“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.
In 1981, I was standing in a small, narrow, crowded little shop in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts called Colonial Drugs, staring at a very odd display of perfume testers. several gorgeous bottles of expensive extrait were arranged in alphabetical order on an incongruously primitive looking, unpainted wooden stand. The stand had several levels on it, and resembled those small wooden stands people put in spice cabinets so they can see the different spices more easily. Did someone, I wondered, just throw that together in their basement? And how was I supposed to test anything? Should I pick one of the bottles up?
I reached for the especially beautiful bottle labeled Mitsouko, a name I recognized, but when I tried to shift the bottle, I realized it was glued into place on the wooden stand. The middle-aged man in the white pharmacist coat who was behind the pharmacy counter finally noticed me, moved down the counter toward me, and brusquely informed me—oh, wonderful, yet another Bostonian who didn’t believe in being “fake nice”—that if I wanted to try anything, I’d have to dip a scent strip into the bottle, and he gestured toward the container of long paper strips. Then he walked away, back to his spot behind the pharmacy counter.
I decided to go for it. I carefully pulled the stopper off the Mitsouko bottle, dipped a scent script into the perfume, then carefully put the stopper back on the bottle. Then, because I wanted to smell the perfume on my skin, not on a piece of paper, I smeared the part of the scent trip that had perfume on it across my left inner wrist. I quickly sniffed my wrist—yes, the strategy I used had applied enough of the perfume for a good test—and I left the store. I was only trying one perfume that day because I wanted to give it a good wear and then jot down some notes about it.
You see, the year before I turned 30, I wasn’t that happy with how my life was turning out. Mainly I was afraid I was turning into a computer nerd because my day job was working as a technical writer for a relational database company, and it had turned out that was something I had a real talent for. Recently some of the men I worked with even told me I would make a good programmer. But my dream was still to write fiction, something I was doing in my off hours without much success—everything I came up with seemed mediocre and unimaginative, except maybe that one science fiction story about the pansexual alien, which was kind of fun. Looking back on it, I would say I was still struggling to find my voice.
So I came up with a plan. I would spend the whole year trying every single perfume I could until I found the perfect new signature perfume, one more appropriate for the next decade of my life than the one I was currently wearing. I had been wearing Cabochard, a beautiful leathery green perfume, since I was about 21 so even though Cabochard was sophisticated and sexy, I associated it with my youth. I also associated it with my mother, because she had been wearing it almost as long as I had ever since she smelled it on me and then ran out to get her own bottle.
I had conflicted feelings about my mother adopting Cabochard as her signature fragrance after I fell in love with it. On one hand, I always thought of her as more beautiful than I was and also more chic and fashionable than I could ever be, so having my taste validated by her was flattering. On the other hand, my boyfriend loved Cabochard on me so much that he would sniff my skin and sigh, “Mmm, so sexy.” And now my mother was going to smell like that, too?
And finally I was beginning to think that rebelling against my parents and their judgments about “style” and “good taste,” was something I needed to do. I was tired of hearing their voices in my head judging everything I did, especially when I was writing. But it had always been so hard to separate from my parents. They were so cool! They lived in a beautiful mid-century modern house designed just for them by a young architect, and they knew all kinds of interesting and arty people, artists, architects, graphic designers, gallery owners, etc. They were also so permissive! You’re 14 and you’re invited to smoke hash with some boys from your English class in a house in Westwood? Sure, sounds fun.
So choosing a new signature perfume was a serious project for me. I even created a perfume dataset (a predecessor to the digital spreadsheet that came a few years later) on our work computer using the relational database system that I was writing manuals about. Although I don’t remember the exact fields, or categories, that were in the dataset, each line included the name of a perfume I had tried, the house, the type of perfume (such as green, oriental, floral, citrus, etc.), whether it was a possibility for new signature perfume, and probably some notes.
And Colonial Drugs quickly became my favorite place to try perfumes. Not only did they seem to have a beautiful collection of perfume, but the shop was on my way home when I walked from my office that was just south of Harvard Square to our apartment that was just west of Harvard Square, making it easy to stop in there briefly as often as I liked. And being ignored by the pharmacist while I tested the perfumes turned out to be a plus for someone who was taking a very long time to make up her mind about what to buy.
