How to Apply Perfume So It Lasts Longer

Tip One: One burst on either side of the neck, at pulse points.

The scent of antiseptic floods into the room, drowning the perfume on my skin, and I try not to breathe. 

“Tell me only what matters,” I say. 

“Sorry, I’m not the doctor, but she’ll be here shortly,” says the woman in a white coat. “I’m just a resident.”

I blink at her. “Oh.”

The woman is young, wearing glasses low on her nose. She squints at an empty clipboard, taps her fingers nervously against it, and twists into her skin, under my gaze. 

“Do you smell like that all the time?” I want to ask. “Doesn’t it make you sicker than you already are?”

I imagine the doctors—and residents and nurses and whoever else—gather into a group huddle and take turns puffing antiseptic into their hair, the backs of their necks, their wrists. Smoking it in blunts made of powdered eggs in latex gloves and pipettes. Don’t doctors do drugs?

There is a crisp, sharp knock at the door, and the real doctor bustles into the now too-crowded room. I pick at the wrinkles in the leather seat under my legs while she introduces herself. 

“You have Vitamin D deficiency,” the doctor says, now, and I pretend to listen. “You need to take your prescription seriously, dear.”

“Yes,” I interrupt, “I know. I do, already.”

“You don’t take it regularly.”

“Yes, I do!”

“Your blood work—”

I wrinkle my nose. “Fine. I will.”

The doctor exhales slowly through her nose, then flicks her eyes up to the ceiling. She meets my eyes with an empty smile, a smile with her lips so tight around her teeth that if I popped it with a needle, the—

“—blood results, here, shows that you need to watch the sugar content of what you eat. You’re still fairly young, so I’m not terribly concerned, but just be conscious.”

“Sure,” I say. I don’t argue.

The doctor continues to warble on and on, and I realize I forgot to tell her to tell me only what matters. 

“Next time,” I mouth to the resident, “tell her what I told you.”

She furrows her brow. “Sorry?”

“That’s all,” the doctor says. “Do you have any questions about your care?”

Only what matters.

“Am I pregnant?”

I stare at the spots on the tile between my feet. Flecks of bluish gray, odd pink, cracks filled with dirt and dust.

“No,” the doctor says. “Your blood work doesn’t show traces of hCG. Are you worried you might be pregnant?”

“No,” I say. “Not worried. Thank you, though.”

“Alright, Eva.” The doctor pauses for a second, her eyes glancing for a second too long on my stomach. I cross my arms in front of my midriff. “Your medication will be ready for you at the pharmacy, first floor. See you in six months. Please take your Vitamin D.”

*

Tip Two: Don’t rub it in.

One shoe drops to the floor, and I’m shaking my heel to shuck the other one off when he asks. 

“Everything alright?” His voice is faraway, though he’s sitting right there, on the couch. I look at him, and I feel nothing.

“Yes,” I answer. Something like that—something like alright. “I’m fairly sure I’m pregnant.”

He stares at me for so long that I think, briefly, that he must have died—his body is in rigor mortis. I walk to the kitchen, place my purse on the counter. My jacket goes on the back of a wooden chair. I pause, then I pick it up to hang it in my room, our room, whoever owns it—that room. I walk back out into the hallway, and his eyes follow me around.

“You cheated on me?”

The words travel right through my ears and clatter onto the kitchen tiles. I turn to him. His face is boiling over with anger and bubbling veins. 

“No. What are you talking about?”

“No, no. You don’t get to do this. What are you talking about?” He’s standing, shouting at me. I blink, and my waterline is sticky. I went to sleep without cleaning the mascara from my lashes. There’s a little bit of lint on his shirt, near the shoulder. 

“I never cheated on you.”

“Well, we’ve never had sex!”

My face furrows into itself, contorting, and I see an ugly expression in the reflection of a picture frame behind him. I hate it. The strings on my face drop, and I see my face become smooth—clean—again. 

“I said I wasn’t ready. Why is that suddenly a problem? We’ve talked—”

“You’re acting like such a fucking child,” he spits, and he’s crying, and I feel strange. “I want an explanation, Eva, you’re not saying anything.”

“I am,” I say, because I am. “I am saying something. I just think I’m pregnant, I never said I cheated or anything like that.”

“I’ve never once felt like you loved me,” he blubbers on, “so maybe I should have seen this coming. I love you so fucking much, Eva, why do this to me?”

I’m confused. I glance around the room, as if there is someone to help me.

“I didn’t cheat. I’m confused.”

“Then how the fuck would you be pregnant?”

