The Smell of Dil's Cigars

By Sarah Jordan

I find myself standing in a cigar store.

When I call my husband on the car phone and tell him, I have the biggest urge to smoke a cigar, he begins a barrage of, “You want to what? Smoke a cigar? You’re the one that keeps telling me not to fall prey to a media image! Celebrity cigar smoking is that it?!
“No. No” I say gently, dreamily, “It’s because I have spent the day at my grandmother’s house.”

“Oh.” he is suddenly quiet. He understands.

One of the great advantages of being married to some one for so long is that you can understand one another in a phrase.

Let me explain it to you. You see my grandmother is dying. She, once an unpredictable, bossy woman now lies waiting for death in her home. She is no longer in her sumptuous bed, but in a rented hospital version for practicality. She can no longer object and must be cared for tenderly, without regard for her former tyrannical demands.

Today, I sadly, sweetly spent time with her. I helped Annie fix her up for the day. We changed her silk dressing gown, smoothed her sheets and combed her hair. Annie was touched that I rubbed my grandmother’s feet warm before tucking them in with fresh booties, an act I never could have done before. I was touched that Annie, after fixing her thin hair, applied Blue Grass perfume, my grandmother’s scent, an act she must have done a thousand times before.

Finished, Annie, a large, dark figure in a bright white maid’s uniform returns downstairs. I sit with my grandmother and a book I browsed from the shelf on the upstairs landing. The scent of Blue Grass perfume has briefly overcome the unfamiliar disturbing smells and returned the room to earlier times. Slowly I realize I’m expecting something or someone else. I turn to see the portrait photograph of Dil, my late grandfather. Oddly, his cane is propped under the picture in the far corner of the bedroom. All that is missing is the waft from the cigar that was wedged perpetually between his thick short fingers.

The cane is not there for my grandmother’s use, as she has not walked since her fall several years ago. The photograph, which is usually over a desk in the upstairs sunroom, is also out of place. They have been arranged here by my older sister. She has been living with our grandmother for several months now and she tells me she has been feeling “him” near. She says she senses Dil has come for his willful and beloved wife. A man of humor and force, I imagine him waiting patiently and bemusedly as only the bossy can; waiting for the equally bossy to make up her mind (or body), to give it up and cross over. She has been pounding down the ladder of frailty, commanding a slow retreat to her elegant deathbed. He waits. He is close. So close I can almost smell him.

So that is why I am outside a cigar store next to the photo gallery I told myself I came to the Quadrangle to view. I have an irresistible urge to go inside, knowing I will be disappointed if I don’t. It feels decadent. I feel silly. I am relieved to find a woman behind the counter and no one else in the store. She won’t disturb me and I can browse until I find what I am searching for. I tell myself I am searching for a gift for my other sister with whom I am getting together next week. She will laugh and appreciate the appropriateness of cigars, which we will then smoke seriously and wickedly. Just a couple of cheap ones for a silly gag. I don’t have the money for much else.

I don’t need a whole package of them, even tiny girl ones. I don’t want ones in the cute tin box, even if I could pretend I would reuse the container afterwards. Soon I go inside the humidified room looking for single small ones. There are some for a dollar each. Perfect, I think. They smell horrible—thin and weak, not like a cigar is supposed to smell. I know how a cigar is supposed to smell. I stand furtively sniffing cigars through the individual plastic wrappers, sometimes through an opened end.

An image of Gigi training to be a courtesan and learning to smell and select a man’ s cigar flashes in my mind. I almost laugh. I know what a cigar should smell like. It should smell like Dil. It should smell like my grandfather. “I am looking for a Dil-smelling cigar.” I think suddenly. I would know that smell.

It is the smell that whooshed out at us as girls when we opened new cigar boxes and lined up the new cigars in Dil’s large carved wooden box. It was a prize job, first, because we were doing something useful for our grandfather and second, because the reward was a coveted paper cigar ring.

It is the smell that clung to the silvery green silk seats of his custom silvery green Cadillac for years after he died. I remember the time I returned home to climb into that car and discovered the smell had gone. Before that moment I had thought there were things about one’s childhood one could count on.

But now I can count on the memory of that smell to find the right cigar, the right smell in the cigar store’s humidified room. Then I find it. It is no slender, sissy, pitifully brown one dollar cigar, but, naturally, a thick, long, classically brown, manly cigar. I sigh. It’s the right smell and, wouldn’t you know, expensive, too expensive to buy for a giggle with my sister.
I leave the store wondering if the woman behind the counter gets many ‘uncustomers’ who spend so long and then leave seemingly without anything. She would not have understood if I had said to her upon leaving, “Thanks for the memories.”

I have an overwhelming urge to call and confess to my husband. Thank goodness for car phones. After a moment of talking to my young daughter who answers, I ask for him. I need to tell him, “I am sitting outside a cigar store and I have the biggest urge to buy one and smoke it.”

“Oh,” he says after I tell him all of it.

“Yes,” I say, “I spent time at my grandmother’s today and he was so close I had to smell him.”

That night my grandmother died. The night nurse saw a flash of light in the corner of the bedroom that held Dil’s photo and cane. My grandmother took a sudden deep breath, then gently slowed her breathing until it stopped.

I am going back to the store. Today I think I will go ahead and get a cigar.
 

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