You see, the year before I turned 30, I wasn’t that happy with how my life was turning out. Mainly I was afraid I was turning into a computer nerd because my day job was working as a technical writer for a relational database company, and it had turned out that was something I had a real talent for. Recently some of the men I worked with even told me I would make a good programmer. But my dream was still to write fiction, something I was doing in my off hours without much success—everything I came up with seemed mediocre and unimaginative, except maybe that one science fiction story about the pansexual alien, which was kind of fun. Looking back on it, I would say I was still struggling to find my voice.
So I came up with a plan. I would spend the whole year trying every single perfume I could until I found the perfect new signature perfume, one more appropriate for the next decade of my life than the one I was currently wearing. I had been wearing Cabochard, a beautiful leathery green perfume, since I was about 21 so even though Cabochard was sophisticated and sexy, I associated it with my youth. I also associated it with my mother, because she had been wearing it almost as long as I had ever since she smelled it on me and then ran out to get her own bottle.
I had conflicted feelings about my mother adopting Cabochard as her signature fragrance after I fell in love with it. On one hand, I always thought of her as more beautiful than I was and also more chic and fashionable than I could ever be, so having my taste validated by her was flattering. On the other hand, my boyfriend loved Cabochard on me so much that he would sniff my skin and sigh, “Mmm, so sexy.” And now my mother was going to smell like that, too?
And finally I was beginning to think that rebelling against my parents and their judgments about “style” and “good taste,” was something I needed to do. I was tired of hearing their voices in my head judging everything I did, especially when I was writing. But it had always been so hard to separate from my parents. They were so cool! They lived in a beautiful mid-century modern house designed just for them by a young architect, and they knew all kinds of interesting and arty people, artists, architects, graphic designers, gallery owners, etc. They were also so permissive! You’re 14 and you’re invited to smoke hash with some boys from your English class in a house in Westwood? Sure, sounds fun.
So choosing a new signature perfume was a serious project for me. I even created a perfume dataset (a predecessor to the digital spreadsheet that came a few years later) on our work computer using the relational database system that I was writing manuals about. Although I don’t remember the exact fields, or categories, that were in the dataset, each line included the name of a perfume I had tried, the house, the type of perfume (such as green, oriental, floral, citrus, etc.), whether it was a possibility for new signature perfume, and probably some notes.
And Colonial Drugs quickly became my favorite place to try perfumes. Not only did they seem to have a beautiful collection of perfume, but the shop was on my way home when I walked from my office that was just south of Harvard Square to our apartment that was just west of Harvard Square, making it easy to stop in there briefly as often as I liked. And being ignored by the pharmacist while I tested the perfumes turned out to be a plus for someone who was taking a very long time to make up her mind about what to buy.
So it was at Colonial Drugs that I first smelled Magie noire. I was immediately intrigued by its smell because it was so rich and complex. I ended up classifying it as an “oriental,” which is typically warm and sweet, but Magie noire seemed to have more to it than that because it was green as well as spicy, bitter as well as sweet, cool as well as warm, and dark as well as light, as if it included everything I liked in various perfumes but all in a single fragrance. With all those notes, it could have been a hot mess but somehow it all came together into something glorious.
I didn’t really care for the name, which meant Black Magic, because it was so cheesy or for the bottle, which was a Halloween-ish combination of black plastic with orange accents grafted onto a glass bottle. But the smell of Magie noire definitely cast a spell on me.
During that time, I also went the department stores in Back Bay and downtown Boston to test out perfumes there. And I sniffed other women’s perfume when I was in their houses. I discovered Caron’s Bellodgia, a gorgeous carnation-based floral, when I sniffed it on Suzanne, a younger friend of my parents, as we embraced each other at one of her parties. The warm spiciness of carnation and clove sent a little shiver of delight down my spine. When I asked her what perfume she was wearing, she took me into her bedroom and showed me her precious Baccarat crystal bottle of Bellodgia extrait. I still remember her explaining to me, in her southern accent, that she never bought the perfume for herself but that whatever man she was with somehow always knew when it was time to buy her another bottle. That expensive bottle of perfume and the story behind it surprised me because I knew Suzanne as an artist who was also a fabulous gardener and cook, and who sewed her own clothes. But I had to admit it—the perfume was just exquisite.
