Our senses of smell and taste are not only powerful chemical detectors but also emotional portals. I am sure every one of us has had moments when a smell or taste has triggered something powerful in yourselves. My grandmother was a seamstress and I once walked into a fabric store and was instantly transported to her sewing room by the smells. This all does not feel like science, it feels more like magic, call it alchemy.
I met Elizabeth in 1979, my sophomore year in college, a good friend introduced us and over the next couple of years we became good acquaintances, bumping into each other at the [Graduate Center Bar at school - drinking age was still 18 - where I taught her how to play pinball over cheap pitchers of Michelob. She ended up rooming with our mutual friend so I would see her often. I was fascinated by her, so beautiful, smart and infectiously happy in contrast to my existential moroseness. She would always wear wraparound skirts, Danskin leotards and Chinese cloth shoes and it seemed that all her friends were gay, so being a big dumb male, I assumed she was a lesbian and left it at that. But there was always this attraction under the surface.
In 1981 my father died unexpectedly, tragically. I took some time off to stabilize my family as the new unwilling head of household. By spring semester '82 I am back at university in the states. The first day back I bumped into the same good friend that had introduced us. She told me that Elizabeth’s mother had died just a week ago. We are all 21, 22, no one has lost their parents, so I know that there is no one other than me in her circle of friends that she can really talk to who will understand what she is going through.
I call her and arrange to meet at a local college hangout bar with a Donkey Kong arcade machine in the corner. She brings along one of her lesbian friends which I am surprised at initially but who is driven away pretty quickly by the intense conversation about death and its aftermath that she and I are ensconced in. We talk and talk and talk for hours. We get kicked out of the bar at around 1:30 and then wander around campus until about three am.
This pattern repeats itself for a week and the better part of the next. We go to bars and inevitably end up talking until four in the morning sometimes crying our hearts out, having a unique vulnerable intimacy. We don’t kiss, we don’t even hug, I can’t vouch for what she feels or is thinking but I am terrified of this intense connection ending. It is not simple of course, I have a girlfriend back home that had saved my sanity when my father died, but we are not well suited, she loves the idea of me and us being together more than the reality of it all. We are not well matched but I do owe her which is a further complication to what’s happening right now with Elizabeth.
At the end of the second week, Elizabeth invites me to brunch and I am convinced that she is going to tell me that we need to cool it, that we have responsibilities in school, that we are in danger of failing out because we are distracted, that I have a girl back home that I need to deal with.
That Sunday I arrive at her apartment, which is barely that, more a collection of random rooms connected to a bathroom that only dispenses a thin stream of scalding water and a kitchen chock full of generic no brand foods. She has cooked me an omelet but has failed in a spectacular, almost chemical way. I can’t really describe what happened but the omelet is not an omelet, it may be considered an egg scramble but parts are not cooked and others have dehydrated. It is to the point that I can’t really eat it, I am heartened by the fact that she also does not seem capable to down this either and finally looks at me and fesses up that it is indeed terrible. At that point she puts her fork down and I am bracing for it. Miraculously, and to my astonishment, she tells me that she wants to have a relationship with me, even though she will be graduating and I won’t and she is heading to conservatory in Germany so that we will only have until graduation and I just feel a planetary pull and kiss her. And I experience another moment of chemistry, biology, and intellect all dissolved into one.
At that moment, as I kiss her, I realize what she tastes like, she tastes like home.
It has been more than forty years and we are still together, so I believe in alchemy.
Node your homework: A variation of this was told live before an audience, with no notes, February 28th 2024 at a Moth slam in Sommerville, Mass where the theme of the night was Chemistry. I didn't win but I did well enough that I plan to do it again. If you do not know the moth, you owe it to yourself to visit their website at https://themoth.org and listen to some of the fantastic stories that have been told on their many live events