Object-ives #8: The Powder Puff in My Drawer Smells Like the Ghost of My Grandmother

I now share my triumphs and struggles with this memento of my beloved Mamá

Angely Mercado’s treasured vintage Chantilly power box that belonged to her grandmother

The round baby-pink powder box was in my grandmother’s old things that were relegated to my parents’ basement.

I stole the circular box with a circular lid that slides perfectly on top. I kept it with the random things in a bottom drawer and remembered that I had it when I moved out of my parents’ house for the first time. I found it when attempting to make an organization system in the room that I was paying $825 a month for on an intern and freelance salary in 2019. Despite being in my mid-twenties, my traditional Catholic mother hated that I wanted to move out. I had to practically keep my plan for moving out a secret until the last minute.

I don’t remember if it was in a box or a bag. I do remember how my hands shook so hard I almost dropped the fragile plastic powder box. One of the stickers from her pharmacy prescription bag is still stuck onto it. I remember keeping it because it had the date and year, 2010, that the medication prescription was sent to the pharmacy. She had lived with us after a series of strokes in 2009 sent her to the hospital. It was months before a doctor said it was safe for her to go back to her home in the Caribbean again.

The receipt also stated her full name. Jesusita. Her name is the feminine form for ‘”Little Jesus.” We called her Mamá Susa.

I took a huge whiff of the powder box to remind myself of what she used to smell like. She liked gardenia lotion and sang the song “Perfume de Gardenias” and powdered her body during especially hot days in her native Dominican Republic. My eyes welled over and I tried to hide my face in my closet. My partner hugged me and I cried into his shirt.

Moving out of my strict parents’ home wasn’t easy. I had gotten into fights with my mom about renting a place with roommates. I worked three jobs and barely slept for more months on end. I struggled to balance everything. My relationship wasn’t going well. Seeing the powder puff from my high school years after Mamá had gotten sick made me miss a time when I had fewer responsibilities. Before I had to learn how to file invoices and work late for a verbally abusive boss who wasn’t even paying me a livable wage.

“You can’t move out before you’re married,” she had warned me when I was in high school. I had told her my life plans of travelling and living alone in an apartment with two cats.

I demanded to know why I had to wait until marriage.

“Two women I knew in my town didn’t get married. They lived in the same house together,” she said sadly. “They grew old without husbands.”

I didn’t tell her that those women may have been in a happy, healthy relationship together.

My grandmother passed before I had ever published an article in an established publication. She doesn’t know that she’s mentioned in multiple essays online. She doesn’t know that I wrote about grieving her by looking for her in fireflies and lightning bugs. She used to tell me stories about how they were souls finding their way. I want to know where her soul is now. I want to know if it’ll look for me when I go.

Years later, I told the powder puff that I had won a writing contest in college. It was first place in my category for writing about the day I found out “El Cuco” (the Dominican boogie man) wasn’t real. I told the powder puff that I was laid off from a job on Friday the 13th thanks to Covid-19 and then laughed about how I was paid to write an essay about my layoff experience. I told the powder puff about a job, and then about being mass laid off from that job with more than 20 of my colleagues about two years later.

I didn’t tell the box that months before the layoff my left eye painfully twitched and how it began to turn into a facial twitch. I didn’t describe how my hands trembled when I took the elevator up from the lobby. I didn’t recount how I ran my fingers through my hair only to find that several more strands than usual had detached from my scalp.

“Don’t ever stop working,” she had once told me. “If you get married, hide money from your husband in an envelope. Hide that envelope under a mattress or in your shoes.”

I have my own bank account and credit cards. No one apart from my parents have ever really provided entirely for me. And some of my jobs have quit me and many of my co-workers at the same time.

I tell the baby pink container that most days I’m exhausted and scared. That I’m working and freelancing every day. I’m afraid that everything is collapsing. I learned the word dictator from my grandmother. I ask if she ever cried in the privacy of her room. Did she want to have seven children? I ask if she ever thought of jumping ship.

“I sometimes worry that I ruined my life by trying so hard for nothing,” I told the powder puff after another job rejection early last year.

“Mamá, I got a fellowship and they’re sending me to the capital for a week,” I told the box.

The circular box sits on my dresser. The broken powder puff, a crumbled two-dollar bill, and a small rock from behind her house in Bonao sits inside. The house was sold after my grandfather passed in 2020. The rock is all I have left of her yard.

There’s still a metallic sheen to the word Chantilly across the top and there’s a crack that goes down the side. I touch it in reverence on rough days. It doesn’t hurt to look at it anymore.

Angely Mercado is a lifelong NYC resident and an independent climate and science reporter, content writer, and fact-checker. Her work is featured in Teen Vogue, Vogue Business, Nonprofit Quarterly, Next City, Sierra Magazine, The Nation, and more. She is often working on long-term fact-checking projects while trying to find more ways to write essays and narrative features around her hectic schedule. She dreams of a livable wage. In her free time she likes to jog, dance salsa, and sometimes rant on the intersection of the environment, pop-culture, and behind the scenes on reporting for her newsletter, Media Mercado on Substack.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Recommended reading on possessions:

“Tuning in to Objects, Essays, and Ideas” by

Cody Cook-Parrott

“It’s okay to just throw it away” by

Lee Tilghman

“The Ray Bradbury Collection of Tom Garner” by

Scott Brown

“History I Can’t Shut Up About: The chic Italian hoarder with no off switch” by

Courtney

(Her Grand Tour)

“Woman Goes Viral for Styling Outfits from Vintage Clothes She Found in a ‘Hoarder’s Home’” by Raven Brunner and Hedy Phillips, People

“A Delancey Street townhouse filled with 100,000 books is a bibliophile’s dream — and an epic estate sale” by Stephanie Farr, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Worcester collector no basket case. But she has one for sale” by Rachel Gow, Worcester Telegram & Gazette

“The Power of a Vintage Betsey Johnson Dress” by Jessica Grose, The New York Times