Chapter 2 - Across Canada - everyone's smelling

Our car is a lot fuller than it was when we left home. Sidney has bought about a dozen new outfits. I have my socks, three new books and a big map of Historical Canada that I can put on my bedroom wall. It has the flags and crests and everything for each province and territory. Even Sam buys stuff and she hates shopping usually. It’s mostly bizarre souvenirs though. Yesterday in Bathurst she bought a round metal tray with a bright red lobster painted on it. What does she want with a tray decorated with a lobster? It’s her new favourite thing and she put it on the night table on her side of the bed. Sidney made the mistake of putting her makeup on it when Sam was having a shower, and when she saw that Sam just tipped it all over the floor. One of the bottles of perfume opened so we had to evacuate the hotel for hours until the smell of ‘Tigress’ had subsided. I was secretly relieved. I can’t stand that stuff. In the morning Sidney puts on way too much and the smell of her ‘Tigress’, Mom’s ‘Shalimar’ and Dad’s ‘Brut’ makes me want to puke. Thank goodness Sam doesn’t wear anything smelly. Except her socks. I hate perfume. I'd rather smell like the little bars of soap that we find in each motel. Before I wash I always close my eyes and smell the soap to try to fix it in my memory so that I can compare them with all the others. I guess my sense of smell is not so sharp because they are all starting to smell the same. Unless they are the same. I hadn't thought of that. They could be I suppose - they are almost always the same colour of pink.

When I was a little kid my friend Lisa Donahue’s Mom used to give us her old blue perfume bottles when they were empty. If we filled them with water it made more perfume. I’d line mine up on the windowsill to see the light shine through the colour, making blue patches on my bed and carpet as the sun hit them at different times of the day. Looking back, even then it wasn’t the perfume I liked so much as the dark blue bottles.

Mom said I am not to be trusted with money anymore because I give it away to old ladies on the street or spend it on useless things like books and out of date maps instead of ‘practical things’ like clothes and jewelry or things for my hope chest which don’t really seem all that practical to me. She tells me I should be less serious and more fun at my age or I’ll turn into my father. So now I have to ask her whenever I want to buy anything which is embarrassing so I don’t anymore. How can what I want be less useful than a metal lobster tray?