Elisabeth and Ana Celina banged through the screen door and took off their shoes; that was the rule. “Hey,” Elisabeth called.
Her mother appeared from the kitchen. “Hey, Liz,” she said. “Oh, hello, Ana Celina. Would y’all like some cookies?”
“Hi, Margaret,” Ana Celina said. “Yes, please.”
Margaret pulled away the plastic wrap from a plate of cookies and offered it to them. Elisabeth rummaged in the refrigerator for her carton of soy milk.
Margaret was comfortably middle-aged—a little pudgy around the middle, but tall enough to carry it well. She maintained her figure by going to step aerobics twice a week with ladies from church. Her blonde hair was darker than Elisabeth’s, with tones of gray and gold, cut into a smooth shoulder-length bob. It was the haircut she’d had for years.
Margaret sat at the table and watched them eat, taking nothing for herself. Now that she was in her forties, she hardly ate anymore. On the mantel was a picture of Elisabeth’s parents at their high school prom, looking impossibly young and fresh-faced. Sometimes Elisabeth caught Margaret staring wistfully at the picture. She wondered if her mother was remembering the days when she and Elisabeth’s dad still loved each other, or the days when she was pretty and thin.
Elisabeth munched her cookie. Ana Celina talked, laughed, complimented the cookies, dipped her cookies in milk, dropped crumbs on the table, clattered around the kitchen looking for paper towels. Elisabeth watched her. It was impossible not to; she was an irresistible force, drawing Elisabeth’s attention with magnetic power.
Elisabeth glanced at her mother, sitting at the table with her hands folded. While Elisabeth watched Ana Celina, Elisabeth’s mother watched Elisabeth, worry in her eyes. She saw the adoration on Elisabeth’s face, the unrequited longing. For a moment their eyes touched, and Elisabeth understood. She wanted to say: What, me? You’re the one with problems. But she just looked away.
•
Swing Set by The Pier
Aquatic notes, synthetic but tantalizing with a tang of salt, sweet undertone of fresh watermelon. Rotting vegetation, algae, damp wood. An aura of fish, gleaming scales, gutted insides; accumulated scum on the dank undersides of the pier.
Gently lapping waves as tame as a river bank, licking the white sandbar. Cold sand scuffing beneath bare feet. The distinctive pungency of metal, clinging to their fingers. The swings creaking wearily. Their bare toes trailing lines in the sand. The gulf is impossibly dark and the waves lap invisibly on the beach. This is their last moment; goodbye is coming, so they let the silence linger, as the end inches closer with each groan of the swing set. Once your heart’s been broken, there’s nothing left to say.
Affected by the fragrance, Elisabeth and Ana Celina didn’t say anything either. But Elisabeth thought ahead to the fast-approaching future when they would say goodbye, too. She wanted things to end joyously, with promises of more to come. Which meant there were many things that simply must remain unsaid.
•
It was an evening in late July. They sat with Neve in the living room, as she drank wine and studied a creative brief. Then she read it aloud.
It described a woman, the kind of woman that every woman longs to be: sexy but reserved, alluring but restrained, ever the object of unrequited love and never its victim. It was Neve’s job to decide what this woman should smell like.
“Ideas?” Neve asked, refilling her wine glass.
“Lemon ice,” Elisabeth said.
“Violets,” Ana Celina said.
“I imagine her on a sail boat,” Neve said. “Sitting to one side. Laughing a little, an obscure smile on her face. Raking her fingers through her hair.”
“Not aquatic, though,” Ana Celina said.
“No,” Neve said. “Too open. It has to be something more sophisticated and mature.”
“Amber and iris,” Ana Celina said.
Ana Celina flipped through the stacks of fashion and beauty magazines that Neve kept for inspiration. The fashion spreads sparked ideas, fleeting visions of potential scents. Perfume is about the future as much as it’s about the past; it draws on desire, even as it plays with our memories.
Ana Celina browsed the magazines, comparing herself to the supermodels, with their endless legs and glossy complexions. “Don’t be silly,” Elisabeth said. “They’re not even real.” She thought about launching into a speech about tools of the patriarchy, but usually that was Ana Celina’s job.