Then my birthday was approaching, and it was time to make the big decision. After all the perfumes I tried—around 100—I narrowed it down to just a few. I still loved Bellodgia, Suzanne’s perfume and I had found it for sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in Back Bay. But I just didn’t feel comfortable copying Suzanne’s perfume—I myself knew so well what it was like to have someone you know copy your signature perfume and besides I wanted something that was mine. So in the end all the perfumes that were in serious contention were at Colonial drugs.
The short list included three perfumes from Guerlain, Chamade, L’Heure Bleue, and Mitsouko, and Magie noire. I was drawn to Chamade, a scent that smelled “golden” to me —like pollen in the spring—but despite its undeniable beauty I felt it lacked that hint of sexiness I always wanted in a perfume. L’Heure Bleue was intoxicating—and definitely captured the “blueness” of dusk—but it had a grandeur and formality that felt foreign to me. As for Mitsouko, the first perfume I had tried at Colonial Drugs. I wouldn’t say I say I fell madly in love with it, but I found it completely fascinating. I thought it smelled mossy and beautiful and mysterious—it was so well blended that it was hard for me to identify any particular notes in it—which flowers were even in there? But it also was a bit musty. It reminded me of the trunk in which Tomi, our Japanese-American neighbor when I was growing up, stored the kimonos and other treasures she had brought back from her stay in Japan in the early fifties. And that slight mustiness—which only added to its intrigue from my point of view—also worried me a bit. Could I live with that day after day after day?
Magie noire was not only easier to wear than Mitsouko, but, unlike Chamade and L’Heure Bleue, it seemed to say exactly what I wanted my next perfume to say. As Tara of the A Bottled Rose blog said about Magie noire, “This is a woman who has grown comfortable in her own skin and feels able to speak her mind because she could care less what others think of her. She rejoices in her esoteric interests and values her coven. If you look closely, you can see a wry sparkle in her eye.”
So, after all that research and testing, I made my decision and let my husband know that I wanted the Magie noire extrait for my 30th birthday gift. He has always loved to splurge on gifts, so he bought me the eau de toilette as well as the extrait, and even the body lotion.
The next time I saw my mother was just a few days later when we flew out to Los Angeles for my birthday celebration.
“You have a new perfume!” she said, as soon as I hugged her. “It smells so wonderful. What’s it called? Magie noire? As soon as you leave, I’m going to buy myself a bottle, too.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, “Thanks a lot, bitch! I took a whole year to find myself a new signature perfume, and now you’re going to copy me—again?” But I decided to let it go because even though my mother and I were still very close and spoke to each other on the phone every week, we were living on opposite coasts, so we actually didn’t see each other physically very often. My new perfume would still signal the change for my next decade of life I wanted to embrace, right?
My mother did indeed buy herself a bottle of Magie noire, and it became the perfume she wore for the rest of her life.
I myself wore Magie noire every day for the next year and a half—on swelteringly hot and humid summer days, on crisp, snowy winter days, and rainy spring days when lilac was blooming everywhere, in smoked-filled meetings with software engineers and in local punk clubs, and even while walking by the Charles River on lazy Sundays.
And then I became pregnant, which was something I had really been hoping for. But along with all the other physical changes, including fatigue and nausea, my sense of smell changed completely. Suddenly I could no longer bear the smell of cooked meat, of tobacco smoke, and even my own perfume, Magie noire, which all increased my nausea. So I gave up meat, tried to avoid smoky rooms, and packed up my Magie noire for a time when, I assumed, my sense of smell would return to normal.
