Authors: Molly Birnbaum
I daydreamed constantly. Over breakfast of a lifeless slice of toast, I imagined the bakery in France that I visited as a college student, where I opened the door to be struck by the scent of rich butter croissants. I imagined once again entering a coffee shop and breathing in the smell of its dark chocolate-like beans, the milk frothing sweet at the bar. I closed my eyes and tried to resurrect the scent of the wood-burning stove we used to light on winter weekends up north, of the salted brine to the beach in Hawaii, where my aunt and her family lived. I tried for fresh-cut grass, for the fluffy pink roses and lush basil plants in my mother’s garden outside.
But the dreams remained fantasy, amorphous and unhinged. No matter how long I closed my eyes and imagined, I could summon nothing specific, nothing real, not the way I could recall the mournful tune of
Saving Grace
or the image of Monet’s desolate haystack paintings on the dark canvas of my inner eye. I couldn’t retrieve any memories of scents, and I knew that the people, places, and moments that had been fastened to each were likewise gone. Bereft, I watched them drift away. Where did they go? Those bright, vivid memories that came with a whiff of pastry or smoke, the background to every bakery or autumn I’d ever known. The ones that came with the smell of the crayons I used to color magical landscapes with my grandfather in his studio. The ones that were perfumed with cotton candy and funnel cake, with fresh-turned earth or the shake of a pet dog just emerged from a lake.
I took myself completely off pain medication in the second week of October. The pills kept me lethargic, no longer in possession of my own body or of my own pain, and I couldn’t wait to fully occupy myself again.
To celebrate, Becca scheduled a visit. Since I had last seen her I learned to operate my crutches without pain and regained most of the weight I’d lost. I no longer caught pitying glances from strangers on the street. Physically, I looked just as I had the previous May, when Becca and I celebrated our college graduation at a dinner with both of our families. Then, I wore a black dress, a pair of bright orange heels, and my hair tucked loose into a bun on the top of my head. We had sipped on rich glasses of burgundy in a restaurant that smelled of garlic and grape. “Cheers,” we had said. But now I felt empty.
On the Friday evening that Becca arrived in Boston, we sat with my mother and Charley amid the flickering candlelight of their small dining room. We held glasses of wine, poured from a very nice bottle of red, one that they had been holding on to for a special occasion. We lifted our glasses, clinking them all around. Our collective laughter felt strange, unfamiliar and comforting at the same time.
I placed my nose carefully near the inside of the fluted crystal glass. I pulled it back and gave it a twirl with a flick of my wrist. The red wine moved in a jaunty pirouette around its inner curve. I held the glass away from me, admiring the deep color in the light and then drew it again toward my face. I inhaled deeply. Once, twice, three times. Was there something there? I inhaled again. My breath came strong in the back of my throat and through my nose. I closed my eyes and pictured a dark red cloud floating above, listening for a whisper of scent. Its image swirled behind my eyelids and reminded me of the outdoors, of fruit on an overhanging limb, a jarring twang on the banjo I once heard on a camping trip in the woods.
I looked up to find everyone staring at me. My family and Becca were watching me closely, wondering if I could smell or if I could taste, wondering if I would hold it against them that they could.
I took a sip. I held it in my mouth for a moment and let it coat my tongue. I could only taste the sweet, the straight sugar of the fruit. I could sense the acidity, which gave a limp sparkle in the back of my throat. Nothing more. The glass held a strange echo of the familiar, but remained an oddly split unknown.
When Becca left on Sunday night for her long trek back to upstate New York, I sat on my bed and inhaled deeply. There was nothing but that all too familiar twang of loneliness residing in the back of my throat.
I GREW UP
in a gray house with red shutters that sat across the street from a tiny apple orchard deep in Boston’s suburban sprawl. I lived there with my parents and my brother, and then just my mother, until I left for college in 2001. This house was spacious and bright, too large even for our noisy family of four, and I was constantly on the search for new nooks and crannies to explore. My mother, a psychoanalyst, worked in an office at the far end of a hallway behind our garage. She kept many of her books there, carefully organized on two large wooden shelves standing against the wall. Occasionally when I was restless in an empty house, I would sit at her desk and look at the cracked spines and grainy titles, their colors faded like construction paper left too long in the sun. I would pick up one or another, flipping through their pages, breathing in their musty, foreign smell—like that of the used bookstores I imagined existed in Paris or London or even New York, places I dreamed of going one day. My favorites included the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s epic novel
Remembrance of Things Past,
which occupied a place of honor at eye level. My mother had read them in college, and I liked to study her handwriting in the margins of the musty yellow pages, which looked careful and composed and nothing like her horrid scrawl of today. I often picked up
Swann’s Way,
the first volume, and smiled over the price tag printed on its lower right corner:
$1.95
. But, even in high school, I never read beyond the first page. I was intimidated by Proust’s language, which was beautiful but impenetrable. I always replaced it carefully on the shelf.
It was only later, when the books had been transferred to a shelf spanning the wall of my new bedroom after my mother moved, that I learned how special these flimsy, tattered volumes really were. My mother had bought them from the bookstore at Brown University in the fall of 1972, her sophomore year of college. I have pictures of her from that time, a skinny blond girl wearing bell-bottoms, a peacoat, and a wistful smile as she leaned against a tree on the Main Green. She bought them for a seminar on Proust, one that would concentrate on this roughly autobiographical tale that sprawls for more than three thousand pages. In that class, she sat at a long wooden table with a group of students and her professor, a dynamic young man named Arnold Weinstein, whose lectures brought Proust’s words alive. My mother became fascinated with the dreams in the novel because, she told me later, they implied the author’s rich and hidden inner life. “That was the class that inspired me to become a psychoanalyst,” she said.
