Chapter Three: Noticing Grape Tomatoes: The First Step

So the smell was gone. I wandered around in a daze for the next few weeks. Actually, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, since I seem to spend a large proportion of my normal waking hours in a daze. Let’s just say that I was dazier than usual.

I felt rather strange, as though I had lost one of the five senses, or at least had woken up color-blind. At night, I tried to bury my face in the pillow (yes, the snot-riddled pillowcases had been washed a-plenty, but the actual pillows might still contain some DNA), but the smell was gone. Most peculiar.

A few days later, we were blessed with a gorgeous spring day, breaking the oppressive frigidity of March, and the warmish breeze on my skin felt wonderful. And I actually noticed it, which was quite unusual.

About a week after the odor-evaporation, I was at my weekly Sunday night girls’ get-together. I had facilitated this gathering of neighborhood; we all knew each other from the local stoops and Starbucks, where most were trying to meet that elusive creature known as an Eligible Man.

Sunday nights were reserved for the female gender, and although we could look, speculate and certainly discuss, none of us made a play for the male specimens that lurked around our table. I had ordered a salad and let out a gasp after my first mouthful. Amanda, convinced that I had found a false eye or something equally appalling on my platter, halted in the middle of a lurid retelling of her Saturday night of passion, and stared wide-eyed at me.

“Omigod,” she moaned (presumably in a different tone than the one used less than twenty-four hours earlier), “Are you OK?”

It was a quiet night, and the waiter caught her horrified expression and approached the table, eyebrows raised in anticipation.

“Fresh ground pepper?” he enquired nervously.

I groaned back in delight, in a fashion more reminiscent of Amanda’s escapades from the previous night. “This just tastes SO GOOD!”

The women exchanged glances. Joan challenged me. “Sweetie, it’s the same salad you had two weeks ago. When you said it was just ‘so-so.’ What’s the deal?”

I scooped another mound of dressing-soaked spinach into my mouth.

“The deal is,” I mumbled, “that these slow-roasted sweet red peppers set off the bitterness of the broccoli rabe, and the garlic combined with the soft, ripe Brie, just melts into these tomatoes - and they are amazingly fresh!”

Then to the waiter, “What’s different?”

Joan and Amanda exchanged glances. The salad was a signature dish at this local bistro, and the waiter insisted that there had been no alterations made to the recipe. But something had changed. It was me: I had recovered my sense of taste.

This was highlighted a few weeks later when the breezes began to soften, and air conditioners were lugged in from their precarious perches on Manhattan window-ledges. I dragged out my winter clothes and discarded many an item I had bought since E.J.E. (the End of the Jimmy Era): narrow-leg jeans, high-neck T-shirts, bulky clogs: what had I been thinking? I replaced these with my pre-Jimmy uniform of low, clingy T-shirts and sexy, baggy denims, my cute basketball shoes, and my adorable suede pumps, my cowboy boots, my Lycra skirts. Out went all things asexual. Yes, my taste had returned.

Unfortunately, right in the footsteps of my returning appetite came the weight. Some women can control their eating when they are happy. Not me. I starve myself when I am miserable. Thanks to a high metabolism in my teens, I never went through a chunky phase, having to spend adolescent lunchtimes downing Slimfast and smoking by the bike sheds. OK, I did smoke by the bike sheds, but that was because I wanted to, not as a means of weight-loss. I was always skinny. Up until a few years ago.

The Jimmy breakup had occurred just in time, coinciding precisely with the onset of fat and cellulite. Luckily, I hadn’t eaten properly since his disappearance, so the weight had stayed off.

But my taste buds had been awakened from a long sleep: the fresh, ripe tomato had played the role of the gentle kiss from the magic prince.

I now recognized what I’d been missing, at least on a culinary level. I swept away those unhealthy Ding Dongs, but replaced them with young, plump lamb chops, luscious crisp onion loaves, eggplant parmesan and, if I was feeling particularly sinful and could get the image of cramped baby cows out of my head for a minute or two, plump veal meatballs, floating in a sea of fresh marinara sauce, poured onto steaming bowls of al dente fettuccini, topped with a mound of hand-grated cheese. At least the black pepper wasn’t fattening.

During the ensuing weeks, the Sunday night crowd watched aghast as I waddled to the table, my cute, baggy denims now somewhat closer to my ever-increasing waistline. They stared in wonder as I worked my way through the menu, each mouthful a newfound delight. Food had for almost three years been just fuel or comfort - but now I could really enjoy the flavors, appreciate the ingredients and craved dishes that contained items other than chocolate.

Although chocolate still tasted wonderful. Always will.