When I told my mother about how certain smells increased my nausea, including my perfume, I could tell she didn’t quite believe me, and she continued to wear her Magie noire when we finally saw each other in person. One day I finally said something. She and my father had come all the way to Cambridge, England, where my husband and I were then living, for a visit. And that day, when I was walking with her into town and we were crossing Mid-Summer Common, a wide-open park on the town side of the River Cam, her perfume was so strong, even on that chilly late winter day, with a breeze blowing across the park, that I blurted, “Your perfume—even outside the smell of it makes me feel really nauseated.” But my mother just shrugged. And a few months later when she came back for a month to help take care of the baby and of me, she was still wearing Magie noire every day. But she was also cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, bathing the baby, and generally being so helpful to me that I never spoke of it again.
So it was that even after my hormones returned to normal, and I went back to enjoying the smell of perfume, I still could not stand the smell of Magie noire. It was forever associated with feeling nauseated during pregnancy and with that winter day in Cambridge, England, when my mother didn’t take my complaint seriously. So after I returned to the US, I gave my mother my partly used bottles of extrait and eau de toilette, the ones my husband had bought for my thirtieth birthday, saying she should have them because I didn’t think I would ever wear Magie noire again.
I did go back to wearing perfume, however, I simply started wearing Cabochard again. Now I wonder why I didn’t run out any get any of the runner-up fragrances from my year of testing. Perhaps the whole experience of hunting down the perfect perfume was ruined for me. Or maybe I was just glad to have my original signature fragrance back—the one with the creation story I loved so much—the French fashion designer Madame Gres had given up her business rather than collaborate with the Nazis, and this perfume was created to celebrate her return to business with a name that meant “headstrong.”
Then my mother told me that she and my father were thinking of selling their house in Los Angeles and moving up to Berkeley, where, by that time, I was living with my husband and daughter. Berkeley was perfect for them, she explained, because they could buy a house for less than the value of their Los Angeles house, and they could live in a neighborhood where you could get around on foot and public transportation, something my father needed to do because of eyesight problems. She said, “But I wanted to ask you how you felt about it. Is this plan all right with you?”
The truth is that I was very conflicted about the thought of my parents moving to Berkeley—this would be the first time in many years that we had even living in the same city and I wondered if I return to being in my parent’s thrall the way I was when I was a child. Or would I be able to live my own life and forge a different kind of relationship with these two people I still loved so much? I really wasn’t sure, but I did know that the move would be a good one for them. So, I said, “Yes. Yes, I think you should do it.”
And in the end I was glad I told her that. My parents bought a beautiful craftsman house on the other side of town from us, and my mother soon became the center of our family life, hosting Sunday dinners for the family every week and holiday parties for friends who lived in the area or came up to visit from Los Angeles. Eventually my brother also moved to the area, so I had my whole family nearby, something many of my peers envied.
She kept being my mother, in that she was always there when I needed help. When I had a miscarriage and my husband was out of town, she drove me to the hospital and took care of my daughter. When my second child was born, she helped me the same way she had with the first. And she loved taking care of my children—there were sleepovers with macaroni and cheese for dinner, cartoons on cable TV, and hot cocoa and English muffins for breakfast, and there were outings to Fairyland in Oakland and even to Disneyland. But she and I also developed a kind of friendship as well, where we spoke often on the phone, read the same novels so we could discuss them, and went into downtown San Francisco together for lunch and shopping.
I did chafe a bit under my mother’s still frequent expressions of disapproval, mostly about my taste, our somewhat shabby house, and our childrearing decisions. She hated it when I let my hair grow out in longer, messy curls and kept asking hopefully when I was going to cut it all off and wear it short and neat again the way she wore hers. But in the end, all of that just began to seem like the small price I paid to have a mother who was an integral part of my every-day life. And I was able to find my own way in life, slowly becoming so much more than the demoralized technical writer I once was.
Gradually, as my mother grew older, I started to help her more and more. We began to have family dinners and celebrations at our house instead of hers so we could take over the cooking and cleaning. When she was treated for breast cancer, I ran all her errands for her. And when she broke her hip, my brother and I helped with shopping and meals, making the house more accessible, and taking her out for walks as she recovered.
