Season to Taste (12 page)

I tasted as I went along. Bread remained like a grainy sponge. Coffee was bitter heat. Milk was a thick and clammy water. The chicken sandwiches Bill served every day for lunch tasted like cardboard. I dipped a spoon into the caramel sauce that tasted only of sugar, painfully sweet. Nothing seemed right. I doubted my every move.

And I was angry. It irked me that Bill’s Red Sox cap was always on backward. I disliked the way the cashier looked at me when she asked about the car accident. I hated the customers. Middle-aged men and their cheerful little children, elderly grandmothers, and businesswomen in suits would come into the store, exclaiming with pleasure. “It smells so good in here!” I wanted to spit in their food. I wanted to smash the glass case of fruit tarts that I painstakingly arranged every afternoon. And I almost did, one day in December, the same day I would have arrived at the Culinary Institute of America with new knives gleaming. Instead, however, I walked into Bill’s office and told him that I could no longer bake. I needed to move on.

I ARRIVED AT THE
University of Connecticut Health Center early on a frosted winter morning in the week before Christmas. I had driven the two hours from my mother’s house in Boston alone but for the voices of NPR News. Dry heat shot up from the floorboard vents of my car, and my left leg fit snugly by the door, enveloped still in its oversized container. As I took Exit 39 off that bleak, leafless interstate, I felt the anxiety wind itself carefully up the back of my neck as the hospital on top of a hill came into view.

The UConn Taste and Smell Clinic is one of a handful of centers in the United States that diagnoses and occasionally treats those with disorders of taste and smell. My father had assured me that these doctors would not be able to cure me, that I would leave the clinic experiencing the same scentless landscape that I did when I walked in. But perhaps, he said, they could explain what happened, exactly. They could tell me what to expect. What would I do next?

As I waited for my name to be called in the waiting room, I thought about the sheet pans of cookies I had burned in the bakery’s ovens. The bacon I had crisped to black soot. All the things I wouldn’t have done had I smelled the beginnings of their demise. I wanted to know what to expect.

I had three days of testing scheduled. When the scrub-wearing nurse called my name I stood immediately. I was ready. “Let’s go,” she said.

In the following days, each of which were bookended by the long commute among the naked winter trees to and from Connecticut and Boston, I saw neurologists, dentists, ENTs, surgeons, and internists. I spent what felt like hours swishing clear liquids from miniature plastic cups around my mouth, each one a different strength of “bitter,” “salty,” “sweet,” or “sour,” to test my taste buds. I rated each of the seventy flavors on a scale of 1 (weak, a hint of salt lurking in the back of my mouth) to 10 (strong, almost gagging on the overpowering taste of bitter quinine). I breathed in deeply while puffing air from label-less bottles up my nose, trying to decipher which had the aroma of a strong chemical and which was odorless (virtually impossible to tell). I sniffed mystery jars of once-familiar food smells, touched my finger to my nose, walked a straight line, said
ahhh
as they peered down my throat, grimaced as they inspected my teeth and tongue. They looked at my cranial MRI and sinus CT scans, as well as the multitude of head x-rays from the accident. They drizzled numbing drops into my nostrils and then stuck a long device up to what seemed to be my brain, looking for obstructions.

One morning I sat on a stool in the office of a lanky, bearded doctor. He twisted open white plastic jars one at a time, their mystery contents covered in thick cheesecloth, and then stuck them under my nose. I held one nostril closed at a time, testing each side of my nose in measured sniffs. Each jar held a common scent—wood chips, coffee, cinnamon, rubber, soap, jam—but they were all invisible to me. The exercise seemed to amount to little more than a frustrating parade of blank inhales.

“Are you sure there’s anything in these jars?” I asked with a little laugh.

But then I sniffed over one of the final jars. It looked the same as all the others, clear white plastic, cheesecloth mesh. But this one held a smell. A familiar smell. It came blasting up my right nostril as I held the left closed with my index finger. I sniffed again.

“That’s CHOCOLATE,” I practically screamed at the doctor, who stood at eye level, a foot away.

He looked at me for a moment, confused.

“Chocolate?” he asked, incredulously. “You can smell that?”

“Yes!” I said gleefully. He had me sniff again with the same nostril. “Yup. That’s chocolate.”

