Season to Taste (7 page)

In the days after the accident, everything in my mouth, nose clip or not, was absolutely nothing. I felt wild and alone. It was only after I began to research anosmia that I discovered it wasn’t so rare. Everyone I talked to seemed to know someone who couldn’t smell. And some surprising names turned up in the mix.

I called Ben Cohen, half of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Company, one afternoon. I had seen his name mentioned on various websites as I researched, unconfirmed rumors repeated frequently about his inability to smell. Was Cohen, who grinned behind a thick beard on the label of each pint of ice cream, truly an anosmic?

I could imagine. After all, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is not simply about flavor. Full of more hunks of walnuts and pebbles of fudge than any other brand, they have the monopoly on texture.

I ate a lot of their ice cream after the accident. I relished the texture then, which gave an otherwise flatlining mouthful of cold sweet a structural oddity. The lumps and globs held my interest. They kept some notion of enjoyment alive. But it didn’t come as a surprise. I’ve known that pleasure since I was small, when I would excavate the knobbed rounds of cookie dough nestled within their pints with my spoon until there was nothing left but a puddle of sweet vanilla.

On summer vacation weekends spent up north, my family would drive to the original Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory in Waterbury, Vermont. We would take their short, guided tour through the glass-encased mezzanine, past the production line and through rooms that smelled of baked cones and sugar. I watched the long rows of conveyor belts siphon pint carton after carton down toward packaging. My brother and I grabbed at the free samples, raising our hands to the air for Chubby Hubby, a malted vanilla cream swirled with fudge and chocolate-peanut pretzel chunks. In the factory “Scoop Shop” I always ordered my favorite: Half Baked, gritty with chunks of cookie dough and boulders of fudge brownie. I watched my father as he devoured his own cone—a waffle one filled with dark chocolate ice cream—in what seemed like only a few bites. I licked mine slowly. It melted in unmanageable rivulets down my wrist.

“Hello? Hello?” Cohen said on a grainy phone line. His voice was low and gruff. He sounded just as I thought he would: casual and carefree, like his picture on the pint. He told me to jump right in.

“I hear that you can’t smell,” I said.

He laughed. “It’s true.”

I felt a little sparkling thrill in the back of my throat, the kind that came when I received an A on a paper in school, when I answered a question correctly, when I was right.

“I have a poor sense of smell,” Cohen said. “Actually, it’s horrible. It’s always been that way.”

“You can’t smell at all?”

Occasionally a scent or two will register, he explained. But only with enough decongestant.

I wondered whether his loss was due to inflammation or allergies, but Cohen didn’t know. In fact he’d never gone to see a doctor about it, despite having lived without smell for as long as he can recall. “I can remember people shoving flowers in my face as a little kid, and I just didn’t smell anything.”

Like most anosmics, Cohen worried about rotting food and stinking clothes, leaking gas and fuel that he couldn’t detect. “It’s a lot better in terms of cleaning up after babies and dogs, though,” he said with a chuckle.

But most important, Cohen’s inhibited sense of smell affected the way he ate. Living with a blank smellscape—“I remember the first time I smelled an orange,” he said. “I was in my twenties and I caught a whiff and it was awesome”—he needed other flavor cues to help him out. When he and Jerry Greenfield began making ice cream in a renovated gas station in Burlington in 1978, Cohen didn’t want simple flavors. He wanted something more. He wanted chunks.

“I am very attuned to food textures,” he said. “And I really wanted there to be textural variation.”

“Did Jerry think that was odd?” I asked, thinking of the looks my mother gave me when I ate bread soaked in hot sauce right after the accident.

“Jerry thought it was kind of odd that I couldn’t tell what flavor I was eating,” Cohen said. “But there wasn’t much weirdness beyond that.”

Lucky man,
I thought.

Before we hung up, Cohen asked: “Have you ever heard of the National Organization for the Smelling Impaired?”

“No,” I confessed, embarrassed. I wondered how I could have missed something so big.

