Feet

My mother’s feet are plagued with bunions, a result of years of squeezing her feet into high heels and feeling negative about it. My father’s feet are two different sizes, and his legs two different lengths, so he’s always a little off kilter. My sister had large feet for a long time, or so my mother seemed to think. My brother’s feet are tiny, like the rest of him, except for his head. My dog’s feet are black and wide and flat, and we call them paws. My feet have scars and discoloration from bike accidents. My feet also have toes attached to them, which are short and underdeveloped.

My father’s feet weren’t always different sizes, same with his legs. They got that way after years of misuse. And my mother’s bunions used to exist only as nightmares. Demons that she saw on her mother’s feet, determined not to follow in those footsteps. And my sister’s feet aren’t so big anymore, though her collection of shoes has grown. My brother’s feet are still tiny, but he’s also 12. Apparently the soles of my feet are smooth, like sand.

Soon all of our feet will become useless.

The Village Club

I really don’t remember any of this all too well, except that the room was painfully white and disguised as a cottage, but when I was like ten, my mother enrolled my sister and me in an etiquette course at the Village Club, which is like a country club except without the golf or pool and caters primarily to older women. The Club now offers an extensive curriculum on bridge, including two six-session sections at the beginner, intermediate, and supervised levels. I think ‘supervised’ just mean advanced, I’m really not sure.  There’s also a few supplementary, more specialized classes (Conventions & More; Defense Wins the Game!; Bid, Play, Defend & Discuss; Beyond Conventions; and Brush Up On Your Basics) available to players that feel they’ve come to grips with the basics of the game. They must really get to the heart of bridge and fine tune the player’s skills, or get them in touch with the heart of the cards or their inner Life Master. Who knows. The purely instructional classes are taught by Life Master Bonnie Ward, while the more analytic-slash-specialized courses are taught by Silver Life Master Judy Hocker and Gold Life Master Gail Hanson, whose biographical statement ends with the quote “There is no bridge without fun and no fun without bridge.”

I’ve never played bridge. My family raised me on euchre and gin rummy and it shows in my bias against bridge. When I read those names with their titles and see all the classes the Club offers and all the time they invest into it, I can’t help but in some way view the whole thing as some kind of strange cult of older women playing cards and practicing perfect etiquette under the indivisible light of an infinite number of bright white rooms disguised as cottages. I have no idea if the Club held bridge classes when I was a fledgling gentleman in that etiquette seminar. I’m sure I wanted nothing to do with the Club’s extracurriculars after that. Like I said, I don’t really remember.

The Club is a hot-spot for those women’s daughters to host baby showers and wedding receptions. My dad says the only reason we were ever members is because my grandparents (mother’s parents) were. The whole thing has a real family vibe to it. We must have dropped our membership around 2007. I really don’t remember. I never noticed that we stopped going, nor was I informed when it (apparently) happened. We would go there for dinner or Sunday brunch toward the end of each year’s membership period in order to meet the yearly spending minimum.

I remember wearing sweaters to the Club often. A sweater can hide a disheveled, wrinkled dress shirt underneath its fuzziness. Of course, if the Club people have the heat turned all the way up to like 85 degrees and we opt to eat upstairs at the barroom because the wait is predictably long on a Sunday evening in February when all the air is frozen and people are scrambling to spend just beyond the yearly minimum so they don’t have to, down the road, pay for food they never order and its even hotter in the barroom than the downstairs dining room because, you know, heat rises and then I’ll spend the whole ordeal debating whether I should tough it out with the sweater or swallow my pride and just take the damn thing off because it’s too steamy and who really cares if my shirt is wrinkled, it’s not like I got some degree or even a certificate from that etiquette class that I now have to live up to. They probably don’t even remember me.