Season to Taste (8 page)

I spoke about language and the senses with Robert Pinsky, the baritone-voiced former poet laureate of the United States. Pinsky, a writer, translator, and poet, believes in the power of sound. He has called poetry a “bodily art form” and thinks writing poems is similar to composing music. “When I say ‘chair’ the little bones in your ear vibrate,” he told me, his voice deep, his intonation practiced. “When I say ‘chair,’ I blow wind,
chh
chh
. When I say ‘very,’ I let it vibrate in my throat,
vvvv.
It’s physical. Words are an abstraction that we attach to physical experience.”

“Smell is almost the opposite,” he continued. “It doesn’t involve category or generality. Smell is such a different sense, because the molecules come into the body, and then they go out. You experience it immediately by its nature. To describe a smell, words are abstract. Smell is so particular—it’s the most particular configuration of molecules that makes coffee or body odor or acetone. No wonder it’s figurative most of the time.”

Pinsky, who teaches at Boston University, had spent some time thinking of examples of poetry that dealt in scent. He had found one by William Carlos Williams called “Sonnet in Search of an Author.” He read it to me over the phone line, slowly, his clearly enunciated words vibrating the receiver at my ear. “It’s a mock sonnet,” Pinsky explained before he began, “a joke sonnet, but it’s a beautiful poem.” It describes two people—nude, “like peeled logs,” in the forest. “A sonnet might be made of it . . .” Carlos Williams writes. “odor of excess / odor of pine needles, odor of / peeled logs, odor of no odor / other than trailing woodbine that / has no odor, odor of a nude woman / sometimes, odor of a man.”

As he read, Pinsky hammered down the word
odor
with each breath, over and over again. He said it with gravity, with precision, with rhythm. He explained that the poet used the word repeatedly in the poem on purpose. “The repetition is insistent that he smells it. And it is almost to say, to emphasize, that it can’t be described.”

When I asked Pinsky how he described scent in his own poems, lush poems as much physical as metaphorical, ones redolent with sound, he paused. “I am trying to think if I’ve ever had to describe a smell . . .” Silence. “You know, I’m not sure I have.”

A poet laureate who couldn’t recall ever describing a scent in his poetry? It didn’t seem possible. But at the same time, it did.

I told him about the one mention of scent I had found in his work. It was in his poem “The Haunted Ruin,” when he had described the smell of the computer, the semiconductor, a machine—“of breast milk / And worry sweat.”

He laughed and sounded surprised. “You’re right,” he said. “Is that in
Jersey Rain
?” Yes. I had found it in one of his collections of poetry, one published a decade earlier. I could hear him pulling a copy off a shelf.

After a moment, he spoke. “You can definitely smell a computer,” he said. “There are lots of little smells there. They are mostly ugly, but some have a little freshness to them.”

Later, when I was away from my desk, I tried to summon a memory of that very scent. I closed my eyes and thought about the smell of wires and plastic, of late nights in college hunched over my laptop, of electricity and metal. It didn’t come. Imagining aroma is difficult. Impossible for most.

Rachel Herz, a Brown University professor and author of
The Scent of Desire,
once did a study in which she asked 140 college students to imagine a number of different physical sensations. They conjured the sight of a car, the sound of an alarm clock, the touch of satin, the taste of lemon, and the scent of chocolate. The ability to imagine smell, she found, was considerably weaker and worse than any other.

Although scientists have documented the overlap in brain activity when one imagines and actually experiences the sensations of sight and hearing, this is not true in imagining and experiencing an odor. “The parts of the brain involved in actually smelling pumpkin pie do not overlap neatly with the parts of the brain that are active when you imagine the aroma of pumpkin pie,” Herz wrote
.

I suddenly lived in an unimaginable world. One where my memories of scent were impossible to bring back. One where my loss was almost impossible to describe. I struggled with it. I avoided it. I didn’t know who I was without my sense of smell. I had, as neurologist and author Oliver Sacks wrote in
A Leg to Stand On
about the aftermath of severely injuring his leg while on a desolate mountain in Norway, “fallen off the map, the world, of the knowable. I had fallen out of space, and out of time, too. Nothing could happen, ever, any more. Intelligence, reason, sense, meant nothing. Memory, imagination, hope, meant nothing. I had lost everything which afforded a foothold before. I had entered, willy-nilly, a dark night of the soul.”

