Every Saturday, as a child, I would hold the elegant bottle in my small hands and shake it as hard as I could in order to let the gold flacons dance like snowflakes before my eyes. And then I would dust it off very carefully and put it back, just as carefully, into its exact place in the middle of my parents’ bureau.
It stood there until my mother’s untimely death.
It was to me, a talisman to beauty, sophistication, elegance, and grown up feminity.
My mother never used it and it evaporated before my eyes as I grew from a little girl into a grown woman.
I am now, the age my mother was when she was dying of cancer and every morning when I open my eyes, her life is the first thought that crosses my mind.
Two women the same age and two women as different as night and day.
There was my mother who thought that a wedding dress should not be worn only once, so she had hers dyed black, and with a few nips here and a few tucks there, it became the dress she wore to funerals.
That was my mother, everything was either black or white.
Nothing was ever in the middle with her.
And here, is her daughter who lives her bohemian life in a million different shades of grey.
My mother’s mother was a gypsy, who as a young girl of fourteen was sent from Yugoslavia to Canada to marry an older gentleman who was thought to be well off.
My grandmother was illiterate in both Serbian and English and her signature was nothing more than the letter x.
Before she died, I would take her working woman’s hands and wrap them around my tiny hands trying to teach her how to write her name. She would laugh and kiss me and call me, her smart little Bobbie, which was her nickname for me.
And there was my mother, who embarassed by her 7th grade education would always wait for our father to come home to sign her children’s report cards because she believed her signature to be plain and not fancy enough for more educated eyes.
Fancy, like that bottle of Mitsouko that stood on her dresser for 32 years, without ever being used.
So you mothers and daughters, and you grandmothers, you go spray yourselves this morning with perfume and keep on spraying until there’s not a drop left, in the damn bottle.
And you tell your stories to anyone who will listen and you write them down, in honor of Luba who could not write them and in honor, of her daughter Rose who died thinking that a damn bottle of perfume was worth more than she was.
And as for me, I am going to douse myself in the most expensive fragrance money can buy and tell my little stories and I will make Luba and Rose proud of their little girl.
Yes, I will write them.
I will write them, like a perfumed woman smellin’, of where she’s been.
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