I began to read her now odorless copy of
Swann’s Way
one afternoon in the months after the accident.
Why not?
I thought. After all, one of the most iconic scenes in literature illustrating the connection between smell, taste, and memory takes place within the first fifty pages of the very first volume of her version of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1922 translation.
Here, the narrator describes a simple moment: arriving home on a winter’s day to his mother, who offers him a cup of tea and a cookie, “one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petite madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell.” He raises a spoon filled with tea and cookie crumbs to his lips and is immediately ambushed by emotion, overtaken, as he says, by an “exquisite pleasure.” It takes many minutes, many sips and crumbs, before he realizes why: a memory. The narrator recalls that when he was small and visiting his aunt in Combray, she fed him a nibble of her cookie dipped in a cup of lime-flower, also known as linden-flower, tea.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Though the madeleine moment is today considered trite, detailed countless times by writers and even scientists, it remains effective. It’s an important moment. Like Proust, we have all experienced the surprising clang of a scent that excavates a memory—a moment not wholly lost to time, one resurrected.
My mother’s professor Weinstein went on to write many books. In
Recovering Your Story,
he tackles Proust.
Remembrance of Things Past,
Weinstein says, is “dedicated to the pursuit of ultimate richness and treasure: our own life.” Most of us, he believes, are unable to retrieve the immediacy of our own living pasts. The heart of memories can fly away, even if we still possess the events, dates, and names stored away in the Rolodex of our brains. The important part—the emotional part—slips away unnoted and unnoticed, sometimes forever. Proust writes about how to bring that back. It begins with a cookie.
“As if to accentuate the grotesque disparity in this equation—the disparity between the whimsical, wispy, capricious puniness of taste and smell on one hand, and the galactic grandeur of our past life on the other—Proust wants us to realize that the immense edifice of memory (his exact words in French) rests on a ‘droplette,’ a
gouttelette,
” Weinstein writes.
Scent can excavate memories of one’s past, of one’s self, in an intense and personal way. Smells can grab at buried emotion and memories, at feelings long forgotten. These memories can come unbidden, lacking words or context. They can be specific, so specific that they squeeze you with their joy, that they pierce your skin with their pain.
Helen Keller put it eloquently in her essay “Sense and Sensibility”: “Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odor of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grain fields far away.”
I BEGAN TO COOK
again one morning in November. It had been three months since I could smell.
Though I had been spending time in the kitchen with my mother and Charley as they prepared dinner each night, I had not yet attempted to wield the sauté pan myself. I told myself that I didn’t want to cook. It was too dangerous to navigate the room on my crutches balancing fillets of salmon or pots of polenta. It was too expensive to buy ingredients that I would only destroy. I don’t need it. I don’t want it, I said.
But one dark November morning I woke to rain pounding on the windows and a sharp pain in my back. I hadn’t been able to sleep on my side since the accident because I had to stabilize my knee in a position that locked my body upward and woke me up each morning aching after a too-still slumber. On this morning I lifted my knee gingerly out from under the covers and off to the side of the bed, which was finally back in my room on the second floor. I hopped on one leg down the stairs, balancing on my crutches and the rail, and sank into a large armchair in the living room. It was a typical beginning to another tedious day in an empty home. Everyone was already at work.
I sat wrapped in a blanket with a book propped open on my lap, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. The rain pattered thick and humid despite the chill and I felt restless. Bored. I hauled myself up yet again and wandered on my crutches—
click
,
hop
,
click, hop,
click
—toward the kitchen. When I arrived I looked around, not quite sure of my purpose. Perhaps I would brew some coffee? My gaze settled on the oven.
I’m going to bake,
I thought.
The idea sprang unbidden and took me by surprise. But why not? Baking was different from cooking. Baking required measurements and timing. It required temperature and science. It didn’t involve tasting or improvisation. It didn’t much involve smell.
I wobbled awkwardly between the fridge and the cupboard using just one crutch under my arm, clutching a dog-eared copy of
Cook’s Illustrated
magazine in my free hand as I began to gather ingredients. With the slow whir of the electric mixer in my ears, I threw a cup of sugar and a couple sticks of butter into a silver bowl. Once pale yellow and creamy, I added salt, cocoa powder, and a teaspoon of instant espresso. The oven clanked as it warmed. I began to feel more confident in my movements. To the bowl I added eggs, vanilla, baking powder, and flour, pulverizing it into a thick glop. I threw in some ground almonds, some cinnamon, and—
why not?
—a dash of cayenne.
At least I’ll be able to feel that,
I thought.
It took a while to figure out how to hold and carry baking sheets, how to portage dirty mixing bowls across to the sink and reach the spices way up on the top shelf. But soon it became a rhythm—the exact number of crutched steps I could take holding a bowl without losing balance, the length of time I could stand comfortably on my right leg while my left hung bent above the ground.
An hour later the timer blared its metallic
ding
and I pulled two trays of cookies from the oven with a mitt. They lacked that familiar, cheerful aroma that I had always equated with the oven-fresh—the one of Nestlé, of my mother, of Christmas. But they felt adequately firm. They looked done. Ugly—the lumpy, mud-colored rounds lay unevenly on the sheet after my uncoordinated attempt to arrange them with one hand—but done. I took a bite of a hot cookie, which crumbled like gravel in my mouth. Later, I arranged them carefully on a plate for my family. Here was something I could share, something I could show. My family had cared for me wholly and tirelessly since the accident. This was one small thing that I could give back.