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Really, I could have worn sneakers and a potato sack and no one would have noticed, but at the time it was a Fashion Emergency.

We were at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection when we received the first of a steady stream of e-mails from the Gucci PR woman. She needed my husband's suit size. We were inside the Church of Santa Maria della Salute when my cell phone rang. She wanted to know what I was wearing. I told her. Long pause. “Do you have jewelry?” she asked. Ultimately, I was allowed to wear my own clothes, but the PR woman sent Lee to the San Marco store, where he was fitted into a black suit he had to return the next morning. The suit broadened his shoulders, sucked in his waist, and lengthened his legs. It was like full-length Spanx. I couldn't believe how good he looked. Neither could he. “What about your shoes?” the PR woman wanted to know. He told her the whole Gucci wedding saga while she checked her e-mail. “They're vintage,” I added.

I'd packed a pair of four-year-old Louboutin kitten heels that I'd purchased at the Madison Avenue boutique at great cost to my wallet and pride. To ask for anything but the highest heel is to invoke pitying looks from other customers, who know you are not “one of them” and by right shouldn't be allowed in the store. I was happy that at least the salesman allowed me to buy the shoes and didn't tell me they were “training heels” for little girls with big feet. Though I used to love them, next to the Gucci Amazons in stilettos, I felt like Tiny Alice.

With the party only a few hours away, I tried on my outfit and hated the way the pants looked with my unfashionably low heels. I needed a new pair and told Lee I was off to do more sightseeing. Taking the hotel's water taxi from the Giudecca to St. Mark's Square, I began a desperate search for moderate two-inch heels. I believed that extra inch would make all the difference. I couldn't go back into Gucci because I'd already spurned their offer to dress me, so after running from store to store, I wound up in Fendi. I bought the lowest heel I could find—nearly four inches. “Not high at all,” said the twentysomething saleswoman. An American tourist, who was also shopping for shoes, looked down at my heels and said, “I love those! I wish I could buy them, but I wouldn't be able to walk.”

“You just have to practice,” I said. “Then it's easy.” The shoe demon had possessed me. Not only was I buying shoes I couldn't walk in, but I was also lying to total strangers about it.

With all the excitement of wearing his new suit, I hoped Lee wouldn't notice my new shoes, but of course he did because I suddenly grew four inches taller, which made me six feet two.

“What do you have on your feet?” he asked.

“Shoes.”

“I know they're shoes. But they look new. You didn't just buy them, did you?”

I couldn't lie twice, so I told him the truth.

“You're not going to be able to walk in those things,” he said.

“You sound like a broken record.”

“Remember Carolyne the Rat.”

“Carolyne the Rat had pointy toes,” I explained. “These are peep-toe.”

“You're still not going to be able to walk in them.”

All I needed to do was walk from my hotel to the party at the Cipriani, which is the equivalent of two New York City blocks. If Venetian courtesans could walk the cobbled streets in chopines, I could manage that.

I couldn't. It was torture.

Up ahead, I saw Salma Hayek climbing out of a Gucci speedboat. Her husband, François Pinault owns the company that owns Gucci. I saw Gucci's former designer, Frida Giannini. I saw Robin Wright. I saw Jessica Chastain. I saw Madonna. They were all extremely tall, even Selma Hayek, who in the real world is extremely short, but this wasn't the real world. It was the World of the Few, the Happy Few, the Band of High-Heeled Sisters, and I was determined to be in their company, even if my feet revolted, even if I limped and hobbled, even if I didn't reach my goal . . .
until St. Crispin's Day!

A Pain in the Heel

W
hen Emily was pregnant, my mother wanted to give her my baby shoes. She'd been keeping them for the right occasion and this seemed as good as any. “But they're mine,” I said. My mother couldn't understand why I'd want my baby shoes when I was no longer a baby, unless of course I was having a baby. At fifty-one.

I was amazed my mother had even kept the shoes. She'd always hated clutter and as she grew older, she'd toss out anything she could lift without getting a hernia. “What happened to Emily's baby shoes?” I asked. “Why does she need mine?”

“I think I threw hers out,” she admitted. “Anyway, all baby shoes look alike.”

I explained that for sentimental reasons, I wanted to keep them. I took my first steps in them. I learned how to walk in them. They started me on the journey that led me to where I am now.

“And where is that?” my mother asked.

“In New York, as a writer.”

“Too bad the shoes didn't lead you to Oprah. You would have been good on that show.”

Since I'd grown up across the street from Jay Leno, my mother had totally unrealistic expectations about celebrity. She thought being famous was easy and failed to understand why I'd yet to achieve that goal, especially since I lived in New York, where celebrities were a dime a dozen.

“Maybe if you'd cast my baby shoes in bronze I could have clobbered someone in the head with them,” I said, “and then I'd be known as the Baby Shoe Killer.”

“That's not even funny,” my mother said. “I bet you haven't thought of your baby shoes in years.”

Actually, I'd thought of them just the other day. I was at the nail salon for my semiannual torture session, when the technician started to shave the corn on my baby toe. “Wait,” I nearly screamed. “It used to be an extra toe!”

