Remembering Smell (9 page)

A taste for sashimi comes so easily if you happen to be Japanese, though, that it's practically innate. Indeed, an ongoing debate in culinary and olfactory circles involves just this question: Are certain taste preferences hard-wired for certain peoples? While the answer seems to be no, cultural conditioning has a huge impact and may seem hard-wired. We know that vomit can smell good or bad to people depending on the culture and context—because, as a molecular matter, vomit is also Parmesan cheese, a food that is enjoyed by Western cultures but reviled in the Far East. Moreover, while a dog will happily lap up its own vomit, humans generally don't. The French like smelly cheeses, but many hygiene-obsessed Americans can't get past the mold. Fermented fish sauce and wintergreen are two other culturally dependent aromas. Asians love the former and hate the latter; with the Brits, it's vice versa.

Generally speaking, children are more open to new smells than adults are, and are thus more inclined to like the basic spices of several different cultures, which is why so many American kids can dine on pizza or tacos one night and lamb couscous or California rolls the next. In the span of a few decades we've evolved from a meat-and-potatoes (hold-the-onions) society to a multicultural one. But these positive feelings are ingrained early; even in the womb, the unborn child is learning to like what Mom likes. So it's not that kids are open-minded; they're just more easily trained because their brains are still developing. And yet, most children are timid about trying new things. All species will reject the unfamiliar outright the first time. With humans there are second chances. And third chances. Sometimes it takes a dozen exposures (in pleasant surroundings) to train the nose to change its mind.

Foods can have profound emotional connotations. We humans don't stray far from our cultural food groups unless the new dish contains a critical mass of the old familiar smells and tastes. No one is born with an exceptional palate, meaning an inherited sensitivity and openness to food. Even the most adventuresome eaters are trained.

But again, the American distaste for certain Asian delicacies such as fish eyeballs isn't set in cement; it's ordained by those coconspirators in the limbic system, memory and emotion, responding to novelty. What's new is threatening. It might be dangerous. Curl your lip, squinch up your nose, and return that eyeball to your plate.

Those facial expressions denoting disgust, by the way, probably
are
hard-wired—not the reaction to the food but the reflex itself. Chimpanzees communicate this way all the time. So do infants, even though the look is not directed at (or triggered by) their own dirty diapers. Feces are an acquired distaste. To what extent that distaste is developmental (inevitable), we can't say for sure.

New work in genetics isn't making it any easier to separate nurture and nature. Scientists have known only since 1991 where the smell genes hide, and it's possible evolution is responding pretty fast to cultural changes. If genes are this fluid, is anything really hard-wired? Most humans (and all Neanderthals) used to be lactose intolerant, but when people in cold climates started drinking milk (which was necessary, since their diets lacked adequate vitamin D), nature selected for a mutation in the DNA that essentially switched off lactose intolerance. Caucasians still tend to be lactose tolerant, and most Asians can't metabolize dairy products. (Could that be part of the reason for their revulsion to Parmesan cheese?) Maybe a cultural shift spurred by a nutritional need can affect the olfactory gene pool. Again, we don't know.

We do know that as the human nose became more neurally complex and as its relationship with memory and cognition grew more nuanced, it became a bit of a snob, perfectly capable of rejecting the wine if its bouquet wasn't just so. It reveled in the addition of spices that enhanced flavor. Indian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian cooking each has its own signature spice blend containing just a few key ingredients. In Hungary, the staple flavoring agents are paprika and lard; in the Mediterranean, garlic, rosemary, lemon, and olives; in China, rice wine, soy, and ginger. Some scientists speculate that even though humans are losing smell genes over the long term, those that are still active represent a hot spot in the human genome and are evolving to respond to extremely specific nuances in various meats and seafood as well as beer and wine. Our species' recent willingness to cross cultural lines suggests that nature and nurture are, as usual, working together to make life more pleasurable and interesting.

Robbed of simple yet indispensable taste pleasures such as sushi, salsa, basil pesto, fresh walleye (fried in butter over a campfire), sole amandine, corn fritters, popcorn, and foie gras, I couldn't help wondering why there were people for whom these foods were meaningless and sometimes even loathsome. Is it the taste buds, the olfactory epithelium, or the central brain that insists that béarnaise sauce smells like stinky fish (or something equally off-putting that can't be put into words)?