“I don’t know, the doctor didn’t say, either.” His crumpled face freezes, then opens up a little, like lopsided origami. “I took a blood test too, so I don’t know why it’s not showing up.”

He sits back, finally quiet. I must have said something correct, so I keep going. 

“Some days I’m so heavy that I can’t sit up. Other days I think I hear something laugh.”

He stares—not at me, but through me, through my ear—his hands clenched so tightly I’m afraid his knuckles might snap, and fly around the room like plastic rubber balls, flinging tissue and sinew all over the place. I map a potential trajectory of it in my head, and wince when I realize it will shatter the window, so, not ideal, then.

“Have you been taking your medication?”

I roll my eyes so hard I’m afraid mine will pop out and bounce off the walls. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Why would I take medication?”

“For your goddamn depression, or—fuck—schizophrenia, what was it? Whatever it is. I told you when we started dating that you’d have to stay on top of it or else—”

Suddenly, I hate this man. 

“I did cheat,” I tell him, and I wait for his face to shatter again. 

“No, you’re having one of your delusions, of course,” he says excitedly, and now he’s pacing back and forth over my mother’s rug. I watch his feet press into the floorboards and I hate him. “You don’t have the balls to cheat. You’re afraid of sex—how could you possibly be pregnant? Twenty-six and afraid of sex. What man would want you?”

There’s a baby inside of my womb, and I think it’s crying. There’s pressure building under my diaphragm, and I imagine my throat balloons like a python, when I scream, “Get the fuck out of my house!”

“This is my house, my lease, my land—you get the fuck out!” 

I slap him across the face. I swear I see a dent in his cheekbone before the flesh bounces back, but I have to run, so he doesn’t hit me back. 

“Right,” I think, as I haphazardly pack, as he roars bloody murder from the other side of the locked bedroom door. Perfumes, jewelry, and a cookie tin filled with postcards and letters. Some from him, mostly not. I was never good at tracking what was his, and what was mine. Where he started, and where I began.

“You’re lucky I haven’t raped you,” he shrieks, and I agree, because he would.

*

Tip Three: Have alternatives, so you don’t get sick of it.

My mother nurses the bruises on my face, but not before calling me stupid. I let her words wash over my head with the dribbling stream from the shower, because what does she know? I scrub at my skin. I think of every person who has ever hurt me. I use twice the amount of conditioner than I really need. The conditioner-water trickles down between my breasts and over my puffy stomach, and I’m not sure I know what my face looks like. The conditioner leaves a slippery slope on my back, and I think it’s still there when I step out of the tub.

The walls of my bedroom, in my mother’s home, are still painted teal. It’s garish, jarring, and I wonder why on earth my mother allowed something so ugly. My high school prom dress is in the closet, and a dead boutonnière and corsage on my desk. I place my cookie tin next to them, and sit on my bed, where the bedsheets are still pink and white. That’s ugly, too. The baby hums. 

I was pretty in high school, I think. 

“Eva?” 

My mother calls, so I go.

*

Tip Four: Less is more.

I’d forgotten how this house smells, and I wonder if it smells different because time bleeds out the wallpaper, or if it’s because my mother is the only one who lives here. Dust rolls off her in waves, and her skin cells turn directly into wavering, wafting specks in sunlight as she sheds them. It must be why she glows when she walks, because she hasn’t done any good to deserve it. 

My mother is quiet when she looks at me, and loud anytime else. Occasionally she stares in my direction but not at me—something behind me, so when she screams and screams, her words pass right through. I think I’m lucky, because if she was looking at me, it would hurt more than it does. It sure does sound like she’s speaking to me. I’m lucky.

The living room is plain, and my mother rests on the floor, on an unfamiliar rug. A TV plays soundlessly, and the family picture is still slightly off-center on the wall behind the couch. I sit next to her, but not quite near. Far away enough.

I pat my stomach with care, and she asks me if I’m pregnant, or just fat. 

“Just fat,” I say. The baby has gone quiet, so perhaps it is dead. 

“Good,” she retorts, fiddling with crochet hooks. There’s missing stitches in the patch she’s grumbling through. “You’d be a terrible mother.”

A laugh bubbles up from my stomach, but something snatches it back.

“Oh, what do you know?”

My mother doesn’t take her eyes off her deteriorating project. I think it’s seconds away from flying apart into a mess, but she works furiously at it.

“You’re still a child, Eva. Twenty-six is young. You don’t know anything at that age.”

“So? You had me when you were twenty-three.”

