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When I arrived in New York, I could barely smell anything. There was a whiff of garlic here, a breath of laundry detergent there. But most of my sense of smell had vanished six months earlier, when, on a drizzly August morning while jogging near my family’s home in Boston, I had been hit by a Honda Civic and shattered its windshield with the back of my skull. The trauma of the impact had severed my olfactory neurons, which snake delicately behind the forehead en route to the brain.
Before the accident, I had been doing prep work in the kitchen of a small bistro in Boston, training to become a chef. My nights were filled with pristine boxes of wild mushrooms, stacks of chocolate bars from Venezuela and carefully constructed plates of quail. I arrived home in the early morning hours smelling of chicken stock and butter. I loved it.
But without the ability to smell, taste is a mere whisper. After the accident, my taste buds registered salty, sweet, bitter and sour. But there was nothing more. While my fractured pelvis and torn knee ligaments eventually healed, milk remained a viscous liquid, steak a slimy rubber, and ice cream was little more than freezing.
I moved to New York when I no longer walked with a limp.
Without the aroma of car exhaust, hot dogs or coffee, the city was a blank slate. Nothing was unbearable and nothing was especially beguiling. Penn Station’s public restroom smelled the same as Jacques Torres’s chocolate shop on Hudson Street. I knew that New York possessed a further level of meaning, but I had no access to it, and I worked hard to ignore what I could not detect.
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A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.
As they departed in sex-segregated lines, my daughters stood transfixed. Serafina asked me, “Why did that girl try to put the crab in the boy’s pants?” “Because she likes him,” I responded. This was an explanation Serafina and her older sister, Natalie, only partly understood. What I witnessed might be called “the teasing gap.”
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