ON A MORNING
in the final days of October, my mother loaded me into her car, balanced my crutches on the backseat, and took me to see an ear, nose, and throat physician, or ENT, in Boston. It was time to get a professional opinion. I didn’t want to believe my father’s dire prognosis. I wanted to know when my sense of smell would come back.

I felt nervous as we drove toward the hospital. We had an appointment at the same hospital where I had spent those terrifying days right after the accident, the hospital that I could hardly remember. But it was a beautiful day, the trees lining the highway capped in leaves of bronze and gold. All I had to do to reinstate my starting date at the Culinary Institute of America was pick up the phone and call.

My mother and I took the elevator to the ENT’s floor and checked in with a nurse. I could feel my heart begin to beat faster in my chest, thumping against my clavicle, as we sat quietly and waited for my name to be called. I stared blankly at a gossip rag, at the rug fuzzy with footprints, at the dull gray door. My mother looked at me and I smiled. I felt jittery but excited. I was ready to know.

When my name was called a few minutes later, my mother and I entered the small, windowless office together. We sat in chairs toward the back. We waited. When the doctor, a young man who exuded confidence, knocked and entered, he smiled and shook our hands. He sat and began to flip through my chart. He didn’t look at me as he shuffled one paper after another. Suddenly, I felt very small.

“I can’t smell,” I told him. “Not since I was in the car accident.”

He flipped through the papers again. I felt like my chest was slowly constricting.

“I’ve heard of this happening before,” he said, finally. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle; he tapped his pencil softly against his lap.

“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, absentmindedly, still looking down at his lap. “But your sense of smell is gone.”

The silence hung in the room. I looked at my mother, who seemed stunned. She always knew what to say. But not now. I couldn’t move, stuck in that chair in his bare white office. No tests? No questions? No medication? How is it possible that was it?

“What?” I finally spluttered.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard of this happening before in car accidents.” He spoke so casually at first I wasn’t sure if he was joking. “The impact destroyed your olfactory neurons. I’ve never heard of it returning.”

I sat there numbly with nothing to say. My chest ached and I realized that I was holding my breath. I could feel the tears rising to my eyes. I didn’t want to cry, though. I wanted to be angry with this well-coiffed doctor and his quick judgment. Where was his sympathy? Where was my hope? But instead my sadness bubbled up to the surface and spilled down my cheeks. The doctor looked up. He seemed surprised to see emotion.

My mother, who had jumped up to put her arm around my back, explained in a terse voice that I had wanted to be a chef. “She can’t taste without smell,” she said.

He looked at me for what felt like the first time and rubbed my arm softly.

“Keep your spirits up,” he said. “Trust my opinions.”

Chapter 3
Rosemary and a Madeleine

IN WHICH I MAKE ADJUSTMENTS

I OPENED A NEW JAR
of salsa while leaning against the kitchen counter one day soon after my visit to the ENT.

Pop
.

I leaned in and inhaled. Air coursed up my nose, warm and blank. Of course there was nothing more. Unable to detect the scents of the tomato, garlic, or jalapeño, I wondered why I even tried.

But the scent of salsa had once meant something more than the lead to a crisp bite of a taco or the party companion to chips and beer. On dusky Sunday nights in the winter of my childhood, my father and I had watched movies. Not just any movies. We watched films handpicked from his extensive arsenal of VHS and laser discs—“the future of film technology,” he used to say—many times the same ones over and over. Sometimes it was a young Robert De Niro in
Midnight Run
or an even younger Mel Gibson in
Mad Max
. Usually, though, my father and I filled those hours with a bag of tortilla chips, a jar of chunky red salsa, and Bond. James Bond.

We would cocoon ourselves on the couch and watch
Dr. No
,
Licence to Kill,
or
Live and Let Die
. I loved
Goldfinger,
mesmerized by the scenes of beautiful women murdered by having their skin coated in layers of gold paint. I would drape an old crochet blanket—beige and slightly tattered, smelling faintly of our cedarwood closet—over my head as we watched. I felt protected by its bulk, but could still see the scary scenes from between its woven holes. Those evenings were always accompanied by a methodical crunch and the rustling of plastic bags. The chips and salsa were an integral part of the James Bond experience and, for years afterward, the smell of salsa brought me immediately back to it. Even after my parents divorced and my father left, I could pop open a jar containing some salty-hot variation on tomato, jalapeño, and garlic and I would be right back on that couch, under that crocheted blanket. I would be with a young Sean Connery, a Roger Moore, a happy young girl with her dad.

