Remembering Smell (10 page)

W
HEN I'M FRIGHTENED
I'm at my most acute. Twisted, but razor-sharp. I'm like smell in that way, the sense that smell expert Trygg Engen so aptly described as "an idiot savant." Smell's keen awareness, its acuity, became more and more apparent as I tried to get used to living without it. Before this, I'd never questioned the almost universal assumption that smell is the least important sense. How absurd such judgments are. You can't rank the importance of an essential part of what makes you not just a human being but a unique individual, the sum total of all that you've experienced through your senses. Besides, I was beginning to realize that in its own quiet and mysterious manner, smell actually knows more about many things than the eyes and ears do. And that in some ways the human sense of smell is more perceptive than that of animals who live and die by their noses. What humans live and die by is just more complicated. Since we don't live in the moment, mere survival doesn't suffice to make life worth living. Smelling has evolved in our species to enhance the experience; it helps us tune out the ticking of the clock by adding nuance, texture, and an emotional component that is so exquisitely subtle we're not even aware of it.

The day after Christmas, Caroline asked if I'd like some help cleaning the house. I declined the offer. She had better things to do with her vacation, I said. She guessed correctly that I wanted to stretch out the household chores so they'd last until it was time to make a semblance of dinner. Leftovers. No actual cooking (that is, the smelling and tasting and testing for the right mix of ingredients) required. As she was leaving to meet her friends, Caroline mentioned to me a scene in John Steinbeck's
East of Eden
that had helped her get through some rough patches in her own young life. In the novel, a wise neighbor comes to the rescue of a jilted husband, not through lengthy talk sessions but by repeating the same gentle instruction over and over: "Go through the motions, Adam."

Caroline told me, "You'll get used to this, Mom." Then she repeated the line from the book. "'Go through the motions.' Just put one foot in front of the other." Soon every day would be just another day without smell. That was something to live for.

I collected the broom and sponge mop, my bucket and rags, the spray cans of Lemon Pledge and mildew remover, the toilet cleaner and the Comet, and I went to work on the house. I decided to take a yellow pill, not to make the work easier but to quiet the unceasing clamor of loss. How I'd loved cleaning my house before ... this. Physical activity of any kind had a stimulating effect. Now, it seemed, the stimulant was missing. Had it been the smell of cleaning products? Just because I hadn't been aware of them—the citrus in the furniture polish, the chalk in the Comet cleanser, the chlorine in the mildew remover, and even the putrid old-shower-curtain smell of mildew itself—didn't mean they hadn't been there, urging me on.

I couldn't stop thinking about them and all the other smells of housework. When my damp rag passed over the spine of some ancient volume in my great-grandfather's library, I remembered how I used to slow down instinctively when cleaning the books, lighten my touch. Dust rose from the cracked leather binding and I saw that I'd disturbed the thin layer that was like a fine sand on the top of the book's unopened pages. A funnel cloud of particles caught in a shaft of sunlight lit up like thousands of bright golden bits of fuzz rising on the thermal that I'd created just by sniffing. And along with the dust came whatever it was that bound together the smells of old glue and leather and the kind of paper that stands up to age without turning yellow except around the edges, where just enough oxygen can sneak in and weaken certain chemical bonds and thus the paper itself.

Though before I lost my sense of smell, such moments were not rare, I'd never deconstructed them—those times when I'd put down my rag, pull a book from the shelf, and open it. I'd stumble as if in a trance, my nose buried in the book, my head full of curiosity and tenderness for this old but still intact treasure, to one of the chairs that had also belonged to my great-grandfather; I'd slowly pivot in front of it (still not lifting my eyes) and back up so my calves were touching the seat cushion, and then I'd flop down like a cushion myself, pull my feet up, tuck them under me, and scoop Mel up into my lap.

I tried to remember the strong smell of the carpet, hoping this would set off a ripple effect. From dogs to dust and dust to leather. Can those olfactory neuron maps stored in the hippocampus (whose shape resembles, of all whimsical things, a sea horse) be brought into consciousness without the chemical knock on the door that alerts the brain to smells in the upper nasal cavity, smells that are let in only after they've spoken the secret genetic password? And how about smells that never make it to the level of conscious thought, those nameless odors we don't even know are there?