My mother’s hands pause on the cheap plastic handles. 

“You don’t know anything at that age,” she repeats. 

In my mother’s home, I live as if I am sixteen. I go to the park and see people in tight little outfits, and I come back home in tears, jealous to the point of nausea. I ignore calls from my boyfriend. I dream about impossible things, like sailing my own boat without being seasick. I see squirrels and hide my hands so I don’t strangle them for how light they are on their feet. 

I go to cafés, order the wrong drink, and spill it all over my lap. Everyone is in on a joke that I’m not. Lauren calls, and I don’t pick up because I’m afraid of my own voice. I go back home in wet pants, and I forget to throw out the rotten flowers in the boutonnière. I shower lying down because I don’t have the strength to stand. I dream of first love, but it’s allowed—I am sixteen.

I ask my mother for permission to see my own sister. My mother squints, and tries to find something to be angry about. She complains that the fridge is empty, and it is, so I tell Lauren no, I can’t see her tomorrow, but maybe the day after? She has a “research conference” for the next week after, so no. I consider killing myself to make my mother pay. 

I don’t, because it would hurt. 

There’s things I remember, things that make the baby groan and stretch. It seizes in my stomach, wiggles its fingers out towards my armpits, and tries to fit its head into my skull. It pushes its legs through the holes in my pelvic bone, like a toddler shoving herself into a father’s suit. It cries, so I cry, and when the mess dies down, there is vomit on my chest and I smell disgusting. 

It was the stickiest day of the summer. I was fifteen, and Lauren was eleven. Lauren was also in tears, barefoot, little hands fisted in her dress. From behind the glass sliding door, her eyes were bloodshot, and she sobbed so viciously that she kept losing her balance. I sat, hunched, at the dinner table next to the glass sliding door, while my mother ate in silence. 

“Eat,” my mother commanded, so I did. I swallowed, and the bite fell down my throat, a cement brick pinning me to the chair. I ripped up pieces of leather off the seat, and ripped off pieces of skin near my nails. I gripped the spoon so hard I shook. 

Lauren’s little eyes bored holes into the side of my face. She was eleven years old and already starving. 

“It’s what she deserves, for lying,” my mother snapped, even though I hadn’t said a word. “You don’t lie to your mother.”

It was a white lie, I think, something like “No, I didn’t go to the gas station to get candy.” Not something like “I hate you.” I wondered when a mother hit her child, if it aches for her in the womb. If the bruises dotted down my sister’s spine would become chronic backaches for the devil sitting across from me. Do devils grow old? Maybe I should have said something. 

I didn’t, because it would hurt. 

*

Tip Five: Store in a cool, dark place, away from direct sunlight.

I know time is passing because the baby is growing. I’m bloated and stiff, and the baby has its fists wrapped around my heartstrings. It sleeps in my throat. My chest is so tight that a breath could crack my ribcage.

“Why didn’t you leave your boyfriend if he was hitting you?” Lauren is horrified, both hands tied up in the birth of a sweater. Her deft fingers have stilled on the yarn dispenser, and on the bed, I pull myself in, a bit tighter. Her bedroom is warm and orange-scented, with plants cascading down her dark oak shelves. Sunlight streams through the wide, wide windows, and a fluffy white blanket is wrapped around our knees. Still, I am suffocating.

“He didn’t hit me at first.”

“Eva! No one hits you at first!” 

“At least it wasn’t anything else. I’m lucky.” I shrug. “And did you know Mom started crocheting?”

“Oh.” Lauren seems dumbfounded. “I didn’t know that. Have you seen him since?”

“No. Blocked him. Maybe she’s lonely.”

Lauren hums. The baby hums. “Maybe.”

I feel a kick at my guts, and wince. Lauren doesn’t notice—her fingers are busy with the cloud she’s crocheting onto the sweater. Her hair curls gently behind her ear, and her arms are thin and fluid. Her skin glows, and the light pours out of her. She notices me noticing her, quirks her lip, and asks, “What are you looking at.”

I don’t know what to say. I want to ask, “How did you escape?”

Instead, I ask, “How’s college?”

“Oh.” She slams down her project, then, and the light pouring from her turns to fire. “Let me tell you about it. This motherfucker I’ve been seeing…”

Her eyes gleam with life I don’t have. There’s a life growing inside my womb, and she has more of it than I and the baby do, combined. She tells me about her failed dates, revenge hookups, and infuriating professors. I laugh and laugh and try to remember if my life had felt that bright at twenty-two. 

“… And he thinks he can trick me? At my grown ass age, I know everything there is to know!”

