I want to stretch out the last few bites because I know what comes next, but the sooner we do this, the better. And, to be honest, I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t excited.Not excited, I correct as I gather the rest of the dishes and bring them over to the sink. Mom is clucking about the lack of rubber gloves, so I hand her a pair of latex ones from my worktable.
The feeling in my gut is the same as going down a roller coaster, and I rename it. I’m apprehensive. That’s a good word. Over the course of the day, I kept sneaking into the bathroom with the register to try to find another ancestor—any one—who had the same fear as me. None of them did, or if they had, they didn’t admit to it. They only felt anticipation.
“Let’s begin,” says Mom, peeling off the gloves. Despite wandering around the city for the day, she looks as put-together as when she left the house this morning, and not a drop of water from the dishes has dampened her shirt. “Sit.”
I sit. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
She ignores me, but the question was rhetorical anyway. Mom isn’t one to admit ignorance or wrongdoing. The mental gymnastics she can do to prove herself right, even when confronted with proof otherwise, are boggling. Dad flipped out the time she said she’d locked the door when she clearly had not. She kept insisting she had despite him taking photos of the door, intent himself on being declared correct.
She looks down at the table. “What’s this?”
“One of Ana’s designs. We’re going to work together to make them into a new line of fragrant jewelry.”
Mom is shaking her head before I finish. “You need to focus on understanding your moli, not this kind of silliness.”
“You said it was nice,” I say, trying to keep down my hurt. “You thought it was a good idea.”
“For someone else. Not you. You should have bigger goals. Bigger ambitions for your work.”
I feel my shoulders go high. “I want to do this.”
She takes a deep breath and lets it go. “Think about what I said.”
My entire body feels unruly, but Mom, having dispatched something I was excited about with a few quick words—efficient as always—points to the worktable.
“Show me,” she demands. “We’re going to go through the process from the beginning. I want you to start by making a perfume.”
There’s no point in arguing, so I move the register out of the way with a violence that is all the rebellion I can handle. Well, Mom can have her opinion on what I do, but I’m an adult. I don’t need to listen to her about the jobs I take on. Mom grabs my notebook as it’s about to fall off the table, and of course, she opens it.
“What is this?” she asks.
It’s the list I’ve been working on as I read through the register. “Chinese characters.”
“I can see that. Why are they in a list? Are you practicing them?”
“No, they’re characters from the register I don’t understand. I’ll look them up later.”
“Always putting things off. Do it as you work so you gain full understanding of what you read.” She points to one. “This is a plant with purple flowers.”
I’m not thrilled to have disappointed her again, but she’s saving me precious time looking up the words, so I let her continue as I jot down a few notes for the perfume. This helps calm my nerves, at least for a moment. I can make a perfume. That’s something I can do well, without failure. She writes down the name next to the character in English and pinyin, then goes through a few more. She laughs at one entry.
“I remember this. It’s from Jingjing’s chapter, when she was trying to capture the smell of lily of the valley. You could feel how frustrated she was trying to get it.”
“Too bad she lived two hundred years before hydroxycitronellal was created,” I say, putting my notes aside to bring out the register and find Jingjing’s chapter. Mom’s right, you can almost taste her rage at her inability to capture the scent.
“Synthetics changed so much,” Mom agrees. She pages through the book, and I notice with interest that, like me, she avoids the twomost recent chapters, her own and Waipo’s. “I always liked Jingjing. She had personality.”
“Like when she gave the perfume to the tax collector’s wife to put him in a generous mood.”
We flip through the pages, commenting on our ancestors like they’re characters in a book. “Do you think they were really like this?” I ask. “Or that they wrote themselves the way they wish they were?”
Mom shuts the register. “Who can say? They knew they were writing for the future, and they could read what happened in the past. Can we blame them if they wanted to be seen for themselves among all these unique women?”
Did she? Mom pushed the register across the counter. “Get ready,” she says. “Time for work.”
I can do this. I need to do this. I want to do this. I look at the rows of fragrances and pluck out a few vials without hesitating. I know exactly what I want to make. Ambroxan with some cardamom. Frankincense. Like my very first fragrance for Ms. Kang, this is a play on incense, but instead of cold smoke drifting to the ceiling, it’s warm with embers before it turns to ash. I add in some iris for the faint metal of an old, treasured censer and give it a sniff. It’s not perfect—too much iris is giving more bite than I want, and it requires additional velvetiness—but it’s fine.
Mom takes it from my hand. “Good enough,” she says. This is possibly the only time she’s accepted less than perfection. “You know what to do.”
