What is it about fragrance that is so ~ and truly there is no better word to describe this ~ evocative? For me there is no other sense that allows a memory or a feeling to creep up from behind and take me out, like a slide tackle that I never saw coming. To add to it’s potency, fragrance can be brutally elusive. I’ll get a whiff and immediately try to pinpoint the smell that is making me want to laugh, or cry or cower in fear or just give up the ghost completely....or all of the above. The moment I try to reach for it, to pin it down, to categorize it, it slips away, an eel between the crack in the dock, slithering just below the surface where the water has become murky. And there I’m left, staring after it, desperately trying to concentrate on retaining the tiny inkling of recognition that came to me in a flash.
Speaking of docks, briny water is a perfect example of a simple scent that can incapacitate if not handled with care. An absurd number of emotions are elicited by one waft of bay water~not to be confused with Atlantic ocean water, which is further not to be confused with Pacific ocean water, which is even further not to be confused with Pacific ocean water south of the equator (you get the idea). Still there is confusion: Imagine, the Pacific exhales and quite suddenly a girl is flat out, on her back, floating on an old raft that fabulously reeks of Grandma’s old boat house. Our helpless subject is down by TKO on a vaguely familiar, blue on one side, yellow on the other, floatation device, face up to the sun, toes dangling in the Great South Bay while her companions are enjoying a school of dolphins jumping high out of the water in the ocean off the coast of Perú. How did that happen? Scent played her happy game and won.
What is it for you? Something fabulous your Mom used to cook? The smell of rain on fall leaves? The fragrance of fresh cut grass? The cologne your first boyfriend wore? The shampoo used by your third grade crush? The possibilities are endless. I just had an experience the other day in the supermarket. I was standing in line and this neatly-coiffed, well-dressed, older woman walked by me. I think my knees buckled. I don’t like to bother strangers but I had to know,
“Excuse me Ma’am, what scent are you wearing?”
Several times, over the past twenty years, I have had a specific reaction to a particular scent. Once upon a time, when I was some unknown teen age, I babysat for this woman who wore that scent. For the life of me I can’t remember her name. I can barely picture her in my mind’s eye and that picture could be a complete fabrication for all I know: She was fine-boned, perfectly groomed, great sense of style complemented by the wallet to accommodate her good taste~she always looked casual, cool and pristine. This next part I know is true because it set her apart from most the women whose children I cared for: she was nice. I have rarely indulged this thought in my forty years but I remember thinking, “It must be nice to be her.” The only other person I ever thought that of was a gorgeous model I met on a flight back from Hawaii when I was eleven. I fleetingly coveted her life because she had see-through plastic Candies, she wore a designer scarf, folded in a triangle and tied in a knot at her spine, as her top and she had the most luxurious shiny brown-black hair I had ever seen. Oh yeah, and she was nice, like my anonymous, anomalous mom.
This woman whose kindness and fragrance are the only things I can remember with any assurance, displayed none of the neurotic tics of the other moms I dealt with, who (almost) invariably seemed personally affronted by my youth, while time was stealing their elasticity and bounce. I remember one mom who yanked one of my curls hard and said,
“I used to have curls like this. Now that I’m forty with these kids, they’re gone.”
Then she glared at me as if I was the dirty culprit in the Case of the Purloined Curls. When she later remarked that she used to have a rear-end like mine, I scurried away from her to make sure she didn’t pinch my derrière for emphasis.
While on the subject of pinched derrières, I will mention that my unnamed mom had a husband that wasn’t a creeper. This put her very high on my list of people to take a babysitting job from. While experience made me a strict adherent to riding my own bike to and from jobs, in an emergency I could have taken a ride home from this dad without plotting an elaborate escape plan. A rarity. Finally, her kids were sweet. This is almost unheard of. Even the kids I liked were generally bratty, spoiled, overindulged. Not fragrant lady's kids, they were fun and friendly and didn’t ooze an air of entitlement. Rare indeed. Unfortunately I only got to spend one brief summer in the sporadic employ of this family. Their house, old with wide wood- planked floors, carelessly dusted with sand from a beach only a brisk walk across a field of grass away, was borrowed for just one summer. When the Labor Day festivities ended in a cloud of white linen, I was honestly sad to see them go.
This sadness came back to me when I smelled the lady in the store. Additionally I found myself admiring the lady in the supermarket for traits I couldn’t possibly know she had. Piled on top, like one of those fancy heirloom tomato salads, I was rushed with memories of mean moms, dark nights racing home on a bicycle, every old house in my home town, secret back stairways, really good books read with summer breeze blowing in from a bank of opened windows, a field of marsh reeds, the bay (of course) and, quite inexplicably, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This last took me a long time to turn over carefully like a puzzle piece that has no design that seems to fit with the rest of the picture. Then I kind of remembered: I might have watched the movie, “The Tempest” while babysitting at their house. See what I mean about fragrance just sneaking up on you and laying you out in ways you couldn’t have seen coming? So strange. And here’s the funniest part, now I obsessively want to see that movie again. Thank you fragrance, thank you Netflix.
One more observation about fragrance before I go: there is no reciprocal agreement with her. She may dominate you without mercy but the minute you try to assert authority over her she will punish you. How? The woman in the supermarket told me what scent she was wearing, “Carolina Herrera.” I asked my husband to bring me back a bottle from Duty-free on his recent travels. Today he brought it to me with his usual generous flourish. As I sit here, typing in a light mist of it’s lovely scent of tuberose, I know I am defeated. I can’t recapture the feelings this fragrance evoked when it passed me by so fleetingly over the years. In trying to take control and harness the fragrance in a deliberate bid for control, I am punished. “Not so,” she mocks, “I am the one who decides.” Clearly she prefers to sneak up from behind. Ah well, I like my new perfume anyway and I think I will rent “The Tempest.”
Detail of Children Faces