When her breast cancer came back at the age of 85—this time it was metastatic and she classified as eligible for hospice care—my brother and I stepped up. I took care of finances, finding caregivers so she could die at home, organized food—all the things my father was no longer capable of doing. And, of course, I sat with her. It was the first time I had helped someone who was dying, and it was so confusing and painful—I sometimes felt like we just lurched from crisis to crisis, from frantic phone calls to frantic phone call—and I cried so much when I was alone that my face hurt. And in her last weeks, when she was too weak to talk much and she made it clear to me that she no longer wished to interact with family and friends and just wanted, as she put it, to “get it over with,” my brother and I had to make some very difficult decisions for her.
After she died, I took my father to stay at my house, but my brother and I decided to pay an extra month’s rent on the place where my parents had been living to give us some time before we had to movement everything out of the apartment. And that is how I found myself, a month after she died, standing in my parents old bathroom and contemplating my mother’s three bottles of perfume, the partially full newer bottle Magie noire eau de toilette that had been on the bathroom counter (obviously the one she’d been using until she got too sick to care about perfume) along with an older bottle of Magie noire extrait that looked very much like the bottle my husband had bought me for my 30th birthday and that I had later passed on to her after I had my first baby, and the unopened bottle of Prada that I found under the sink. I knew my brother wouldn’t want them—he hates perfume—so I decided I would just take all three bottles home and deal with them later.
When I was ready to face the perfume, I set the Prada aside to wear when my current bottle was empty; I had never smelled it on her, so it still seemed like my perfume, not hers. But what was I going to do with the two bottles of Magie noire? I should test the extrait, I decided. After all, I had once found it to be one of the most beautiful perfumes I had had ever smelled. But when I opened the bottle and just took a quick sniff, I was assailed by such a powerful combination of negative emotions—grief and anger and anxiety and guilt—that I closed up the bottle and walked away. I had spent so much time with her when she was dying—had I done all the right things? Had I said all the right things?
I realized that what had once been my mother’s signature perfume had become so intolerable to me that I couldn’t even bear to have the two bottles in the house. So—don’t hate me perfume collectors—I put that rare and expensive bottle of extrait out on the sidewalk in front of our house (that’s how people “freecycle” stuff they don’t want in my neighborhood) and someone else—I will never know who—picked it up and took it home, along with the eau de toilette.
Yes, I know. I regret it. I regret it so much. Because a few years later when I finally came around to thinking that I really should have a bottle of Magie noire, the world had caught up with me in thinking that Magie noire was one of the all-time great perfumes, and bottles of the vintage extrait, like the one I put out on the street, were going for astronomical prices.
What could I do? I decided that I should just let it go. But it turned out that Magie noire wasn’t through with me yet. A dear friend of mine from the period when I had lived in Cambridge and had chosen Magie noire as my signature perfume now lived in her home country, Belgium (she also had only lived in Boston for a few years when her husband was a graduate student at MIT). We stayed in touch over the years and I tried to visit her every time I went to Europe. And on my next visit to her, I noticed that she had in her bathroom a bottle of Magie noire, one that looked quite old, maybe even from the period when I got my original bottle. It seemed like a strange choice of perfume for someone who, as far as I knew, only wore O by Lancome, a bright and fresh citrus perfume.
When I asked her about it, she said, “It’s not really me but I bought it a long time ago because it reminded me of Boston.”
I shook my head in disbelief, “Bea, I said, if it reminds you of Boston, that’s because it’s the perfume I wore when we were all living there.”
I didn’t really care for the name, which meant Black Magic, because it was so cheesy or for the bottle, which was a Halloween-ish combination of black plastic with orange accents grafted onto a glass bottle. But the smell of Magie noire definitely cast a spell on me.
During that time, I also went the department stores in Back Bay and downtown Boston to test out perfumes there. And I sniffed other women’s perfume when I was in their houses. I discovered Caron’s Bellodgia, a gorgeous carnation-based floral, when I sniffed it on Suzanne, a younger friend of my parents, as we embraced each other at one of her parties. The warm spiciness of carnation and clove sent a little shiver of delight down my spine. When I asked her what perfume she was wearing, she took me into her bedroom and showed me her precious Baccarat crystal bottle of Bellodgia extrait. I still remember her explaining to me, in her southern accent, that she never bought the perfume for herself but that whatever man she was with somehow always knew when it was time to buy her another bottle. That expensive bottle of perfume and the story behind it surprised me because I knew Suzanne as an artist who was also a fabulous gardener and cook, and who sewed her own clothes. But I had to admit it—the perfume was just exquisite.
