The Persistence of Odor
Skyler Jones
In her husband’s closet, surrounded by layers of dust and cotton, Margaret tried to lie perfectly still. Up above her, the bottoms of jackets and plaid shirts swayed with the practiced rhythm of her breath. She inhaled long and deep and felt the space fill with his presence. There was no time in the closet. No night or day. No past or present. Only the history of two people, one gone, the other slowly breathing, taking in the last bits of their lives together.
From work to home and back again, Margaret’s days were nearly indistinguishable. For most people, this kind of monotony could provoke a sense of nagging discontentment, but Margaret never felt agitated by the predictability of her life. From the outside, she lived a simple day-to-day existence. But her interior life was spontaneous and exciting. This was all thanks to her nose.
Margaret’s sense of smell was so inextricably linked to her memory, a passing breeze could splay open the days of her life and draw from them like a fanned deck of cards. Sometimes the memories were so vivid she could see parts of them unfolding before her eyes. This allowed Margaret to avoid the odd bouts of nostalgia characteristic of middle-age. She found pleasure in the accumulation of memory and the ease with which her nose could pull her back to something it thought was important. The only thing she feared was that her nose would send her back too often, rendering the past and present indistinguishable. Or worse, replacing the past with the present so that her mind would become more reliant on memory than reality. Margaret’s only deterrent for this confusion was her husband’s consistent placement in all but a few of her most important memories. He was the common thread that kept her mind from unraveling.
As her husband approached senescence much quicker than her, Margaret made a conscious effort not to delve too deeply into memory. She thought she was prepared for this moment, but as his health deteriorated she couldn’t stop her nose from pulling her down the deep well of their relationship to compensate for the uncertainty that would follow his death.
Margaret wasn’t surprised by her husband’s death. He had smoked all his life. And she didn’t feel guilty either. She did all she could to get him to stop. She rifled through his pockets and his glove compartment, crushing every cigarette she found. She bought him the gum, the patches, the therapy, and even a few hypnosis sessions. She wept and threatened to leave, and got their children to weep and threaten to leave. At her most malicious she even considered lacing his cigarettes with something vomit inducing, hoping he’d take it as a sign from God to call it quits. But she never did and he never stopped.
Near the end of her husband’s life, Margaret would take him to Target for some light exercise. They would lock arms and do laps around the perimeter of the windowless store. Shuffling past the beauty care aisle, Margaret would catch whiffs of the deodorant her husband used when they first met. “A proven aphrodisiac,” he would always say when Margaret caught him applying the neon green stick to his wrists and neck. At their 25th wedding anniversary he claimed that the timeless aroma of Old Spice—not love or any other immeasurable quality—had sustained their quarter century relationship.
Passing the row of slender red tubes, Margaret would lean close and inhale. A brief vision would appear before her just as the fragrance hit her brain receptors. Standing at the end of the aisle, leaning on a shovel, would be a 25-year-old version of her husband. He would stand there for the briefest moment, just long enough for her to take in his musk. It wasn’t much different than the scent of the diminutive man wrapped around her arm. He smelled how she thought a cowboy would, like bramble and dust and the oaky tang of cigarettes. The only difference was the strong smell of dirt. Her husband was a landscaper when they first met and all his shirts and pants were stained brown from hauling mulch. Margaret remembered the damp grittiness of his dirt stained jeans as they rubbed up against her knees during one of their first dates.
When they first moved in together and all their clothes and furniture intermingled, her scent changed, but his remained the same. It was a grounding, sturdy scent. From it Margaret knew he would stay put, knew he wouldn’t run off enraptured by dreams of middle-age adolescence. His smell made her feel safe.
After their walks around Target, Margaret would drive straight home, avoiding any stops at gas stations or fast food restaurants. The aromas of these places had started to induce dark and mysterious trips through her memory. Highway rest stops were worst of all. The sweet heat of exhaust mingling with the stale smell of fryer oil reminded her of old dime novels and movies that memorialized the open roads of America. When she still considered herself youthful, these smells conjured up pleasant fantasies. But now that the only person who made her life seem real and right was almost gone, they started to remind her of the emptiness and tedium of the life she had chosen to live. If she were young, these feelings of regret could be overcome by dreams of the future, by a life yet to be lived. But experiencing them now, Margaret felt they were the inevitable conclusion to her life.
