ESSAY
Beauty In The Eyes Of A FishLOS ANGELES 30 January 2008 |
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I have always associated certain things in my life with specific scents and aromas.
I believe it is the strongest of my five senses because I never forget a smell and I always remember the moment when I first experienced it, whereas I can just barely picture my own mother’s face when pressured to do so.
Visual memories are hard to come by in the storage section of my brain. Because smells are stored in the nose, it is easier for me to hold on to them.
There is a brand of lip gloss that I cannot smell without being reminded of a trip to Six Flags in St. Louis when I was in eighth grade.
I had such a good time on that trip that I often buy this brand even though it doesn’t moisturize nearly as well as the other options.
Parsley, to me, smells of caterpillars. This is because my mother had parsley in her garden when I was growing up, and it was always crawling with green and yellow caterpillars. They were chubby and squishy and I hated them with every fiber of my being. The furry guys were different; they had hair, which made them more like mammals. But these slick, bald, green and yellow caterpillars did nothing but revolt me. I always plucked them off of the plant and threw them into the neighbor’s yard. I cannot eat parsley. If some manages to slip into my mouth accidentally, I can’t help but imagine the pale white pus squirting from the body of a caterpillar as I bite down on it.
The smell of Italian sausages cooking in oil trigger memories of Donald Duck and fractions. It was a frequent scent in my house growing up, and my mouth used to water as I started my math assignment at the kitchen table. My little brother was always watching Donald Duck cartoons in the background.
The smell of wet wipes always remind me of puppy shit.
The dusty smell of a closed-off garage forces visions of my crunched-up cat, freshly run over by my mother’s car.
The smell of the house of an ex-boyfriend reminds me of the days I spent awkwardly avoiding his family because I was crying nonstop due to our breakup. There are so many, I couldn’t list them all if I had an eternity.
One of my favorites, though, is the smell that brings back memories of one of my dearest friends, John. John is from the Bahamas.
He knows everything about every plant in existence. Just point at any random shrub and ask him, and he’ll tell you more than the best encyclopedia could offer.
He and I used to drive around Miami together and I’d point at palm trees, and he’d educate me. When I became capable of recognizing the palms for myself, I’d point to them and repeat to him what he’d taught me. John pretended to be proud of me because it was apparent that his approval was, for some reason, everything to me.
It is impossible for me to smell a rotting fish without thinking of John.
Make that any rotting sea creature, including marine plant life. This is not to say that John smells of rotting fish. But when I am around him, I smell it anyway.
In my defense, in the time I spent with him, he did handle an unreasonable number of fish. He would go wading in the ocean almost every weekend, a net in his hands so he could catch different kinds of fish. He happened to know everything about sea life in addition to plant life, otherwise I would never have trusted that these fish were safe to eat. With the things he scooped out of the ocean, John would make fish stew and soup. He didn’t need to follow a recipe, but instead just knew instinctively how to prepare these things.
When we lived in the dorms, he caught small fish from the lake on campus for his fish tank.
I had a clinically depressed fish that I had purchased from a store.
It was a Betta, the kind of fish with long, flowing fins. He was blue.
When I told John I thought my fish to be depressed and therefore incapable meeting his potential, he suggested that I move him into the fish tank with all of the little campus fish.
I did, and within a week, the campus fish had beaten my fish nearly to death, chewing off his fins so he was just a drifting body.
“I don’t think this particular brand of psychotherapy is helpful,” I told John.
So John cut my fish’s head off with a pair of left-handed scissors and flushed the pieces down the toilet. He insists that this was the most humane way of dealing with the situation, but I still think it was over the top.
John was an art major. He could recreate any nature scene and make it more stunning than real life allows. Most of his paintings were of plants and ocean creatures.
One day, he asked me to sit for a few photographs that he could use for a painting.
Sitting for paintings was nothing new to me, because my mother paints. Her art is more of a therapeutic process, however, so the paintings in which I appear are generally not flattering.
Mom also wood-burns her own frames. She has one painting of me next to a snarling wolf. The frame reads: “Lenore carefully hones her words to a keen edge before she aims and shoots them with exquisite accuracy towards those spots most tender.” Or something like that.
The gist of it is, “Lenore is a bitch.”
John didn’t paint like that. He painted beauty, not antagonism. So, I was naturally very flattered when he wanted me to sit for him.
“Don’t think too much into it,” he told me. “You’re just the only girl I have access to right now.”
But that didn’t deter me from imagining myself to be a flawless princess surrounded by gentle Poinciana flowers.
I asked him daily if he had finished the painting. I was so eager to see what I looked like through John’s eyes, to see if I really was beautiful enough to grace his canvas.
John and I spent a lot of time alone together, but our relationship was never sexual. It wasn’t quite friendship, either, though. Within me, there was a monstrous need for his company. There was an understanding between us that I still can’t fully absorb. Our friends always accused us of sleeping together, but really, we were usually bingeing on sushi and encouraging each other’s bitter tendencies.
Whatever we had together, it meant more to me than most relationships I’ve experienced.
When he finished the painting of me, I rushed to see it. It was like looking in the best mirror in the world. Me, only far more beautiful.
“You painted me prettier than I really am,” I said.
“I know,” he told me.
His comments weren’t meant to hurt me, and they didn’t. It was true, he did exaggerate my beauty, but to me that didn’t matter. He had found that beauty within a picture of me.
I was the source from which this exquisite painting originated.
It made me feel so good that I didn’t smell rotting fish on John for months.
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