“Oh, that means good luck,” she said. I was so deeply touched I agreed to have the Special Spa Pedicure, which cost an extra $40 and involved more pummeling and pounding than any person could possibly endure.

As for my baby shoes, I was fairly sure my sister didn't even want them. I'd seen her only once during her pregnancy, when I'd invited her to the Broadway rock musical
Rent.
She looked beautiful that night, fresh and glowing and happy. Though she'd purposely kept her distance from me, perhaps fearing that if I didn't have a baby, she might not be able to have one either, I was thrilled she was pregnant and hoped it would signal a new beginning. But even today, I can't listen to the show's opening number, “Seasons of Love,” without feeling unbearably sad. Jonathan Larson,
Rent
's
thirty-five-year-old creator, died suddenly on the day of the first preview. The song addresses the fleeting nature of time, reducing a year to
“five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred
minutes.”

When Emily gave birth to an adorable little girl, I was overjoyed. I imagined the two of us walking the baby in Central Park. I imagined taking my niece to the theater, museums, and the ballet, showing her the New York I'd grown to love. Maybe I'd even write the children's cat book my mother was always pestering me about. I'd name the main cat after my niece, who would get involved in all sorts of magical adventures. But even though my sister and I live twelve blocks apart, I rarely had the opportunity to see the new baby. I'd try to set up specific times, but they were never convenient. When I did arrange a date, Emily would tell me to call before I came. I'd call and the baby was sleeping. I'd call again and receive the same or a different response, but either way, the message was that if I wanted to see my niece, I had to play by my sister's rules, which to me were increasingly mystifying.

In
A Room of One's Own,
Virgina Woolf, who had a turbulent relationship with her sister, Vanessa Bell, wrote that women are always “thinking back” through their mothers. I'd add that we're also “thinking back” through our sisters, examining our past through our shared history of love and hate, intimacy and rivalry. Because we speak the same “sister tongue” and can encapsulate whole decades of our lives with a grimace or catchphrase, we enjoy a relationship that's far deeper than most. When it's good, it's wonderful, but when it's not, there are few things more painful.

With sisters, you always remember the smallest details, even the ones they wished you'd forget. I remember when Emily sucked her fingers at night, insisting they tasted of butterscotch. I remember the squeaky bed. I remember her crush on Adam West, the original Batman, and on her ninth-grade English teacher. I especially remember my decapitated doll, Betty.

Over the years, the struggle to reunite Betty played out in different ways. I became a writer, fulfilling my destiny as “Betty's head.” When I didn't get pregnant, I was disappointed but not devastated. I was hard at work on a book. Emily, who is long-limbed and physically fit, was elated when she became pregnant. When I called to congratulate her, she cut me off, explaining that it was a private matter between her and her husband. I hung up the phone feeling as if she'd punched me in the stomach. She subsequently didn't return my calls. When she finally emerged two weeks later, I was hurt and confused. “Why didn't you call back?” I asked. Drawing on a lifetime of pent-up emotion, she lashed out. “It's always about you, isn't it?” Then she added,
“
You don't know what it means to be a sister!”

Being a sister was an integral part of my identity, and over the years, I'd considered myself a good one. I'd always been there for Emily and couldn't fathom how she could actually say that I didn't know what it meant to be a sister. It seemed cruel and unnecessary. It also seemed totally wrong.

My mother, who had only one brother, had always been desperate for sisters, imagining a warm, wonderful
Little Women
scenario. She expected us to be the March girls, though if she'd looked deeper into Louisa May Alcott's life, she would have found complications there too. “You were always so happy together,” she'd say, which was not entirely true. With three children, sibling relationships are often triangulated, and at different points of their lives, one usually feels left out. There were times when Emily was close to Nancy, other times when she was closer to me. It was just the way it went.

Once Emily got married and had a baby, however, she had her own family, which seemed to preclude her old one. It was as if the two universes couldn't intersect. Before her wedding, when she moved out of my old apartment, she made a point of telling me that she'd left a coat behind. It happened to be one that Lee and I had given her. That said everything. She no longer needed or wanted my protection; she would soon have a husband to fill that role. I'd become dispensable, like the coat. Since that wasn't something she could articulate to my mother—indeed, she may not have even been aware of it—she needed reasons not to talk to me and continually found them.

After we planned a vacation at the end of August that happened to coincide with my niece's first birthday, Emily expected me to cancel the trip. When I told her it wasn't possible due to Lee's work schedule and suggested we celebrate the following weekend, she didn't speak to me for a year.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.

There were countless incidents in which I continually did something “wrong,” which gave her the freedom to stay mad so she didn't have to actually see me. When I dropped off a present for my niece one Christmas, Emily returned the gift with a note saying that I owed her the gift of an apology. It involved something a friend's daughter had said to my niece the previous Christmas. The daughter apologized the next day, and in any event, it had nothing to do with me. Still, I persisted in trying to fix things without knowing what was broken. I invited Emily to the opera, but she never wanted to go. I continued to send my niece birthday and Christmas presents, receiving polite but curt thank-you notes in return.