You don’t know anything at that age. 

I wonder how everything changes when you turn twenty-three. 

I go back home. My mother isn’t there.

My finger rests on the nozzle of the perfume I bought when I graduated high school, and I spritz it into the air. The scent is too faint, and the bottle is too warm, from where it sat in the sun. It smells like handmade charms, like secretly waking up early to paint a watercolor card for Mother’s Day, like pulling into a busy Thai restaurant, like 3:56 in the afternoon, after school. But only for a moment.

The teal walls are so cold that I want to die. 

*

Tip Six: Nothing truly lasts.

“I’d think I’d be a good mom,” I say to my mother. 

My mother scoffs. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“I would!” I insist, and the baby in my womb nods. The TV is still playing soundlessly, and the family portrait is still slightly off center. My mother hasn’t made progress on her lopsided crocheted patch. In defiance, I plant myself behind her, on the couch, so she cannot see me from where she sits on the rug.

“Get down here,” she snaps. “Didn’t I tell you it’s rude to avoid eye contact while speaking?”

“I know how to love a baby. How hard could it be?” I say. My mom’s hands stop moving, and with her back still against the couch, she turns her head back a bit to glare at me. Her hair is colored a light, airy brown—so no white hairs show, she had said, though she likes dark hair better. She sneers, and I drop my gaze.

Her voice turns ugly. “Do you think it was ever easy?”

“Well,” I say, “don’t you remember that day at the amusement park?” I hold my hands against my stomach, but the baby is quiet. Listening to me. 

“I think Lauren was twelve. So I was, what, sixteen? There was a day you took off from work to take us to the amusement park. It was our first time on rollercoasters, and we went on so many, we threw up all the funnel cake. You pretended to be annoyed when we would link our arms with yours, but I saw you smile a couple times, even if you never admitted it after.”

“And then?” My mother’s voice is quiet. 

“It was a weekday, too, a Friday. In October, remember? After the amusement park, we drove all the way to that fancy Thai restaurant, and you let us order anything. You asked us if it was better than the pad thai you tried to make, once, at home, and then you got all offended when we said yes, but what did you expect, Mom.” I laugh. I’m staring at my hands in my lap, and the couch is shaking—no, just me. I’m shaking. The reality show hosts on TV are making irritating expressions, exaggerated and soundlessly loud, but it eases my nerves. 

“And then?”

“And then Lauren said she loved you, Mom, and your face made this really ugly shape. No offense! But you said ‘I love you’ back, so you must’ve loved her, right?” I risk a glance at the back of my mother’s head, but she isn’t moving, her face turned away from me. “And instead of driving us home, you drove us to the sleepover that you had said we couldn’t go to. And you surprised us, with all the packed pajamas and everything. And at the door, you hugged us goodbye, even though you’re not a hugging person. And then I yelled, ‘I love you,’ when you were back in the driver’s seat, and then you yelled it back. So you must’ve loved me too, right?”

There are tears dripping down my face and onto my hands. They are clenched, white knuckled, onto the oversized shirt I used to wear in my mother’s home when I was sixteen. My teeth are digging into my lip, so harshly that I’m afraid I might bite it clean off. 

“Sorry,” I choke out, and I clear my throat to lie. “I’m not crying right now. I know you hated it when we cried for no reason.”

“What happened, after that?” My mother’s voice is nearly unintelligible. My vision is blurry, and my chest is heaving. 

“And then, we came home the next day. During the sleepover, we talked about how nice you had been, and what a good mom you were. We talked about if we wanted kids in the future, with Iris and Luce and Olivia. Lauren said no, but I said yes. And when we got home…”

I’m afraid to clear my vision. The colors and shapes all blend together, and if I concentrate, I feel like I’m floating in space, suspended, tethered to nothing. A baby with no umbilical cord. 

“When we got home,” I whisper, “you were in the kitchen with the oven on, but everything smelled so bad. We turned the oven off, ‘cause maybe you were trying to make breakfast but just decided to take a nap. But you were so cold.”

The living room is cold. 

“But you loved us, right? You said so, and lying is bad. Wasn’t loving us easy?”

I blink, and I’m sitting alone on a dusty couch. The TV is on, and the sun is setting. Near the furnace, there are lines of pencil smudged against the chalky white walls. Lauren, 3, 35.75 inches. Eva, 7, 51.5 inches. 

The spot on the rug below me is cold. The perfume wafting up from my neck smells like I am twenty-six, and I am the loneliest person in the world. 

There is no mother in this home.