Chapter 9 #2
“Thank you for the perfume. I was about to call you.” It’s a lie I’ve offered so often it feels like truth.
“Did you like it?”
“Of course.” Another lie.
She pauses. “Ah. Good. I’m glad.”
Our conversations usually follow a format as strict as a nun’s schedule.
From Mom’s comments about what I’m eating or have eaten or am going to eat, it moves to my day and then straight into something that will irritate me.
The last topic changes, but in the past has included: my love life (lack thereof), how I run my shop and why it should be more like hers, the weather, and any mention of Vancouver or coming home.
The breadth of potentially dangerous topics is wide-ranging and capricious enough that a tone is enough to set us off. Or, more accurately, set me off.
Today, though, Mom deviates from the routine. “I started cleaning out Waipo’s rooms.”
“Oh.” Waipo lived in an annex off my parents’ house for the last few years. Remorse jabs another bruise on top of the others it’s left around my heart. I should have known my mother would be trimming the threads of Waipo’s life. I should have asked.
“There’s more to do, but I’m putting some boxes aside for you to go through when you next come home,” she says. “Keepsakes. She didn’t have much. She gave you the thing she valued most.”
“The register?” I ask tightly. “I said it belongs with you.” We still haven’t addressed the fact that she ignored me to send it back to Toronto. There’s no point.
“Waipo thought not, and I can’t debate with a dead woman.”
I recoil at her harsh tone. My gaze lands on the anodyne pastel landscape that came with the apartment and the small table under it that should be covered with framed family photos. It’s where I put my junk mail.
Instead of fighting back, which is my first inclination, I take a deep breath. Neither my father nor my brother would have offered to help sort through the room. One of the terrible consequences of a death is filling garbage bags with the remains of a life, and Mom had to do it alone.
I don’t want to fight, not when Mom is dealing with Waipo’s things and it’s my birthday. I muster every ounce of kindness I can excavate from my soul to say, “Thank you for keeping some of her things for me.”
“Of course, Luling.” She sighs. “I should go. I’m closing the store. Take care of yourself.”
This is brisker than usual, and when she hangs up, I stare at the phone, almost hurt. I’m the one who hangs up first, and this reversal unsettles me.
I pluck the shot glass out of the sink and check it for cracks before washing it and putting it away where it belongs.
She said she was closing the store. Why those words?
Not “I’m closing up the store,” or “I’m getting ready to go home.
” I weigh the pros and cons of texting Eric.
Pro: Finding out what’s going on. Con: Listening to him crow over knowing more about Mom’s business than I do. It’s an easy enough choice.
I shut the cupboard to go slump at the table and decide how to spend the rest of my special birthday night.
I can watch My Neighbor Totoro, my comfort movie.
I can take out Anne of Green Gables, my comfort read and the only book I’ve allowed to get dog-eared from use.
I can have a bath laced with sandalwood, my comfort smell.
I can work on my new autumn line or some of my commissions, my comfort coping mechanisms. I can go to bed, since it’s already after ten, although that will bring no comfort.
None of the options are appealing because of those bottles lined up in the cheap dollar-store container in my closet.
Ah, goddamn it. I haul myself up from the chair and pour a second shot of tequila before shuffling back to the bedroom to stand in front of the closet again.
The earthy smell wafts up from my glass, laced with honey and citrus.
I finish it before snatching out the container, putting it on the bed, and sinking down to the floor so the bottles are at eye level.
Why have I never smelled Mom’s birthday creations? Does she know? I’m punctilious about my thanks—truly the least I can do—but I never give her details of what I think about them. What secrets am I about to find that she assumes I know?
I drag the box down to the floor and pull out Luling21.
It arrived at my studio apartment in Halifax, which was about as far away as I could get from home without landing in the Atlantic.
The bottles are the classic Yixiang design, created by Hua Zhengyi in the early 1900s, a low, wide bottle reminiscent of old incense censers.
The designs etched on the side all feature peonies, but subtle changes in the way the flower is depicted indicate which fragrance family the scent falls into: floral, ambery, woody, leather, chypre, or fougère.