A friend of mine noticed subtle oddities in his autistic son's behavior even in infancy, long before his later problems emerged. By the time Sammy was old enough to feed himself, issues surrounding food were front and center. Why wouldn't he eat anything? He lived on chicken tenders and chocolate milk. Why such children find many foods unpleasant may stem from the same synaptic misfiring in the limbic system that interferes with their ability to learn from positive experiences.

Autism makes it difficult for the brain to erase old food associations and replace them with new ones. When an autistic child tells you that the delicious cheese omelet you've made just for her tastes like glue (or worse), she's not kidding. It does ... to her. And the glue factor is as real as the stench of phantosmia is to someone suffering from a damaged olfactory system. Autistics do overcome some of their aversions some of the time, but the learning process can be as frustrating and illogical-seeming (why does she refuse eggs but not spinach?) for the child as it is for the parent. Social problems are so much more painful than any difficulties over what's for dinner that underlying parallels are often overlooked.

The day before Christmas I lifted my head from the pillow and sniffed. Nothing. I tried to summon a particularly noxious scent: burning rubber.
Come and get me. Whattya, chicken?
Still nothing.

Rotting fish ... roadkill ... skunk.

No, no, and no. I couldn't remember what they smelled like beyond the verbal descriptions I'd crafted for anyone interested in feeling my pain when the stench had been constantly present. My head was clear. Phantosmia had left without a trace. Alex and Caroline were already setting the dining room table for our dinner guests when I came downstairs. "It looks so pretty," I said, trying to ignore the demons that were whizzing about the room like those flying monkeys in
The Wizard of Oz,
telling me in their leering, nonverbal (but all the more sinister for that) way that I'd entered a whole new kind of hell. So this was anosmia.

I made my to-do list while sipping the tasteless coffee that explained the more pronounced than usual tremor in my hand. Nerves. Caffeine. Whatever. This afternoon I would wrap presents, mend a tear in the sofa, polish the silver until it gleamed. I would, of course, leave the cooking to my capable husband, all but the chocolate roll, which was a family tradition and not easy to make on the first try. The roll wasn't much to look at but it would taste good ... I hoped. I'd never know.

What should I wear? My clothes hung on my skinny body. I didn't want anyone to notice, to know, to talk about it. I could control this. If I didn't seem bothered, other people wouldn't find it horrible or freakish either. They wouldn't find it much of anything. A flu bug. A hangnail. A perfect circle of deceit. Put on a smile, my mother always said on her way out the door to the hairdresser's after some small setback, and your mood will follow.

My daughters sensed their opportunity—Mom's willing to let us have a go at her. Alex rummaged in her closet for a stylish blouse and a pair of slacks that wouldn't have fit me just a week ago.

"I seem to have lost a few pounds," I said. "How fabulous is that?"

Caroline circled with the eyeliner and mascara. I removed my glasses and gingerly placed a contact lens on each eyeball, a trick I've never quite gotten the hang of. The girls discussed blush for fully ten minutes, using sign language to communicate decisions regarding wrinkles and age spots (to cover or not to cover?). Finally I was ready for the finishing touch. I still looked wan and tired. My mouth was their last shot. They fished around in their makeup bags. I told them that I would bow to their judgment. Lip-gloss, I said, is fine with me.

Alex pulled out a frosted coral shade and applied it to my mouth. Caroline shook her head and suggested dark red.

No improvement. "How about mauve?" she said.

"You'll see," I said, shaking my head. And they did see. My small pink mouth became a mauve slit.

"Let me show you something," I said. After rubbing my lips with a tissue, I slowly removed the top from my own lipstick. I twisted the tube to raise the bright orange missile out of its silo. It still had the perfect body of a brand-new lipstick, the fingernail-shaped tip, the flat, smooth place that meets the lips head-on. If you were under forty, the slightest hint of color above the lip line suggested a secret wish to have lips as full as Angelina Jolie's. Over forty and it meant you needed bifocals. I was perilously close to the age when lipstick that strays beyond its appropriate boundaries settles in the vertical creases made by decades of pursing one's lips. A deep frown line in my forehead was my skin's only obvious stress fracture, but the lines along my upper lip in particular were quite visible if you were really looking for them—another reason to save the broad, indefinite smear for later.

