An article by Scott Sayare in the New York Times (June 14, 2024) tells the story of 72-year-old nurse Joy Milne who smelled her husband’s Parkinson’s:
Joy’s had always been an unusually sensitive nose, the inheritance, she believes, of her maternal line. Her grandmother was a “hyperosmic,” and she encouraged Joy, as a child, to make the most of her abilities, quizzing her on different varieties of roses, teaching her to distinguish the scent of the petals from the scent of the leaves from the scent of the pistils and stamens. Still, her grandmother did not think odor of any kind to be a polite topic of conversation, and however rich and enjoyable and dense with information the olfactory world might be, she urged her granddaughter to keep her experience of it to herself.
Milne’s husband died in 2015, but she went on to diagnose others’ early Parkinson’s and has made a wonderful contribution to medicine with her hyperosmic sense.
I skimmed this very long article with great interest—not in diagnosing Parkinson’s or even in Milne’s ability, but because I was thrilled to finally have a word, “hyperosmic,” for what I’ve called my “canine olfactory system.” I am hyperosmic.
Like Milne, I never talked about this other than saying I was sensitive to smells. And because mentioning people’s odors is rude, it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began talking about and exploring my sensitivity. It happened when I attended a healing school and began identifying what specific smells meant. Fear stinks and since I felt so much of it, I was self-conscious. Finally, one day I blurted my insecurity in class and was both stunned and relieved that nobody seemed to know what I was talking about—but they were interested.
Fear has a particularly strong odor, but all emotions have odors. All people have odors. Dogs know this and have no judgment about it, and despite our personal oblivion, we know it too: We employ scent dogs to track people; hunters know to stay downwind of their prey, but still, we would rather not discuss our odors that are apparent to all nonhuman species and apparently there is now a thriving industry of full-body deodorants.
This is ridiculous. No matter how much stuff you slather on, dogs and hyperosmics still smell you. I know when somebody is angry or seething in resentment without them saying anything. I also know when they have cancer.
Frustrated at our species’ mass delusion that we successfully hide our scent and feelings, I wrote a novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg (Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize-winner, 2015), about a protagonist with a perpetual stink. I hoped that by exaggerating all the human traits we are so invested in believing we can hide, and writing it with humor, I could nudge people toward self-acceptance. Predictably, readers have broken down into those who love Zelda and those who find her disgusting. (I will not psychoanalyze the responses, but draw your own conclusions.)
My new novel, Cats on a Pole (Kano Press, July 2, 2024), goes further into the hyperosmic world. Without having the descriptor, I wrote the story of a hyperosmic woman who is overwhelmed by the smells and energies that bombard her. She really has no recourse but to learn self-acceptance whose side effect is nonjudgment. The book has humor in it, but nothing close to Zelda McFigg. Still, I hope it does its bit to nudge people into self-acceptance.
The truth is we all smell. We can accept that or we can continue to delude ourselves and waste enormous amounts of money on products that promise to make us as odorless as AI—an intelligence with no body. Do we really want that? Or we can delude ourselves into believing that we’re pure and odorless and it’s only the “others” who smell.
~~~
The Aroma of Energy
Excerpted from Cats on a Pole (Kano Press, July 2, 2024)
Who cares? thought Harmony, who had been hired for her current position after three weeks as a temp with “above-average organizational skills,” according to the Your Garden HR department, who found her ability to sort and traffic and make lists “very competent.” She’d been so excited, believing she would write articles and become part a plant-loving community. But a year into the job and the resounding silence of the tomb, she decided that she really wasn’t that fond of people after all. She liked plants. So it was fine. For a while. The one big drawback was that Joseph, her boss, was the only male employee, he was gay, and although she had no interest in physical contact, it was now five years later and she hadn’t met even one attractive, available straight man.
“When stuff is stuck, it stinks,” she’d told her therapist, trying to describe the problem. “I’m stuck.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?” Dr. Thompson had asked.
