Perfume
Authors: Caroline B. Cooney
Caroline B. Cooney
A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney
T
HE PERFUME WAS ADVERTISED ONCE
, and only once.
It was enough.
Venom.
The newspaper sprayed outward like a fan, and Dove’s hand cramped around it.
Venom
could be read between her fingers like rings.
“Let me see that ad!” cried Connie. She peeled Dove’s fingers off as if this were a normal activity: Dove clinging to a newspaper and Connie ripping her hands away.
Dove was a gentle girl, who dressed like her gentle name: soft cottons, soft colors. Folds of pale gray with white lace collars. Her voice was melodious and her friendships were affectionate.
And yet, the word
Venom
attracted Dove like gravity. The newspaper seemed to bite her, like a paper viper.
“Oh, wow!” cried Connie. “It’s a new perfume. I love perfumes! What a great name! I have Obsession. I have Poison. I want
Venom,
too.” Connie was always full of herself; she would say “I” half a dozen times in every speech. Sometimes Dove was not sure why she and Connie and Luce were such good friends.
“What store is selling it?” asked Luce. She took the newspaper from them both and smoothed it out. “Dry Ice carries it.”
“I love Dry Ice,” said Connie.
Dry Ice carried the trendiest clothes, the funkiest costume jewelry, the craziest colors, and the sickest T-shirt slogans. Bins of solid carbon dioxide, safely hidden from customers’ exploring fingers, wafted clouds of vapor into the air. Through mist, you entered the shop, and once inside you could not see back out. You shopped in fog. When you left, your hair sparkled like morning dew and your skin felt damp and moldy.
Dove never went into Dry Ice without a shiver of fear. The store spoke to her, its voice curling out from under the smoke.
I’m waiting for you, Dove
…
I’ve always been waiting for you, Dove
…
this store was built for you … it’s only a matter of time.
“Let’s go to the mall after school,” said Connie, “and check out Dry Ice and see what
Venom
looks like.”
I cannot be afraid of a store, Dove told herself. I am nearly sixteen.
Of course, being nearly sixteen had not broken Dove’s habit of looking under the bed each night to be sure nothing was there. With the hall light on and the bedroom ceiling light on, Dove would crouch in the doorway of her room after brushing her teeth and quickly peer under the bed. No floor-length bed ruffles for Dove. She needed a clear view across the room. It only took a moment, and there never was anything under the bed.
She had not skipped the nightly check in years.
You never knew.
“You don’t
look
at perfume, silly,” said Luce. “You
smell
it.” Luce was short for Lucinda, which Luce considered the crummiest name her parents could possibly have selected. (“I might as well be Irmengarde,” Luce would say glumly, “or Hulda.”)
Luce wore a black knit pullover with a black cotton shirt over it, and black jeans. Luce liked black. Dove owned none. Black was death and night and traps in the dark. Black made Dove’s heart shrink, as if her heart were losing weight and would become fragile, and no longer pump blood.
“
Venom
,” repeated Connie.
The word clasped Dove like tiny teeth. She almost wanted to scrape it off her mind. Dove shivered, and then shook her head very slightly, freeing it from the word. But instead of leaving her, the word split into two, and bothered her even more, like a cell dividing.
Ven
—
om.
“I’ll drive, of course,” said Luce. Luce had her own car and loved driving. She especially loved driving to the mall, because it involved back roads that twisted and highways with shrieking trucks and tricky left turns across traffic.
Dove was not as fond of the mall as Luce and Connie were, but she enjoyed circling the long halls, taking the sparkly glass escalators up to glittering layers of shops. She would pretend to be rich, going into dress shops to feel the fabrics, and hold the lovely gowns against herself, and stare in the mirrors, with as many dreams as Cinderella.
“I’m not going,” said Dove. “Thanks, anyway.” She almost thrilled to her own words: how strong she was. What a relief to know she could refuse her best friends. She was no weakling who followed wherever anybody led.
“Because it’s Dry Ice?” said Luce, rolling her eyes.
“You’re so weird, Dove,” said Connie, giggling. “You can’t be afraid of a
store
. Come on. I wanna look at
Venom
.”
“Smell it,” corrected Luce again.
But Connie was right. The perfume would have shape and form and texture. They really would look at it. “I don’t think I want to go,” said Dove. The creepy tremor came over her again, but on the inside, like something crawling upside down within her skull.
Connie was bored and full of pity, as if spending time on Dove required an effort Connie would shortly stop making. As if Dove were a burden rather than a pleasure. Connie simply propelled Dove ahead of her, toward Luce’s car, a prison matron changing cell assignments.
Dove had a weird sense that she did not know Connie: had never known her, in spite of being in class together since nursery school. Connie’s long dark hair, neither straight nor curly, but ruffled and tangled, seemed an impenetrable mass of threads, hiding the real Connie. Connie’s simple denim shirt, with its gleaming silver buttons, was open at the front to reveal a gaudy T-shirt in hot pink and orange. Connie suddenly seemed very complex to Dove: a girl both tangled and smooth.
A stranger.
“Really,” said Dove. “I have a lot of homework. No time to go to the mall.” Her hands were cold, her face hot. Her mind felt queerly crowded.
