At the beginning of my first year of high school, I still had straightened hair (which I wore short and hidden under what I hoped was a cute little white cap) and the group of friends I had made in Junior High had drifted apart. In fact, I rarely saw any of them because, as I was surprised to find, I had been “tracked” into separate set of classes from the rest of them, which were designed for those with the highest IQs in 10th grade, most of whom I’d never seen before. Although those kids were nice enough, they mostly seemed like nerds with super organized notebooks and neat pencil cases and big plans for getting straight A’s and I felt very out of place. Then Sylvia, who sat in front of me in one of my classes, started talking to me.
Holding up a paperback copy of L'Étranger by Camus, she said, “This book is so brilliant! And I just love reading it in the original French.”
I replied that I also thought the book was brilliant but had only read it in English because I was taking Spanish.
“I just love everything French,” she said. “French literature, French movies, French food.”
That made me take a hard look at her. She had the conventionally desired stick-straight long blond hair, but I wouldn’t have called her pretty. Her nose and jaw were strong and her lightly freckled skin was so pale she looked as if she might be cool to the touch instead of warm. “French food?” I asked.
She flipped her hair back over her shoulders, “My friend Betty’s step mother makes the best steak au poivre!”
Eventually she invited me to her house. After introducing me to her mother, she took me into her bedroom—which was painted dark purple—and we sat together on the floor. She played Incense and Peppermints by the Strawberry Alarm Clock for me—it was her latest obsession, she said—and lit up a joint, which she shared with me. Then she brought out paints and paper, and we had fun messing around with watercolors while Incense and Peppermints played over and over—“Who cares what games we choose/Little to win, but nothing to lose.”
I was awestruck—this was a girl who knew what she liked and what she wanted, and she went after it. Purple was her favorite color so the walls of her room were deep purple. She loved fried eggs, but only the whites, so she asked for fried eggs for breakfast and ate only the part she wanted. She said she had a crush on Richard Saul and when I expressed surprised because I had known him since first grade, she said bluntly, “That’s the type I like—short, smart, nerdy Jewish boys.”
Then, a few weeks later, when we stopped to sniff perfume at a department store in Beverly Hills, Sylvia fell in love with a fragrance in a bottle printed with black lace that seemed over the top to me: Femme. It was fruity (peach, plum, and apricot), flowery (jasmine, rose, and ylang ylang), spicy (cinnamon and clove), and skanky (musk, leather, and civet), all at the same time. And even though most people would have said this drop-dead sexy fragrance, which perfume critic Victoria Frolova says is “seductive and cruel at the same time, a vision of beauty that makes one lose all senses,” was not quite the perfume a 15 year old should wear to high school, Sylvia chose Femme as her signature fragrance and from then on wore it every single day.
Soon after that Sylvia introduced me to her friend Betty, a tall and gawky girl with an artsy sense of style and a goofy sense of humor. I liked her immediately so instead of being rivals we three became an inseparable trio, meeting in the same spot every day at lunch time to trade books—the Beat poets, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Anais Nin and Doris Lessing—and brainstorm about wonderful, unexpected things we could do in Los Angeles on the weekends. We loved foreign movies, like the French New Wave films, and Hollywood classics, especially those with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Then there were the hot fudge sundaes at CC Browns, where you could sit in old fashioned wooden booths and the fudge sauce came in small brown ceramic pitchers. Later we discovered the UCLA botanical gardens, which were free and open to the public., and that became our oasis of beauty and privacy right in the middle of the city. We got in the habit of going there to read out loud to each other (after a few afternoons of reading the classic Dracula, Betty and Sylvia spent the next several months talking in fake Transylvanian accents whenever the three of us were together).
Betty had a signature perfume, too, the French classic Chanel No. 5, which her French step mother had given her. And for us wearing sophisticated, complex, and womanly fragrances—so unlike the girly preferred by our classmates—the clean, lemony Jean Nate, the delicate floral of Yardley’s Lily of the Valley, the sweet and powdery Heaven Scent—was the membership card to our elite clique of three: “We only wear French perfume!”
Finally, the summer before my second year of high school I got up the courage to cut my hair off so I could stop straightening it. I was partly inspired by the women in the Black Power movement with their beautiful “naturals,” which they proudly made even bigger, and frizzier, by teasing out with special combs and also by the hippies of the Free Speech movement, who wore their long hair however nature made it—straight, wavy, curly, frizzy—let your freak flag fly! When I went in for my appointment, I had no idea how my hair was going to look afterward—I just craved the personal liberation going natural would bring—and I was surprised when it dried into a soft halo of springy curls.
But when I returned to school, I quickly discovered that the personal was the political. “Is that a boy or a girl?” “Haha, she looks like Bob Dylan.” “Well, maybe hardly anyone else does, but I like your hair.” I was flanked by Sylvia and Betty, however, and anyone who dared insult me in their presence was recommended to fuck off. This helped me strengthen my resolve to look like myself, no matter what kind of flack I got for it. And that was it for me. Never again would I try to fit in, and I wore my hair natural for the rest of my life, even after “big” hair went out of fashion and then came in again and then went out again, and was always, for some reason, considered “unprofessional.”
