Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Shrimpy and Flaky
Tonight it finally happened. I knew it would happend eventually, but once it happened I didn’t recognize it till it was too late. And now, the shame is mine to bear.
I got home late after a long, complicated, and draining day. As I stumbled in, looking not much forward to setting in immediately to cook supper, Kel accosted me with concern in her eyes. “Thank god you’re here,” was how she greeted me. “The smell is terrible. It’s worst in the bathroom. I had to take him out of the tub. (With this, she inclined her head toward the toddler in her arms, who was still a bit damp and discombobulated from having been plucked peremptorily from his bath.) I think something’s wrong. Can you check?”
I believe that the question, “can you check the bad smell in the bathroom?” has got to be one of the worst questions to be confronted with, along with “has this gone bad?” and “wanna see what they did to my colon?” But at home, I’m the guy - or at least, the guy who can operate the bathroom door all by himself, so I put down my bag and immediately went to check the situation.
I opened the hall door – and started to smell something sour.
I walked down the hall and opened the bedroom door – the stink got really intense, like burning rubber or a fish that had long since stopped being food. I checked out the window – it smelled good out there. I pulled my head back into our sleeping chamber – eurgh. How could something have crawled into our mattress, died, and decomposed to such an extent, within just a few hours?
I walked to the other side of the room, past the closets, and I opened the bathroom door. WHOA. What a stinky, stinky, room. It was horrible, a sharp acrid stench that caught me by the throat and dared me to taste my inhalations. I peeked out the airshaft window just to see if I could tell what the problem was, but I couldn’t. It just really smelled bad, and mostly in that one very critical room.
I reserve the right to dictate what stinks in my own crapper, thank you very much, so this caused me much consternation. I went back up front, closing doors behind me as I walked. “No idea what it is, but hell right it stinks.”
“Can you go downstairs and check? Once they were welding the pipes in the garage and smoke came into our bedroom. That stuff is toxic, I don’t want to risk making the baby sick.”
It seemed like a fair concern, so I walked back outside again and down the stairs to my landlady’s apartment one floor down. I knocked. No answer. I knocked and rang – and then the door down in the ground floor garage apartment opened and the landlady’s son peeked his head out. His grandmother, the landlady’s mom, lives there – a crusty old woman who never bothered to learn English and doesn’t recognize me on the street after 15 years in the same house with me. “Who is it?,” he called out into the entryway.
“Up here, it’s me, Dan from upstairs,” I announced with resignation. The son was not a great source of information – he had a brain trauma when he was young and never really completely came back from it. “Um, I was wondering if you knew what we were smelling upstairs. Something smells wrong. We smell it in the master bathroom – like something’s burning, or gone wrong. It’s really intense in there and it sort of made Kel feel bad. She’s worried there might be something dangerous in the air.”
The son stood there, blankly blinking at me. Then his mother poked her head around him. “Oh hi Dan,” she called up. “You smell something?”
“Yeah, hi, I do smell something. Something smells really strong, and not good. Horrible, really. We smell it in the bathroom. Is anyone burning something or melting something? We’re concerned that the baby might get sick.”
“It’s my mom. She’s cooking. She’s making food. Chinese cooking. I think… I think you smell the dry shrimp flake, eh?”
Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s the smell. Like someone making fishfood gumbo, a skillet of sautéed sea monkeys. Naturally, when I smelled that rank stank I didn’t associate it with food, to the extent dry shrimp flake qualifies as food… especially not when I smelled it in the bathroom. That’s not a place I associate with kitchen odors, especially not the odors of the kitchen of the damned, which apparently is where grandma cooks.
I’ve dealt with her smells a few times before, when she was boiling down retchweed on a big hotplate in the backyard right under our bedroom window. It’s always been a horrible smell, but I could look out the window and see what the problem was – the cooking of something that was manifestly not food. I always avoided making the huge stupid mistake of going out of my way to tell her that her so-called cooking was a toxic hazard. But this time when I looked, I saw nothing cooking-related and so I assumed the worst. And what it was, instead, was the old woman’s supper. And I called it air poison. That is because I am tactful and always know what to say. So I went ahead and said it:
“Oh, right, dry shrimp flake. Sounds great. Have a good supper!” I went back up the stairs in nauseated humility. I just love insulting the landlady’s mom’s cooking. Maybe next week I can impugn her daughter’s virtue or something. I’d hate to leave anyone out.
