Please, Let Me Explain To You Why I Have Onion Slices In My Socks
Tonight, I will put onion slices on my feet.
An herbal woman on Instagram recommends it. Go to sleep with onion slices inside your socks, she said. Cotton is best. You will wake up less toxic. You will have a spring in your step. She went so far as to suggest that if you do this on a regular basis, your life will be transformed. You will be healthier and happier.
“Guess what I’m doing tonight?” I ask my teenage daughter Cloe. “You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.”
“Yoga?”
“Nope.” It’s pointless making her guess. My daughter is smart, psychically so, but even she will never guess in a million years. I tell her about the onions.
“Living the life, Mom.”
These are the pleasures of sleeping alone. You can put onion slices on the sole of your feet and who will object? Nobody. I can stink up the place all I want.
I wonder, briefly as I slice the onion I’d bought for bean soup if I’m a fool. First, you know, onions in your socks. Plus, I should have reason not to trust Instagram. Every item I have bought on Instagram is a piece of crap: the pheromone sticky pad said to miraculously attract closet moths. Yesterday, I opened the closet and out flew two moths. I looked at the trap that’s been hanging there for a month. Nary a moth is attached.
The super tape that can attach a man to a wall. I tried hanging a picture that couldn’t have weighed more than a pound and it crashed to the floor.
The revolutionary exercise tool that you hang over your door. The Instagram ad makes it look as if you will be transformed into a 12-year-old Cirque du Soleil acrobat within days. When it arrived in the mail, it looked nothing like the magical contraption advertised. What I held in my hands was nothing more than a four-foot-long swath of stretchy pink polyester with two tennis balls attached to the ends. The only acrobatics were my mental gymnastics as my mind got knotted up in pretzels unable to make sense of how to make the balls attach at the top of the door frame. I never once even scored a somersault. The contraption is lying in the corner of one of my several moth-filled closets.
Again, on a whim, lured in by an Instagram ad of toned women doing warrior pose on a tropical beach, I bought a yoga app. (Putting the “insta” into Instagram, barely waiting five minutes to reconsider a purchase.) The app forces you to take a quiz before doing your yoga for the day. Last week, there was a picture of sliced-up apples. “What is this? A. Green pepper. B. Apples. C. Kumquats.” I was so pleased with myself that I clicked on B., unleashing virtual confetti that rained down on my phone screen. I felt a rush of pleasure. Pleasure! There it is. All because I correctly guessed that a picture of chopped up apples was chopped up apples.
I’ll take that prize, that “Go, Leslie!” prize. These days, where else am I going to get myself such a cheap dose of dopamine? Like everyone during the pandemic, my life has become so circumscribed that Fun with a capital “F” has gone the way of hugs and handshakes. I stopped drinking so that always disappointing thrill is gone. I have no romantic partner. So onion slices it is. Better yet, in bed. Yes, onion slices in bed are as kinky and exhilarating as it’s going to get for this girl for a while.
In the event that this admission evokes pity, I should make something clear: I have realized that I like it this way. I like these simple pleasures. I’m sure that I’m not alone. All my friends are enjoying said onion slices in our socks. Joys that are peculiar, small, and cost little. You don’t have to get dressed up and put on foundation and curl your eyelashes for it. You don’t have to make small talk or drive anywhere and park, in San Francisco no less.
I like having this pared-down life. I’m learning what genuinely makes me happy, which is little more than having my chicken Charlie jump on my lap for me to scratch her neck every morning. Haven’t we now got it that the stuff bogs us down and even if it promises a rush, in the end, said stuff rarely changes anything? Aren’t we learning that even all of our social materialism, all that consuming of experiences and coffees and get-togethers, is more often enervating than energizing?
Now I am about to find out if I can improve my life, for good, for the small price of two onion slices, one for each foot. I am about to find out if, after all of this — no end of Instagram failures, why no end effort at being joyful and at peace — what I needed all this time were onion slices in my socks. In only a few hours I will wake up as a woman who for the first time in her life knows what it feels like to have onions dwelling on the soles of her feet. Life’s such an adventure.
