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Coffee and High HeelsDecember 08, 2009 Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem. I brought "Grandmummie" to my writers' group last Sunday. Reaction was favorable, and as I was reading it, my voice started to shake at the end. These are both good signs. One writer asked if I planned similar pieces about my parents. Good question. At the moment I don't think so, because one or both of my parents are present at least as lurkers whenever I write about my life. Take this piece, for instance . . . Adults drank coffee and wore high heels, so I would know I was an adult when I started wanting to drink coffee and wear high heels. I thought "adults," but what I clearly meant was "adults of my particular species," which was women. I waited and waited for the desire to drink coffee and wear high heels to descend upon me, sort of like the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception rolled into one. The idea that these things had to be learned didn't occur to me till much, much later. To my girl mind, high heels were stupid. Standing at the platform at the Longwood MTA stop, en route home from school, I'd watch adult women miss trolleys they could have caught easily if they'd been wearing shoes they could run in; skirts that weren't so tight around the knees would have helped too. My mother's heel sometimes slipped through the grate of a storm drain and broke off. I never had this problem with sneakers. When I worked for the Red Cross, there was a middle-aged secretary down the hall whom my buddies and I called Bird Lady because she was bird-thin and her heels went briskly tap-tap-tap-tap down the linoleum hallway. Years of wearing high heels had so stretched some of her foot muscles and so contracted others that she couldn't walk in flats. This was a wonder, and not a pleasant one. Why did all these adult women wear such ridiculous footwear? No one ever explained, and I couldn't figure it out. My best guess was that they must want to do it, and that some day, when I was grown up, I would want to, too. I did wear "pumps" with one-inch or inch-and-a-half heels to high school, and I probably begged my mother to let me do it, but that was as high as my heels ever got. Little girls playing Mommy hobbled and teetered around in heels swiped from their mothers' closets. That made perfect sense, like donning a cape to play Superman. But why did older girls voluntarily exchange comfortable shoes for uncomfortable ones even when they weren't play-acting? In my twenties, thanks to formal and informal feminist consciousness raising, along with plenty of reading, I began to get it: Maybe the women were play-acting. Men thought high heels were sexy, or women thought men thought high heels were sexy. Sexy? What's sexy about not being able to walk and run? Well, in patriarchal cultures, women's clothing tended to restrict women's movement. Sometimes it was meant to protect men from being aroused by women. Sometimes it was meant to attract and titillate men. Sometimes it was meant to do both. Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology introduced me to the old Chinese practice of footbinding. The feet of girl children were bound from an early age, stunting the growth of the bones and creating tiny feet that were barely three or four inches long. Lovelorn poets penned rhapsodies to the tininess of their beloved's feet. Women with tiny feet couldn't walk property; they had to be transported in sedan chairs or other conveyances. Not surprisingly, tiny feet were a luxury indulged in only by the highest classes and those who aspired to be like them. Finally I understood why Jessie, my grandmother's cook and housekeeper, was one of the few adult women I never saw in high heels. When working she wore sturdy oxfords. When she served dinner, her shoes matched her white uniform. In her younger days, did Jessie ever don four-inch spike heels to trip the light fantastic with her sailor husband, Frank, when he was home on leave? I don't know. I didn't know enough to ask. Years later my costume for a play I was in included three-inch heels. Walk up and down stairs? You've got to kidding. I thought I was going to fall over. Christopher B., an actor with size 13 feet, gave me some tips. I made it through the show but immediately went back to sneakers, walking shoes, flat sandals, and boots. Since I got back into horses, nearly all my shoes have been boots. They have just enough heel to not slide through an English stirrup. My feet are nearly ten inches long. I can walk all day in my boots. Coffee is a little more complicated. My mother was a morning coffee drinker. My father drank tea. I started drinking tea partly because my father did and partly because coffee was for adults and I was a kid. As I moved through junior high and high school, I kept waiting to be struck by the Urge for Coffee. I loved all kinds of coffee ice cream, especially Brigham's mocha chip. A teenage Arabist might be expected to have an affinity for coffee, but though I did know where "mocha" came from, I drank tea with breakfast -- after I got over the bizarre notion that Tang, Carnation Instant Breakfast, and a Pop-Tart was a sensible way to start the day. In college, Caffeine Central, drinking tea was peculiar, but during my fifteen months in Great Britain I never had to explain why I drank tea with breakfast, tea with supper, and (of course) tea at tea. In the States, it was a rare vending machine that even offered tea. In the U.K., they all offered several options for tea -- milk, double milk, sugar, double sugar, and "black" -- and only one or two for coffee. Revenge was sweet, even though vending-machine tea, like vending-machine coffee, was terrible. By the time I returned to the States, I was drinking my tea with milk. This meant that I had to stop squirting lemons in my tea. Tea with both lemon and milk makes a curdly mess. It also meant that I could brew stronger tea. I didn't develop a real taste for coffee till I was in my early thirties. I was the book buyer at Lammas, D.C.'s feminist bookstore, which was located on Seventh Street, S.E. During the day, I'd take a break to stroll around the neighborhood and get lunch or a snack. Eastern Market, a short block away, offered plenty of immediate-gratification options as well as fresh produce, meat, and fish; there I was introduced to poppyseed hamantaschen and pulled-pork barbecue. These might seem culturally incompatible, and true, they were sold at opposite ends of the indoor marketplace, but coming as I did from the culturally and culinarily impaired WASP ethnic group, I felt no qualms about mix-and-matching delicacies from possibibly incompatible traditions. Across the street from Eastern Market was a row of small shops, including a gourmet grocery that included a deli and basement café with exposed brick and stonework walls. Its bagels were the best in the vicinity and thickly spread with real cream cheese, not the spreadable kind that hadn't become popular yet; this was also long before you had to specify "untoasted" when you ordered a bagel. Bona fide New Yorkers weren't impressed by these bagels, but one advantage of coming from a culinarily impaired ethnic group is that your standards aren't impossibly high and a fair-to-middling onion bagel slathered with cream cheese has it all over the white bread and peanut butter you grew up with. The macaroons at this place set a standard that nothing later ever equalled. After many disappointments I gave up macaroons. Exemplary the macaroons and bagels might be, but the tea was far below par, even by my modest expectations. For fifty cents you got hot water poured over a Tetley or Red Rose teabag in a Styrofoam cup. I needed some hot liquid to go with my bagel or macaroon, especially if I was planning to sit a while in the café with a publisher's catalogue or the latest issue of Gay Community News or Common Lives/Lesbian Lives. I started ordering coffee. The coffee was freshly brewed. It stood up to Styrofoam better than tea. Thus I became an occasional coffee drinker. In the years since, the tea offerings in U.S. restaurants and delis have greatly improved in quality and diversity, but I still order coffee when I eat out, even for breakfast. Most restaurant tea doesn't suit me nearly as well as what I brew for myself at home, so I'd rather spend my entertainment money on coffee. The biggest challenge of being a morning tea drinker isn't that you can't attribute all your antemeridian gaffes to insufficient caffeination. It's that when your colleagues attribute all their antemeridian gaffes to "I should know better than to put anything in writing before I've had my coffee," you're pretty sure that they're making excuses. Either that or they need a 12-step program.
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