The morning after her husband's death, Margaret’s car ran out of gas on the way to Target. She sat stone still for an hour before a policeman arrived. He filled her car with enough gas to reach the nearest station, but instead of stopping she drove straight to Target, hoping a vigorous stroll would give her the courage to get gas on the way home. When she stepped inside—her husband’s arm no longer linked with hers—the smells that were once so comforting took on an ominous quality.
It stunk of plastic and recycled air. In the past this was a smell empty of memory—the aroma of a future she knew she wouldn’t be a part of. But now that she was no longer tethered to another life, to a trajectory she could predict and prepare for, the smells started to remind her of a different future, a sterile void that had just consumed her husband and was planning to take her next. The memories of her life were uncoiling, and she couldn’t wind them back together with the main strand now missing.
After this day at Target, Margaret started spending all of her time at home. She was too old to spend the rest of her life floating through the gloomy smells of regret. And as far as she could tell, this was all the outside world had to offer. In the home she shared with her husband, safe from errant perfumes and odors, Margaret found all the memories she needed. Her husband was everywhere. He was in the bed sheets, the pillow cases, and the old socks stuffed between couch cushions. He was in the cab of his pick-up, the tool shed behind the house, and the stacks of photo albums in the attic. Anywhere his scent was she found him.
After weeks of seclusion, her husband’s smell started to fade. Margaret stirred up flecks of dust from corners of the house hoping he was hidden there, but they only made her sneeze. She burned camel cigarettes like incense, but their pungency only masked his scent further. After days of searching, she found only one place where his scent remained: his closet.
At first Margaret went weeks without opening her husband’s closet. She would hover past it and pick up traces of the heavy odor that emanated from within. She would sit with her back against it and feel the scent roll under the door and up into her nose. When she finally opened the closet door, the sensation hit her like the head-rush of an ex-smoker revisiting the habit. The door banged open and she was gone, entwined from ankle to elbow in stiff wedding present sheets with a man she still felt she hardly knew. And when the closet door slammed shut she fell onto the bed, onto those same sheets, now pilled and faded by thirty years of softly falling, and loomed between here and the past for another few moments before the heaviness returned and she was back, only alone, entirely beholden to a nose she couldn’t control.
These moments were euphoric for Margaret, but just like any narcotic, the smell from the closet began to lose its potency. Soon opening the door was no longer enough, so she started to stand in the closet. And when she grew too tired to stand she brought a small stool to sit on. Eventually Margaret had to lie down in the closet for her husband’s musk to induce a memory. But the smell kept dissolving, kept blending with her own collection of skin particles and sweat. She knew she was destroying his scent by immersing herself in it, but she couldn’t help it. It was the only part of him she had left.
The last time Margaret visited the closet she brought a pack of cigarettes with her. She lay in the closet for thirty minutes, but a memory still wouldn’t surface. To speed up the process she pulled her husband’s shirts off the hangers and draped them over her body. His scent was heavy now, but a memory still wouldn’t come. She tugged her right hand out from under the pile of clothing and lit a crumpled cigarette. She inhaled deeply and blew the smoke high into the corner. It ballooned and quickly filled the space. Soon the only shape Margaret could make out was the glowing ember of her cigarette as it slowly burned down. When she couldn’t smoke anymore she flicked the cigarette into the corner.
Just before Margaret lost consciousness, the mulch-stained legs of a young man appeared in the closet. The young man crouched down, picked up Margaret’s half-finished cigarette, and took a drag. It was hard to make out his face through the smoke, but Margaret recognized his smell. She couldn’t think of anything to say so she just smiled. He smiled back, then blew out a column of smoke that plumed and plumed until he disappeared behind it. He was gone, but Margaret kept smiling. And when she closed her eyes there he stood, leaning against a shovel, smiling back.
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