THE SOCKS PROBLEM

I WISH TO BROACH a matter close to every man’s, and most modern women’s, feet: “Whatever happened to socks?”

Everybody I know agrees: It doesn’t matter whether you are living alone in a tepee, or married to two different people in two different bungalows, or just floating around with no fixed address, or pursuing a career as a recluse in the family manse, or lying chained to the floor in a tiny basement room off the initiation chamber in a sorority house. The one result you can depend on is attrition of your socks. A person could stay in the same room with all of his or her socks for a month, never (except to sleep) taking his or her eyes off the drawer in which his or her socks are kept, and at the end of that period he or she would have three to seven fewer socks than he or she began with.

In my case, I believe I have considered all of the natural outlets:

• A member of my household, who is being blackmailed and can’t make the payments out of the change on the dresser, sells them. I doubt this, because no member of my household can keep a secret. If they were involved in something that would worry me if I knew about it, they would tell me.
• The washing machine, or the dryer, digests them. This may be. The dryer produces, I know for a fact, something that is very suggestive of socks. This is probably why so many of my washables are translucent—and if any member of my household were handier, a good many socks could no doubt be re-created annually from this lint, or fluff, three or four wash-loads’ worth of which would cover a sheep. But this ongoing leaching of fiber from the nation’s clothing, while it is something that the Federal Trade Commission might well look into, appears to be a gradual process, which cannot account for the sudden disappearance of whole socks.
• The modern sock is made of a material designed to disintegrate, of its own accord, after a period of time. I would not put this past American industry, but in this case a sock would occasionally go poof while I was wearing it, or while I was holding it up to the morning light trying to decide what color it was.
• Dust is dead socks. If it isn’t dead socks, what is it? Certainly if you let the dust of two or three rooms accumulate for a while, you can shuffle your feet around the baseboards and have bedroom slippers that will serve in mild climates. But I have in my drawer, where hope springs eternal (and where, in fact, a sock has been known to resurface, magically, after up to eighteen months’ absence), single socks whose ages range from three months to four years. Some of the older ones have been with me at seven different addresses. If the socks that match have gone to dust, why haven’t they? Often, heartrendingly, it is almost-new socks that are missing. The poets have not written adequately of the near-erotic pleasure of easing your foot into a new, lissome, gladly yielding sock. And then one day it is gone, and you are left with shrunken, cankered old socks that may require lubrication.

Of course, one thing about socks is that they don’t mate for life. You can buy fourteen identical black ones, and at the end of three weeks, even if they were all still extant in sock form, no two of them would quite match. It may be that people across the country should get together on socks. I have a newspaper clipping that tells of two one-legged ladies who, although one lives in Wisconsin and one in Ohio, have been sharing pairs of shoes for more than two years. (Incidentally, the report notes, both ladies “agreed they wouldn’t want an artificial leg even if it could be easily fitted. The extended reach of a crutch is great for disciplining recalcitrant children, Mrs. Gruenbaum said, and Mrs. Harma sticks a cloth on the end of hers and washes ceilings.”) People could advertise single socks in a newsletter and trade off by mail.

I don’t know. Maybe one of my loved ones is saving all my missing socks to present to me, sewn together into an effigy of someone I admire, on the occasion of my retirement from active life. Maybe if the cat could only talk she could explain quite simply how it is that socks are transmuted into kittens. But I think it more likely that socks get off in some supernatural or wholly illegal way. I will not presume to trace the process by which they do it. But I think I know what becomes of them.

Every so often, usually at the change of seasons, when I dig into my closet for my summer or winter wardrobe, I find things I have never seen before in my entire life: a pair of pants, perhaps, that resembles a pair of pants only as a raisin resembles a grape; a sweater that a Red Guard might have denounced as too tacky; a knit tie with a horse painted on it.

Let us assume, then, in the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary, that socks die and are reincarnated, perhaps in groups, as a variety of garments.

It is the work of the Devil—maybe—or maybe a sock-manufacturing-and-rummage-sale cabal, about which the media are so strangely silent.