Perfume Fight

In the top left room upstairs once you entered, Calvin Klein, Chanel, and Elizabeth Alden duked it out.

It started with one person say, "on guard" and then that's where it went.

One perfume in hand for three girls; another was brave enough to hold one in each hand. And on went the perfume battle that made my cousin's room flammable as a dry field on a hot summer day. We grabbed socks to insulate the smell to our noses and jumped over suitcases. For three glorious minutes, we breathed in chemicals that heroin addicts would find crazy to ingest. We were saying hello to our cousin after all. We hadn't seen her for a while and doing something as poisonous as a perfume fight meant we were bonding as close as a smoking buddy is to an addict.

You may wonder what your typical 120 square foot bedroom smells like after a few minutes into a perfume fight. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Too much flowers, fruit, and cotton candy in one place, in fact. We stopped when one bottle ran out and we felt a little lightheaded. What had we just done? Suddenly the reality was that the socks over our faces didn't help as much as we had hoped for and now my cousin's room was intoxicating as the gas mask test they did in military camps. And we were needing to sleep in that room that night.

My mom scolded us for what we did. Not only did we waste a bottle of cheap imitation perfume, but we smelled up my cousin's room. Possibly intoxicating ourselves for life, but it was all worth it. My sisters and I had never had a perfume fight before.


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It felt like the best kept secret in Southern Illinois. The one no one knew of to even talk about. Only my cousin and surrounding neighbors knew about it and we were the ones who were sworn to keep it a secret. We snuck out while our mother was away in town on one cloudy spring day. We walked through the fields into the patch of grey woods in my cousin's back yard. It was about a half mile out of her yard and we knew this meant keeping good timing before our mom came home to find where we had gone.

We put our swimsuits on underneath our clothes and walked out to the pond. It was a place my cousin claimed to have been to several times. At least that is what she would say when she had to defend our actions against my mom later on when we were caught. We arrived at the spot and saw water flowing across rocks. We stepped in and rocks grinded against our feet. My sisters and me were from the safe suburbs. We were taught to buy gallon jugs of water and to stay away from the metallic water that went through the tap. Lake or pond water was something to get used to because of this mentality.

I remember feeling grimey afterwards, but I felt the purpose in doing what we did was justifiable. We never had touched dirty water. We had gone to the chlorine enriched pool near our house for several years. We were free from any rules or regulation. Someone telling us what to do. Being sneaky. Mischievous. It was fun.

We walked back to the house and from the looks of our bathing suits, it didn't matter that we beat our mom back to the house. She found out when our swimsuits were covered in sandy dirt and like a Catholic, we confessed our wrong doing.

I watched from the other room, behind a cracked sliding door my cousin justify her influence in our lives that day.

"I go there all the time... They were not going to drown.... It's okay water."

My sisters and I were let off easy because we were the ones influenced, but it did mean that we were now not able to possibly go swimming at the rec center the next day when we hung out with our grandma... I can't remember if we did or not. Who cares? We did something wild and crazy outside the suburban world we had grown up in.

And our poor mother who had to endure what was outside the norm for us, yet in her day was the norm for herself. Some worries do not make sense, I suppose.

It was not even five years later when news of one of my cousin's friend drowning in a lake came around. One moment he was seen and the next he was gone. My cousin had to hide from us girls in order to grieve to herself. Hiding in the tree house and basement, any place she could get to before us. I didn't understand at the time what death was. I never had really thought about it or experienced it, but I found out later with my grandma's death within a few years after my cousin's friend. It taught me to keep on living.

The dead can be buried and grieved, but life must go on with joy or else it isn't life at all. Stressing over loss weighs down the body. So does worrying about death coming in life. My poor mother who worried for us girls after a perfume fight and being in an unmarked body of water had her right intentions in being mad, but it was us girls who had the right intentions in how to live. Not without care, but without concern, we wanted to experience life and the endless possibilities to it. Maybe we could discover or do something new. The possibilities were endless when we were with one brave soul.