Ana Celina shrugged. “Real or not, I still wish I looked like that. Ohh, and I still wish he was my boyfriend. Delicious.” She pointed to a Dior or Ralph Lauren man that looked like a boy. He was shirtless and gorgeous, perfectly sculpted. He didn’t look real either.
Elisabeth felt a flash of betrayal, which faded immediately into the bloom of embarrassment. She picked up a magazine for herself and didn’t say anything else.
They looked at the pictures, but they didn’t rip apart the paper tabs to smell the perfume. Those samples were empty now, nothing more than pretty scents. They weren’t alive, and they had no stories to tell.
•
Rock Concert, Wearing His Perfume
Essence of rose, rose absolute. The sheerest hint of violet and mandarin. Rich base notes of woody ambers, golden and glowing. Neve wears this scent layered between her breasts and on her wrists. The scent is her intoxication, her fever-dream. There’s the haze of cigarette smoke and the tang of beer on the breath of the man beside her, the salt of her own sweat. Music crashes around her, and the musician she loves screams into his microphone, his voice soaring upwards from his slender frame. She’s close enough to see his tattoos.
Every time she brushes away her hair, her gold bracelets tinkle against her skin and she breathes the scent emanating with her pulse, the scent that remains her favorite. It’s the scent she made when she fell in love with him. Like the daughter they created together, with her freckled cheeks and frank smile and heart-shaped face. He will remain with her always. She can’t decide if that’s consolation. So she loses herself in the music and tries not to miss the feeling of his arms around her.
•
Summer faded. The trees were no longer as vibrantly green, and the thunderstorms came in full force. Clouds rolled in midday, pouring torrential rains on hot pavement so that steam rose from the puddles. Thunder rang like gunshots, bathing the sky in electric light.
Summer faded and fall drew closer, bringing immense waves of change. Ana Celina would leave for London in just two weeks. Elisabeth felt she was already losing her, as if Ana Celina was drifting away even when they were side by side.
•
They sampled Parade in New York City, 1986.
Afterward, Ana Celina smiled. “She knows I have the box,” Ana Celina said. “She wants us to explore the rest. Maybe she thinks it will make me change my mind.”
“Will it make you change your mind?” Elisabeth asked.
“No,” Ana Celina said, but she shrugged, and Elisabeth could tell it wasn’t that simple anymore.
They tried Philosophy at the Café in Paris. Lost Without a Map in Rome. Possible Fairy Sighting.
Until only one remained. In silent agreement, they’d both saved it for last.
First Kiss.
They embraced ritual, brushing scent on their wrists and clavicles.
Essence of roses, rose absolute. It flutters; it wavers; it remains, pure and true. The cream tinged with pink. The irresistible red. Roses complicated by middle notes: duplicitous jasmine and finicky heliotrope. Vanilla: a warm beginning that darkens to a seductive core.
A garden at twilight, when the blooms drift shut and the scents are strongest. The first star appears; it’s not a star at all, but Venus, flickering unevenly, lit with the brilliance of its flaming sky.
He stands beside her, his arm around her shoulders. His arm circles tighter, pulls her in close. His jaw inches toward hers. Stars explode on the insides of her eyelids.
Ana Celina and Elisabeth lay side by side
. Their eyes opened slowly. Their arms were sweet with the fragrance of roses. Elisabeth’s heart thudded inside her chest, flushing her cheeks with rose-like pink. She thought: Now. If not now, then never.
She glanced sideways at Ana Celina, dark hair spread across the pillow. Her cheeks were flushed and freckled. Her eyes remained half-closed, her lips slightly parted, her fingertips tense. Remembering. Or imagining—a world that happened before she was born, lives that excluded her before they conceived of her. Or maybe simply wanting.
Elisabeth saw everything Ana Celina thought, and none of it included Elisabeth. In her own way, Ana Celina had told Elisabeth everything she needed to know.
So then, never.
They’d opened the last vial. They’d dreamed the last dream. There was no more memory, only an ending. There was only the sensual summer, coming to an end and bringing goodbye.