Suddenly I understood why old ladies love lipstick. What do they care if they overindulge? The more lipstick used, the stronger and more long-lasting the nostalgic perfume that goes up the nose with every inhale. Lipstick is better than Botox for making a woman feel young and sexy. Cheaper too. I now realized why each daughter's attempts to color my lips had failed to induce in me the slightest pleasure. It wasn't so much the visual result that was a disappointment but the olfactory absence. It was my lipstick's smell, as strident as its color and just as eager to please, that had gotten to be habit-forming. That fake fruitiness filling my brain was the smell of winning people over, getting my way. It made me confident because as long as that wonderful fragrance hung around (always too briefly), I could be someone else, someone infinitely more desirable and competent than I really was. When the smell faded, I was my plain old self again for all the world to see—until I could get to my purse for another stiff shot of the buoying elixir.

My current lipstick was by Revlon and called Peach Sunset. Appropriate. I applied it in one fluid stroke across the upper lip and then the lower. Then a gentle dab at the twin pyramids just below the nostrils, and finally the ritual pressing of the lips together around a tissue and a quick glance at the soft bright replica of my mouth before my fingers flicked the tissue into the wastebasket. Without the tangy aroma to trigger the ego boost I attached to the lipstick, I could feel myself shrink into drab, tongue-tied obscurity.

"You know, you're right, Mom," Alex said. "Orange suits you. You look great."

Alex buttoned my blouse—her blouse—and I slipped on my (her) pointy-toed high heels. The dressing room was littered with hairbrushes and undergarments as well as fragrant lotions, lipsticks, hair gels, and perfumes, and yet to me it felt as barren as a white-tiled tomb.

At the stroke of seven, the relatives burst through the front door in a pack, red-cheeked and beaming. Four families (including ours), twenty-some children, my mom in her wheelchair. Everyone exchanged hearty hugs in the front hall. Ribbons streamed from shiny packages. Steam rose from my sister-in-law's special pizza rolls; everyone was thrilled by their sharp pepperoni smell, by the smells wafting in from the kitchen (tenderloin in the oven, garlic mashed potatoes on the stove), and by the winter coziness of the crackling fire and the fragrance of the Christmas tree and the pine boughs.

I collected coats and parkas and brought them upstairs, where they'd spend the evening in a congenial heap on top of our queen-size bed. Suddenly exhausted, I flopped down beside them. How I wished I could stay right here, where it was quiet. My family's cheer made my own feelings of estrangement all the more acute.
Where've you been?
they would ask as one when I went downstairs.
How
are
you?

They would laugh if they knew. They would roll their eyes and say,
What would she do if something really serious happened?

I lay on the bed and thought about my mother. Even now, entering her daughter's home in a wheelchair, frail as a sparrow and facing an evening that would slowly erode the forced merriment she'd trained herself to exude over a lifetime of being the perfect hostess, she could arouse my envy and awe. It was she who taught me that "putting on a smile" meant wearing lipstick. Tonight she had on a smart red wool suit that matched the lipstick on her wrinkled mouth. She'd been to the hairdresser. Her nails were also painted red. Even though she was weary and lightheaded—always—and hated going to a party in a wheelchair and wondered if there would be anything bland that she could eat, I didn't need a nose to know that she'd taken the trouble to put on perfume; out of habit, yes, but also to honor the holiday. There was far too much noise; too many children, dogs, presents, hugs. But it was Christmas, after all.

Mom was dimly aware that I had been "ill." She wondered why I hadn't gone to bed to get over what was ailing me. My sister, Judy, explained to Mom that anosmia wasn't the kind of illness that sends a person to bed. I was having trouble smelling. "Is her marriage all right?" she whispered to Jude. Mom's had not been all right. Something smelled funny to her about happy marriages, she always said, or rather hinted. Most of Mom's honest beliefs were not articulated, even to herself. But she had ways of getting a point across. The collapse of a marriage made perfect sense; the failure of a nose she could not fathom.