Remembering Smell (17 page)

Still, a red balloon isn't merely red; it has a unique verbal descriptor. A tune is
melodic,
a whisper
low,
and a gunshot
loud.
Sugar is
sweet
and lemons
sour.
Wool
scratchy,
velvet
soft.
Language may not be the slave of the thinking brain, but it has risen in importance in lockstep with it, and pretty much in tandem with smell's decline in the gene pool. That is nowhere more evident than in what Andrei Codrescu bemoaned as our sparse smell vocabulary. Richard Axel's primal sense has to borrow from taste—words like
sweet
and
sour, fungal
and
fume-like
—or resort to analogies. There is no word in any language specifically meant to describe the smell of an old sock.

I
'VE ALWAYS BEEN
a poor sleeper. Even when I had small children and was exhausted most of the time, I felt lucky if I got four hours of shuteye a night. If some household project didn't occupy my restless mind during those sleepless predawn hours, I read a book.

A friend had given me
The Kite Runner
for Christmas. Months later I had a go at it and after a week I'd fought my way to page 141, where the book took hold of me. For the first time in months the words were not jumping around but invisible, and I was no l onger reading in my soft, warm bed but struggling to breathe in the black bowels of an oil truck. I must keep still, and quiet. My father's hand is touching my sleeve. The glowing white dial of his wristwatch emerges out of the darkness. He whispers to me to keep my eyes on the glowing dial. The smells in the truck that had seemed suffocating vanish.

The main character, a young Afghan boy named Amir, keeps his eyes glued to the wristwatch dial for twelve hours, until the oil truck has crossed the border to freedom and escaped from the Soviet invaders. Even though the boy knows the fumes in the tank are harmless and will soon fade from his awareness the way other smells, like the smell of garlic in his mother's kitchen, do, he cannot bear the stench until a visual distraction anchors him once again to a familiar here and now. His eyes—vision—save him. Amir survives twelve hours in the black belly of an oil truck by staring at his father's watch.

My heart raced and then I too was gasping for air. The fumes
were
suffocating—and it never occurred to me as I read that I wouldn't have been able to smell them.

This was progress. The memory of smell was better than nothing, and books restored that memory, at least in the abstract. The primary sense can't conjure up smells in the brain the way vision can summon pictures, and hearing can recall sounds. But memories can be triggered by a familiar scent. Writers love this sense's mysterious talent as much for its literary usefulness as for its mystery. There is no solid explanation for what is often called the Proust phenomenon.

I felt oddly elated, as if my mind had been a caged bird set loose in a room; I too had been set free, if only for a few minutes. Reading was still hard work. I told my husband it was even harder than working out at the gym, something else I was making myself do because I remembered the effects of endorphins and trusted that one day those endorphins would wake up. Biology would force them to, just as biology in the form of a pill had forced the foul smells out of my brain, leaving me entirely anosmic. I knew, or rather believed, that without this torturous
trying,
the slow stitching together of mind and body, emotion and thought could not happen. It was as necessary as changing the dressings on a painful wound, or climbing back on a horse that keeps tossing you into the dirt, or picking up a musical instrument after you've botched a recital, or learning to like raw fish when you've grown up on meat and potatoes and always cast a wary eye at even the cooked seafood entrées (who would order that?) on steak-house menus. Hard, hard, hard. But necessary.
Put one foot in front of the other.

I went to the library and brought home a pile of books I'd been meaning to read, hoping something in them would grab me the way that passage in
The Kite Runner
had. Deprived of storytelling's magic, I became obsessed with exposing its mechanical underpinnings. This was better than staring at a fuzzy and unintelligible page, and something I could get my discombobulated brain to focus on. I felt like a college student parsing lines of poetry. Caroline hated the way writing papers and "overanalyzing," as she put it, stole a book's pleasure from her. She was always too worried about getting a book "right" to get lost in it.