Staring at the worn carpet failed to bring back its peculiar aroma. I seemed to have forgotten it, maybe because it was not altogether pleasant. Good smells are said to stick around longer than bad ones. I tried another: the smell of the worn tapestry fabric on my great-grandfather's wing chair. I sank into it, closed my eyes, and tried to summon its odor, this time by sniffing. I thought about how the chair had sat beside the fireplace for as long as anyone could remember. The comfiest chair deserved the warmest place. It had absorbed the odors of slow-burning oak and the silver birch logs that went up like parchment; each tree as it burst into flames gave off its own distinctive whiff of cell structures being violently rearranged. The trees left their imprint on the chair; the smells of their incineration seeped into the pores of its upholstery, and into the feathers inside the cushion, and into the wadded-up cotton stuffing added later and now gray with age, and into the springs and the thin fir slats that held the fabric to the heavy-timbered frame that sat on four claw feet. Still shiny from layers of varnish, the feet left hollows in the carpet when the chair was moved for the semiannual deep cleaning of the dust, accumulated buttons, pennies, and pine needles that hid beneath it, out of reach of the vacuum nozzle.

Yes, the wing chair was a sponge for smells. My sensitive nose always knew who'd sat in it the last time we'd had company based on hints left by perfume or shampoo, or just the odor that comes off a person's skin, as unique as a fingerprint. Human odor is more pungent in times of stress or excitement. The scent was always more readily detected if it had been warm in the room and there'd been an argument.

It didn't make sense that the organ that made such subtle distinctions and attached even more subtle emotional messages and responses should be regarded as inferior to the same organ of a species that was led by the nose in direct and obvious ways. A wine is judged by its complexity. Why not a sense? Dogs are glibly pronounced superior in all aspects of smelling. True, a canine's world is saturated in smells, and a dog lifts its nose to catch scents from miles away. A dog is able to distinguish the smell of its owner from that of a stranger and to tell other dogs apart. We're so impressed by such seemingly uncanny talents that we all but ignore our own smell acuity. Human olfaction isn't inferior to dogs' but different, just as humans differ in having bigger and more complicated brains. As the human brain evolved, its older parts received upgrades, abilities made possible by the intricate wiring of the newest features.

The retronasal passage, located behind the mouth, allows all the intermingled aromas of one's surroundings, including some released through chewing, to slip up to the brain by the back way. To neurobiologist Gordon Shepherd, this suggests that the central brain contributes more to smell function than the peripheral parts do, which in turn explains why, in his view, humans actually have an excellent sense of smell in spite of our small noses and declining number of smell genes. The primary sense seems to have insinuated itself ever more securely into the psyche via those complex neuronal structures of the neocortex. Even rats have been shown to smell just fine after 80 percent of the (peripheral) olfactory system is removed.

Shepherd thinks that our active smell genes are becoming more focused on the specialized olfactory needs of a highly evolved species. It's not the overall gene count that matters; it's what each gene does. Smell scientist Stuart Firestein discovered that one human olfactory gene performs the work of three or four mouse olfactory genes.

That humans smell quite well is more than just a fun fact to toss around over lunch in the lab cafeteria. Take a recent contest dreamed up by psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley: canine smellers and college undergraduates both tracked a trail of chocolate on all fours. True, the dogs outperformed the kids by a factor of four. But the students surprised the scientists by how few mistakes they made. With their noses pressed to the ground, as dogs' usually are, the students were able to smell the relatively big, heavy odor molecules that escape detection when one is standing upright.

Moreover, what the human nose lacks in raw olfactory firepower, it more than makes up for, Shepherd argued, in finesse. This is why humans may have a better sense of smell than animals that have many times keener noses—better for what humans enjoy doing, which is not wading into mosquito-infested marshes to grab a dead mallard but rather shooting mallards and then handing them off to a good cook to create a meal that would be wasted on a golden retriever.