Connie hauled Dove toward Luce’s car.
Dove tried to laugh, but the laugh didn’t come. “Maybe I’ll look in Sears while you’re in Dry Ice,” said Dove.
“Sears?” repeated Luce. “What—are you insane? Washing machines and lawn mowers? Dove Bar!”
Her nicknames annoyed Dove deeply. “Don’t call me Dove Bar,” she said.
“Then don’t be an idiot,” said Connie, who had never received a nickname and was jealous of a friend who had so many. “Just come with us.”
Luce’s car was a tiny little thing: as flimsy as a can of peas and about the same color. The seats were extremely hard, as if the assembly line had forgotten to pad the metal—just glued vinyl straight to the steel. Luce drove fiercely, shifting gears like throwing sticks of dynamite. Connie fidgeted with the radio. She was a radio freak who was never satisfied and punched her way through stations.
Dove sat in the back, tossed up and down on the unyielding seat no matter how tightly she yanked the safety belt.
The parking lot of the mall was jammed.
To Dove, parking lots were like cemeteries.
Empty spaces were white rectangles waiting for metal coffins.
Once she had gone to day camp. Every morning the bus took the children from the pickup on South Main six miles to the camp at Slick Lake. Its route passed a cemetery. “Don’t breathe!” somebody would shout. “It’s bad luck to breathe when you’re going past dead people.”
Dove had never been able to hold her breath long enough. She would always have to breathe before they were past the tombstones.
“What will happen to me?” she had said anxiously to her mother one day.
“Oh, Dovey, don’t be such a dumbo,” her mother said crossly. “That’s the oldest nonsense in the book. That’s like being afraid there’s something under the bed.”
This did not comfort the child who knew—had always known—that someday there would indeed be something under the bed.
Full parking lots, on the other hand, were doom: the end of the world.
Metal boxes, which only a moment ago had been full of people and chatter and beating hearts, were now locked, hard and identical.
Dove could not bear things that matched. Identical objects seemed to accuse her of some crime, because she could not distinguish between them. She could not look at them. She knew she would spend a portion of her adult life wandering through huge parking lots, trying to remember where she had left her car, what her car looked like, why she had ever come to the mall, what the purpose of her life was.
I am Dove Daniel, she said to herself. I am a nice person. I have brown hair and brown eyes and Timmy O’Hay thinks I’m cute. Of course he hasn’t done anything about it, but that’s a boy for you. I don’t have to worry about the purpose of my life and I don’t have to worry about how to find the car afterward, because Luce always remembers where she left the car.
In the front seat, Connie fluffed her tangled hair off her neck, and Luce tipped the visor to study herself in the mirror on the back of it.
For a moment Dove did not know who they were. She seemed to be looking at photographs in somebody else’s yearbook: the backs of anonymous teenagers.
They parked. Luce tilted back the passenger seat to let Dove crawl out.
“Let’s look in the pet shop,” Dove offered. She wanted to touch long-haired dogs, listen to screeching parrots, watch shimmering fish.
“No, dummy, listen up,” said Connie. “We’re going into Dry Ice.
Venom.
Isn’t that perfect? Don’t you love it?
Venom.
” She said the
V
long and hard. A wasp stinging. Dove was stung by fear.
“Is there an antidote?” asked Luce.
Luce and Connie giggled.
“Serum to save yourself from your own perfume,” agreed Connie. “We should write the manufacturer.”
They were in the mall, passing the neon-bright store guide, passing the smells of pizza and cinnamon and grease from the Food Court, gliding up the escalator whose glass walls were caught with diamond sparkles.
Toward the third level, the vapor from Dry Ice oozed out into the mall.
A cologne of terror invaded Dove’s mouth. “If I go in there, I won’t dare breathe,” she said to her friends. “If that perfume goes into my lungs, it’ll get into my bloodstream.”
The vapor worked its way toward Dove. It wrapped itself around Dove’s ankles and she kicked at it, trying to free herself.
Luce howled with laughter. “You are
so weird
, Dove Bar!”
They pushed her into the shop first. The queer thick damp of the carbon dioxide vapor steamed her hair.
Dove could hardly see the display cases. If there were salespeople, they were invisible in the thick fog of their own making.
Her lungs screamed for air. Her heart hurt and her head ached, demanding oxygen. Good old breathing material.
Connie was trying on the new perfume.
Dove could actually see the fragrance coming, borne on the sick white vapor from the dry ice. She could taste it. It went right to her chest, leaping across the barriers of cell and membrane, and entering her blood.
It wrapped itself around her heart.
Venom.
It was primitive and dark.
It went back before history. Before civilization or time. Before sanity.
Let go my heart, thought Dove. Please! Let go my heart.
“What a great container!” exclaimed Connie, holding up the bottle.
The glass was translucent, like an unpolished diamond, hiding its contents. It was shaped like a snake. Connie held it to her chest, and Dove thought of Egypt, and pyramids, and Cleopatra holding an asp to her bosom, standing still and elegant while it bit her. Dying of the venom.
“I don’t really like the smell, though, do you?” asked Connie.