SMOKE

Albert Huffstickler

Cigarettes tasting of face powder evoke the Second World War.

They were from my cousin Grace's purse, smoked as we sat in my Aunt Nell's kitchen talking.

Grace was home for the weekend from Charlotte where she worked.

I was in high school, discontented.

All the men were off to war: Grace's husband, Dan; her sister's husband, Heman Queen; my father.

It was a distant war. More immediate were things like starting to shave, starting to smoke,

why I couldn't talk to girls, what I was going to do with my life.

Grace sensed my restlessness and seemed to understand, perhaps because her own had never left her.

So we talked and exchanged confidences through a pale blue haze of cigarette smoke,

An intimacy between us born of the time; the sense, even this far. away from the war,

that things would not last: an imminence in the air as of things about to die,

of men going off not to return or to return changed.

Grace liked living in Charlotte out from beneath Aunt Nell's allknowing gaze.

She liked the bustle of the city, the sense of life, the soldiers passing through.

Living there five days a week, she was able to do pretty much what she wanted to

and hinted at intrigues and romances, stopping short of details only because of Aunt Nell's impeccable timing:

she seemed to sense when the conversation veered in a certain direction

and appeared in the kitchen doorway with an omniscient lock in her eye.

Only later did I realize that she had other reasons for looking in on us from time to time.

Aunt Nell didn't think that, at sixteen, I needed to know all that Grace did.

Aunt Nell didn't think that Grace, for all her years, needed to know all that Grace did.

Grace wavered between intimidation and defiance

and sometimes they argued in soft voices in the other room.

There was a haze of mystery surrounding this time.

Now, looking back, it seems pretty obvious what Grace was doing in Charlotte

with all those young men on their way to the war

and just as obvious why Aunt Nell, with her staid convictions, objected.

But then, it was more mysterious than that-and more romantic:

a perfume hovered in the air not unlike the fragrant smoke of cigarettes from a woman's purse.

I was a very young sixteen.

Once, a couple of years later, something almost happened between Grace and me-

on a winter evening when I was home from college.

But it was snowing outside and Aunt Nell was inside and there wasn't much time.

It might have saved me a lot of difficulties.

Grace was sensitive and gentle and loved me very much in her way.

She'd have taught me without my knowing and saved me countless blunders.

But, like so many times, what should have happened didn't.

And what did happen is more factual, less tinged with fragrance and mystery.

The war ended. The men came home.

Grace got pregnant. I went off to school, then married and dropped out.

Grace was never very happy. Later, she got sick and Aunt Nell moved in and nursed her.

I don't think this world was enough for Grace.

Perhaps there is no world for people like her.

But if there is, it's a world of beautiful young men going off to war never to be seen again,

of brief, intense meetings amid the bustle of city streets, ending as quickly as they began;

a transient world, as fleeting, fragrant and insubstantial

as smoke.