After my brother and I dealt with everything that was still in the kitchen and living room, we had to face what we’d been putting off: going through our mother’s personal possessions. Her clothes, shoes, and accessories—the things she wore on her body—seemed like an inextricable part of her physical presence. When we walked into the bedroom and I saw the chest where her jewelry, scarves, and belts were kept, I shook my head. It seemed so wrong that these things should live on even after the person who owned them and made them come alive had been reduced to ashes stored for now in a nondescript box.
“Why don’t you look through Mom’s jewelry,” I said. “See if there is anything you want for your daughter.” I procrastinated by going into the bathroom and starting to clear out the cabinets in there. Even though there was an intimacy in going through shampoo and medications and such, decisions were fairly easy. Yes, I would use the Bandaids. No, that baby shampoo could go.
But when I opened the cabinet below the sink, a place where you normally would see only toilet paper and cleaning supplies, I found a bottle of perfume stashed away in there. And I said to myself, “Oh, no, Mom, not again!”
Because that perfume, the original one from Prada (a sheer, modern amber fragrance) was the very perfume that I had been wearing myself lately. And this wasn’t the first time my mother had copied my perfume. In fact, the perfume on the bathroom counter, Magie noire—the only perfume I had expected to see—was also one she had copied from me many years ago. What was different was that this time she was keeping it a secret, literally hiding it away. So she must have known that her buying a bottle of my latest perfume was something I wouldn’t like. And she was right. I didn’t like it.
Let me tell you why.
To read the rest of this story, go here: https://delusiastic.blogspot.com/p/five-stars.html
by Nina Zolotow
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