One day, I passed Emily on the opposite side of Madison Avenue. She was with my niece, who was then five or six, and a handful of mothers from her daughter's school. I was coming from the radiologist's office after my yearly mammogram. Though our mother didn't have breast cancer until she was sixty-four, I—we—have always been categorized as being at high risk, and I'm always a nervous wreck before my checkups. But luckily, everything was fine and I felt like buying something to celebrate.

“Hey, I'm okay,” I wanted to tell my sister as she walked toward me. “They didn't find anything!” I pictured us going shoe shopping together and then sitting at an outdoor café, where we'd laugh so much that the women at the next table, noting our similar voices and blue eyes, would whisper enviably, “Oh, they must be sisters!
”
But we didn't go shopping or have lunch or laugh. We didn't even say hello. Instead, we hid behind our sunglasses, passing each other as if we were strangers and continued to walk in opposite directions.

Finally, my mother, who is nothing if not persistent, convinced Emily to invite us to see her daughter dance in
The Nutcracker
. For the next several years, the only time I saw my niece was when she was in ballet slippers onstage. At that rate, I figured the only way I'd ever get to know her was through all the various roles, up to and beyond Sugar Plum Fairy.

My mother couldn't understand why her daughters were “fighting.” She kept pushing me to make contact, once going so far as to convince me to call Emily on my own birthday. I felt ridiculous, and it didn't matter anyway. Emily remained elusive. She never showed up at Thanksgiving because Nancy and I were there, visiting my parents when she knew we'd be absent. Perhaps as a middle child it was the only way she could carve out a unique identity for herself. I'd always run interference between Emily and Nancy, acting as a mediator during their frequent misunderstandings, but now that Emily and I were no longer close, the sibling ecosystem was thrown off balance. When Nancy became pregnant with her daughter Isabel, she assumed it would bring her closer to Emily, and I feared I'd be the one left behind. On more than one occasion, Emily had told me pointedly that a “book is not a child,” but Emily and Nancy didn't bond over their children; in fact, by having a baby, Nancy had introduced another “Betty” into the family dynamic, and Emily didn't want to hear about her.

I desperately wanted to fix the situation, because that was my designated family role, but no matter what I did, nothing worked. I discussed it so much with my therapist that even she was growing frustrated. Whenever I uttered the word
sisters
to my friends, I saw a look in their eyes that said,
Please, not again
! Finally, I told myself, “Enough!” Whenever my mother brought up the subject, which she did frequently, I begged her to let it go. “Emily is happy,” I explained. “She has a wonderful husband and a smart, talented daughter. Maybe she needed to cut ties so she could be her own person. Let it be.”

I hoped my mother would catch the Beatles reference, but she was having none of it. She prayed for reconciliation, and finally, her prayers were answered, when all of her daughters developed plantar fasciitis, the most common cause of heel pain. It happens when the thick band of tissue—the plantar fascia—that runs from the bottom of your foot to your toes becomes inflamed, due to a number of reasons, including overuse or improper footwear. “Improper” means flats
and
high heels, so I could no longer be self-righteous about wearing sensible shoes.

“You should talk to Emily about this,” my mother said. “She went through the same thing!” My mother was practically giddy at the notion that we might bond over our mutual sore heels. I suspect she'd have been even happier if Emily had needed an organ transplant, figuring that if I gave her one of my kidneys, she'd be obligated to call now and then.

I commiserated with Nancy, who gave me the same advice she always gives:

“You should see my chiropractor. He's incredible.” Since her chiropractor lives in Boston, it wasn't the most practical recommendation. She then suggested ice and rest, neither of which she'd bothered with due to her extremely high tolerance for pain. Years ago, she taught aerobics, and her class was so difficult she received hate mail, and yet everyone kept coming back for more.

“Don't worry about it,” she said. “It will go away.”

“Has yours?”

“No, but I've blocked it out.”

I decided to go to the podiatrist I'd seen once before. He plays flamenco guitar, which I didn't know at the time so was left wondering why a podiatrist would have three very long glossy nails on his right hand. He must have seen me staring because he immediately explained about his guitar playing, though he probably would have done so anyway. In my experience, foot doctors seem to be unduly proud of their hobbies. I remembered my fencing podiatrist and his recommendation for my overpronation. I doubted flamenco guitar would do much for heel pain.

I made a point of wearing tie shoes with special “revolutionary” air insoles. He squeezed them between his fingers before rolling them up in a ball. “These are useless,” he said. “No support.”

He wanted to know how long I'd had the pain and I told him about two years. “You've been walking around in pain for two years and never thought of doing anything about it?” he asked.

I explained that at first it was a dull ache that didn't really bother me until the pain grew intense. I blamed Vera Wang. We met in her office so I could interview her for a story, and she had on Martin Margiela's split-toed stacked-heeled Tabi boots. I didn't like the boots but admired Wang's attitude. Every word out of her mouth was “fierce,” and for someone in her sixties, she was definitely that. I looked down at her chic, if slightly ridiculous, boots and then at my boring flat boots, and I realized I needed fierce. After the interview, I walked thirteen blocks to Saks, where I barely managed to reach their 10022-Shoe Salon, before I had to sit down on a banquette. The dull ache in my heel was now throbbing like mad.