Free Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown by Adena Halpern

ubiquitous schmuck would approach us, it was something that truly irked me.
    In the spring of 1990, my junior and Adam’s senior year of college, we had just left a matinee showing of Jules et Jim at the Bleecker Street Cinema. Adam was a film student who had dreams of moving to Hollywood and becoming the next Martin Scorsese, and I was his faithful girl who loved the movies as much as he did. As we threw on our requisite shades and leather jackets (the 8-ball jacket by this point had been put in the closet for posterity and had been replaced with a motorcycle jacket; I wore a simple one with black buttons) we decided to walk into SoHo for shopping and coffee.
    We drifted into a shoe store, and Adam tried on size-thirteen black Doc Martens and I glanced over to the women’s rack. Perched in the middle of motorcycle boots and Converse All-Stars was a particular shoe that caught my eye. It was a pair of six-inch platform sandals to be exact: black, faux suede, size five—my size. I took off my one-and-a-half-inch-heeled black cowboy boots and slipped into the six-inch platform sandals. Suddenly I was up with the rest of the world. The air seemed clearer. I had to put on my Ray-Bans because the light seemed brighter.
    “What do you think of these?” Adam asked. I looked down at his shoes and then up to his face. It was incredible. The strain in my neck was gone.
    “Your shoes are really cool,” I said. “What do you think of these?”
    He looked down at my sandals and then into my eyes.
    “They make you look tall,” he said.
    “We’ll take both pairs,” I said to the saleswoman.
    For the next week, the only time I took those sandals off was to go to sleep. I had gone from the middle of Adam’s chest to almost close to his shoulder. We could practically dance cheek-to-cheek, and I didn’t have to stand on a chair to do it. The best part, though, was what I thought of as I threw my arm over Adam’s shoulder as we walked into Nell’s nightclub that night: Since my pants were long enough to go over the shoes, no drunken putz in a dark bar would ever know the difference.
    After two months, Adam threw away his Doc Martens because they were giving him blisters I wore those sandals, even in the winter with snow on the ground, for the next three years. I’d had the soles re-stitched four times before they died a horrific death involving a tree stump during a hike in the Santa Monica mountains.
    These days, I don’t care what anyone else thinks about my shoes. I don’t feel comfortable unless I’m in a heel that could give me a nosebleed from the altitude. My brother calls them “stilts.” Random people come up to me on the street and ask me how I can walk in them. I’ve had my boots called “a KISS reunion.” If friends mention me in conversation and the other person is cloudy as to who I am, my friend will say, “She always wears high heels,” and the person will remember.
    On a shoe hunt, if a salesperson asks if they can help me, I always say the same thing: “Show me your highest heel.” Ninety-eight percent of the time, the heels aren’t high enough, so I’m left with a surprisingly pitiful number of shoes in my closet for a Jewish princess with a shopping addiction.
    Now that I’ve been walking in heels for so long, I have trouble walking in flats. Last September, my neighbors were having their living room painted and I went over to spy. I had just come from the gym, the only place I’ll be seen in flats. While doing my best impression of Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched I tripped over one of their steps in the front yard and fractured my metatarsal bone in two places. I had to wear a cast for six weeks. When my neighbors came out to help me, one of them said, “She’s in sneakers, too. This girl really can’t survive without those heels.”
    Was it Adam’s taller-than-tall height that caused me to desire a more elevated existence? No. It was, however, the final straw. Truthfully, I can’t