He smiled and then had me sniff with my left nostril, now holding the right side shut with my hand. I sniffed. My shoulders sunk, defeated.

“No, I can’t smell anything on that side,” I said.

The doctor looked off into space, thinking. He seemed perplexed, yet the sides of his mouth were curved in a small but unmistakable smile.

“This is unexpected,” he said. “Generally chocolate is not an odor that those who cannot smell first pick up on. Very unexpected. But no matter what, even if only through your right nostril, this is wonderful.”

I beamed. A new smell! A great smell! I wanted to dive into a swimming pool full of chocolate and drown in its scent.

“The flavor of chocolate,” the doctor reminded me, “is almost entirely dependent on smell.”

I nodded. I knew.

On my final day at the clinic, I met with the center’s head doctor, an older man who was cheerful and kind. “Recovery is possible,” he said, going over the results of my tests.
Hyposmia on the right side and anosmia on the left side no doubt caused by the head injury she sustained in the auto accident,
they had written in my report.

“But it’s unlikely,” he said. “And if it happens, it can take years. We’ve seen people who didn’t smell a thing for nine years.”

“Nine years,” I repeated numbly.

“It’s possible you will recover,” he repeated. “But it’s not likely.”

“But what about the rosemary? What about the chocolate? Some things have returned!”

He nodded. “I know. And that’s a good sign. But I can’t say what will happen.”

“What can I do? I wanted to be a chef.”

“Work is therapy, Molly,” he said, kindly, looking down into my eyes. “Stay busy.”

Chapter 4
Fresh Bagels and a Boyfriend’s Shirt

IN WHICH I IMPROVISE

I MOVED TO NEW YORK CITY
on a frozen Saturday in February. Boarding the train in Boston early that morning, I lugged two large duffel bags as my mother waved good-bye from her car. When I arrived at Penn Station, I hailed a cab amid a swirl of snow and ice. The buildings loomed large from the taxi window, and the sidewalks teemed with people despite the unwelcoming weather. I stared at the city skyline like it was a painting as we drove over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn.

We cruised up Flatbush Avenue, past small shops and squat buildings in the tumult of traffic. We took a right onto a windswept Fourth Avenue and then a left onto Sixth Street, which was lined with trees and brownstones. This was Park Slope, a quiet neighborhood where I had rented a room in a three-bedroom apartment.

I dragged my bags up the stoop of the brick building on the corner, careful not to twist my left knee, which was still encased in a metal brace under my jeans, and rang the bell. My heart beat quickly and I could feel my face flush in anticipation. I had met my new roommates only once before and all of the pressure of beginning a new life in a strange city suddenly amplified this first moment at what would be my home. Jon, an international risk analyst with a halo of black curls who would occupy the room across the hallway from my own, descended the three flights to give me a set of keys and help bring my belongings upstairs. We smiled and shook hands, and I realized that he was the first person I had met in New York, the first new friend since the accident. He didn’t know me when I was injured; he didn’t know me when I was broken and depressed. I tried not to limp.

“Welcome,” he said.

I plunked my things down in my room, which had bright red walls and an old wooden desk covered in dust, and sat on the full-sized bed that I had already purchased from the departing tenant. I looked out the window. I could see the bare branches of a tree, a naked street corner. The heater clanked uselessly against the wall.

I SPENT MY FIRST MONTH
in the city wandering. I didn’t have a job or a plan, only the vague notion that I wanted to write and spent hours haphazardly applying for positions at every publication I could find. I took the subway to Manhattan and walked to interviews in large warehouse spaces in Chelsea, in tiny dark offices in Midtown, and in apartment buildings on the Lower East Side. I interviewed for positions at culinary magazines, art magazines, teen magazines. We’ll call you, many said. But I had no internships or experience behind me. My phone remained silent.

And all the while I wandered. There were coffee shops in the West Village, where hipsters drank cappuccinos and tap-tapped on their laptops. I perched at low tables with a book and a steaming mug and could imagine that the warmth of my coffee held the scent of bean and milk. I spent afternoons at the Met, where Monet’s water lilies lost something without the familiar background scents of marble and museum. I went to bars with friends, where gin lacked an edge and I turned conjecture into a game: Which well-suited man was the type to wear cologne?

