​The Charioteer’s Feet, by Patricia Newbery

Feet of the charioteer of Delphi, bronze sculpture c. 470 BC. Photography by Helen Simonsson. CC BY-SA 2.0. Via Flickr.

​The Charioteer’s Feet

Phoebe has had a thing about the Charioteer’s feet and the values she feels they represent since she read The Triumph of the Greeks at thirteen. She went to Delphi to see them on her first solo trip abroad and, all these years later, images of the Charioteer still adorn her bedroom: a one-quarter profile with lips that might part in speech at any time, the famous feet from several angles, the right hand holding a fragment of rein that seems to be alive.

The Charioteer stood in the sanctuary of Apollo until an earthquake buried him under a rock fall. Impassive in victory, Severe in style, he has survived the millennia more or less intact, despite – or thanks to – his misadventure. He’s lost his left arm and silver from his headband, but still gazes from fringed, inlaid eyes; his tunic falls in fluted folds to his ankles; his feet, with their veins, metatarsals and flexed toes, are celebrated for their anatomical precision, though never intended to be seen.

*

Phoebe looks at the linen dress she splashed out on two summers ago but has never worn. She’s clearing mistakes and misfits from her wardrobe, but she can’t let this dress go: it’s a gorgeous shade of blue and would be perfect if it were just a fraction shorter, which, were she less hopeless, it would have been two years ago.

Her efforts at sewing were ridiculed at school, held up as models of what not to do. When she bought the dress she told herself she’d shorten it anyway, but lost confidence when she got it home. She admired it hanging on her wardrobe door for several weeks, until it felt like a reproach and she buried it inside. The following spring she asked a friend to pin the hem. It was easy then to thread a large-eyed needle and tack, a struggle afterwards to thread a smaller one. Carefully, she sewed five unsightly hem stiches that puckered the fabric on the right side. Her next attempt produced stitches that were less visible on the right side, but raggedly uneven on the wrong, so she unpicked them and went through it all again and yet again. In the end, she lay the dress over her bedroom chair resolving to have another go next day, but a week later shook it out untouched and returned it to the wardrobe with its tacking.

Now, under the Charioteer’s even gaze, Phoebe admires herself in the mirror. She admires the no-longer-new dress, but is dismayed by its lumpy, black-tacked hem. She takes it off and presses it, sits by the window. Laboriously, she threads a needle, sews several uneven herringbone stitches and unpicks. 

In the garden, a squirrel leaps across the path, tail twitching. A blue tit alights on the abandoned woodpile to gather moss. She pulls at the green tufts for a minute or two before flying off, beak frothing with trailing green.

The Charioteer’s feet were modelled "with scholarly realism," though it’s always said that, hidden as they would be by the chariot in which he stood, they were never intended to be seen. Most accounts also note that those unseen feet were "much admired in antiquity," a contradiction that has always puzzled Phoebe, but she’s been reluctant to think too closely about what it means. Now, as she contemplates the life of the garden, she thinks about the admiration of those allegedly unseen feet and the fact that her hem really will be seen by no one but herself. What matters is not puckering the right side.

She turns back to her sewing box, snips a new length of thread and perseveres until she passes it through the eye. She shifts her chair for better light and sews one herringbone stitch and then another and then two more. She looks at the right side of the dress, turns back to the wrong and takes greater care to pick up just one thread of linen for the single-thickness stitch. It’s pointless to worry that the stitches aren’t uniform in size, so she works on until the thread is finished and lays the dress aside. 

She makes coffee, checks her email, listens to the midday news. Back at the window, she watches the blue tit gather another froth of moss, shifts her chair, recharges her needle and sews on.
 
Patricia Newbery

Patricia Newbery's work (poetry, fiction and CNF) has been published in The Cafe Irreal, The Cincinnati Review miCRos series, The Citron Review and elsewhere. She's a British/Irish translator and editor and has lived in Egypt for twenty-five years.

The Charioteer of Delphi, 470s B.C. Bronze, 5ft.11in. high. Delphi Archeological Museum, Greece. RaminusFalcon, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons