L'Air du Temps

When is the last time you smelled perfume - not from a bottle in a store, but just out and about in the world? One day at work last week, I walked down a corridor and into some perfume, just hanging there, lingering in the air. It hit me like a physical force. It had been years since I had smelled perfume - real, old-fashioned, lady-with-a-spritzer-at-department-store perfume - and it took me all the way back. I think I understand Proust and his madeleine now. 

The scent was maddeningly familiar; heavy on the Oriental notes, and a little bit floral but not rosy floral.  Something like Opium but not Opium. Maybe I should just Google a list of popular perfumes of the 1970s and 80s and then match a name with a scent. 

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Of course you understand that I actually did this, and I promptly ended up in a rabbit hole of mid-20th century beauty culture nostalgia, from which I emerged only days later.

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When I was growing up, lots of women - maybe even most women - wore perfume. The women in my working-class Philadelphia neighborhood wore Tabu or Charlie or popular Avon scents (if you’re young, then you might not know that Avon used to be known mostly for perfume - the cosmetics came later). When I was in high school and college and then a young person in the working world, I learned about expensive perfumes, classics like Chanel No. 5 and Joy and Arpege. Perfume was very popular among young women in the 80s - we favored overwhelming heavy scents like Opium and Lauren and Chloe, suitable for the aspirational luxury ethos of that decade. Every city still had fancy downtown department stores, marble floors and high vaulted ceilings and full-service restaurants and dressed-up salespeople and elaborate Christmas displays that families made special trips to visit. You couldn’t walk into one of those stores without being chased by a young woman wielding a spritzer of perfume. Just thinking about those department stores makes me miss my grandmother. 

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I read Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties early in 2022, and I started writing about it, but I never finished. Here’s a preview - if you were a young person in the 80s and 90s then you might remember that right around 1991, there was a very abrupt popular fashion 180, from glamor and high heels and big hair to hippie revival and grunge. In 1987, young women dressed up to go out - full hair and makeup, high-heeled shoes with designer jeans and dressy tops, and of course, perfume. In 1992, the aesthetic abruptly changed. This is not to say that young women no longer cared how they looked - they very much did care. But it was no longer acceptable to act or look as if you cared. It really took just as much time and effort trying to appear as if you didn’t make any effort at all as it did to look flawlessly put together. Perfume did not survive this fashion transition, perhaps because it was an obvious olfactory clue that a woman cared about being conventionally attractive. 

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When I was very young, age 5 or so, we lived with my grandparents for a time. I think we were there for about a year, more or less. My grandparents went out most Saturday nights and my grandmother would usually let us sit on her bed and watch her get dressed and fix her hair and put the finishing touches on her hair and makeup. Perfume was always the last step. 

Eventually, I realized that my grandparents’ nights out were not particularly glamorous - they went to movies sometimes, or to VFW or American Legion events, or mostly to friends’ houses to play cards. Perhaps it was that perfume, lingering in the air long after my grandmother left the room, that made grown-up life seem very exciting and romantic.

I never did figure out what last week’s perfume was, even after my internet rabbit hole research. It reminded me of Opium or Chloe, not because of how it smelled but because of how it felt. It was like John Wanamaker or Strawbridge and Clothier, circa 1980. It was like midnight Mass at St. John the Baptist, circa 1975.  It was like my Nana’s bedroom on a Saturday night in 1971. It was like my childhood in the middle of the American century. 

Disappearing people

Do you ever think about places or events or people from your past and wonder if you dreamed them? So many of the everyday places of my childhood have a dreamlike quality for me. I remember riding my bike through alleys behind rowhouses, and it seemed that I never actually rode on the street, just one narrow back alley connecting to another, a network of secret passages set aside for 10-year-olds on their bikes. It’s not possible that none of those alleys ever intersected with the street. That’s just how I remember it. 

I remember riding down one of those alleys and ending up on a pine needle-carpeted path through the woods. This is possible, actually. My grandmother’s neighborhood backed up on city parkland. What doesn’t seem possible is that I rode past an opera house and heard the singers rehearsing inside. I’ve never been able to find any evidence that this opera house existed but I remember what I heard. 

Was it real? I don’t know. It was probably just a house in which someone was listening to opera. Although I lived right in the middle of a city, in a very working class neighborhood. Houses were on the street, not in the woods; and we weren’t much given to opera or other high culture. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it, except that I’m older now and I think about the past sometimes.

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One day last week, a name popped into my head. The name was the name of a classmate - a girl - from my class at St. John the Baptist parish school in Philadelphia. SJB is closed now - the church is still there but the school closed a long time ago. 

St. John the Baptist school, may it rest in peace, was an old-fashioned Irish Catholic uniform-wearing Mass-before-school nuns-with-rulers throwback to another time. St. John’s was old-fashioned (and just old) even when I went there, which was a long time ago. Now, I think, people my children’s ages would simply not believe me if I told them about piano lessons in the convent, where you didn’t speak in a voice louder than a whisper; or Chinese jump rope in a cement schoolyard surrounded by that same convent, a rectory, and a graveyard; or the veils that we had to pin to our hair for Mass and confession. If you’ve seen “Doubt,” you’ll have some idea of what it was like to be a working-class child at a Philadelphia archdiocesan Catholic school in the middle of the last century. Many years later, I found out that we even had a creepy molesting priest. Though I think we all knew about him even then - or rather, we knew that there was something terribly wrong about him but we couldn’t put it into words. Some of us (girls) could avoid him. Some of us (altar boys) could not. I believe he’s dead now. God will judge him. I certainly have. 

When my mother went to SJB, it had a lower school (first through eighth grade) and a high school (two separate high schools, actually - the boys’ school on Manayunk Avenue and the girls’ school next door to the lower school). After the high schools were closed (my mother’s class, 1962, was the last to graduate from SJB), the boys’ school was torn down and replaced by an apartment building, and the girls’ school building was used to expand the lower school. When I was at SJB, first through fourth grades were in the old lower school building, and the high school building housed the fifth through eighth grades. Even then, the building was really old, and openly acknowledged to be unsafe. There was an auditorium on the top floor, permanently closed, the stairway blocked off. We were frequently (almost daily) warned not to try to climb those stairs and not to enter that auditorium because the floor was in such bad shape that no one was sure that it could accommodate a person’s weight, even a 7th grader’s weight. 

Normally we’d have taken any such warning as an invitation but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone ever trying to break into the auditorium. I also don’t remember anyone wringing their hands about our safety or demanding that the parish get us out of that manifestly unsafe building. The 70s were different, you know? We were the original free-range children, like a bunch of wild chickens.  

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Those buildings are all still standing. I was just there last year, in fact, for my grandmother’s funeral. So there’s no confusion between reality and dreams when I think about SJB in a physical sense. It’s all solidly real, 150-year-old stone and ironwork and cement. But the time that I spent there, eight years of school that felt like 20 at the time, seems remote and dim, steeped in unreality. I remember in a broad general sense what it was like to be an eighth grader, for example, but I can’t clearly recall more than a handful of days or even moments. I know that I spent eight years in that school, in a plaid uniform jumper and navy blue kneesocks and a rosary looped around the button placket on the skirt of my jumper and of course those veils on Mass day. I have photos to prove it. But it’s all a haze. 

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I look up classmates from St. John’s and sometimes I find them but often I don’t. An astonishing number of my childhood friends and classmates seem to have managed to avoid the internet altogether, leaving absolutely no trace of themselves - no Facebook, no Twitter, no LinkedIn - nothing. Maybe they don’t exist. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing after all. Or maybe my old classmates are too smart to leave a breadcrumb trail on the internet. Maybe that school taught us something after all. 

I never did find the person I was looking for. She’s not on Facebook; or maybe she just uses her married name without inserting her maiden name in parentheses like most women of my age. She doesn’t seem to be on LInkedIn or Twitter or Instagram. So I stopped looking. Maybe she’s in witness protection. Maybe she just doesn’t want to be found. I just wanted to see if she was anything like the girl I remembered. Sometimes, I want to see if anything is as I remember it, anything at all. 

The smell of snow

I remember when I first noticed that I could smell when snow was coming. I was probably in sixth or seventh grade and it was a school day in late December, just a day or so before the last day of school before Christmas vacation. My classmates and I were giddy with anticipation. We weren't allowed to run at recess because our schoolyard was nothing but a tiny cement quad surrounded by the school building, the enormous stone church, the parish hall, and the convent with its cemetery for a backyard. It sounds like 19th century Dublin but it was a parish Catholic school in 1970s Philadelphia. We weren't allowed to run because there was no room to run freely without crashing into other kids, and the cement wasn't kind to the bodies that landed on it. Arms got broken. Foreheads split open and bled like geysers. The nuns, who weren't always kind or reasonable, were entirely justified in enforcing the no running rule. But with vacation approaching, they threw up their hands. They knew and we knew and they knew that we knew that there was no stopping kids from running with Christmas on the immediate horizon.  

We didn't run during recess, we 6th and 7th and 8th grade girls. We didn't really even play anymore, although sometimes a girl would bring a Chinese jump rope to school and we'd jump rope, for old time's sake. But mostly, we stood around in little circles and talked. 

You couldn't just say anything. The bossy girls didn't let us talk about schoolwork or our families (except to complain about unfairly strict parents) or books or current events. You could complain about nuns and teachers, you could say mean things about other girls, you could talk about pop music (and only pop music) and movies and TV shows and clothes and hair and who was allowed to have pierced ears (not me) and who wasn’t. And of course, you could talk about boys. You definitely couldn't talk about the weather and so when I blurted out "It smells like snow," I braced myself for the inevitable scoffs. We were working class Irish Catholic Philadelphia school kids in the 1970s. We scoffed at everything, on principle. But no one scoffed. "It does," everyone squealed. "We're gonna get a white Christmas!" I don't remember if it actually snowed or not. I don't remember if we had a white Christmas. But I remember the relief of abandoning the cool soon-to-be-teenage girl facade for that minute or so, and just being little girls again, excited about Christmas. 

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That was a very long and roundabout way of telling you that it's Saturday morning, chilly and January gray, and I'm on my way to a high school swim meet. Rockville vs. Magruder. This is one of the last regular season meets of our last high school swim season. It's 8:45 AM and it smells like snow.