“The energy. My energy. When it’s all stuck in a missile, it starts to stink. I stink. I know if I could get myself to meet someone, it would start to move, but I don’t like bars or singles activities or people. Basically I don’t like anything.”
With a quizzical look, Dr. Thompson had told her the hour was up, and for next session, she should think about interests that could expose her to people she’d like.
And this morning, she’d suddenly realized she did like something: energy—the energy that stank so much when it didn’t move. All her life she’d felt it, smelled it, dodged it, reveled in it. Kathy Smith, her video aerobics teacher, had great energy. The way she looked into the camera so sincerely and assured Harmony that she could do just eight more leg lifts made Harmony believe she really could—that she could have “nice” energy like this pretty blonde white woman, that even if she could never really be nice, maybe she could do good things with her energy. Energy—good or bad—it interested her—this was the epiphany that had set her back five minutes.
“Energy?” asked Dr. Thompson, trying to sound nonjudgmental, despite Harmony’s lateness and lack of explanation. “Can you elaborate on that?”
“You know—the stuff people give off when they feel or think. Sometimes it’s hot or cold. Sometimes it stabs or cuts or envelops you. Sometimes it stinks—like what I was talking about last session. It depends on the person and the situation. Kathy Smith probably smells lovely, even after a workout. Cancer, on the other hand, is stinky. I know that’s not a thought or a feeling, but maybe it comes from a feeling. I’m not sure. All I do know is Cora, the secretary in the cubicle next to mine, has a tumor in her stomach, and I swear, I could use a gas mask.”
Dr. Thompson took a long sip of iced tea. “This is very interesting,” she said readjusting her skirt to cover her thick calves. “Can you tell me some more?”
Harmony was paying $120 a session and was beginning to get annoyed. She’d been seeing Dr. Thompson for eight months—since her dog died and her suicide inclination had been hijacked by a sudden and seemingly permanent state of arousal—a bizarre manifestation of grief? It was more physical than emotional—like there was a missile of energy between her legs, and if she didn’t blast off, she would blow up, kill somebody, or go mad—which was why she’d been jumping up and down with Kathy Smith for eight months. This energy destroyed her ability to be depressed, which at least would have been more rational than relentless arousal with no true desire for companionship. She’d tried masturbation, but seconds after the orgasm, the missile would return. And eight months of therapy hadn’t made it any better. She glared at Dr. Thompson and ground her teeth. “I’m glad you find this interesting. I’ve never really tried to explain it before, but energy most definitely has a smell. For instance, if somebody has a really strong thought—the way you did when I was five minutes late for my appointment tonight—it smells.”
“Excuse me?” said Dr. Thompson recrossing her legs and willing her foot not to tap. She had thought this was just an anxiety disorder following the death of a pet, but perhaps she had been too hasty in her diagnosis.
Harmony half-closed her eyes and softened the front of her body to feel Dr. Thompson’s discomfort level. Very high. But $120! “When I was late and didn’t apologize or explain but just started talking, you were annoyed,” said Harmony, staring steadily so she wouldn’t miss the reaction.
Dr. Thompson sucked in breath. “You feel I was annoyed?” she queried on a measured exhale. “Why do you feel I was annoyed?”
“Because you thought, ‘She’s five minutes late and hasn’t apologized. Another narcissist. Lord, I’m sick of this. Well, I’m not saying anything if she doesn’t, and I’m ending the session on time. I wonder if she’ll protest.’”
Dr. Thompson turned crimson and took several controlled breaths.
“And now you’re wondering if I’m delusional and a good guesser, or if I can really hear you think which scares the shit out of you because this isn’t in the DSM, and how on earth can you deal with it?”
Dr. Thompson spilled her tea, slowly rose from her chair, and said, “Please excuse me for a moment. I need a paper towel.” Then she walked out of the room.
Harmony felt a little guilty for how much she was enjoying this, and she gazed around the room trying to pick up clues about Dr. Thompson’s personal life.
