When I Was Only Five

Femme avec un Poudrier by Félix Vallotton

When a friend of mine recently asked me, “How long have you been interested in perfume?” I had to think about it for a minute.

Then an early memory came rushing back to me, so I said to her, “Forever.” And I confessed to her, “I actually have a very vivid memory of a certain perfume I smelled when I was only five.”

The perfume I was remembering belonged to a girl from my kindergarten class. She looked very different than me, with her long, straight blond hair, blue eyes, and pink frilly dresses. I had hair that was so frizzy I always had to wear it in tight braids, my eyes were dark brown, and my school outfit was a plain skirt with a simple blouse. But the girl seemed to like me because she often joined me on the monkey bars and sat next to me as we drank cold milk from waxy cartons in the mid-morning.

Then, one day, it turned out we were friends. My mother told me that the girl’s mother had said that the girl wanted me to come over to her house one day after school. And I agreed to go, with no idea at all of what to expect. At this point, I don’t remember much about her mother picking us both up at school and driving us back to her house, where she must have given us lunch soon after we arrived. All I remember is what I saw when I entered the girl’s bedroom. She had her own room, all to herself, and it was decorated for a girl, all in pink! There was pink and white wallpaper. There was a big bed covered with a pink bedspread, and that bed was raised up off the floor and even had a headboard. And the rest of the room had matching pink furniture, including a pink dressing table with mirror and a little pink chair in front of it, and there were pink curtains over the windows. I kept blinking my eyes because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like being transported from a black and white program on a small TV into a colorful film in a real movie theatre.

At my house—which in those days was a simple two-bedroom Spanish-style bungalow—I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, and our bedroom was the opposite of this one. Stark and simple, it had plain white walls and plain wood floors, and there were no curtains or wallpaper or pictures on the wall. And the only furniture we had was just the two beds where we slept—mattresses on the floor that were covered with black and white wool serapes that my parents had brought to LA from Mexico—and a single fiberglass Eames rocking chair.

While I was completely dazzled by the whole pink room, I was especially fascinated by the dressing table, which had on it a jewelry box, a set of brushes and combs, and, oh, was that a bottle of perfume? I had never met another five-year old who had her own bottle of perfume! So, I asked her about it. She just said, “It’s called Chantilly,” and then picked up the bottle, removed the cap, and held it out to me to sniff. I leaned forward, took a deep breath and smelled something that was just heavenly—sweet and powdery and pretty and girly. Because I’m going on my memory alone, I can’t describe the fragrance in any more detail than that. So, here's part of what Barbara Herman, author of Scent and Subversion, a book about vintage fragrances, says about Chantilly:

“some notes are resolutely old-fashioned; for example, the ‘powderiness’ that sometimes come from carnation, orris, and sandalwood, all three of which are in Chantilly. If you can get past the modern prejudice against powdery scents, Chantilly will knock your socks off. If you can’t, spicy baby powder will be all you can smell, which would be a pity.”

Having my socks knocked off by the smell of Chantilly is all I remember about that day, except that when my mother came to pick me up, I didn’t tell her anything about what I had smelled—or seen—in that girl’s bedroom. Even though I was only five, I understood that a pink perfume and pink room could never be in my future because my parents had made it clear to me that we belonged to a different tribe. We were “artsy” people and beatniks, and that’s why our whole house, like my bedroom, had plain white walls with no curtains and no rugs, and only a few pieces of furniture, and that’s why both my parents wore clothes other parents didn’t wear, like jeans, and they used our bathroom as a darkroom for the black and white photos they were always taking. My mother had even given me a picture book called Suzuki Beane that explained everything. Suzuki Beane also had parents who were beatniks, and though they lived in New York, the inside of their apartment looked like the inside of our house! And just like my brother and me, Suzuki Beane slept on a mattress on the floor in a plain, bare room. The main story in the book was about how Suzuki Beane’s parents were so into being beatniks that they didn’t even want her to be friends with this rich kid named Henry (and Henry’s parents didn’t want Henry to be friends with the beatnik girl Suzuki Beane, either). That’s why I decided that it would probably be best if I just said I had a nice time playing with the girl and left it at that.

But the truth was, unlike Suzuki Beane who really wanted to be friends with Henry, I didn’t much care about being friends with that girl. I already had a friend who I adored so much that when I found out that I was going to see her I felt such an unbearable excitement that I thought my heart was going to burst. Her name was Rita Finch, and her parents, Keith and Connie were artist friends of my parents. Rita was so much fun to play with, and I loved her beautiful face, with her dark, almond-shaped eyes and long dark lashes. So I knew what really caring about a friend meant. No, it wasn’t the girl with the pink bedroom that I loved, it was just her dressing table, and, oh, yes, her perfume. For though I soon forgot that girl’s name, I’ve always remembered both the name of her perfume and the smell of it.

After the end of my first semester of kindergarten, I never saw the girl with the pink bedroom again because we moved to a different house in a different part of Los Angeles—a brand new, architect designed, wood and glass house that my parents had built up on a hill in Beverly Glen Canyon. Now, our living room was huge, there were two bathrooms, and my brother and I had our own bedrooms! And because my father had a new job as an art director for a large advertising agency—they had a pool at their office building!—there was nicer furniture and no darkroom in the bathroom anymore. Our lives were no longer like Suzuki Beane’s, I realized. Of course, I still didn’t have a pink bedroom with pink furniture and perfume on a vanity—my room had wood walls and a glass sliding door that led out on a deck and a very plain bedspread I don’t even remember—because we were still “artsy” even if we were no longer “beatniks.”

As I grew older and was ready to make my own decisions, my mother took my training in “good taste” to the next level, voicing strong disapproval whenever she considered that the choices I made were not “aesthetic.” If I wore a combination of clothes that offended her, I was sent back to my room to change. If I said I wanted a Barbie doll like the girl across the street, I was corrected and pressured to request a more “aesthetic” doll instead. And when I was ready to read chapter books, she gave me Rhododendron Pie, saying this one was about me—a girl in a family of artists who just wants to be ordinary. Well, I read that chapter book from cover to cover, but all I learned was that when Ann’s parents made a pie filled with rhododendron flowers each year for her birthday, all she really wanted is a plain apple pie, with “with lots of juice … and cloves.” Then, when she grew up, she married an ordinary man and lived a completely ordinary life. So boring! My mother must be wrong. After all, I figured, even if I couldn’t be an artist—everyone said I had no talent—I could at least be a writer, maybe.

By the time I was old enough to buy my own perfume, a powdery, girly perfume like Chantilly was out of the question. As an artsy girl who had grown up in a mid-century modern house, I knew that I should only wear edgier, more chic perfumes. And even now, all these years later when I finally can admit to myself that I love old-fashioned, delicious, powdery fragrances and I have Barbara Herman to back me up, I still can’t bring myself to pull the trigger on Chantilly.