Then my birthday was approaching, and it was time to make the big decision. After all the perfumes I tried—around 100—I narrowed it down to just a few. I still loved Bellodgia, Suzanne’s perfume and I had found it for sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in Back Bay. But I just didn’t feel comfortable copying Suzanne’s perfume—I myself knew so well what it was like to have someone you know copy your signature perfume and besides I wanted something that was mine. So in the end all the perfumes that were in serious contention were at Colonial drugs.
The short list included three perfumes from Guerlain, Chamade, L’Heure Bleue, and Mitsouko, and Magie noire. I was drawn to Chamade, a scent that smelled “golden” to me —like pollen in the spring—but despite its undeniable beauty I felt it lacked that hint of sexiness I always wanted in a perfume. L’Heure Bleue was intoxicating—and definitely captured the “blueness” of dusk—but it had a grandeur and formality that felt foreign to me. As for Mitsouko, the first perfume I had tried at Colonial Drugs. I wouldn’t say I say I fell madly in love with it, but I found it completely fascinating. I thought it smelled mossy and beautiful and mysterious—it was so well blended that it was hard for me to identify any particular notes in it—which flowers were even in there? But it also was a bit musty. It reminded me of the trunk in which Tomi, our Japanese-American neighbor when I was growing up, stored the kimonos and other treasures she had brought back from her stay in Japan in the early fifties. And that slight mustiness—which only added to its intrigue from my point of view—also worried me a bit. Could I live with that day after day after day?
Magie noire was not only easier to wear than Mitsouko, but, unlike Chamade and L’Heure Bleue, it seemed to say exactly what I wanted my next perfume to say. As Tara of the A Bottled Rose blog said about Magie noire, “This is a woman who has grown comfortable in her own skin and feels able to speak her mind because she could care less what others think of her. She rejoices in her esoteric interests and values her coven. If you look closely, you can see a wry sparkle in her eye.”
So, after all that research and testing, I made my decision and let my husband know that I wanted the Magie noire extrait for my 30th birthday gift. He has always loved to splurge on gifts, so he bought me the eau de toilette as well as the extrait, and even the body lotion.
The next time I saw my mother was just a few days later when we flew out to Los Angeles for my birthday celebration.
“You have a new perfume!” she said, as soon as I hugged her. “It smells so wonderful. What’s it called? Magie noire? As soon as you leave, I’m going to buy myself a bottle, too.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, “Thanks a lot, bitch! I took a whole year to find myself a new signature perfume, and now you’re going to copy me—again?” But I decided to let it go because even though my mother and I were still very close and spoke to each other on the phone every week, we were living on opposite coasts, so we actually didn’t see each other physically very often. My new perfume would still signal the change for my next decade of life I wanted to embrace, right?
My mother did indeed buy herself a bottle of Magie noire, and it became the perfume she wore for the rest of her life.
I myself wore Magie noire every day for the next year and a half—on swelteringly hot and humid summer days, on crisp, snowy winter days, and rainy spring days when lilac was blooming everywhere, in smoked-filled meetings with software engineers and in local punk clubs, and even while walking by the Charles River on lazy Sundays.
And then I became pregnant, which was something I had really been hoping for. But along with all the other physical changes, including fatigue and nausea, my sense of smell changed completely. Suddenly I could no longer bear the smell of cooked meat, of tobacco smoke, and even my own perfume, Magie noire, which all increased my nausea. So I gave up meat, tried to avoid smoky rooms, and packed up my Magie noire for a time when, I assumed, my sense of smell would return to normal.
When I told my mother about how certain smells increased my nausea, including my perfume, I could tell she didn’t quite believe me, and she continued to wear her Magie noire when we finally saw each other in person. One day I finally said something. She and my father had come all the way to Cambridge, England, where my husband and I were then living, for a visit. And that day, when I was walking with her into town and we were crossing Mid-Summer Common, a wide-open park on the town side of the River Cam, her perfume was so strong, even on that chilly late winter day, with a breeze blowing across the park, that I blurted, “Your perfume—even outside the smell of it makes me feel really nauseated.” But my mother just shrugged. And a few months later when she came back for a month to help take care of the baby and of me, she was still wearing Magie noire every day. But she was also cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, bathing the baby, and generally being so helpful to me that I never spoke of it again.
