I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch Page A
Authors: Annabelle Gurwitch
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the bottom-of-purse lint—cookie crumbs, crushed vitamins, a crumpled notice from my son’s PTA—until the day I change purses, maybe two years from now. I can’t imagine why I’d ever need to call her except to ask for a job application.
I want this lunch to last forever. Bouquets of flowers are exploding from vases on both sides of our table. I am gripped by a sense of dread that this might be the last time I will be invited into a place where even the air smells expensive.
It turns out that it’s not the flowers that are perfuming the air. Hotels have started pumping fragrances through their airvents to aromatically enforce their brand. * The Beverly Wilshire’s aroma, Purple Water, has been designed by Asprey (the British line specializing in both jewelry and polo equipment) to reach into your reptilian brain and mimic the smell of old money. It has notes of leather, cigars and cooked peas. If an odor had corporeal form, Purple Water would be wearing an ascot. It taps a memory deeply buried in my subconscious.
Before my family moved to Florida, where I grew up, we lived in a series of small apartments in Wilmington, Delaware. The units had 1970s avocado-colored plasticky kitchens, and wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the bathrooms. That was an improvement from camping out at my aunt Gloria’s house, where we landed after losing our home in Alabama. The Florida move marked a major step up for us. Our new residence was located on one of the exclusive man-made islands in Biscayne Bay, right off Miami Beach. A uniformed guard was stationed 24/7 at the gated entrance of the bridge leading to the islands.
I gleefully bounded into the house and lay down, pressing my face into the cool, polished hardness of the white tiles in the eight-hundred-square-foot living room. “We’re rich,” I reveled, though our cottage-style home was modest compared to the surrounding estates. Everything looked brighter here, from the tropical fruit growing in the yard to our future. It was like we’dbeen living in black-and-white and had woken up in Technicolor. I couldn’t know it at age ten, but it was to a large extent an illusion. We were floating on a sea of debt. Our wealth was as artificial as the island we resided on.
We were also only the second Jewish family to move onto Sunset Islands. The first, a prominent local Jewish family, had to sue the Island Association to gain permission to live there. Upon our arrival, I made fast friends with Shelby, a longtime island resident my age. She and her mother, Gigi, were long, lanky blondes with sharp, birdlike patrician features who wore faded fruit-and-flower-printed A-line shifts. The whereabouts of Shelby’s dad were never spoken of. Thirty-foot Doric columns framed their colonial-style mansion. There was little furniture, but even I could tell that it was “important.” High-backed winged armchairs, heavy crystal chandeliers and leather-bound books. I thought it was fun that the only food in the pantry was crackers and hard cheese. That first summer, I enjoyed long sweaty days at Shelby’s—they didn’t “believe” in air-conditioning—polishing her mother’s silver and skimming the leaves from their kidney-shaped backyard pool.
After my mother learned I was essentially working as a maid, the home was off-limits to me. I rarely saw Shelby again during the remainder of the eight years in which I lived there. They would drive by in their ancient wood-paneled station wagon, and I’d wave to them as they headed off to the Surf Club, a club whose membership excluded Jews, while I played touch football in the island park with the kids from the island’s other Jewish family. Years later I recognized Shelby’s colorful smocks as LillyPulitzers. Too bad I hadn’t stuffed one of those dresses into my pocket while cleaning their silver. It might be worth something today. The smell of their home stuck with me, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but it turns out to
I want this lunch to last forever. Bouquets of flowers are exploding from vases on both sides of our table. I am gripped by a sense of dread that this might be the last time I will be invited into a place where even the air smells expensive.
It turns out that it’s not the flowers that are perfuming the air. Hotels have started pumping fragrances through their airvents to aromatically enforce their brand. * The Beverly Wilshire’s aroma, Purple Water, has been designed by Asprey (the British line specializing in both jewelry and polo equipment) to reach into your reptilian brain and mimic the smell of old money. It has notes of leather, cigars and cooked peas. If an odor had corporeal form, Purple Water would be wearing an ascot. It taps a memory deeply buried in my subconscious.
Before my family moved to Florida, where I grew up, we lived in a series of small apartments in Wilmington, Delaware. The units had 1970s avocado-colored plasticky kitchens, and wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the bathrooms. That was an improvement from camping out at my aunt Gloria’s house, where we landed after losing our home in Alabama. The Florida move marked a major step up for us. Our new residence was located on one of the exclusive man-made islands in Biscayne Bay, right off Miami Beach. A uniformed guard was stationed 24/7 at the gated entrance of the bridge leading to the islands.
I gleefully bounded into the house and lay down, pressing my face into the cool, polished hardness of the white tiles in the eight-hundred-square-foot living room. “We’re rich,” I reveled, though our cottage-style home was modest compared to the surrounding estates. Everything looked brighter here, from the tropical fruit growing in the yard to our future. It was like we’dbeen living in black-and-white and had woken up in Technicolor. I couldn’t know it at age ten, but it was to a large extent an illusion. We were floating on a sea of debt. Our wealth was as artificial as the island we resided on.
We were also only the second Jewish family to move onto Sunset Islands. The first, a prominent local Jewish family, had to sue the Island Association to gain permission to live there. Upon our arrival, I made fast friends with Shelby, a longtime island resident my age. She and her mother, Gigi, were long, lanky blondes with sharp, birdlike patrician features who wore faded fruit-and-flower-printed A-line shifts. The whereabouts of Shelby’s dad were never spoken of. Thirty-foot Doric columns framed their colonial-style mansion. There was little furniture, but even I could tell that it was “important.” High-backed winged armchairs, heavy crystal chandeliers and leather-bound books. I thought it was fun that the only food in the pantry was crackers and hard cheese. That first summer, I enjoyed long sweaty days at Shelby’s—they didn’t “believe” in air-conditioning—polishing her mother’s silver and skimming the leaves from their kidney-shaped backyard pool.
After my mother learned I was essentially working as a maid, the home was off-limits to me. I rarely saw Shelby again during the remainder of the eight years in which I lived there. They would drive by in their ancient wood-paneled station wagon, and I’d wave to them as they headed off to the Surf Club, a club whose membership excluded Jews, while I played touch football in the island park with the kids from the island’s other Jewish family. Years later I recognized Shelby’s colorful smocks as LillyPulitzers. Too bad I hadn’t stuffed one of those dresses into my pocket while cleaning their silver. It might be worth something today. The smell of their home stuck with me, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but it turns out to
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