I noticed an abundance of olfactory references in many of the best of the books I read. And I began to commit that sin of analysis purposely. I could see patterns in the authors' use of the primary sense to convey primary things, to say the unspeakable and illuminate the imponderable. I noticed that smell was particularly useful in first-person accounts when the author wanted the reader to view the world through the lens of an honest narrator, someone plainspoken and direct, someone either too young or too unworldly to obscure his observations in self-conscious rhetorical flourishes.

Smell makes an excellent character witness, testifying to the narrator's innocence and thus candor. Some of the opening lines in
East of Eden,
one of Caroline's favorite books (unsullied by modern English lit class), are an obvious example. The narrator is a farmer, a good man of simple background. How do we know this? Steinbeck transplants his own boyhood memories of California's Salinas Valley into the head (and through the voice) of his narrator, who sees things clearly through his nose. He isn't a thinker but a doer. Steinbeck knew that if he could get readers to smell that valley, they'd end up inventing their own valleys and making the story theirs too. It would seem real and alive, personal, even if its description was minimal.

Since smells can't be conjured in adjectives, Steinbeck began his novel with a carefully worded inventory of fragrant things: "I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich." The narrator trusts his nose, and this makes him trustworthy.

Marilynne Robinson's novel
Housekeeping
opens the same way. The narrator, Ruth, has had a hard life. The book is an extended backward glance at that life, and it's heavily infused with odors. It starts with the smell of a mysterious and menacing presence, a lake that takes the life of the narrator's grandmother's husband and the rest of those on board a train that had sunk "like a stone" or slid "like an eel" off a bridge into the lake and disappeared with scarcely a trace. We learn that the wives of two victims left town at once, driven away in their sorrow by the lake's inescapable watery smell. The word
they
is another device that lends credence to the event and its narrator, who was not yet born and so was not there that horrible night the train derailed. She relies on others' accounts. But were
they
reliable? Possibly.
They
said that the two women who left town "could no longer live by the lake" because "the wind smelled of it," as did their drinking water.

The lake is not made sinister in the usual way. Its smell is not fishy or fecal. Its smell is "watery." It smells like nothing except what it is made of. Yet it is unearthly, this smell. The odor's compelling peculiarity makes the lake's presence as a character all the more ominous. Ruth's grandmother is the only one of the three newly bereaved wives to stay in town—she has three daughters to raise—and in a beautiful paragraph she is described in her widow's black "performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith." She hangs laundry and fights a strong wind off the lake. "It smelled sweetly of snow, and rankly of melting snow, and it called to mind the small, scarce, stemmy flowers that she and Edmund would walk half a day to pick, though in another day they would all be wilted."

I trusted Ruth's imagined version of this marriage because I trusted her emotional memory. For one thing, I hadn't ever read a more honest account of what it's like to go on a wildflower hunt in early spring while knowing the hunt is futile. Pried loose from the gravelly dirt, alpine plants seem to wilt more from homesickness than lack of care. In fact, in most cases, it's too much care that kills them. Edmund lifted the flowers "earth and all" into a bucket with a trowel. They died because they "were rare things, and grew out of ants' nests and bear dung and the flesh of perished animals."

As the pair trudged home with their doomed treasures, "the wind would be sour with stale snow and death and pine pitch and wildflowers." Death? Though it was early spring, the sour smell was that of the waning winter. Last year's dead leaves and flowers, now ripe with mold. Soon would come the "resurrection of the ordinary," and in spite of the wind Ruth's grandmother looked forward to when "the skunk cabbage would come up, and the cidery smell would rise in the orchard, and the girls would wash and starch and iron their cotton dresses." The watery smell is only faintly suggestive of death, and its intimation of those unrecovered corpses is more chilling and sinister than any real corpse thrown up onto the shore, rotting and bloated, would have been.

The violence and inconclusiveness of the derailment is embodied by the old lake, "smothered and nameless and altogether black." Especially in spring, when the water of the lake is "suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal."