So it was that even after my hormones returned to normal, and I went back to enjoying the smell of perfume, I still could not stand the smell of Magie noire. It was forever associated with feeling nauseated during pregnancy and with that winter day in Cambridge, England, when my mother didn’t take my complaint seriously. So after I returned to the US, I gave my mother my partly used bottles of extrait and eau de toilette, the ones my husband had bought for my thirtieth birthday, saying she should have them because I didn’t think I would ever wear Magie noire again.
I did go back to wearing perfume, however, I simply started wearing Cabochard again. Now I wonder why I didn’t run out any get any of the runner-up fragrances from my year of testing. Perhaps the whole experience of hunting down the perfect perfume was ruined for me. Or maybe I was just glad to have my original signature fragrance back—the one with the creation story I loved so much—the French fashion designer Madame Gres had given up her business rather than collaborate with the Nazis, and this perfume was created to celebrate her return to business with a name that meant “headstrong.”
Then my mother told me that she and my father were thinking of selling their house in Los Angeles and moving up to Berkeley, where, by that time, I was living with my husband and daughter. Berkeley was perfect for them, she explained, because they could buy a house for less than the value of their Los Angeles house, and they could live in a neighborhood where you could get around on foot and public transportation, something my father needed to do because of eyesight problems. She said, “But I wanted to ask you how you felt about it. Is this plan all right with you?”
The truth is that I was very conflicted about the thought of my parents moving to Berkeley—this would be the first time in many years that we had even living in the same city and I wondered if I return to being in my parent’s thrall the way I was when I was a child. Or would I be able to live my own life and forge a different kind of relationship with these two people I still loved so much? I really wasn’t sure, but I did know that the move would be a good one for them. So, I said, “Yes. Yes, I think you should do it.”
And in the end I was glad I told her that. My parents bought a beautiful craftsman house on the other side of town from us, and my mother soon became the center of our family life, hosting Sunday dinners for the family every week and holiday parties for friends who lived in the area or came up to visit from Los Angeles. Eventually my brother also moved to the area, so I had my whole family nearby, something many of my peers envied.
She kept being my mother, in that she was always there when I needed help. When I had a miscarriage and my husband was out of town, she drove me to the hospital and took care of my daughter. When my second child was born, she helped me the same way she had with the first. And she loved taking care of my children—there were sleepovers with macaroni and cheese for dinner, cartoons on cable TV, and hot cocoa and English muffins for breakfast, and there were outings to Fairyland in Oakland and even to Disneyland. But she and I also developed a kind of friendship as well, where we spoke often on the phone, read the same novels so we could discuss them, and went into downtown San Francisco together for lunch and shopping.
I did chafe a bit under my mother’s still frequent expressions of disapproval, mostly about my taste, our somewhat shabby house, and our childrearing decisions. She hated it when I let my hair grow out in longer, messy curls and kept asking hopefully when I was going to cut it all off and wear it short and neat again the way she wore hers. But in the end, all of that just began to seem like the small price I paid to have a mother who was an integral part of my every-day life. And I was able to find my own way in life, slowly becoming so much more than the demoralized technical writer I once was.
Gradually, as my mother grew older, I started to help her more and more. We began to have family dinners and celebrations at our house instead of hers so we could take over the cooking and cleaning. When she was treated for breast cancer, I ran all her errands for her. And when she broke her hip, my brother and I helped with shopping and meals, making the house more accessible, and taking her out for walks as she recovered.
When her breast cancer came back at the age of 85—this time it was metastatic and she classified as eligible for hospice care—my brother and I stepped up. I took care of finances, finding caregivers so she could die at home, organized food—all the things my father was no longer capable of doing. And, of course, I sat with her. It was the first time I had helped someone who was dying, and it was so confusing and painful—I sometimes felt like we just lurched from crisis to crisis, from frantic phone calls to frantic phone call—and I cried so much when I was alone that my face hurt. And in her last weeks, when she was too weak to talk much and she made it clear to me that she no longer wished to interact with family and friends and just wanted, as she put it, to “get it over with,” my brother and I had to make some very difficult decisions for her.
