At the time of year when the summer falls back and the fall verges forward, the two seasons leave a space between them in my head for all the years before. If a single madeleine is all it took, Proust would walk up Third Avenue the last weekend in August and lose his mind. The sun is warm like summer and bright like fall, and the smells seem paired the same way, funnel cake and new undershirts, Italian sausage and leather, something happening and something else coming.

The space has a hundred fragrances, starting with my aunt’s house on Cape Cod. It’s always at the end of August and it always comes into the car first, scrub pine and sand and a whiff of gasoline. Inside the house, it’s salt-cured fabric and mildew and slowly decomposing athletic equipment — rusting seven irons, ping-pong paddles with dead glue and bite marks in the handles. Tricky spider webs tying the bikes together. Stiff beach towels. Wood in the act of warping. Brackish bathwater. But that first moment in the doorway, deciding on a bedroom, the smell is a thousand August afternoons ending here, a thousand children about to tip over backwards with a backpack stuffed full of summer reading and only two weeks left, decades of baked cod with lemon and mayonnaise in a foil jacket, watery oatmeal, burnt coffee, carsickness, the flea market that smells of stale popcorn, Bactine, calamine lotion, forgotten razors waiting in the cabinet, dads wondering what kind of person leaves half an inch of Myer’s Dark.

After that, it’s my brother’s birthday cake that I made that afternoon, in a kitchen so hot I went out into the yard to lick the bowl. Sorry about the crumbs in the icing. Eh, you can’t see them on this side. Ma, please, get a decent icing paddle. Cake’s for eating, not watching, who cares. Ma, all right? Wavering-hot candles and the little trails of smoke, four, five, twelve, two and five. Sharp, crisp wrapping paper and the wheaty cardboard smell of Styrofoam. The official beginning of the unofficial end of summer.

Out in Jersey, cars are pulling up to the front door of a school and big, small, fat, thin, tough, frail girls are getting out with their stomachs in their mouths. The first floor smells of new backpacks and fresh-cut graphite, rich like new clothes, waxy like lipstick, sick like carpool exhaust and dread, the soupy-sweet ink of the overheating mimeograph, Mrs. Merkel sneezing at a fresh coat of watery blue paint and lining up gauze and chunky sanitary napkins left over from the boarding school days. Murphy’s Oil Soap on the banisters and desks. The alcoholic sting of marker.

The air in the side staircase is thick with floor wax and cold as a tomb and smells like feathers. A dozen times I emerged on the second floor and boom, the sharp bile from the designated Nervous On The First Day Of School Hallway Barfer. Poor girl. Past the chair in the hall marking the spot where Jimmy has to mop, it switches to formaldehyde, ninth graders paralyzed in horror and Mrs. Petterson presiding over a regiment of dead frogs, and then the library — acidic paper pulp, mildewy cloth covers, sharp new laminate, and Mrs. McPherson sweating in beige wool, her rosy perfume describing a path in the stacks. Girls, hello. Girls, hello. Girls, hello.

It’s hot in the lounge, and it smells of chalk and WD-40 on the locker dials. Double A is cross-legged on the floor strapping a hockey stick with tape, and around her is a corona of Prell. Gigi has fresh bagels. The lounge is full of vanilla and hairspray and mint, and the couches smell like line-dried clothes caught in the rain. Passing teachers leave wakes of black coffee and Newports and fountain pen ink and…wow, heavy patchouli. Hi, Mrs. Hutchinson. No, we don’t have our art section until next trimester. Yes, we like your necklace. (She had bedhead. I know. On the first day! I know! I bet she had clay under her nails on her wedding day. I bet she did.)

And then it’s over and it’s moving-in day and it’s hazy out and my deodorant is set to punch out already. Ernie is clomping around on the stairs, coated in a slick of sweat and Loulou; her mom is supervising, not sweating at all but happy to hug me anyway. She smells costly, like the quiet, silky preferred-shopper areas in a department store, neat and cool. Up and down the stairs with boxes and bags and milk crates. Ernie’s things smell like tea. My things smell like sun. The room smells like the rooms always smell — rotting paint, dying wood, three-month-old spackle, a wet bathing suit F. Scott Fitzgerald must have left in a corner seventy years ago. It’s an underground cave with windows, mossy, secret. Every time I smell it, I remember opening the door to my room freshman year and finding Supersize with a battered skate in one hand and a gooseneck lamp in the other, telling her mom, “Enough.” I remember shaking her father’s hand, and that he looked like a priest and smelled of ironing. I remember the sickening starchy steam in the dining hall that reminded me of every fever I’d ever had, and I thought about my mom, probably trying not to cry in the front seat on the way back home, and I thought about my brother who smelled like dough and shoelaces, and how I’d just started to like him.

I remember getting drunk on vodka with Supersize and trying on each other’s boots. Real leather. Leather. Leeeehhh-thaahhhh. Dork.

The smells of apartments — sauerkraut, burnt toast, ozone, grass. I moved here seven years ago on a Tuesday in September, and after we returned the van, we lay on the futon and looked upside-down out the window and I inhaled the smells to fix them as home. Home is soot. Home is rug shampoo. Home is a woman down the hall fighting the beef burgundy recipe in Gourmet tooth and nail. I had streaks of dirt on my legs and didn’t care if they stayed there forever. The sheets came over in a box with candles and dusty textbooks, and for days that’s how they smelled. The Biscuit had to shower with Lemon Joy, the first soap we could find.

Toast. Basement. Joop. Bourbon. Bleach. Grip tape. Cedar. Wet cement. Men I know smell like these things, and I would know those men in the dark, even after fifty years, even in clothes their wives picked out.

The horse chestnuts come down and sour in the grass. The light at dusk suggests dead leaves and wood smoke and boots with hangnails of wet twig in the treads. It’s the last of it, fusty sandals falling apart, the crickets saying ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch.

I have a plastic bag in my closet that I never open, that I will never throw away. In the bag I keep a pair of stack-heeled Mary Janes and a short plaid skirt with dust in the buckles and folds. If I held them up to my face, I would smell it — a hair held up to a match at a Girl Scout campout, then magnified a hundred thousand times — but I never hold them up to my face. I never open the bag. I know the burnt super-fine fog dust is silted down at the bottom, kind of pink, kind of grey. I shouldn’t hope for a little puff of the Paloma I had on that day, or a trace of Secret.

Canal Street takes me right to the Manhattan Bridge.

A gopher died in the back paddock.

My grandmother doesn’t have her glasses on, and if she could see that makeup, she would never stop laughing, but it doesn’t matter.

Bean has a sweater I can borrow.

It’s raining so hard that Q and I have to smoke with the windows closed.

York is very nervous, and she can’t stop crying but she doesn’t make a sound.

Wing Chun comes out the back gate. The green tea incense Glark likes is in her hair, and butter cookies, and soap — probably pink soap.

All of these things live in the space between the seasons in my head, in my nose, all of them and more. One is still missing, but I’ve imagined it. The tang of a freshly dry-cleaned suit, I think, and the charred smell of filed nails, and probably hair product with a hint of berry in it, and the scent every man has — entirely of his own and defying description — that he carries with him wherever he goes, usually at the place where his ears join his head. But I didn’t hug him, so I don’t have it. I can’t cock my head in a crowd after he passes by and say, “Oh, sure. That’s him.” I hope I still know him if I see him again, because I’ve started to forget what he looks like a little bit — not sure of the nose anymore, not sure of the color of the suit. I’d recognize the handshake, though, warm and kind and lucky.

Until we meet again, Don. Happy birthday.

September 8, 2003

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