What Stinks?

Here was the thing about Opal: She smelled. 

Opal smelled the way that a dumpster full of nothing but half-emptied yogurt containers smells at noon in the middle of August. 

Opal smelled the way that a baby with a particularly finicky gastrointestinal tract smells when he’s just woken up from a six-hour nap and nobody’s had a chance to change his diaper quite yet. 

Opal smelled so very bad but she had no idea that she did.

Our heroine was born without a sense of smell and all throughout her girlhood, it hadn't mattered. Opal’s mother — a fastidious and tidy single mom named Clara — refused to let her daughter’s “impediment” set her little girl back. Clara imposed a strict two baths a day policy from the week she brought Opal home from the hospital to the week she succumbed to a particularly aggressive form of cancer at the age of 39. 

The last memory Opal had of her mother was of holding her lotion-smooth hand and being told to never buy store-brand soap. “It just isn’t worth it,” Clara said before batting her eyelids closed one final time.

Opal, aged 18, was outraged that this, of all things, was her mother’s goodbye. For as long as she could remember, it had been spritz this and wash that. The one time that a delinquent Opal had snuck away to make mud pies with the neighbor boy she’d ended up loofahed within an inch of her life with a homemade concoction of lye and lavender. The scent of the flowers still made Opal shiver, years after that infamous bath.

So to have her mother shrug off her mortal coil without a word of love or even general good wishes for her daughter — it was just too much to stand! Opal threw her hands up. So much for soap, store brand or brand name. Yes, of course, she’d wash up after using the restroom — she wasn’t an animal! — but two baths a day, scented perfumes, and exfoliating body scrubs be damned. She’d had enough.

For a time, Opal’s new regimen worked better than our clean-obsessed society might lead you to think. People made allowances in the months immediately following Clara’s tragic death. Sure, her daughter’s hair was a little greasy and perhaps, yes, there was a certain twang in the air whenever Opal walked into the room but she was in mourning!

Six months later, Opal went to college. Her freshman roommate requested a transfer after two months of discreetly holding her nose. Opal chalked Trina’s sudden departure up to a difference in politics (it was an election year). B.O. never even crossed her mind because while Opal knew her daily toilette was different than others', she didn’t realize the ramifications of her lifestyle choice. She couldn’t smell it.

It wasn’t that people didn’t try to tell Opal that she reeked like a bad batch of homemade kombucha but people hated to point out the obvious. When Tony, a polite boy whom she dated for a few weeks first trimester, broke it off, his stammering goodbye was more apology than critique. There was something so distastefully mortal in acknowledging that our bodies could stink.

Opal, meanwhile, didn’t know any better. Clara had never explained quite what would happen if her daughter gave up bathing completely. Combined with the fact that the whole world was an odorless gray expanse in the wake of her mom's untimely death and we can appreciate how our girl Opal never stood a chance.

We owe the next turn in Opal's short, smelly life to a fact of human anatomy that people always forget: The nose helps us taste. Opal’s inability to smell meant that she couldn’t savor. So while her dormmates gorged on pizza and ice cream, Opal subsisted on a diet based on efficiency and cost savings. She mainly ate protein bars.

It wasn’t enough. Eventually, Opal lost so much weight that the RA finally took note. She sent Opal to the campus doctor who, expecting something much worse whenever a skeletal 18-year-old girl booked an appointment, opened the door to the exam room and nearly dropped dead from the stench. 

“What is that smell?” Dr. Rose said, with the bedside manner that usually won her few friends.

“Smell?” Opal replied, a blissfully ignorant look in her eyes. “I can’t smell anything.”

“You're kidding,” Dr. Rose said, not getting the point. “It’s like something died, came back to life, mucked out a pigsty, and died all over again.”

“No, you see…” Opal explained her condition.

Dr. Rose was enthralled. A medical miracle, right here in her office! Who would have thunk?

What came next were three months of weekly appointments where Dr. Rose did everything she could think of to unclog Opal’s schnoz. It was treatment Clara had never considered. She hadn’t had health insurance.

The fateful day came, as it so often does, when Dr. Rose was on the verge of giving up once and for all. Olfactory textbooks towered over her desk and petri dishes filled with perfume lined the shelves. Nothing had worked, not even 72 hours of continuous Neti Pot treatments.

The idea struck as Dr. Rose reached for her morning latte. She canceled her appointments and rushed Opal in. “What’s wrong, doc?” Opal said, taking her familiar seat on the paper-lined exam table. She’d never minded the treatments; indeed, she enjoyed the attention. Dr. Rose, unlike everyone else, didn’t mind getting close.

“Smell this,” the good doctor said as she handed Opal a bowl brimming with coffee beans. It was a trick she’d recalled from her days working part-time at Bed, Bath, and Beyond (med school was costly): Coffee beans cleaned the nasal palette. Take a big whiff between various odors and voilà! Good as new.

With her customary shrug, Opal took the dish and shoved her nose in. A deep inhale in and then two more for good measure. 

“Anything?” asked Dr. Rose, hands earnestly clasped against her white jacket.

Opal looked up from the dish in her hands. Tears in her eyes, she looked at her friend and for the first time in her life, asked quite sincerely: “What stinks?”