After she died, I took my father to stay at my house, but my brother and I decided to pay an extra month’s rent on the place where my parents had been living to give us some time before we had to movement everything out of the apartment. And that is how I found myself, a month after she died, standing in my parents old bathroom and contemplating my mother’s three bottles of perfume, the partially full newer bottle Magie noire eau de toilette that had been on the bathroom counter (obviously the one she’d been using until she got too sick to care about perfume) along with an older bottle of Magie noire extrait that looked very much like the bottle my husband had bought me for my 30th birthday and that I had later passed on to her after I had my first baby, and the unopened bottle of Prada that I found under the sink. I knew my brother wouldn’t want them—he hates perfume—so I decided I would just take all three bottles home and deal with them later.
When I was ready to face the perfume, I set the Prada aside to wear when my current bottle was empty; I had never smelled it on her, so it still seemed like my perfume, not hers. But what was I going to do with the two bottles of Magie noire? I should test the extrait, I decided. After all, I had once found it to be one of the most beautiful perfumes I had had ever smelled. But when I opened the bottle and just took a quick sniff, I was assailed by such a powerful combination of negative emotions—grief and anger and anxiety and guilt—that I closed up the bottle and walked away. I had spent so much time with her when she was dying—had I done all the right things? Had I said all the right things?
I realized that what had once been my mother’s signature perfume had become so intolerable to me that I couldn’t even bear to have the two bottles in the house. So—don’t hate me perfume collectors—I put that rare and expensive bottle of extrait out on the sidewalk in front of our house (that’s how people “freecycle” stuff they don’t want in my neighborhood) and someone else—I will never know who—picked it up and took it home, along with the eau de toilette.
Yes, I know. I regret it. I regret it so much. Because a few years later when I finally came around to thinking that I really should have a bottle of Magie noire, the world had caught up with me in thinking that Magie noire was one of the all-time great perfumes, and bottles of the vintage extrait, like the one I put out on the street, were going for astronomical prices.
What could I do? I decided that I should just let it go. But it turned out that Magie noire wasn’t through with me yet. A dear friend of mine from the period when I had lived in Cambridge and had chosen Magie noire as my signature perfume now lived in her home country, Belgium (she also had only lived in Boston for a few years when her husband was a graduate student at MIT). We stayed in touch over the years and I tried to visit her every time I went to Europe. And on my next visit to her, I noticed that she had in her bathroom a bottle of Magie noire, one that looked quite old, maybe even from the period when I got my original bottle. It seemed like a strange choice of perfume for someone who, as far as I knew, only wore O by Lancome, a bright and fresh citrus perfume.
When I asked her about it, she said, “It’s not really me but I bought it a long time ago because it reminded me of Boston.”
I shook my head in disbelief, “Bea, I said, if it reminds you of Boston, that’s because it’s the perfume I wore when we were all living there.”
She just smiled and said, “I don’t actually wear it, so if you want it, you should take it with you.”
So now I own a vintage bottle of Magie noire again. I’d like to say that I’ve now reached the point where I can wear this beautiful perfume, but the truth is I haven’t. However, I do occasionally like to sniff the bottle I got from Bea and maybe even dab a bit on my left wrist. It’s all still there—green as well as spicy, bitter as well as sweet, cool as well as warm, and dark as well as light—along with the dizzying rush of love and grief, comfort and anxiety, and beginnings and endings that Magie noire always creates within me.
So now I own a vintage bottle of Magie noire again. I’d like to say that I’ve now reached the point where I can wear this beautiful perfume, but the truth is I haven’t. However, I do occasionally like to sniff the bottle I got from Bea and maybe even dab a bit on my left wrist. It’s all still there—green as well as spicy, bitter as well as sweet, cool as well as warm, and dark as well as light—along with the dizzying rush of love and grief, comfort and anxiety, and beginnings and endings that Magie noire always creates within me.
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