An Evening In Paris With Mom
Someone was wearing Evening In Paris perfume the other day, and the scent instantly reminded me of Mom. I haven't smelled Evening In Paris since we lost her, yet its fragrance transported me back to childhood and the Mother's Day when I broke a bottle of it.
When I was little, I thought Mom was a goddess. I could sometimes be found clumping around in her high heels, scrunching my toes into a ball in an unsuccessful attempt to keep my feet from sliding all the way down into the pointy toes.
She had beautiful hats, which I dearly wanted to try on, especially the ones with veils, but I couldn't reach them all the way up on the hall closet's top shelf where they perched on faceless wooden heads.
One particular Mother's Day, I sneaked into forbidden territory -- my parents' bedroom. I intended to apply the contents of various tubes, jars and bottles of lady stuff, using many colored pencils; soft, fat brushes; pots of rouge and powder.
I can remember smearing her lipstick across my mouth; some color actually made it inside the lip lines. I attacked her huge pink container of powder, and its fuzzy puff made a scented pink cloud as I vigorously pummeled my face with it.
Standing regally in its prominent position on a special shelf above the dressing table was the cobalt blue bottle of Evening In Paris perfume, which Dad had given her that morning.
I didn't notice that each time I reached for another cosmetic, the dressing table jiggled and the Evening In Paris bottle wobbled precariously closer to the edge. I was caught offguard when it came crashing down, striking the glass vanity top.
Everything was in a million blue smithereens except the silvery stopper. In a frantic effort to stop the perfume from cascading over the table's edge and onto the carpet where a reminder stain might last forever, I panicked, clutching at the wet pile of broken blue glass and gashing my fingers. I can still feel the sting of the perfume as it dribbled over the new cuts, on its way to the carpet.
The concentrated scent was heavy, more like a year in Paris than an evening. The sound of shattering glass traveled downstairs reaching my parents. It was the first of many occasions when Mom said she hoped I'd one day have a daughter of my own just like me. I didn't know what she meant by that until I had one.
Sometimes it seems impossible to please a Mom with Mother's Day gifts, no matter how much you love her. Mine preferred the flawed presents I made when I was little, like the flowered apron with the pockets accidentally sewn shut and no ties to go around her waist. She used safety pins to hold it on.
Or the year I made an artsy, colorful collage using canned food labels and nobody knew what was inside the cans without labels to tell them, not even when they shook the tins next to their ears in an effort to identify the contents by sound. Meals got all mixed up and cling peaches sometimes took the place of stringbeans at dinner. Once we had stewed tomatoes for dessert. The only canned contents we were sure of was tuna fish, though Dad thought it might've been cat food.
She loved the Mother's Day card I made with photo cutouts of the heads of my father, sister and self, even though she later had to try to match the heads with all the pictures of leftover torsos that remained in her photograph box.
When I was old enough to earn money to buy Mother's Day presents instead of making them, they no longer pleased Mom. No matter how she tried to hide her disappointment, I can still see the fixed smile on her face as she opened up her Ginsu knife, "the only kitchen knife she'll ever need," the TV ad had said.
I thought those Mother's Days were gone forever. Then a stranger passed by, wearing Evening In Paris, and returned to me my lovely Mom.