“Well, neither have I.” Cohen laughed uproariously. “It doesn’t exist. But if there was one, I’d totally join.”

I WAS DUE
to begin training at the Culinary Institute of America in December. Six weeks after the accident, however, I sat on the couch with my cell phone and the packet of informational material I had received to prepare for my starting date. My left knee and its thick metal brace rested on a pillow in front of me and I stared out the window as the heavy wind buffeted the trees out front. The familiar rhythm of Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
played softly against the background patter of rain.

I’d thought about this call for weeks. I thought about it over every flavorless bowl of my mother’s beef stew, alongside each bite of my favorite molasses cookie, the kind that now tasted like paper. I knew I couldn’t cook. Not at home. Not in a professional kitchen. Not the way I wanted.

I knew it was time to make a decision, finally, when my father had come over a few days before. He looked grim and asked if he could sit with me on the couch. I was surprised to see that my mother, who generally cleared out of the room during his visits, sat as well.

“Molly,” my father said, his voice low, “we need to talk.”

“Okay.” I looked at him. I knew what was coming.

“About your sense of smell . . .”

But I didn’t want to hear it. I shook my head no. But my father wasn’t looking. He charged on: “The outlook isn’t good.”

He had been reading all of the literature on anosmia that he could find. He had placed a call to a Taste and Smell Clinic at the University of Connecticut. They don’t know much, he said. But they do know this: the loss of smell often has no cure. Anosmia can be permanent. “We need to think about your future,” he said.

Tears rolled down my face. My nose was wet, dripping. But I stopped shaking my head. I already knew.

I waited until I was alone to call the Culinary Institute.

“I need to delay my acceptance,” I said to the woman who cheerily answered the line.

“No problem,” she said.

No problem?!? Of course it was a problem. What would I do with the rest of my life now?

But I told her my name and scheduled starting date, calmly. I could hear her typing in the background as I spoke. I imagined the view from her window, high up in a stately old building on the campus I’d never visited in Hyde Park, New York. There were groups of young student chefs holding thick black cases of knives. They wore crisp white shirts and they laughed as they traversed the green.

It only took a moment to cancel my start at the school I had so desperately wanted to attend. I kept the phone to my ear for a moment after she hung up, the hard click vibrating through my body.

“Well,” I said to my empty house. “That’s that.”

AS THE DAYS PROGRESSED,
one at a time, slowly and alone, my body did heal. My scars did begin to fade.

I sat on the stationary bike at my physical therapist’s office three times a week, pushing the pedals back and forth before we did strength-training exercises on the bench. I had been helplessly fiddling on the bike for weeks and had not yet been able to bend my knee far enough to make an entire circle, too tight in scar tissue not yet ripped open for use. But one morning in early November I made a push, felt a pull but no sharp pain. My leg lifted those final centimeters, skimming the pedal like it was ice. It went all the way around and I looked up, surprised.

“You did it, Molly!” my bubbly young therapist called from across the room. “You’re well on your way to recovery!”

Recovery,
I thought.
What does that even mean?

Though my knee was healing and I no longer received pitying looks from strangers on the street, I had never felt so broken. I didn’t want to hear that I was better. Once my limbs were healed, I had nothing left to focus on but my nose. It was an invisible injury, potent and intense. It involved nothing concrete like crutches; physical therapy wasn’t a possibility. But the absence—the monotone blank, the indescribable pale of a scentless landscape—was more painful than the nights I hyperventilated in the hospital after knee surgery. But this time, no one understood.

Without my nose, what was I?

“Beethoven couldn’t hear,” my father would say. “And he did it.”

I nodded. I smiled, mechanical.

“You can be the Tasteless Gourmet!” he said.

With each passing day, I grew more and more frustrated. It was easier to live with the screaming pain of my knee injury. At least that was visible. At least everyone around me could understand. But now my friends and family were congratulating me on my recovery and my health. My life, however—my day-to-day life—felt numb.

