Outside the Window
Thursday evening, I walked from work to a foot doctor near City Hall, a building adjacent to the Woolworth building, an early 20th century high-rise defined on its website as the “neo-gothic cathedral of commerce” and “the tallest building in the world until 1930.”
I announced myself at the security desk, went up to the 16th floor, and arrived at the foot doctor’s office. Inside, it was quiet and empty. A sign read “the foot whisperer.” I waited for someone to hear me as I looked at the filing cabinets, fake plants, and water dispenser that made me feel stuck in another time. The intricate design of the Woolworth’s stone facade glimmered in the sunlight outside the window.
I waited a bit longer, noticing the other doctors apparently in this same office, noted on business cards hanging on display - psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, dermatologists, and the infamous foot “whisperer” I was waiting to see. I shuffled around, again hoping the sound of my presence would make someone appear from the empty hall behind me, until I decided to just walk towards the open doors. Finally, I passed enough doors to run into her sitting at a desk and accidentally startling her. “Hi, sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No it’s ok. We’re just a bit short staffed. Mana?”
I took off my shoes, sat on the patient bed, and let her point and poke at my foot trying to find the spot that hurt. I had woken up three days ago, I told her, with a sudden pain and now I’m limping every day and the pain goes away at night but it hurts when I walk. She nodded and continued to slowly and gently twist my foot around.
After many times of her asking “does this hurt?” And me saying “no” every time, I started to doubt my pain, was it psychological? I knew for a fact that I could barely walk up or down stairs, and was holding up foot traffic every morning walking up to my train stop. She noticed my high arches and flat shoes and suggested I buy insoles, offering temporary relief in an ultrasound therapy. Anything will do, I thought to myself, not really questioning the cost or what it was, only that it would “transmit sound waves into my foot.” The quiet of me laying down and being ultra-sounded allowed for conversation.
I found out that she has been working in the same office for twenty-five years. She told me how Tribeca has changed and how when she first moved here, everyone wore suits. Women weren’t allowed to wear pants, she said. “It was much better. Now you can’t tell who’s a tourist!” She had an accent that sounded Russian, but I didn’t ask about it. I thought about the men in the suits and the women in pencil skirts and heels, as she continued to put sound waves in my foot that was injured by me wearing wrong shoes. How many women in the 90’s must have sat in this chair with the same foot problem. I thought about how the office was stuck in time, and how the Woolworth building was always there, just outside the window.
Thank you for reading! I’ve been having a hard time making this newsletter consistent, so I decided to just send out something, even if it was incomplete. Here are some reviews I published recently:
Pope.L Lives On: A Review of “Life—A Group Show”, Newcity Chicago
Brad Kahlhamer: Bowery Nation: Birds are Talking, Brooklyn Rail
The American Midwest as Bastion for New Nordic Tradition, Hyperallergic
(P.S. my foot is better)