When Elisabeth lay in bed that night, a cave tunneled its way through her chest, and an emptiness opened inside her arms.
•
Ana Celina left a week later.
The night before her flight, they sat in her living room, sharing a bottle of champagne with Neve. Bubbling with excitement, Ana Celina imagined the worlds that lay before her across the ocean; she dreamed aloud of adventures in faraway European cities. Elisabeth pretended to be happy for her. “Promise me you’ll call whenever you come to visit,” Elisabeth said. “I’ll drive back to see you.” It was only a couple hours; nothing like a trans-Atlantic flight.
Ana Celina promised she would. Elisabeth knew she wouldn’t.
They hugged each other tightly, hair brushing each other’s cheeks.
“I’ll come in the morning to say goodbye,” Elisabeth promised. “What time are you leaving for the airport?”
Ana Celina was vague. “After breakfast,” she said, finally.
•
The next morning was humid, suffocating. The sky was gray with slow-moving clouds. Heat crackled anxiously in the air, anticipating rain. Elisabeth ran all the way through the woods, taking a simple comfort in the way her sneakers pounded against the dirt.
As she emerged from the woods on Ana Celina’s side, the first thunderclap shook the treetops.
When she knocked on the door, it was Neve that answered.
“I came to say goodbye,” Elisabeth said breathlessly, wiping sweat from her forehead.
Neve frowned. “I’m sorry. She left already. I just got back from dropping her off.”
There was another earsplitting crack of thunder.
For an instant, Elisabeth imagined it as an earthquake, the ground opening beneath her, a crevice widening between her feet. Lightning snaked across the sky.
Looking closer, Elisabeth saw Neve’s red-rimmed eyes and pale smile. For a minute, she felt sorry for Neve; Ana Celina had left her, too. But then she remembered—all the memories, all the adventures, all the cities that Neve knew. Ana Celina deserved to know them too.
She hated them both, for everything they would do without her.
She turned abruptly for home.
“Wait,” Neve said. She disappeared into the house, leaving the door half-open. When she returned, she held an envelope. The word Liz was scrawled in looping cursive across the front. “She asked me to give this to you.”
Elisabeth received the envelope cautiously. There was a lump in the middle, a shape she recognized. “Thank you,” she said, even though she felt too sad to be polite.
“Come back and say hello sometime,” Neve said.
“I will,” Elisabeth said. She wouldn’t.
She ran home. The storm inhabited the world in a war of light and noise, the first fat rain drops hitting the pavement just as she made it to her own yard.
She went to her bedroom and closed the door. She was trembling, but she managed to open the envelope anyway.
Inside was a note, scratched in leaking black ink on creamy card stock.
My first. I let Neve show me a few things. I made it for you.
Love always,
Ana Celina
The note was wrapped around a vial, shaped like all the others.
Tears coursed down Elisabeth’s cheeks. I can’t believe she left without saying goodbye, she told herself, but it was a lie. Ana Celina was the kind of person who never wanted to say goodbye, or never needed to. Elisabeth wasn’t surprised, not really, and that hurt the most. She flung herself across her bed and sobbed, drenching her pillow with a flood of tears.
There was a knock at the door. Elisabeth ignored it.
A minute passed; then her mother opened the door, peered in cautiously, and rushed to the bed.
Elisabeth tried to stop crying. She willed herself to corral the tears inside, or send them back to the source. She couldn’t. She sobbed.
Margaret tucked Elisabeth’s hair back and made soothing noises. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “Did Ana Celina leave?”
“Ye-es,” Elisabeth squeezed out.
Margaret shook her head in silent regret. “You poor thing.” She got up, found tissues, offered them over. “You’re heartbroken, aren’t you.”
Elisabeth nodded, blew her nose. She sniffled and hiccuped and blew her nose again.
Her mother petted her hair, and Elisabeth surrendered to it, feeling like a child again, lulled by her mother’s gentle fingers. “Sweetie,” her mother said. “There will be more girls, lots more. She never really saw you, anyway. She never got how special you are. But I know.”
Elisabeth heard the quaver in her mother’s voice. She didn’t look at her. She couldn’t.
