1 THE PERFUME
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Stephen Rubin | 1st Place
W
hen I was young, my father owned his own chrome plating company and was very successful selling to customers like Schwinn Bicycle. We lived in a large, two-story house flled with nice furniture; my parents each had a new 1955 Cadillac, and we went yachting in our 36 foot Rammer Cabin Cruiser. I had all of the building blocks, Lincoln logs, plastic soldiers, and Tonka trucks a kid could want. I remember Dad had planted roses along the verge of the back patio. But then one night his business caught fre and burned to the ground. This was before business insurance existed, so we lost everything. My grandmother provided us with a place to live, a third story apartment in the building she owned. My grandfather had purchased it just before the war. We had three bedrooms, a small dining room and kitchen, and a single bathroom with a free standing bathtub on claw feet. We took with us some pictures, a few of my toys, and an upholstered sofa and chairs that were very uncomfortable as they were always wrapped in a heavy clear plastic. Everything else was left behind, victims to repossession and foreclosure. My older brothers shared a bedroom with bunk beds and a closet too small for their clothes. My bedroom had a window where I often sat looking over the fat roofs of the two story apartment buildings that lined the street. I could see the people in their apartments and would make up stories about them. This room served as my bedroom and the family television room as well. My bed was a vinyl sofa. I felt no sense of shelter in this place except when I was in my room with the door shut. The kitchen was at the back end of the apartment where the back door opened to a small wooden landing and the wooden stairway that led down to the second foor landing and from there down to the ground and back yard. I remember the mornings that time of the year in Chicago when windows and doors were left open, a time before air conditioning. The warm breeze entered our kitchen blending with the scent of reheated cofee and the odor of cold cigarette stubs. Every morning, when I came downstairs, my mother would be sitting in her corner where the end of the kitchen table adjoined the wall, clutching at her housecoat below her chin as if chilled, her thin body buried in its wrapping. Her posture was brittle and rigid. She raised the cup to her lips and blew across the surface of the hot cofee as she cautiously sipped from the rim. Then she tapped the pack of Chesterfelds in her palm, pulled out the last cigarette, and put it between her lips as she crumpled the empty pack and dropped it in the wastebasket at her side. A double row of amber medicine vials lined the sill ordered according to their timing and frequency. She raised the Zippo in front of her face, and her lips adjusted the end of the cigarette to the edge of the fame. She took a slow deep drag closing her eyes as she leaned back as if swooning, her cheeks hollowed by the drag that pulled the orange glow up the cigarette. I watched as the thin column of smoke purled up from a lipstick-stained butt, her last smoke among the others piled in the Bakelite ashtray.
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