The city was a blank slate without the aroma of car exhaust, hot dogs, or coffee. Nothing was unbearable and nothing was especially beguiling. Penn Station’s public restroom smelled the same as Jacques Torres’s chocolate shop on Hudson Street. I couldn’t tell the difference between the bakery on the corner and the cardio room at the Brooklyn YMCA, where I joined the sweaty bodies racing on elliptical machines every morning.

I knew that New York possessed a further level of meaning. Boston had smelled of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the fresh concrete poured within the construction site near my mother’s home. It had smelled of the springtime lilacs in Arnold Arboretum, the perpetually full Dumpster on the street near the local high school, and the dark beer on draft at the bar next to Fenway. But in New York I worked hard to ignore what I could not detect. I kept busy.

One afternoon in March I took the subway, the twists and turns of which I was just beginning to master, to Fourteenth Street for a job interview near Union Square. It turned out to be a long interview for a job I didn’t really want, and I left with a headache and what felt like the beginnings of a cold. I walked a few blocks down to the Strand bookstore, which was stuffed with volumes old and new. I entered looking for distraction, wanting to lose myself in pages of prose. I had been in New York for a month and I still didn’t have a job. My internal dialogue had begun to rise in pitch, staccato and loud. I reeled with the possibility of failure.

I was anxious about more than employment, though. A few nights before I had been on a date with a tall blond man who worked as a teacher in the Bronx. We sat over a bottle of wine and plates of pad Thai at a restaurant downtown talking about travel and music and books. And I had felt nothing. I told myself it was because his face was too smooth, his movements too awkward. I told myself it was because I still wore a bulky knee brace and my pelvis ached when it rained. But, quietly, I worried.

I’ll never be attracted to a man again.

I knew that the sense of smell was linked to libido, to attraction, and to sex. I had heard about pheromones and had been subject to the advertisements of the perfume industry for years. I remembered the scent of Alex’s shirt—a soft mix of Old Spice deodorant and sweat. Alex had moved to California the month before I arrived in New York. The last night I saw him before he left, we had hugged, locked in an embrace for a solid minute before I let go. I had inhaled and exhaled through my nose, but I had smelled nothing of the past, when I had loved to nestle my face against his and breathe in that human scent of his skin.

Unlike my grandmother Marion, who had still retained the liquid drops of memory of her childhood as Alzheimer’s overtook her body, the scents of my present had vanished along with those of my past. What could I do with this emptiness? Where else beside my depression would it lead? I knew that the sense of smell went deeper than the instant pleasure in the scent of a fresh-baked loaf of bread. I knew it influenced more than the conscious here and now. I began to wonder how much more I had lost. I began to wonder how much of my life—love and otherwise—had been tied to the perception of scent.

I browsed through the miles of books at the Strand, trying hard not to think of work or of men. I paused in the stacks to open a crumbly used copy of
Run River,
a bleak novel by Joan Didion, whose sparse prose I had always admired. I stuck my nose up close and fanned out the pages like a deck of cards. I breathed in and out, slowly, remembering happy afternoons spent in the library during high school.

For me, the musty aroma of old books—the combination of paper and ink and crisp cardboard bindings—had always hinted of the past, of the people who read them and places they went. The mildewed smell of libraries and used bookstores had been a comfort and a friend. Now, it was gone. I stuffed the novel back onto the shelf and walked out of the store, heading home.

“What if it never comes back?” I typed on an otherwise blank Word document on my computer that night.

HAD I THE
courage to begin researching the extent of my olfactory loss as it happened, I would have known that the connection between smell and sex has been studied for generations. Even the ancient Greeks knew there was some kind of undetectable communication between animals. They just didn’t know what. But the modern study of the subject began in the late nineteenth century. It began with a moth.

One morning in May, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915), a square-jawed botanist living in Provence, caught a moth. It was a female Emperor moth, also called a Great Peacock. It was a large one with a white fur collar and wings whirling with patterns of burnished browns and eyelike rounds staring out in blacks and golds. She had broken free from her cocoon on the table in his laboratory and Fabre, often considered the father of modern entomology, or the study of insects, imprisoned her under a sheet of wire gauze.