Joy For Beginners (23 page)

SHE FOUND THE ADDRESS for the party in Pasadena and got out of her car, perfume case in hand, ready for her last event before summer, when people would travel and spend their days inhaling new and invigorating smells
.
They would come back to her in the fall, when their jobs took them indoors again and they would find themselves missing something they couldn’t quite describe. But for a few months, summer would do Ava’s job for her.

The demarcation line for summer in Los Angeles, where the seasons came at you sunny and bland, indistinguishable as Twinkies rolling off a conveyor belt, was less obvious than in Seattle and in many ways had more to do with calendar than climate. Even after more than twenty years in LA, Ava had a hard time getting used to it. Particularly now, when the spring rains would be soaking the Northwest, pulling the tulips out of the ground, spotlighting the bright whites and pinks of magnolia and dogwood blossoms, she missed the liquid silver of her hometown and the sweet smell of daphne blossoms even as she enjoyed the fact that as she knocked on the door of the Pasadena home her legs were bare under her skirt.

 

DESPITE THE SOMEWHAT FORMIDABLE aspect of the house’s white columns and circular drive, the group inside the Pasadena house was warm and welcoming. Four generations gathered together to celebrate the ninety-second birthday of their matriarch, a woman with hands curled by age but whose eyes caught every current in the room. Her scent would be easy, Ava knew immediately—the smell of beach grass and sun-dried laundry; underneath, the sharp, bright smell of typewriter ribbons. Her daughter was milk and vanilla, all rounded edges and open arms, the hostess of the party, of course. Add just a bit of white musk and tobacco and it would be the scent she would hide in the back of her drawer, visit but never wear. The youngest girl, a tall, lithe thing of ten years or so, was evergreens and beach rocks. Thoughts of Lopez Island and Kate washed over Ava whenever the girl was near.

But it was the girl’s mother whom Ava could not decipher. The woman stayed at the edge of the party, despite the best efforts of her daughter and mother to pull her in with food or conversation. Ava watched as the daughter brought her mother bottle after small bottle of perfume for her to smell, noticed how the mother nodded, smiled, but never breathed in the scent. When it came time for matching, she was the last to come into the small side room where Ava was conducting individual sessions. Her answers to Ava’s questions were bland and monochromatic, devoid of olfactory details or colorings. All the same, Ava could not dismiss the feeling that she had never met anyone more alert to the sensation of smell. The woman sat, rigid as a hunting dog, her focus complete to the point that it seemed to block any other scent but the one she had been born to detect. In the room alone with Ava—without the need for a certain level of politeness that had obviously been bred into her—discussions of food, locations and childhood memories were all tossed aside with a certain visceral impatience.

At the end of her questions, with no solid clues on which to rely, Ava remarked almost off-handedly that she was often in the presence of women at her gatherings, but rarely were they all related to one another. How interesting it was, how feminine the family seemed to be.

The woman looked at her with an expression of such angry and unfiltered grief that Ava recoiled instinctively. She was not known for social gaffes; usually her sense of smell was more accurate. Jealousy, nervousness, pride, lust were all scents her nose easily detected, allowing her to reroute a conversation accordingly.

“I’m sorry,” Ava said. “Whatever it is, I didn’t know.”

Ava waited. The smell of sorrow in the room was so strong it obliterated all other scents. Without them, Ava had no sense of where to go.

“My son,” the woman said, her voice flat. “He drowned, two summers ago. He was ten.”

The woman looked around the room. “After he died, I could still smell him in his room. But one day they convinced me to go out, and when I came back, they had taken all his things away. They said it wasn’t healthy. They told me to remember my daughter.” The woman looked at Ava and the case of perfume bottles by her side. “I want my son.”

And Ava knew that no matter what scents she put together, she could not bring this woman back into the world when the only thing she wanted was what wasn’t in it anymore.

“I’m so sorry for your loss.” Her hands empty.

As she left the party, Ava passed the mother’s daughter and the scent of evergreens followed Ava into her car.

