message in a bottle

My grandmother told me that men like girls who look like girls and use their feminine wiles. This is unsolicited and I don't really know what it means, but I tell her I'll do my best. So, while she tries on gold shoes and green shoes and shoes for wearing to town, I skulk around the perfume counters and try to find some wile in a bottle. Men in books always fall for women who smell good. I think. Yes, that sounds right... 50 years later, after the children she had with another man are grown and married, he still sits there dreaming of the smell of spring rain rising off the back of her neck. His buddy pokes him with a bony finger to get him to take his turn at checkers.

I uncork the first bottle but it doesn't smell like the path to undying love. It smells like the jungle and says I will pounce on you like a tiger; I am ferocious and will subdue you with my scent. You will obey. I skip the second bottle entirely because the girl on the poster is blonde (which I will never be) and lying in the sand (which I rarely do) so why even bother. The next smells a little overdone with all its black and white notes of let's kiss passionately under the Eiffel Tower since it is raining and we are wearing matching trenchcoats. Maybe in 7th grade when obvious was the lingua franca. A few feet down the smooth white counter, a shopgirl with hot pink eye makeup sprays something on the slender wrist of an elegant old woman. It seems promising until I get closer and realize there are diamonds on the bottle and I AM BEING SEDUCED BY THE SMELL OF MONEY! I try 2 more bottles because they seem to be giving off a certain savoir faire -- sort of take me to the party at the embassy and I'm an ace at post-communist eastern European politics -- but in the end the nose knows and it's pretty obvious that really it's just a lot of black eyeliner and champagne which I always regret the next morning. The last bottle says Come here so I can feed you sugar cookies and stone you to death with vanilla beans... My grandmother shows up with her arms full of shopping bags and few more helpful suggestions for me to try on. Nothing fits rights, though.

For awhile in college I was a chemistry major and I'm starting to regret switching, although white lab coats and goggles are at the bottom of the of chart of Catalysts for True Love at Room Temperature (solid and liquid states only). Dr. Olmstead liked to listen to the soundtrack for The Last of the Mohicans while going over lab reports in his tiny office. He never remembered my name even though I was his only advisee, but I think he might have taught me how to concoct my very own bottle of wiles. The first whiff would say I'll do my best not to spill coffee on you or talk too much followed by Tell me your stories all night and I'll hold your secrets in my hand like seeds to plant. Chemistry blurs into alchemy so we can stuff everything we need to say in the bottle: I will write you notes on my green typewriter and read our children poems about tall ships. Old people eating alone at McDonalds make me sad so let's never be old or alone.