And I was angry. I was angry with my mother for asking me if I needed anything. I was angry with my father for looking at me with a glint of sympathy in his eyes. I was angry with my brother for simply existing—for eating with enjoyment, for laughing on the phone. I hated my friends for going on with their lives as normal. And I was angry with myself for caring.

One afternoon in October my mother and I went for a ride in the car. We were on our way to the supermarket and I wrote out a grocery list as we drove. When we came to a stop at a set of lights, I glanced up. It was the intersection of Route 9 and Warren Street, only a few feet away from the exact spot I had been hit. A ghost of my former self danced across the road. My mother took a deep breath.

“It was really scary, Molly,” she said, looking ahead at the pavement.

“I know,” I said.

I paused.

But did I know? I couldn’t remember one second of the day that had so terrified my family, and driving through the intersection seemed to inspire more of a reaction in my mother than in me.

I wanted to alleviate the tension in the air. It made me uncomfortable. “It would have sucked if I had become a vegetable,” I said, awkwardly. I tried to laugh.

My mom looked at me, as if to see if I were serious or not. “You’re very lucky, you know,” she said.

“I know, Mom,” I said, softly. “I think about that every day.”

“You do?” The surprise in her voice felt like a handful of needles pricking the base of my throat.

I nodded. I inhaled and then I exhaled slowly, just like the nurses told me to do after surgery, just like Maws had told me in the kitchen.

THE INVISIBILITY OF MY INJURIES
wrapped me in what felt like a thick, impenetrable mist—just like the “fogbound horror” the novelist William Styron once described as his own crippling depression. A dark absence, a mysterious nothing.

Unlike the ripped tendons in my knee or the strawberry bruise on my neck, no one could see the injuries of my nose. I didn’t limp or cry. I didn’t cringe or shake or wither away. There was no pain; my behavior didn’t change. There was nothing physical to show.

Not even
I
could see my injury. I didn’t experience anything false. There was nothing obviously wrong in the way I perceived my surroundings. I didn’t
feel
anything, not like those with the phantom limbs of amputees. I wasn’t witness to a sight, not like the apparitions of those with visual hallucinations. No symphonies played unbidden in my head. This injury left me solely in possession of an absence. An important part of my world had become faded to blank.

My family tried, but they couldn’t fathom my loss. I tried to explain the nothingness, but in order to do that I found that I had to describe what was now missing. And the language of smell, I quickly realized, is an absence in itself. How could I describe the indescribable?

Unlike the other senses, smell defies language. Its words are those specifically termed for something else, things perceived in other ways. Smell is a metaphorical sense, then, always in comparison to a concrete other, a more palpable here. Scents are often described in terms of taste (ripe or juicy, sour or sweet). They can be visual (bright, dark, green), tactile (warm, soft, cool), or come in sound (mellow, melodic, rich).

Diane Ackerman, author of
A Natural History of the Senses,
calls smell the “mute sense.” She writes: “In a world sayable and lush, where marvels offer themselves up readily for verbal dissection, smells are often right on the tip of our tongues—but no closer—and it gives them a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without a name, a sacredness.”

But even relating the experience of my own physical pain became difficult once it was gone. Only a few months after knee surgery I could no longer remember its immediacy, the scalding thrum of which had once circled my body like a vulture, vibrating in my muscle and bone. I tried to recall, but the memory turned out to be as fleeting as the relative duration of the sensation. And if I couldn’t relate to my own pain, others had an even harder time. Harvard professor Elaine Scarry wrote about registering others’ physical suffering in her book,
The Body in Pain
. “When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.” Smell, like pain, is a primal, amorphous sensation, one of intensity and immediacy. I wasn’t surprised to find that they each caused problems in language. Virginia Woolf once wrote, in her essay “On Being Ill,” that someone who is sick “is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other . . . so to crush them together that a brand-new word in the end drops out.” She may as well have been writing about the words to describe the scent of the cologne worn by my first kiss, a young breath on a humid summer evening in Pennsylvania.