“Everything will be all right,” Margaret said, her hand still stroking Elisabeth’s hair. Then she straightened her back and squared her shoulders, as if she’d made a decision, one she was determined to see to the end. “Trust me, sweetie. Everything will be all right.”
•
A few days passed before Elisabeth opened the vial. Maybe she wanted to get over being angry; maybe she wanted to save it for later. She wasn’t sure. She kept busy, packing for school and shopping with her mother, who never stopped thinking of things Elisabeth might need.
Finally, she was ready.
She sat on the bed. Removed the vial. It wasn’t labeled.
The liquid was perfectly clear. She dabbed a few drops on her collarbone, then swiped her fingertip across the crease in her arm. She stretched out, closed her eyes. She breathed out, breathed in, breathed out.
Delicate, woody smells of forest and moss. A hint of cool water, dark earth, smooth stone. Notes of magnolia and honeysuckle. Warm skin and hair.
The boulder at the edge of the stream that felt like the edge of the world. The hard swirls of granite, cool to their fingertips. The trickle of water below. The rustling in the trees, live with vibrations that began in the roots and traveled to the highest leaves.
The hollows in their knees. The freckles on their shoulders. Their drumming feet. Their slender fingers. Crooked smiles, shining eyes, swinging hair. A thudding heart.
I have a secret for you.
•
D is for Delicious
Steve Berman
Ms. Grackle heard the word “Scrumptious” whispered in her ear as she tended Chucky Goldberg’s skinned knee. But then, all week long she’d been hearing voices.
When she reached into a glass jar for a gauze pad to cover his scrape, she found instead a folded strip of paper covered with rows of colored dots. It would have fallen on the worn linoleum if Chucky hadn’t grabbed one trailing end. As he giggled away, she checked the drawer where she kept spare supplies and found it full of pink tufts of cotton candy.
The oversweet smell brought back memories of a distant summer during high school spent behind the counter of the Snack Shack. Memories of Effie Lintz, who had a gap between her front teeth that made the young Miss Grackle stare and tingle all over—a gap meant more for tongues than spit.
Uncomfortable with dredging up the past, she slammed the drawer shut. Chucky, still sweaty from gym class,
jumped. The poster of Inner Workings of the Nose fell to the floor.
“My mother won’t let me eat sugar.” Chucky crunched and chomped on the candy. “She wants me enthusiastic, not manic, she always says.” Chucky had already taken his daily dosage of Ritalin.
By the time Chucky had torn off every dot—leaving his slick tongue swirled with color—Ms. Grackle had found enough tiny bandages to cover his kneecap in a patchwork pattern. “Cool,” he said, and dropped the empty paper on the floor before running back to the classrooms.
Ms. Grackle dumped all the candy in the battered trashcan. She sat down at her desk and discovered a chocolate bar in the snout of the piggy bank the fifth graders had bought her as a retirement present. She tugged the bar free.
Candy. For almost a week she had been finding shiny gumballs, cellophane-covered nougats, and black licorice crows littered around her office. Tongue depressors replaced by lollipops fashioned from pink or purple sugar. At first, she had thought it was a prank played by the children or by Mr. Crad, the French teacher, who last year had sent an entire giggling class to her complaining not of cooties but coutés. But the treats now appeared so suddenly that nothing scientific or educational could be behind them.
She washed the milk chocolate residue from her hands with antibacterial soap. When she turned back, a woman in her thirties with long black hair and an even longer green apple-shaded dress had taken her chair. The woman looked familiar despite her smile. The icicles hanging from Ms. Grackle’s windowsill this past winter had looked less white, less sharp than those teeth.
“You look hungry,” the woman said.
Ms. Grackle stepped back. Her stomach did grumble. She had packed a tuna fish and tomato sandwich but when lunchtime came the soggy wheat bread and pasty fish had been less than appealing, with a smell worse than any dumpster. Had she missed an expiration date on the can? Mrs. Towfer, the second grade teacher, had rescued the sandwich at the last moment, as Ms. Grackle brought it near the garbage pail. She had watched as Mrs. Towfer’s lips had smacked away while the stink of a dirty aquarium hung about the faculty lunchroom.
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