When I was younger I wanted to simplify it to amber, floral, woody, and fresh, the more modern standard scent families, but Mom refused.
“This is our tradition,” she told me firmly. Waipo agreed, and as head of the family, her decision was what mattered most. I took my defeat gracefully because I was nineteen, with no reason to think I couldn’t make the changes when Yixiang inevitably passed down to my stewardship.
I lean over to grab some blotters from my dresser drawer, settle back down, and give the black cap a slight twist.
Then I spritz.
It’s jasmine, an intoxicating single-note floral.
I wave the blotter and sniff again, the memory coming to me not in bits and pieces but fully formed.
When I was sixteen, my mother told me to re-create the jasmine she grew in the small garden behind the house in all its different moods.
Jasmine in the rain. In the sun. Playing up the indoles for the pungent smell of mothballs, and then its green notes.
I’d done dozens of jasmines, refining and learning each time.
The one my mother had chosen for my birthday was a light and sweet interpretation, something suitable for a girl.
Luling22 makes me gasp out loud. It’s a rich, spicy bomb, not typical of my mother, who prefers soft fragrances designed to stay close to the skin and respect the olfactory space of those around the wearer.
This is the opposite, an amber overdose with notes of opopanax, civet, and vanilla.
It’s said when Giorgio Beverly Hills was released, it was so overpowering restaurants posted signs asking people to tone it down.
Luling22 could give that, Angel, and Poison a run for their money.
It’s the 1980s in all its lavish excess, and it pulls a surprised laugh out of me.
If it were a relationship, it would be the love-bombing of a narcissist.
The more of them I smell, the more I’m convinced my mother is trying to tell me something—but I don’t know what.
There’s a tea scent with a breath of buttery pastry that reminds me of Sunday mornings, a leather that smells like a supple old handbag, and a powdery rose I recall from one of Waipo’s old cosmetic compacts.
I sit with Luling28 for a while, as it’s a feat of technical brilliance that brings me an unusual feeling of envy.
I knew Mom was good, but this good? She’s combined the ozone of an approaching storm in the top notes with the petrichor of the rain-soaked earth, giving the entire story of a summer shower, with an epilogue of fresh leaves trembling with rain.
I don’t know how she made the green linger, when its volatility means it should be one of the first notes to disappear.
Then I open the package that came today. All the accompanying note says is Happy Birthday, Luling, and I put it carefully in the pile of identical notes from years past, tucked under the bottles in the bottom of the tub.
The mist from Luling33 settles on the blotter, turning the white paper translucent. Then I sniff.
There’s nothing.
I try again, but again, nothing.
Bringing my arm up, I bury my face in my sleeve and inhale to reset my nose. Coffee is a myth for fighting olfactory fatigue, since it only replaces one smell with another. I take another breath and turn back to my blotter.
Still nothing.
It’s ridiculous to think she mailed a scentless bottle, and Mom doesn’t make mistakes. I spritz it on my arm in case it’s some novel formulation that has to interact with heat or something.
There’s definitely nothing there.
I put the blotters in the kitchen garbage and the bottles neatly away, all except for Luling33, which I keep on my night table.
If I previously suspected the perfumes were a message, now I’m sure.
I leave it and head to the shower to clear my nose and my mind, but once I’m back in my room, damp and warm, I pick the bottle up to spray it again.
Nothing.
“Why can’t you just tell me what you want to say instead of playing these games?” I mutter.
Because you never listen, her ghostly voice says.
Wounded by this internal debate that I made up myself, I get into bed, still staring at the bottle.
Is she saying I have a blank canvas to play on now?
Is she saying my life is empty? I want to ask her, but then I groan, remembering that I already thanked her.
I can’t go back and tell her I hadn’t smelled it.
I put the box of perfumes away and take two melatonin gummies. Then I curl around Luling33 like a lover and wait for sleep, hoping to puzzle out the mystery of my mother’s empty perfume in my dreams.