Indulgence by Jane C. Elkin

My mother grunts like a greedy infant at the breast as the hospice health aide massages lotion into her flaky feet, her pleasure so audible it drowns out The Eternal Word Television Network she insists on playing 24/7 until the lesions on her brain claim her. It would never occur to me to do this for her, even if those feet were not gross with yellowed nails and cracked heels. We are not pedicure people. We are tough.

Which summer was it that she teased me for being a tenderfoot? I was eight or nine, picking my way across the pine-needled carpet outside our camp, wincing at each acorn. “If you went barefoot like me, that wouldn’t hurt,” she bragged.

Was that the summer I stubbed my toe and lost a nail, or the one when I burnt my soles on fresh asphalt? A neighbor warned me not to the moment I stepped into the road, but I had to prove I had asbestos feet the way my mother bragged about her asbestos hands in the kitchen.

At ten, I begged for sandals. Hippies did not wear Keds, and my secret desire was to be Peggy Lipton from The Mod Squad, a show I knew only from commercials. She got me sandals, too, plastic ones with silver medallions, from a Dollar Days bin. They fell apart a month later, but that July, I felt like a fashion model.

Three years later, I got fungus from the family clippers and hid my toes for decades.

The health aide kneads Mom’s chilblains with balm, and it occurs to me that, though she didn’t contract the fungus until menopause, I’ve never known her not to have cracked heels. But then, she rarely wore socks. Too poor, too young for such luxuries.

When, at twelve, I wore out my snow boots before the spring thaw, she balked at letting me use hers. “At your age, I walked further to school than you do, and in my only pair of shoes. They got so soaked, I developed chilblains and had to peel off my bloodied socks and go barefoot the rest of the day.”

Such grit is what makes pilgrims climb the Scala Sancta in Rome on their knees: twenty-eight marble steps, one bruising riser at a time. In her morphine-addled mind, she’s already ascending the stairway to Heaven.

Artist’s Statement

Memories crowd my brain like bric-a-brac at a flea market. If there’s something in my experience that speaks to another soul, I need to share it as much as they need to hear it. That’s how we normalize this thing called life.

Jane C. Elkin is a language teacher inspired by a long memory for minutiae. A graduate of Bennington Writing Seminars, she is the author of World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom, and other musings in such publications as Popula.com, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, Ruminate, and The Best of Ducts.com. Her major work-in-progress is Mother’s Ink: A Momoir in Handwriting Analysis. She splits her time between the Chesapeake Bay and coastal Maine. To learn more, visit www.jcelkin.net