What, what, what now? I'm so tired of everything being urgent.
But I open the window anyway, lean out slightly, wait for her urgent request. She'd been playing outside for five minutes, the first time in several days I'd been able to persuade her that going outside to play might fall within fun parameters.
Maybe it was because, if you concentrated and breathed deep, you could smell spring coming. It was really too early still; winter was probably still there underneath in the ground, waiting its chance for a comeback. But it had fallen down on the job this week and let spring start to wake up, just a little, just stretching, just releasing enough warmth so that you could smell it not as you faced the wind, but as you turned your back on it, heading back inside.
I'd gotten my husband a wine-tasting kit for Christmas, a set of a couple of dozen vials of odors. Who knows how they did it, squeezing smells into little plastic jars, but the idea was to make you better at wine-tasting by recognizing the component odors of a glass of wine. Each vial was topped with a cap and, underneath, a plastic sieve so you couldn't see the inside, but, if you opened the lid and put it to your nose, each one let loose an odor: kiwi, leather, pepper, mold.
It had turned out to be a harder game than I thought; you'd smell something and you'd know exactly what it meant, summer, spicy, cut grass, something gone bad…but I couldn't put a name to them, even the easy ones, even the shuddas, "I shudda gotten that one!"
The wind on this day was like that: I could recognize the smell, but I had to concentrate to know it for what it was. Why did my daughter change her mind about hibernating curled up next to the TV and go outside? Could she smell it? Did she know she could smell it?
"Mama, I have to tell you. Don't tell anybody."
"Okay."
"I'm looking inside my body," she said, making several small circles in the air iin front of her torso with palms faced inward so that I'd both understand where she was looking and that what she was looking for required protecting. "I'm looking and I can't find my powers. I had powers in me and now I'm looking and I can't find them."
Now she had my attention. This did sound urgent, after all.
"What do you mean, you had powers? What kinds of powers?"
"I had powers to just do things, I don't know. All kinds of things. And I think they're gone. Mama, what do I do? I want my powers back."
And I want them for you, my baby.
At the same time, I didn't really have any idea what she was talking about. You think you know your child, this being you've cared for, fussed over, watched breathe at night, and waited on and resented since the moment she appeared on the planet. Were we not everything to each other? But suddenly, I got a glimpse of this whole other being inside there, a whole life I'd hadn't even known was there despite physically being in her presence for all but about some slivery percentage of her seven years. And this being, apparently, has been living in there for some time, time enough to discover she has powers.
"Baby, I think maybe you just you need to keep looking. On the inside."
"What do I look for?"
"I don't know. I don't know what powers you had."
She looked at me, still believing I was going to figure this out for her.
"Maybe you didn't use them for a while," I volunteered. "And they changed. Maybe they changed form and they're new powers now. You've still got powers but they're different powers now."
I looked at her, still believing I was going to figure this out for her. I thought that bit about the powers changing form was a good line…I'm keeping that one.
"You need to look a while longer? Try for 10 more minutes," I suggest. If you put a timeframe on an idea for a kid, sometimes that helps. Sometimes they forget before the time runs out; or sometimes they tell you they've noticed that you've misled them. If enough of these add up, it means another shrink's kid gets to go to college. Let's see what happens this time.
"Okay, Mama." She turns and steps back on the skateboard that she'd jumped off before she started yelling for me. She has her jump-rope, missing one plastic hand-grip on the end, looped over her arm.
Whatever powers she discovered she was missing, apparently they weren't the power of skateboarding or jump-roping, although that might be because, truth be told, she doesn't do either of those things particularly well. Apparently, pretending to herself that she could do either of these things particularly well wasn't among her powers either, even though she was normally good at pretending this kind of thing.
Come to think of it, I thought as I closed the window, pretending I am good at stuff I'm not good at would be a good power to have.
A little breeze was pushed inside by the movement of the windows, which all open inward here in my house in France, like doors do. All windows are French doors here in this home, even the little ones.
I could smell that smell again on the breeze as it whisked into the room with me, if only for a second, and I recognized the smell without being able to name it.
That's what she meant. That's what she's talking about.
It smelled like that outside our house in San Leandro, in California. I had powers too. Or I thought I did.
There was a stunted old crabapple tree in front of our house. It must have been one pathetic tree because it seemed stumpy and dwarfish to me even then and I must have been her age, rather stumpy too.
I stood under the tree and jumped off the sidewalk. I thought I was Peter Pan like in the Disney movie, my favorite. I was all cocky like Peter Pan, only a girl, and I thought that if I practiced jumping off often enough, eventually I would fly. I never worried I would hit my head on the crabapple tree – what the hell is a crabapple anyway? I never saw anything labeled crabapple. Do you eat them? I hope they just made that name up for stumpy trees with flowers because who'd want to eat something called a crabapple? – but I was sure that once I started flying, I'd also be able to control it perfectly, swerving from the path of all obstacles like trees and electrical wires and airplanes, just in time.
How long did I stand there, jumping off the sidewalk? It must have been a lot of times. It must have been more than once that I stood there. And I must have remembered doing it many more times after that because, otherwise, I wouldn't remember it so vividly now. And I do remember. It was right there, inside my body. I was so sure it would happen.
I read once the sense of smell provokes stronger memories than other senses. Our brains are so full of images and sounds, those senses so overused, that they get forgetful, or rather the most recent impressions overwhelm earlier ones. But we have less use for the sense of smell so those associations remain more intact. They get shelved in our memory but stay to the front, more easily located than other kinds of memories.