 

AVA DROVE BACK to the perfume store and found her business partner sitting in her office, surrounded by piles of scarves from France.

“They have just that bit of fragrance, you know?” Monica said as Ava walked in. “Just a moment of walking along the Seine, that half-second before you enter the Louvre.”

“Monica,” Ava said, “I need to go home.”

 

ANY CONCERN THAT She might be doing the wrong thing evaporated as Ava looked out of the airplane window and saw Seattle, silver and blue and deeply green, the lines of the water and islands that surrounded the city curving open in welcome, curling into safe places to go and figure out your life. It always surprised her, the amount of green, the uninhabited blue, after living in a city where houses steamrolled their way over hills and mountains and deserts, leaned off cliffs and put their feet in the ocean.

It hadn’t been easy, convincing Monica. They had finally settled on a three-month sabbatical when it appeared that Ava was adamant.

“It’s just a minor midlife crisis,” Monica—who knew what she was talking about—had said. “You’re efficient. Three months should be plenty.”

Now, on the plane home, Ava inhaled in anticipation and caught a flash of excitement from the little girl sitting next to her.

“I’m going home,” the little girl told her, leaning over Ava’s lap to look out the window. “I’ve been with my dad; now I’m going back to my mom.”

The little girl looked at Ava, curious. “Where are you going?”

“To Lopez Island, to smell the blackberries.”

“My mom says the blackberries won’t be ready for a while.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” Ava replied.

 

THE CABIN WAS as she remembered it; her father had taken care over the years to preserve it the way it had been when Ava was a child. The same red-and-white-striped dish towels, the ancient fold-out couch that left guests creaking in the morning, the cot on the screened-in porch that she had loved to sleep in when she was small, feeling the excitement of being alone out in the world, yet still safe within the enclosure of her family. Even after her mother died and Ava refused to sleep on the porch anymore, her father had kept the bed there. Just in case, he always said. You never know when you might want an adventure.

She put down the bag of groceries her father had thrust upon her when she stopped by his house in Seattle on the way to the island.

“I know you want to be there by yourself for a little while,” he had said. “But feel free to call your dad if you want company.”

As she unloaded the groceries, Ava smiled. Her father knew her temptations—fine-ground coffee, Mexican chocolate, a bottle of single-malt scotch. She opened the bag of coffee, cracked the seal on the bottle, and inhaled slowly and deeply.

 

LOPEZ WAS ONE of the flatter of the San Juan Islands, known mostly as farmland, its landscape rolling rather than peaked. Walking the long, flat roads that circled the island, Ava was often passed by bicyclists and cars loaded down with camping gear. The locals were friendly, waving and offering rides. If they’d heard what she was training for they usually stopped and told her stories. It seemed everyone knew someone, their words spilling out on the road, the smell of their sadness or anger or acceptance overtaking the air until she would make excuses, comment on cooling muscles, a need to finish ten miles that day, to keep on schedule.

In the late afternoon, she would walk the beach in front of the cabin. There was space for her thoughts on its long expanse and she found them traveling, wandering across the water. The waves sputtered up across the rocks; her feet crunched on the sand and pebbles below her. She played a game she used to play with Kate as a child, looking for rocks that would reflect the mood of the day. Round speckled ones, a glowing orange oval, wet from the sea. At the end of the day, she would bring her favorite back to the cabin and add it to the collection on the fireplace mantel, a long line of stones, beginning with the one Kate had given her the night of the victory party.

In the evenings Ava would make dinner—salads with pale orange carrots, basil and giant tomatoes from the farmer’s market, fish from the local marina. She would take her plate out to the porch and watch the sun start to think about setting. She would salute its final leave-taking around ten in the evening with a glass of scotch as she listened to the world grow quiet, the flowers closing, the fragrance of the warm air rising off the surface of the land and mingling with the soft peat smell in the glass in her hand.