A neighbor and long acquaintance of mine, the author Patricia Hampl, was writing a memoir about her parents,
The Florist's Daughter.
Her mother, a feisty Irish lady and devout Catholic to the end, had recently passed away at eighty-five. Hampl's mother had been born the same year as mine, 1917, and, also like my mother, had been living with the damage caused by a stroke. Even the dream life Hampl describes her mother creating for herself toward the end was like my mother's, romantic fantasies involving various male composites.
The Florist's Daughter
is a tribute to things universally important and dear, and doubly so to someone who happened to be born and raised in what Hampl and I both still refer to as "old St. Paul."

Old St. Paul was made up of Irish and German Catholics and just enough
WASPS
to give it a sense of entitlement and a level of class that was presumed lacking in its more openly ambitious sister city of Minneapolis, which was full of Swedes and Norwegians too busy to care. They left old St. Paul in the dust, with only our old neighborhoods to brag about, our Victorian homes preserved not by foresighted urban planning but by the town's lack of commercial success. Patricia Hampl's dad hired me when I was a teenager to work as a designer for the business he managed, a carriage trade florist called Holm and Olson. People in old St. Paul still used expressions like
carriage trade
in the sixties, even though the carriages had long since vanished. I was a junior in high school with no experience designing anything. Nevertheless, I believed him when he said he thought I showed promise. I learned the truth in Hampl's book—her dad did favors for women like my grandmother, a good customer.

Patricia worked for her dad too. Her coworkers called her the chatterbox. Unfortunately, when I worked for Stan Hampl as a floral designer I was struck deaf and mute by embarrassment at my own shocking ineptitude. For eight hours a day I poked garnet roses into Styrofoam amid the tumult of deadlines and personal dramas being played out around me, trying to summon the courage to say something, if only an apology for existing.

My refuge was the greenhouse. Hampl remembers it as being like a farm, smelling of renewal. She "was willing to be enchanted" by the greenhouses and the silent, unglamorous (compared with the designers) men who cared for the tender plants. So was I. But the florist's daughter was accepted into the immigrant Eastern European fold as family, while I was an outsider and felt keenly my lower status, the girl brought on as a favor whose grandmother was one of what Hampl describes as "the ladies of the little curving streets of leafy Crocus Hill" who all trusted her dad "to follow them in their decorative plots ... to supply the palette of their spring gardens, planted every fall, and then furiously dug up and discarded to be replaced with annuals every summer for a few short months until the whole business had to be rooted out and the process started again."

But these feelings aren't what present themselves to me unbidden whenever I enter a greenhouse and am engulfed by that inimitable greenhouse smell, as universally familiar as the smell of a bakery. Instead I feel a sense of relief triggered by memories of when I would escape the design room and creep into the greenhouse and sit down with a book on the damp cement floor, surrounded by camellias and azaleas and geraniums awaiting permanent winter homes in townspeople's living rooms. I was and am at home with the smells I love best: dirt, manure, flowers.

My muscles relax, even the ones in my forehead that had begun digging a permanent furrow long before I found myself at Holm and Olson, desperate to truly earn my paycheck. The florist's daughter's words remind me of other smells that take me back to that greenhouse. And to the design room too. When the powerfully fragrant Casablanca lilies in my garden are blooming, I'm packing Easter lilies into "the company's narrow, powder-pink boxes," carefully wrapping them in the "waxy green tissue to be sent on their way in the forest green Holm and Olson trucks," as Hampl recalls the ritual.

Never lilacs. They were too fragile. But May still means lilacs in old St. Paul.

And here it was—lilac time. And lilacs my favorite of all flowers. Actually, a florist father would seem to work against a passion for lilacs. For lilacs, being practically wild, abundant, and free, are dismal failures as a retail commodity. But at this time of year, St. Paul, finally unfrozen, is always a lilac-town. The lilac is our consolation prize, a post-winter badge of honor. The scent lies heavy in the mid-May air,... the incense of ages ... In mid-May lilac even overpowers the rank garbage cans along the narrow alleys of the Crocus Hill neighborhood where, it seems, the oldest, most profuse lilac canes flourish.