My sister lost her sense of smell once for several years after a really bad cold. She said it was quite a strange sensation, not smelling, and she missed smelling, she even missed bad smells like when she was changing her first grandson's diapers. But it's not like she could apply for disability or a handicapped placard or anything. We can live without smelling and who's to notice?
That house we lived in when I was a kid with the tree out-front was close to the Heinz canning factory. The air in that neighborhood usually smelled like ketchup in tomato season or peaches in peach season, not real peaches, but the syrup they poured in the cans. I remember the ketchup smell best though because my best friend Mandy's mom worked in the factory and when she came home from work, she brought the ketchup smell inside with her, until she took her work-apron off and put it in the laundry room.
There wasn't much else I can remember about Mandy's mom, even right now while I'm trying; she hardly ever spoke to me. I suppose she spoke very little English although I pretty sure I didn't realize that at the time; somehow when she was speaking Spanish to Mandy, it was simply a kind of timeout, a pause in the audio reel, a technical problem that would resolve itself as soon as Mandy started speaking English again. I remember that now because that's kind of how my kids' friends treat me when I speak English in front of them; they have no reaction to me at all when I speak English, I simply blip off the screen of their consciousness until I switch back to French.
She was Mandy's mom and she didn't speak much and I think of her when I serve my kids fish sticks, for which they require ketchup. I wonder if she's dead already.
The Heinz factory now grinds coffee. I smelled it a few years ago when we decided to take a detour through my old neighborhood to get to the freeway.
And I don't live close to any factories anymore, here in my house in France surrounded by fields of French grass and weeds. And I don't have a crabapple tree although, obviously, I wouldn't know if I did have one. There is a stunted apple tree in our yard, but it produces actual stunted apples that we ritually eat in the fall; they're so small we don't even bother to wash them and a knife would be beside the point. But crabapples are not apples that are just pathetic, are they? I don't remember ever picking crabapples when I was a kid. I gotta Google crabapple.
So it's not ketchup I'm smelling now that reminds me of standing on that sidewalk and trying to fly. It must be the smell of spring on the breeze, the earth warming, slowly heating up the inside of the trees. I think that's what you could call it if it were in a jar; you could label it Spring.
But what it feels like inside your body when you're looking inside of yourself is a different thing; it smells like the last time you were absolutely sure of something.
I had been absolutely sure that someday I would fly. My daughter was absolutely sure she had powers, at least she was the last time she looked. My son had told me just a few days ago that he could predict things that were going to happen before they happened. "Just boring stuff though," he'd added. I'd told him that was called Experience but, privately, I was amazed that delusions can be transmitted across the generations without even trying.
Now my daughter's not sure though. Her powers may have gone away; this is so frightening she has to run up to the window and yell for her mother that it's urgent even though she must know that her mother will answer, but sigh heavily after she's opened the window. "What is it?" she will say in that voice that's not irritated, yet, but is holding irritation at bay. But maybe Mama will understand why finding the powers again is urgent.
I do understand, this time. I really want her to find her powers again.
So I'm relieved when five minutes later she bangs on the kitchen door, which I keep locked so the kids don't barge in two doors with muddy feet, only the single door, the front door. It's like holding off the flood with sandbags, an imprecise process that one is tempted to think achieves nothing, but worth it compared to the alternative.
I've gone to the kitchen to make coffee for the repasseuse, the woman who comes and doors my ironing every week. We can't afford her, but I can't afford to be left alone with the ironing either.
The clothes come out of the machine here not merely wrinkled but crunchy, stiff, itchy; the French women don't iron everything merely out of a belief in decorum, a national streak of perfectionism – although I'd argue that is in the mix – but because un-ironed clothes here are uncomfortable. Why this is remains a mystery, but probably something to do with the water quality? American women here ponder this question frequently.
Some, like me, hire other women to do it for them and some portion of these, like me, feel guilty about this. But my guilt is completely outdistanced by my hate for the ironing, which grows every day of the week until it's a huge pile of hate and ironing that must be beat back; the hating and the ironing and the beating back all conspire to make me want to leave France. The ironing makes me want to believe I still have time to move to yet another country, not California, not France, just somewhere else entirely where no one irons anything at all.
Instead of running away, I pay this nice, tired-looking woman, Chantal, and make coffee for her every week. My children are always polite to Chantal, but today, when I open the kitchen door, my daughter peeks around the doorframe the towards the ironing board nervously.
I know she doesn't want Chantal to hear her talk about her powers; she pulls back to the other side of the door and gestures with her hand for me to conspicuously lean outside towards her; then, for good measure, she whispers in English: "Mama, it's okay. I made a potion." She pronounces it the French way, po-see-yon. "It's a secret potion and it gave me my powers back. They were still there. You were right. They had transformed."
"Good for you, baby," I reply, smiling in the way of mothers who don't get it right very often but who finally score a parenting three-pointer. She runs away.
Chantal and my husband look at me questioningly as I close the door. "It's okay," I say in French. "She needed a potion to get her powers back." They nod, unfazed by this explanation.
I know instantly I've blown it, tarnished my record. I betrayed her secret; I made it a grown-up joke when it wasn't a joke at all to either of us.
But she doesn't know about that. All she knows today is that she successfully made a potion to find her powers, which had transformed inside her.
It's a good line. I'm going to keep it.
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