Scent-Sational Memories

Our minds make peculiar mental associations when triggered by certain scents. For instance, whenever I smell seasoned chop meat frying in a pan I’m sent back to my grandmother’s kitchen on lower Main St. (now the upstairs of In Napoli’s Restaurant) circa 1967; whenever I smell the Hudson River at low-tide I remember all those late ‘60’s/early 70’s summers swimming and crabbing off the deck of Bunty’s Dock near the base of the George Washington Bridge; whenever I’m in a car and I smell burning fuel I hear my father ordering us to run before the Falcon exploded. (My dad was Wile E. Coyote with cars—every trip, near or far, was tinged with the threat of explosion! I truly believe my old man was the inspiration behind the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters; albeit without the benefit of safety gear, disability insurance, or sponsors.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, scent and memory. Recently, my daughter received a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft for her birthday. As soon as she unscrewed that pink cylindrical cap the scent rushed my brain back to 1970’s and into my old bedroom that sat on the second floor of my childhood home on Fifth St. with its floral patterned papered walls and white eyelet bedspread. Love’s Baby Soft was the Evening in Paris of my generation. Whether you attended School No. 1, School No. 2, School No. 3, School No. 4, Madonna, Holy Trinity, Intermediate School, or the High School, back in the 70’s every school’s hallway was drenched in Love’s Baby Soft’s narcotic powdery undertones. I distinctly remember a boy leaning over my desk and whispering, “Wow, your perfume smells great,” to which I quietly replied, “That’s not me, that’s Rosemary,” who sat all the way over on the other side of the classroom; proving that even if you failed to get your Love on, all you had to do was walk into school with a girl who did to be infused with its contagious scent.

I can’t smell Loves Baby Soft without being reminded of something that happened when I was in the eighth grade at Holy Trinity School. Holy Trinity was is in the Coytesville section of Fort Lee and educated the Catholic kids from Bridge Plaza North all the way to Jane Street and beyond in Englewood Cliffs. Holy Trinity didn’t have a P.T.A.; it had a “Mother’s Guild” which says everything it needs to say about the times. One afternoon just before the start of Spring I accompanied my mother, the Mother’s Guild secretary, as well as the—cringe—school secretary, to the former President of the Mother’s Guild’s house. 

I accompanied my mother that day for completely selfish reasons—I was madly in love with the former President’s son who, from the time I was a first-grader, had been a year ahead of me at Holy Trinity, but was now a freshman at Bergen Catholic. He was an altar-boy; he played basketball; he was a drummer. I had loved him since the fifth grade; he had loved my best friend since the fourth.

While my mother and my future mother-in-law chatted away in the kitchen, I pulled the cord of the cable box and sat alone and bored on his couch flipping and pressing the buttons trying to find something of interest to watch. F-1; L-2—watching cable was like playing bingo back then. I paused to see who was on The Mike Douglas Show, but it was a commercial. That was when I decided to go in search of his bedroom. I only mustered the courage to attempt this because I knew that he wasn’t home, and my once and future mothers were preoccupied. I don’t know what I thought I would find; my name scribbled on his desk blotter? A postage-stamp sized class picture of him as an awkward pre-teenager that I could steal and swoon over? Perhaps a few rubberbands for his braces that I could swipe from the small manila packet that he used to carry around in his white uniform shirt pocket and tape them onto a blank page of my diary? I don’t know. 

I walked down the dimly-lit beige-carpeted hallway of his split-level house. The door to the first room I passed was slightly opened, and I caught a glimpse of his drum set. (Cue heavenly music.) I pushed the door open and crossed into the inner-sanctum of his manly boudoir. I immediately noticed that over his desk hung a cabinet whose door was slightly ajar. I had every intention of closing it, but in a last minute reversal, I opened it instead. Things, lots and lots of things, came nose-diving out in rapid succession. In horror, I crossed my arms over my face like Tipi Hedren in Hitchcock’s The Birds waiting for the eruption to subside when something large and white came hurtling into my open palm and affixed itself like an albatross onto my hand. It was his jock strap. I freaked.

I tried to shake it off, because there was no way that I was touching it, but the more I shook it, the tighter it twisted around my wrist. Of course at that moment I heard the wheels of his ten-speed Schwinn steer into the garage. “Oh. My. God!” I had to get out of his bedroom fast, so I thrust my arm inside my zippered sweatshirt and retreated like Napoleon at Waterloo to the living room where I tripped over the cord of the cable box and fell face-first onto the cushion of the couch giving myself, I’m sure, a severe case of tweed burn. As I rearranged myself I tried to act nonchalant like it was perfectly normal for me to be sitting on his couch watching Mike Douglas interview Zsa Zsa Gabor while my right hand was indelicately shoved down the front of my sweatshirt giving the appearance that I was fondling myself.

Walking up the stairs from the basement, he seemed surprised to see me sitting alone on his couch. While I was silently imploring God to end my life right there, he confidently walked towards me. My head nearly exploded in sheer panic, but just as he appeared to be about to sit down beside me his mom summoned him into the kitchen. Noticing my hand shoved down my shirt he asked me what was wrong. What could I say, “Nothing, I’m just wearing your jock strap like a Speidel I.D. bracelet?” Instead my quivering thin lips released a nervous idiotic giggle that made my orthodontic retainer vibrate causing a sort of death-rattle sound to ooze from between the thin quaking lips of my mouth. Before retreating to the kitchen, he leaned over me and said, “Mmmm…Love’s Baby Soft?” I think I lost consciousness at that point.

And here I am, years later, sitting on my daughter’s bed holding that same-shaped perfume bottle in my hand marveling that across the span of decades the scent of Love’s Baby Soft is powerful enough to evoke buried memories of unrequited love, vibrating retainers and the twisted jock straps of altar boys.