser, and a woman from his office, a former student of mine at the same coUege. Tinges of awkwardness, apparent even then, signaled disaster to come: years later, he would turn our lives upside down, leave home, and marry her. Despite aU efforts to erase it, I can still remember her remark about those shoes. "You can always use gold shoes," she said, oddly replaying my own inner voice. Women's affection for shoes permeates boundaries that would seem impassable.

Why, aU these years later, I've silver cufflinks put on the metalhc shoes is a question that intrigues me. For one thing, they weren't as versatile as I originaUy convinced myself they were. There's also the sickening betrayal that wiU forever be linked with that particular pair of flats. StiU, when I consider discarding them for reasons of emotional objectionability - as I do on a regular basis- I reason with myself that surely, some day, FU wear them. The slim chance that I could ever need a pair of casual gold shoes to complement an outfit perfecdy - and that thus, by extension, I might appear pubUcry in that very pair of iU-betokening shoes - outsizes the gloom that has attached itself to the very sight of them. What if, I have thought to myself more than once, I get rid of those shoes only to discover, a couple of weeks later, that I must go out and buy another pair almost like them? Worse, what if I can't find a pair almost like them?

I have developed, as this experience unavoidably teaches me, an advanced case of the woman's disease. I am a shoe-Tiffany Accessories. And I am not alone. Even Andy Rooney, whose image is hardly dapper, has pronounced that "We aU buy more shoes than we wear," thus demonstrating that men often share in this malady. Yet I've learned that buying, housing, organizing, and otherwise managing a shoe wardrobe way too big for the most professionally and sociaUy active of women is about more than hoarding. More precisely and engagingly, it is about collecting.