Rebecca in Solar Flare from a Sharper Sun, © Solar Dynamics Observatory/AIA, NASA
Rebecca sent me a delightful e-mail last year (after discovering Nosy Girl through her reading of Alyssa Harad) wondering whether I was still collecting nosy interviews. It was a fine question as this interview space has been woefully under-utilized! But let Rebecca serve as signal flare, launching us back into more regular postings of Nosy Interviews. (I've missed them.) Rebecca's debut novel, Unbecoming, comes out next week and after reading her responses you'll probably join me in jonesing to read it. While we wait, let's visit Rebecca's website and follow her on Twitter @chezscherm.
What do you like to smell?
I like bracing smells —Aquavit,
grapefruit peel, black pepper—and green-grungy smells like moss and damp bark. I
love the smell of Sun Bum sunblock, which has the best “postcard from the
beach” memory-scent. I love the smell of my gentleman when he has just come in
from playing basketball—the fresh sweat of single-minded exuberance. The
timothy hay my rabbit eats. Saltwater. Cilantro. And what I sometimes think of
as cellar smells: cardboard, wet rocks.
When I was a
teenager, I liked all those blue-bottle “clean” scents—Gap Dream and any lotion
called “calm” or “serenity.” But one day I was watching a maxi-pad commercial
on TV and when they poured the blue juice, I conflated it with all those blue bottles
and that was the end of that. Now that I’m older, I guess I like to smell a
little dirty.
The first
not-food smells I remember loving are grass clippings left on a lawn and the
small hardware store, then called Botkin’s, where I grew up. Concrete, dirt, fertilizer,
unknown greases and glues. I love the smell of wet paint as you roll it on the
wall (the sound, too). Murphy’s oil soap. I love the smell of black mulch and
cedar mulch. These are all home-owning smells, aren’t they? I can’t explain it.
I don’t own a house. Maybe these are my smells of childhood happiness—the
scents of playing outside and then coming home, together.
What do you smell like?
I was an
unlikely candidate for perfume. I turn my nose up at “fancy” things, ads that
quantify sex appeal, the notion that you can purchase something that represents
you better than you can.
What happened
was that I was in Manhattan and needing to pee so I went into Bergdorf Goodman,
somewhere I only ever go to pee. On my way out, a man waved a fuchsia glass
bottle at me and swore I would love it. Instead of just saying no thanks and
moving on, I told him that I didn’t like fruity smells. I may have been
prickly. I didn’t like how he’d pegged me. Then he asked me what I did like, and I stopped and said “grass
clippings.” I guess I thought that would end the conversation. Instead, he
leapt to a bottle at the other end of the counter, and I let him spray it on
me. I had no idea what I was
smelling, only that my skin smelled rebellious—languid, arrogant, humid, and
green. The word I always want to use for it is “humpy.” I felt almost stoned.
That’s how it
starts, right? I felt transformed, like this perfume had given me some new
quiet power. Later, when I held out my wrist to a friend, she recoiled. To her
it smelled like a rich old man offering to show us his etchings. I couldn’t
believe it! I second-guessed myself and smelled hundreds of perfumes that weekend,
but everything else seemed sweet or powdery or like a red scarf thrown over a
lamp. But I couldn’t buy Humpy. For one thing, it was $300—which didn’t jibe at
all, since to me it smelled like drunken skinny-dipping in a slippery,
algae-skinned watering hole. $300 was out of the question, both really and
philosophically. It made so mad that I liked it.
A month later, I
bought a sample vial on the internet. My feelings about it have changed since
that first spell of mad lust. What we have is a summer thing. It’s only Humpy
when it’s hot outside, when it mixes with sun and sweat. In the cold, it smells
moneyed, and I hate it and don’t get
it at all.
But that was my
first bite of the apple. I know I'm still at the beginning of this, and I only like
perhaps one perfume in a hundred, but the odds just stoke my appetite. I have
to find them. When I do, I feel this
rush of both revelation and recognition, as though I’ve found something I was
trying to say but could not find words for.
To finally
answer your question: I smell of Annick Goutal L’Eau d’Hadrien and Voyage
d'Hermes when I’m feeling nice and Creed Original Vetiver (yep, that’s Humpy)
when I’m not. I still have only sample vials. But the scent of my truest heart
is Wild Hunt, from CB I Hate Perfume. In it, I feel profoundly mine.