But as I ate in the months after the accident, salsa no longer brought me near the cedar-safe memory of my father, the delicious tingle of fear I had when watching James Bond. It was simply a jar of mush: sloppy, chunky, red.

I wasn’t eating for sentimental reasons, though. I ate salsa—and I ate a lot of salsa—because I could
feel
it. The hot pepper kicked the back of my throat with blunt force, a tiny sign of life. It tickled my trigeminal nerve, which wraps around the face and into the mouth, transmitting sensory perception to the brain. The trigeminal is responsible for the tingle on the lips and the tongue after eating a pile of spicy chicken from Atomic Wings or inhaling the menthol of Vicks VapoRub. It is the source of pain for the sensitive and a joy for those addicted to hot sauce, as well as for me, who had little else.

After many meals struggling to enjoy something,
anything,
in bite after mute bite, sometimes I just wanted to feel. I craved some kind of sensation in my mouth. I used Tabasco like salt; the Thai hot sauce sriracha like ketchup on fries. I couldn’t detect herbs or spices or subtleties, but I could eat out of two jars of salsa blindfolded and feel the difference between spicy and mild. It all burned—painful, delicious.

On that October afternoon, I scooped the salsa into my mouth with a tortilla chip like a spoon, chewing straight-backed against the counter. I stopped attempting to smell. Sniffing felt monotonous, frustrating, and futile. My small but buoyant bubble of hope had burst in the office of that ENT. I needed different means with which to cope.

I had been forcing myself to concentrate on my other senses. As I ate, I honed in on the texture, temperature, and color of the food before me. I had always known that there was more to eating than flavor. I had watched Tony Maws work to keep his cauliflower florets a bright white, carrots their crisp orange, his sorrel sauce ablaze in greens. I had delighted in the pop of bubbly caviar atop a crisp blini, the smooth smear of sour cream. I had grown up eating bowls of homemade applesauce, redolent in cinnamon and steaming straight from the stovetop, with a big dollop of frosty vanilla yogurt on top. For years, in fact, that simultaneously hot and cold snack was the only way my brother would eat fruit.

But now I concentrated on the texture, temperature, and color so intensely that they took on a new significance. My eyes, my fingers, and the nerve endings of my tongue stood poised with meaning as each bite entered my mouth. I forced them to.

And I was surprised to find that it worked.

Suddenly the feather-light crack of my teeth on a wafer-thin Necco candy echoed in my mouth. The stringy heat of cheese pulled from that first bite of pizza, stretching against my teeth, soft against my lips, made me smile. I liked the pop of a ripe cherry tomato exploding juice against my tongue and contemplated the sensation of spaghetti in my mouth—slippery, smooth strands—the way I once did the lurking undertones to basil and butter. I stared at the rainbow of roasted beets arranged on my plate at the first restaurant I felt bold enough to go to with my family while I was still on crutches. They were luminescent in deep purple, fiery orange. I inhaled with my eyes.

At home I sought the crunchy: tortilla chips, popcorn, biscotti. I savored the jagged-edged crust of a sesame seed bagel. I ran my tongue along the tiny square indentations of a Triscuit as I let it dissolve in my mouth. I relished the thick feel of cream in my coffee and sticky spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar. My mother made custard one night. She baked it in tiny porcelain ramekins in a
baine-marie,
a shallow water bath in a large pan in the oven. I told myself that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t tell whether mine was vanilla, butterscotch, or lemon. The soft, pillowy bites were fine.

And, slowly, I ventured back into the kitchen. Balanced on my crutches, I stood at the sink, by the oven, near the stove. I stood tentatively, hesitantly. I didn’t cook. I didn’t
want
to cook. But as thin threads of enjoyment began to weave their way back into my mouth, I no longer feared the proximity. I breathed in and out over pots of low-boiling water. I wanted the caress of steam on my face, the thick band of damp heat up my nostrils. It was a different sensation now, and I pretended I could smell its warmth, conjuring images with each breath. Heat became the scent of two bodies under a mound of blankets on a winter night. Cold was the aroma of the chairlift, clanking as it took me to the top of a ski mountain in Vermont.