Tiger Lilies for the Taking

a stream of conscious piece. unedited, per usual.

There’s a waxy smokey smell inside this car. Like someone has been burning something with all the windows rolled up.

Mom smelled like amber and musk when we were growing up. Like nights waiting to unfold, like expectation, like a hope she knew was just around the corner. 

Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew was the actual scent. I reminded her of it recently. She was shocked I remembered it. How could I not? She had no idea back then how often my tiny hands would clutch the bottle she kept on her vanity. She had one of those mirrors with different magnifications and lighting – office light, daylight, nighttime. You could see your pores in that mirror—every non-existent blemish on my perfect young skin. As soon as she would leave the house I’d run there. Play with her powders and puffs. Pretend to do up my face but too afraid to actually put anything on it. But that bottle of Youth Dew—like a tiny torso in my 7-year-old hands. A gold bow perfectly tied around its waist. I’d take the cap off and inhale. It was mom. Safe and adult, dressed up and ready to go out. What I thought a lady should smell like. 

My mom and I used to pick tiger lilies by the side of the highway. A weird strip of woods with a steep incline. I remember a creek running through but I don’t think water existed there. 

Tiger lilies have no smell so this memory is lodged in my brain with visuals only. I remind my mother of the tiger lilies and our adventures picking them. She does not remember this but it makes her happy that I do. In my mind, we did this often. But it could have been just once, a memory I played on repeat because I loved living in it so much. 

I buy my mother perfume for Christmas. Alien by Mugler. It’s a heavy white floral with amber at its base. She didn’t ask for it but told me her bottle was running low. She wore it to my little brother’s wedding. Said she searched for a scent just for that event and ended up falling for that one. 

I wanted to find Youth Dew for her again. I knew I could easily find it online but I wanted to be in store with her when we rediscovered it. It’s never at the makeup counters in department stores anymore. They have gone more modern. Byredo and Baccarat Rouge. Tastes have changed. 

But on one sticky hot afternoon in Jersey, I find it on a bottom shelf in a far-off forgotten corner of Saks Off Fifth. It’s marked down and I buy it immediately. My mother is getting her hair dyed, she picks me up after and I can barely contain my excitement. We open the box and pass the perfect little bottle between us. Inhale the cap. Spray the lightest spritz in the car.

I want it to transport her like it does me. To take her back to the days when she was dating Tom. When he was alive and young with a full thick beard and a head of dark hair. I want it to make her see what we all saw back then, our tiny family about to triple in size, a road of possibility stretched out before us with tons of tiger lilies for the taking.