At some point after the last of the snow from the spring blizzard melted, my mom accused my dad of smelling like a skunk. It wasn’t the type of thing a wife says to her husband, spitefully. He just smelled like skunk and she thought he should know.
He could smell it, too, which only made things worse. Starting with the obvious, my dad chewed his way through potential culprits like a hungry caterpillar: replacing deodorants, swapping out one brand of hair tonic for another, divvying out his dry-cleaning to three different stores suspecting it might be a “chemical” issue. It got to the point that when we’d see him marching toward with that Here, smell this look, we’d fling ourselves out the nearest door.
For two solid months, we lived and breathed B-O, slowly breaking apart the model of our suburban existence, piece by stinky piece. At first, no one was allowed to wear perfume or cologne. Not even my older brother Craig, who’d moved out the year before and was only an occasional visitor to the house for free meals and laundry. Next, our friends were banned from hanging out after school for fear that it was something in their houses that sparked an allergic reaction in his glandular system. Finally, our mom started washing our clothes in a solution of baking soda, vinegar and ammonia — a particularly humiliating course of action that took its toll on our social standing at school. We became “those kids” who smelled like sour little homeless people. Eventually, our meals and junkfood were up for grabs. We stopped eating beef cold turkey. Waffled over white versus dark meat. And fish that was previously fried and delicious was now baked beyond recognition and served alongside piles of strange new vegetables like beets and kale, which could only be eaten by plugging your nose and swallowing them whole without chewing.
But no matter what we did or how we did it, dad still smelled like skunk.
“Why are you punishing them?” Craig snapped one night at dinner pointing to me and my sister. “It’s not Sam’s or Spencer’s fault. You’re the one who stinks!”
“Damnit Cindy,” dad brustled ignoring Craig’s little show. “Are you using vegetable oil in there?”
“We’ve already gone though this, Mike. It is NOT the vegetable oil, remember? Don’t forget, you have an appointment with Dr. Gladweller tomorrow.”
“Gladweller? What’s the dentist gonna tell me?”
“Could be something in your mouth,” she sighed under her breath retrieving from the oven a baking sheet of Orange Roughy strips that had been reduced to leathery insoles.
My brother kicked me under the table. It was only a week ago that we’d been over to our cousins’ house and watched dad and his brothers get stinking drunk around a table of cards, which ended with dad telling our uncle to eat a shit sandwich. “Looks like the sandwich is in the other mouth, so to speak,” Craig cracked.
“You know, you’re a real wise-ass,” dad seethed. “You got that fifty bucks I loaned you last month? Cindy, no more dinners for Mr. Smartass over here. Gimme your plate.”
“That’s enough—both of you.”
“You know,” Craig added. “I read that a person’s job satisfaction can actually impact the body’s ability to produce certain phenomes.”
“Pheremones,” mom corrected him trying to shimmy a metal spatula under what was left of our fish.
“Yeah, pheremones. I saw it on 60 minutes. Harry Reasoner interviewed some guy in Japan who was talking about the impact his new job had on his body. His hair fell out. He developed cavities. Even grew an inch and a half. And the thing is, it all started —”
“You like teaching, don’t you dad?” I interrupted.
“I love my job, Spencer. Your brother is just trying to rattle me so his mother will give him his plate back—”
“I’m serious dad—”
“We don’t have to talk, Craig. Some of us can eat.”
After dinner, Samantha wiggled out from the table pumping her arm like a bird with a broken wing, and the three of us went upstairs to play Dungeons and Dragons in her bedroom.
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