NEW YORK SMELLS LIKE VIRGINIA

by Rachel Loring

The first thing I noticed was the water. If I close my eyes in the shower, I’m back in my grandmother’s upstairs bathroom. Northern tap water, my Tias used to say, came from springs, not swamps like Florida and always tastes better. In my Virignia-scented showers, I pretend to be little. Not in the way the city makes me feel little, like I might just slip right off of Manhattan if I’m not careful, but warm and weak like a hug.

My window unit churns out AC juice, baptizing my neighbors below and the filter smells like Virginia summers spent sprawled around my grandmother’s soft green carpets. Those damp and dusty afternoons when cabinets were big enough to hide in, and powdered sugar bags were soft enough to sleep on. When I walk past laundry mats, the steam smells like my grandmother and her wiggly arthritis fingers folding piles of underwear, somehow always underwear, working even the tiniest, silkiest pair into submission. And when the trees up 145th are dewy and crisp with the morning they smell like her street, Montague, full of crepey pink flowers with a name I still forget.

The Hudson from Hamilton Heights smells like Lake Gaston, where one side was in North Carolina and the other in Virginia. And if you crossed under one particularly echoey bridge you’d be in two places at once. It’s brackish and airy and dirty and lovely. When I sit by it, and the September breeze pushes across my face, I feel seven again. I am waking up early to sit at the dock before school starts again, before summer officially ends, before the sun and the cousins and the tias come out with their sunscreens and towels and radios and eight-ounce diet rites. Back then, I’d stare at the rippling lake and wish I could think the thoughts I thought adults had. But eventually, the sun came out and it was suddenly noon and my thoughts were forgotten, left behind on the dock.

Central Park at dusk smells like Virginia. Like the square of backyard between my grandma’s old house and my tia’s. Sweat and heat and grass, the soft northern kind that doesn’t itch at all, that promises real seasons and trees that turn orange. I don’t get a single rash if I lay on it, and it doesn’t poke into my back or my legs. And there are lightning bugs again, although they are dwindling now, but they still smell like dirt and grubby cupped hands.

Harlem smells like my grandad and the closet his clothes were kept in, in my mind always brown and tweed and scratchy. The vendors along 125th with their tables of belts and hats smell like him. Tanned leathers and gelled hair and cologne that was splurged on. And the women holding paper-wrapped bouquets of flowers, trailing the scent of geranium and rose behind them remind me of him, and the way he’d bring flowers to the post office employees. I like to pretend here too, that these are the same women from fifty, thirty years ago, still toting around my grandfather’s bouquets, just in New York instead of Norfolk. And I can imagine him, in a different life slipping into the shoes of New York and them fitting perfectly, I see him merging with the hustle and swaggering by next to me as I walk home with my groceries, offering to take a bag so my shoulder doesn’t snap off. For him, I accept.

I have become all of it again, new in the city feeling new in the world feeling new to the fall. I am that little girl again, somehow not thinking those once dreamed-about adult thoughts, but the same little ones I had then: that the world is beautiful and I wish to be here forever. I have become my grandfather in brown slacks on the subway, wanting to wear hats for some reason. I have become my grandmother, pinching pennies, washing delicate white shirts in the sink, sewing at night hunched over on my rug, contorting my body and hands into her, that old familiar woman, tugging at strings and, for the first time ever it feels, finally putting things together. Zigzagging threads of me and the city and the past and the people who loved me. And how strange it is to stumble into your future and find it no longer scary, but familiar and worn in. And at night, when I am lying in the dark, the sounds of the sirens and cars and shouting on the street puts me back in a twin bed on a dark Norfolk street, and on my bedside table there is a cup, mostly empty, but with one sip of Virginia still in it, and it tastes like being home.