“Yeah, Mr. V,” the smartass said, understanding. “You caught me”—pause—“making stuff up.”
And lastly, the baby-powder vial predictably conjured up memories of mothers and young siblings, and one instance of being locked in a clothes dryer against the student’s will, followed by the almost exact same recollection, but done willingly.
And then Mr. V did a total U-turn, or so it seemed.
“I know I’ve prefaced a lot of these demos with the standard disclaimer to not try this at home, but this time I’m changing that.” He paused. “Those of you who still have access to your grandparents and/or great-grandparents, think about trying this experiment on them, especially if they’ve started to lose their memories. Especially if they’ve developed the habit of wearing way too much perfume or aftershave.”
A hand went up. Mr. Vlasic seemed to already know the question. “No,” he said, “the grandparents experiment won’t be on the test. It’s strictly for extra credit.” He paused. “And extra credit for you personally, in the being-a-good-person department. You’ll be amazed at how grateful old people can be when you show the least interest in what they have to say.”
Pandora, stationed in the back of the classroom, per usual, thought, Been there, still doing that . . .
Pandora didn’t need extra credit—not in science, at least—but trying the experiment on Gladys would give her an excuse to talk to Mr. V about the results. The truth was, she had a little crush on him. How secret that crush was, given her traitorous face, she didn’t know. But he’d not said anything, which either meant he hadn’t noticed or was even more crush-worthy than she thought.
She did tweak the experiment a bit, though. First, the vile vial needed to go on the grounds of sheer nastiness, and second, she nuked the hell out of those other two cotton balls, spraying them in their respective air fresheners until they were dripping with memories to compensate for the ones her grandmother had lost already. Press-twisting their caps back on, Pandora proceeded to slide the vials into her parka’s side pockets, one bottle of memories each.
“Hey, Gram,” she greeted, unbooting and sliding off her parka. The usual chitchat followed, the two having developed a routine further routinized by the fact that increasingly, Gladys’s side of the conversation was a practically verbatim rerun of what she’d said the previous visit.
“So anyway,” Pandora said, “we did an interesting experiment in science class today.” She plucked the vials from the pockets of the parka she’d draped over a kitchen chair and placed them on the breakfast nook between them, continuing to explain the gist before asking if her grandmother was game.
Gladys shrugged and Pandora said, “Okay,” before uncapping the first vial and passing it forward.
Her grandmother dipped in her beak and inhaled. Shrugged.
“Smell harder,” Pandora advised.
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
Pandora demonstrated by sniffing in loudly. Gladys tried. Shrugged again, passing the vial back. “You try,” her grandmother said.
And so Pandora did, easing the mouth of the vial noseward, abundantly aware of how thoroughly she’d soaked the cotton balls and wary of olfactory overload. But as she drew the vial nearer, she sensed something was wrong. She couldn’t smell anything, even when she placed her nose directly over the vial and inhaled as hard as she’d demonstrated earlier.
Briefly, a butterfly of panic flitted across her brain, heading toward her stomach as Pandora wondered whether dementia was contagious—whether she’d exposed herself so thoroughly that she’d already lost her sense of smell and the rest of her brain would be next and . . .
. . . and then she noticed the cold against her fingertips where they held the vial. She looked inside and flicked a fingernail against the side. The cotton ball—frozen—clicked against the other side. She hadn’t been outside that long, but then again, it doesn’t take long to freeze something at forty degrees below zero. They’d been in her pockets, but the outside lining was closer to the air than any extraneous body heat coming off Pandora.
“Maybe later,” she said, leaving the vials uncapped on the table between them to thaw.
They talked while they waited to resume the experiment, but as they did, Pandora noticed her grandmother getting anxious. “Have you taken your Xanax?” she asked.
But instead of the yes or no the question seemed to call for, Gladys said, “Talcum powder.”
Pandora blinked, inhaled, and then smelled it, too, along with a strong hint of pine. “The experiment,” she said. “I’d almost for . . .” But the younger woman stopped before getting to gotten, refusing to say the word, as if saying it would bring her grandmother’s disease crashing down on her. Instead, she asked, “What does the smell of baby powder remind you of?”
A strange look fell across Gladys’s face. “I’ve felt like this before,” the old woman said.
“Like how?”
“Like I’m racing against death,” her grandmother said. “This time, it’s my brain cells dying, but before . . .” She drifted off, and Pandora tried reeling her back.
“When was this?” she asked.
“World War II,” her grandmother said.
“What about the war?”
“I fought in it.”
“That was Grandpa Herman,” Pandora corrected. “Your husband. Only men fought in the war.”
“The ones who fought and died were boys,” Gladys said. “But they weren’t the only ones fighting.”
“How, specifically, did you fight in World War II, Gladys Kowalski?” Pandora asked, using her grandmother’s back-then name in case it helped jar loose anything the smell of baby powder hadn’t—like, for instance, what talcum had to do with the war.
“I can’t say,” Gladys said, shaking her head violently, followed by the words that would doom her at the hands of a girl once nicknamed Dora the Implorer: “It’s secret,” the old woman said. “Classified.”
Gauntlet accepted. “Tell me,” Pandora said, squaring her shoulders, prepared to resort to elder abuse if it came to that.
“Can’t.”
“Can’t because you can’t remember,” Pandora drilled, “or because you won’t?”
“Shouldn’t,” her grandmother said, already softening. “They could put me in jail . . .”
Pandora reached across the table and took her grandmother’s fretting hands. “I don’t mean to be mean with what I’m about to say,” she said, pausing to meet Gladys’s eyes. “But what difference would it make?”
Her grandmother blinked, as if thinking about it, while the what-if machine in Pandora’s head went crazy with possibilities. What if her grandmother had been some femme fatale spy luring Nazis to their deaths or maybe a footnote in the history of Los Alamos? Gladys, meanwhile, reached for the vial with the scent of baby powder wafting over it, brought it to her nose as if it contained smelling salts, and inhaled.
“Ready?” she asked.
18
“I’m from the fairy dust clean-up team,” Milo said. “I’m the speaker—excuse me, preacher—of truth to naïveté.”