Harmony was interested in people’s backgrounds. She had so little information about her own. She had been adopted soon after birth and had no knowledge of her racial roots. She’d been asked so many times what she was that by the third grade she’d begun telling people her birth parents were a Native American medicine man and a Middle Eastern gypsy who’d met in jail after being arrested for fortune telling. She’d told the story so many times that she’d almost come to believe it. After all, she did feel different.
Her parents were Rosemary and Larry Rogers, two hard-working white Christians who married too late in life to conceive a biological child. Harmony had grown up loved and admired, if not understood. When she would answer her mother’s unvoiced questions or tell her father he worried too much, her parents would simply hug her and tell her what a sensitive girl she was, but she shouldn’t spend so much time indoors. She should make friends with the other children in their suburban development of box houses with rectilinear windows so identical that you could get lost. It was a lostness particular to small towns awash in people who smiled and said good-morning no matter how angry they were at their husbands or wives or annoying children. When Harmony asked why the minister at church always pretended to like people when he shook their hands good-bye, but his hand smelled like dirty socks and he really hated everybody, her parents told her she could stop going to church. And she did. No big deal.
Harmony made very good grades, which seemed to compensate for the fact that she had no friends. She was a devoted daughter and had nursed both parents to the end of their lives. After her mother died was the first time she contemplated ending things. She was sitting on a bench at the East 72nd Street entrance to Central Park trying to choose between a pill overdose and “falling off” the subway platform when a stray puppy of indeterminate pedigree had jumped into her lap. The puppy had no collar, so what could Harmony do but take her home and name her Delilah?
They’d lived together for eighteen years—the longest relationship besides her parents that Harmony had ever had. And when Delilah died in her sleep last August, Harmony lost her focus. Her energy lost its focus and was trying to make her insane. Although she badly wanted to join Delilah and her parents, the missile forbade it, and since she was well aware that forty-two was too young to die, she’d decided to give therapy a try.
Dr. Thompson walked stiffly into the room with a roll of paper towels and dabbed at the puddle of spilled tea.
“I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable,” said Harmony after what seemed like an interminable silence. “I was late to work and I had to make up the time. It’s been a long day, and I guess I’m cranky.”
“You think I’m uncomfortable,” began Dr. Thompson, and Harmony stood up.
“Can we stop this? Please! I’m paying you to help me, and this doesn’t help. I don’t think you’re uncomfortable. I know it. I know that right now you’re wondering how much time is left in the session because as soon as I walk out of here you’re going to pour yourself a stiff drink. Then you’ll call a colleague to try to make sense out of all this and put it in a box with a label so you can be assured you’ve done the right thing. I know that right now you’re scared to death because you’ve never felt so exposed. You’re trying to think of all the stray thoughts I might have heard, and you’re even more scared because you’re actually believing I can hear you think. So maybe you’re crazy.”
All the blood drained out of Dr. Thompson’s face, and Harmony sat down.
“You’re right,” said Dr. Thompson finally. Her eyes were soft.
“Thank you,” answered Harmony, sighing heavily.
“Now how can I help you?”
Harmony closed her eyes and swallowed. She had never told anybody about her secret language before.//
Buy the Book: https://amzn.to/3C84S1H
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Betsy Robinson writes funny fiction about flawed people. Her novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg is winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2013 Big Moose Prize and was published in September 2014. This was followed by the February 2015 publication of her edit of The Trouble with the Truth by Edna Robinson, Betsy’s late mother, by Simon & Schuster/Infinite Words. She published revised e-book and paperback editions of her Mid-List Press award-winning first novel, a tragicomedy about falling down the rabbit hole of the U.S. of A. in the 1970s, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, when it went out of print. Her articles have been published in Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Chicago Review of Books, Oh Reader, The Sunlight Press, Prairie Fire, Salvation South, Next Avenue,and many other publications. Betsy is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators have been published by Kano Press in 2024. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com
About the Author