It surprised her not to be lonely or to miss the perfume parties and the interplay between customer and fragrance. Instead, she found herself paying attention to the smells of the landscape around her in a new and different way, fascinated by how the mist on cooler mornings brought out the sharp snap of pine trees, how the sun pulled the scent of dried grass from the lawn. In Los Angeles, her ability to bring out the essence of each individual through a perfume was a gift few could match; here she was simply doing what nature had always done. It surprised her, too, how little that bothered her.

 

ONE AFTERNOON in the middle of August, from the woods bordering the overgrown lawn that stretched from the cabin down to the beach, Ava heard the old eagle whistle Kate had spent months perfecting the summer they were nine. She looked over and saw Kate, heading toward her.

“Your dad told me you were here,” Kate called out when she got closer. “I thought you might want a walking partner.”

 

AVA AND KATE Sat at an outside table at Kate’s favorite Lopez restaurant, looking out to the water. They had walked twelve miles that day, Ava watching for any sign of fatigue on Kate’s part. Kate had laughed it off.

“You’re not the only one doing something challenging this summer,” she had reminded Ava. “I’ve been in training, too.”

They had arrived at the restaurant around seven and by the time they had finished their dinner and were drinking the last of their wine, the sun was setting and the air starting to cool.

“So, how are you feeling these days about rafting the Grand Canyon?” Ava asked.

“Scared.” Kate’s mood dipped.

“How so?”

“Well . . .” Kate took a sip of wine. “It’s not the rapids—I mean, it is, but it isn’t. It just feels like such a risk.

“I understand that’s the point,” Kate continued. “But here’s the thing I keep thinking about—a risk is a risk
because
it’s avoidable. We’ve both done unavoidable, and it’s horrible. But if something happens in the Grand Canyon, it will be a loss that didn’t have to happen. I don’t know what to do with that anymore.”

Ava nodded. “But it happens anyway,” she said. “I didn’t come when you were sick because I was scared I might see you die. I couldn’t risk it. A lot of good that did me—it’s gonna take a whole bunch of walking to get back to where I was.”

“Is that why you think I gave you the Three-Day Walk, to punish you?”

Ava looked at Kate and nodded.

Kate shifted her gaze out over the water. “You know,” she said, after a time, “they say you can never know what cancer will bring out in someone. I remember one time, I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital before my chemo session and this man came in to make a delivery. He was so alive—you could just feel it. I wanted what he had so badly. At that moment, I would’ve given my cancer to him, if I could have. Even knowing what that meant, knowing what I would’ve been doing to another human being, I’d have given it to him; I was just so tired.” She paused. “You don’t know what you’ll do, Ava. Nobody does. And I can’t judge.”

“You’re not angry with me?”

“I didn’t say that,” Kate answered with a wry smile. “But it’s not why I gave you that challenge.”

“Then why?”

A maze of emotions flickered across Kate’s face and then she raised her glass.

“I wanted you to come home,” she said simply.

 

AT 5:30 A.M. on the first day of the 3-Day Walk, Kate drove Ava to the starting point at the university parking lot.

“Wow,” said Ava, as they inched their way forward in a line of cars that stretched out of the campus and down the road. Some of the walkers, forgoing the wait, had hopped out of vehicles and were heading up the road wearing backpacks adorned with pink flags. Ava saw team signs and T-shirts—the Mammogrammys, Walkers for Knockers, Save Second Base. There were enlarged photographs of women—healthy, turbaned, with children—with birth and death dates underneath. One woman wore a shirt that read simply: “I Walk for My Dad.” When Ava and Kate finally pulled up to the front of the line they saw twenty-five huge white trucks, an elaborate series of tents, a stage with blaring music, and thousands of people, hugging, crying, jumping up and down to keep themselves warm in the cool morning air. It was like some strange funereal carnival. In pink.

“Are you going to be okay?” Kate asked. “I didn’t know it was going to be quite like this.”

“Sure,” said Ava, pulling out a pair of dark glasses.