That women score higher than men on tests of smell acuity seems to contradict the finding that all people are equal when it comes to smell. But the nurture side of the nature-nurture polarity is expanding its territory. Biologists now count prenatal influences as nurture, not nature. This is important. They want to be absolutely precise when determining if a given biological difference is gender-based. Since genes can be altered in the womb by elements of the outside world, even a genetic difference isn't always nature-driven—that is, determined more by gender than other factors. Boys are stronger than girls. This is a biological fact. Are boys smarter than girls? This is a minefield. But the same brain research that is pointing us toward a negative answer (no, they're not) is behind current thinking on smell: girls are better smellers. Not born better, but primed to want to be better at it and thus more inclined to learn. I'm not talking about conscious learning, as in a classroom, but conditioning that comes from experience and gender roles.

Why was I so aware of the smells now missing from my house, many of which I'd noticed only vaguely when I could smell? Would my husband have had the same heightened awareness of smell's absence if this had happened to him? No. I doubted that he would have gone into as deep a funk as I had, nor would he have been so keen to deconstruct smell (as if that would bring it back). He would have acted like a man, sucked it up, and moved on.

This fact struck me as the key to my original question: are women better smellers than men? Only to the extent that they have evolved to perform gender-specific functions that seem to be part of their DNA because of adaptation. Unhelpful genetic traits are extinguished by the death of the individual burdened with them. Helpful traits live on. In the latter category in humans is a nose that is highly impressionable and easily trained. Then life experience takes over.

Such thoughts occupied me as I cleaned. I was keeping a tight rein on thinking. Keep it simple. Logical. Focused. I am a classic random personality, eager to chase every capricious notion that enters my brain. This habit of thought (and behavior) is why my house is usually a mess.
We'll have none of that,
my inner Nurse Ratched scolded as my thoughts wandered. She was the polar opposite of smell. Cold, practical, and as sensitive as a post.

I'd lived a third of my life in this house. I considered it part of my DNA. Or maybe I should say my family's DNA, seeing as how I was the fourth generation to live here and the house hadn't changed much since it was built. The wing chair smelled of me and Mel and a thousand meals enjoyed before a thousand fires and whatever else I'd contributed to the second skin it had acquired since my husband and I moved in. We'd had it reupholstered and the springs fixed fifteen years ago. The heavy fabric that replaced my grandmother's pastel chintz gave the room an earthier, more masculine feel that also disguised the fact that we don't have live-in maids as she did. All the chairs were going to see more wear living with us than they had in three generations with my ancestors. The wing chair would acquire the slightly oily aroma of cat hair hiding under the dilapidated cushion, which was now as limp as a flat tire. It also held the aroma of Sweetie, the black standard poodle we'd bought as a puppy for the girls; thirteen years later, she reeked of cancer and could barely get up into the chair she used to leap into with the grace of a fawn and loved to lounge in with her long black paws hanging over the edge of the cushion like a pair of slender silk tassels, her long elegant nose resting daintily on the soiled arm.

All these moments would soon be imprisoned in their fabric cage, their smells locked away in the limbic system. I closed my eyes, determined to resurrect others before they too disappeared without my saying a proper goodbye. The chair captured and held them, an eyewitness, though its clues could not be deciphered through vision. Only through smell. The curtains and the drab pea-green carpet grabbed the smells too: compost and the crisp fall leaves and bits of grass that stowed away in dog and cat fur and came into the house through the rubber flap of the small opening in the side door that I'd cut out years ago with a Sawzall to let pets go in and out of our fenced garden at will; the countless times wine had been spilled, or coffee, or milk; the smoldering embers the fire spat up and over the screen, leaving a burned-carpet smell and a black spot; and the dust from the books in the bookshelf.

My house with all its marvelous smells was my refuge, my joy and comfort, the only place that could persuade time to slow down, back off, and sometimes, at very special moments, like when I was cleaning and became distracted by a book, even stop altogether. I could revel in the house's sensuality, not just the smells but the images they summoned, the people and moments when we had all been so much younger.