The First Time She Smelled L'Interdit

She was nineteen. She was in a department store she had no business being in, killing time before a bus, wearing clothes that did not match the marble floors or the lighting or the women who moved through the space like they had been born knowing exactly which counter to walk toward.

She wandered. She smelled things she could not afford and would not have known how to wear. She was performing confidence she did not have yet, which is what nineteen is for.

Then she smelled it. A tester bottle — unlabelled, no card, just the bottle in a line of other bottles that she spritzed on her wrist without looking at the name. And something happened that had not happened to her in a perfume department before. She stopped. She brought her wrist to her face. She stood very still.

Dark but not heavy. Floral but not soft. White flowers that had decided to be something more complicated than white flowers.

It was dark but not heavy. Floral but not soft. White flowers that had decided to be something more complicated than white flowers. Tuberose and patchouli and something underneath both of them that smelled like a decision already made.

She looked at the bottle. L'Interdit. Givenchy.

She looked at the price. She put the bottle down. She left the store and got her bus and went home.

She thought about it for ten years. Not obsessively — she had a life, she had other perfumes, she wore other things and liked them. But occasionally, in the way you occasionally think about the version of yourself you were going to be, she thought about the bottle on the counter and the wrist and the moment of standing still.

On her twenty-ninth birthday she bought it from BettyWhyt. She wore it that evening. Her husband said: “You smell different. Good different.”

“I know,” she said. “I've been waiting.”

Givenchy L'Interdit. Some things are worth a decade.