The summer before my third year in High School I volunteered to work at a residential organization that helped drug addicts get and stay clean. The staff put me on a two-week rotation, starting with manning the reception desk, then on to working behind the bar, and finally assisting at the child care center. As I entered the child care center on my first day, I was astonished to see that guy—the boy who looked like a man—all six feet of—standing in atrium with the sunlight pouring down on him. It felt surreal after all those years to actually meet that guy—he turned out to be volunteering, too—and to learn his name, which was John. I was used to looking at him but had never heard him speak, so what I noticed right away was John’s deep, strong voice and his loud, hearty laugh as I regaled him with my stories about my stint as a bartender, which had consisted of standing behind a real bar that overlooked the beach and the Pacific Ocean and dispensing soft drinks and seltzer to both recovering drug addicts, some of whom had been dangerous criminals, and their supporters, who were either eating peanut butter sandwiches or just looking for someone to make small talk with. John told me that although he was living with his father and stepmother in Westwood, he’d been attending Pacific Palisades High. Was that why I had seen him hitch hiking on Sunset Boulevard every morning during the last couple of years, I asked him. He said yes, but added with a smile that this coming fall he would be starting at University High (my high school). I felt surprisingly at ease talking to him—he seemed so open, natural, and comfortable—and besides I didn’t have a crush on him because after all he was just that guy.
Over the next two weeks, John and I kept a running conversation going as we monitored the kids playing in the courtyard, breaking off only when one of us needed to intervene in a crisis or comfort a child in tears. And the more we talked, the more surprised I was. Despite his appearance—he still had the broad-shouldered, muscular build of a football player along with the all-American square-jawed handsome face and blond hair to go with it—he wasn’t a jock or even a surfer. He was, in fact, deep into some of the same books and movies that Sylvia, Betty, and I were obsessed with and had some sharp and perceptive observations about them. He was also unexpectedly honest and straightforward. He told me that he and his younger twin sisters had only moved in with their father a couple of ago, and before that he’d been raised by his mother and her parents. But his mother was a schizophrenic, who had been in and out of the hospital John’s entire life—that was why his father had left her—and now that his grandfather was dead and his grandmother was elderly and on her own, coping with three grandchildren and a mentally ill daughter had become too much for his grandmother, so his father—who had struggled with alcoholism until recently—had finally stepped in.
On the last day of my two-week assignment, John brought me a small bouquet of garden flowers he’d picked himself—they reminded me of you, he said—your hair makes you look like a dandelion—and he asked if he could come by that weekend to visit me at our house in Beverly Glen. I said yes but asked how would he be able to get up there (neither of us had cars). He said, “Don’t worry, I can just hitch hike!”
After dinner that Saturday, I didn't change out of my jeans–after all this wasn't a date—we were just hanging out—but I did splash on some Le De Givenchy and oh, yes, there was that little jolt of pleasure I always got from the tangy herbal top notes. It was only after John arrived and I had introduced him to my parents that I suddenly realized that sitting with him in our living room while my family was going in and out was going to be awkward. It was still light out so I asked, “Would you like to go up in the hills?” and then led him out into the backyard, over the retaining wall, and up the tiny path, rocky path that wound behind the hill, which took us immediately out of sight of the house. From there, we climbed together to the plateau where the Sweet Acacia tree stood. I told him that this was my secret place and it was actually the first time I’d ever had anyone join me here. Then he sat down under the tree and I sat down next to him, and of course that is when he kissed me. And even though French kissing felt nothing like I had imagined it—there was no ecstatic rush of pleasure—just the shock of a soft, wet tongue in my mouth—I kissed him back because after all those years of noticing him—of somehow being drawn to him from afar—it felt like a relationship was fated and I was dying of curiosity to see where it was going to go.
It was late summer so the Sweet Acacia was not in bloom (every year from late January to April it was covered in tiny, fuzzy, yellow balls that produced a surprisingly strong fragrance, which I adored, dreamy and honey-like), so when we lay down together on the bed of feathery Acacia leaves under the tree and he took me in his arms and kissed me sweetly all over my face and neck, what I smelled was him and me and my perfume mingled together in the warmth of the chaparral. Oh how I wish I could remember the scent of his skin—which I got to know so well during the next year—because sometimes for a fraction of a second it brushes by me like butterfly wings—but all I have left are some photographs and this bottle of Le De Givenchy, the bottle that was not my bottle back then but that looks and smells the one I had when I met John.
Because life is so complex and bittersweet, when a perfume triggers memories it will bring you sorrow as well as joy and pain as well as pleasure. So perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that this story has a sad, even tragic, ending. But that ending would take several more years to unfold. So for now let’s just leave the two of us at the beginning of our love affair, lying together under the Sweet Acacia tree up in the hills behind the house where I grew up.
See What I Chose, Part 1 for the first half of this story (I'll unite the two parts one of these days). And see In the Dark for a tiny peek at the very end of this story.
by Nina Zolotow
by Nina Zolotow
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