I’m grateful to The Chaffin Journal (the annual literary print journal out of Eastern Kentucky University) for publishing this short piece, entitled “Life Without Onions.”
I’d be negligent to not opine this piece might resonate better than it would ten or twenty years ago, thanks to our overdue and necessary #MeToo movement. The fact that the first draft was written all the way back in 1998 is either a commentary on how out of synch I am with literary and cultural trends, or else ahead of the curve. Or both, or neither.
It’s one of the first stories I attempted from a female perspective, and while I’m reluctant to comment on the merits, I can safely say I’m anything but embarrassed, a couple of decades later.
Obligatory and heartfelt plea: please make time to support art and more importantly, the often unappreciated (and unpaid!) people who publish and promote it! XO
Life without Onions
My dude, who hasn’t gotten around to proposing marriage but talks about it often, doesn’t eat onions.
He’s one of those people who, if misguided by an apathetic waiter, might taste an unintentional onion in his soup, or in the sauce, or on the not-quite-clean-enough silverware and turn pale, then begin sweating and suffocating and cause a complete scene right in the middle of any restaurant.
This has never actually occurred, yet the possibility exists—and could happen any time, he insists—so he tends to be obsessive about avoiding undesired allergic reactions. We don’t eat out very often. The best way to protect oneself, he claims, is to assume that every meal prepared by anyone else is certain to contain at least a trace of onion, or onion powder, or else has been handled by a fork or sliced by a knife that has come into contact with an onion. His diligence makes him a bit abrasive at times, and occasionally it’s awkward to eat with him in public.
But this isn’t the biggest problem.
I think he’s come to believe that his dread of all-things-onion is a perfectly natural, proper attitude, and not a result of his own personal anxiety. I’m afraid he assumes my empathy is unwavering to the extent that I myself no longer enjoy onions.
But I do. I love to cook, and you can’t cook in a kitchen with no onions. I mean it’s not like red meat, or a particular type of food that one can easily avoid. Onions tend to dominate and pervade everything on the plate, so it becomes an all-or-nothing scenario. How can you plan a lifetime of meals—pasta, salads, hamburgers, meat loaf, pot roast, chicken kabobs—with the utter absence of onions? You can’t. And so I feel as though I’ve been unfaithful if I dare to prepare a meal for myself that in any way involves onions. If he even knew that one had been in his kitchen, he’d be beside himself.
Growing up, I had a friend who was allergic to bees, and she would tell me about the terrible nightmares she’d have. She was obliged to wear a special bracelet and carry antidote around with her all the time in case she got stung. Even though the chances of death were remote, she was traumatized by the notion of anaphylactic shock and eventually had little desire to go outdoors. So, I can understand where my dude is coming from, and I know it’s not my place to judge another person’s phobias with regards to their health.
But it bothers me, nonetheless.
More than I think it should. Maybe it’s simply that I can’t imagine life without onions. And that’s the way it will have to be if and when we ever go to the next level. He won’t have it any other way, and I’m not the type of person who would keep secrets from her husband, so I can’t comfortably exist worrying that I’m cheating on him.
The thing is, he’s so intelligent, and intense, it’s easy to see why he takes things too seriously sometimes. He seemed surprised when I first mentioned how he constantly talks in his sleep, and I told him it was because his worry-motor never stopped running. I used to think it was cute, like the way he gets so worked up when one of his teams (he’s a big sports fan) loses and he screams and curses at the TV, like they can actually hear him or something.
Maybe it’s the premonition I sometimes have, kind of like a recurring dream where I see his compulsion overtaking other areas of our lives. Perhaps at first there’s a certain type of soap that he determines is unacceptable, or that drinking unfiltered water is unhealthy, or that canned soups might cause cancer. Occasionally I have this terrible vision of living in an all-white house, endlessly scrubbing and cleaning because of all the germs we continually come into contact with. Or I imagine the way he might act with our children.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely.
I have been upset all night, and I’m sitting here in the darkness, watching his fish that always seem to be watching me. I see them swim up and down, from one side to the other, in the same circles, either exhausted or indifferent as the result of being trapped in their miniature world.
He says studies indicate that owning an aquarium helps stimulate concentration and creativity. He tells me it relaxes him to look at the tank, how peaceful the fish (who don’t shed or bark or bite like other pets) make him feel. I think he’d be disappointed if he knew I didn’t share his point of view. The constant activity in that tank inspires anything but calmness, and actually makes me nervous. I can’t look at that blur of bright movement without noticing that the big fish is very deliberate, and intent as it chases the smaller one, over and over, all around the tank, never letting up.
It’s probably silly, but it makes me sad, as if I should be doing something to help. But I know it can’t be helped. It’s nature’s way, and if that little fish wasn’t being chased in this aquarium, she’d be getting hunted in another aquarium, or across a lake or ocean somewhere.
I can hear him, chattering away in his sleep, probably solving all the problems from the past day, and anticipating the ones to come tomorrow. I wish I could convey my feelings, to share some of these thoughts with him, but I’m afraid. Afraid of saying the wrong thing. Or upsetting him. Afraid he won’t understand me the way I try to understand him. Afraid that if I start talking I won’t be able to stop.
