The Panthers had not finished the coin toss before Cleo walked out of Marlene’s living room with one hand cupped under her nose and the other still holding a pretzel rod, and I knew before I even looked at the coffee table what had done it. There, between a bowl of chex mix and Trent’s IPA, was a 14-ounce soy-blend candle in an amber jar, flame leaning sideways, throwing off something that smelled like a concession stand had been set on fire inside a Yankee Candle.
It was called Stadium Sunday. The brand is Hearthwick & Hollow, which Marlene’s daughter Aubrey gets at a boutique near the Trader Joe’s, and the lid lists the notes in a little curly font like it’s perfume. Top: fresh-cut turf. Heart: ballpark hot dog and bourbon barrel. Base: “leather glove,” “stadium air,” and something called “crowd musk.” I am not making any of that up. Crowd musk is a thing they decided to bottle.
I have been in the Facebook group Candles & The Quiet Damage They’re Doing for almost a year now, and the women in there have done the work. A “fragrance” listed as one ingredient on a candle label can be a black box of forty to two hundred undisclosed compounds, most of them phthalates, and the way you know is that no one selling them will tell you. Hot dog is not a smell that exists in nature without help. To get a candle to smell like a hot dog you have to ask a chemist to build you one, and the chemist does not work for free, and he does not work without solvents.
I said this, calmly, while Cleo bled into a paper towel printed with little footballs. Marlene picked up the jar, pointed at the side, and said “Brooke, it says clean burn,” the way people say clean burn, like the words are a doctor’s note. Clean burn is a marketing term. Clean burn means the wick is cotton. The wick was never the problem. The problem is that we were aerosolizing a chemistry-set hot dog into a closed great room with eleven children and a golden retriever in it.
I texted my sister-in-law Jessa, who works the front desk at a pediatric ENT in Hendersonville and has watched enough of the appointments that she is, functionally, basically a nurse. She wrote back inside of a minute: “nosebleeds in fall = synthetic fragrance 100% of the time, especially the gourmand ones, the food ones are the worst, tell her to open a window.” I read it out loud. Marlene said the windows were already open. They were cracked maybe an inch and a half. That is not a window. That is a suggestion.
Meanwhile Trent, who is a wonderful father and a deeply unserious man, kept leaning toward the candle and saying it smelled like the Sheetz off Exit 53, in a tone that meant he wanted to eat it. At one point he asked Marlene, sincerely, if it was a queso. Marlene’s husband Brett told him it was a candle four separate times before halftime. This is the man I have built a life with.
By the second quarter the dog had walked himself out onto the deck and would not come back in even when Brett shook the treat bag. Wyatt, who has the same fall sinus situation Cleo has, started rubbing his eyes the way he does in the car wash. Aubrey’s friend Marin, who is twelve and confident, told me the candle gave her a headache but that she liked it because it “smelled like the mall.” That is not the recommendation she thinks it is.
I went out to the Cherokee and got the beeswax taper I keep in the glovebox for exactly this kind of afternoon. Real beeswax, single-ingredient, sourced from a man named Phillip outside Weaverville whose hives I have personally seen. I lit it on Marlene’s mantle and asked everyone to just sit with it for a minute. Marlene took one polite breath and said, kindly, “Brooke, that smells like nothing.” I said: exactly. That is what air is supposed to smell like. Air is not supposed to have notes.
Cleo’s nosebleed stopped before the two-minute warning, which is its own kind of data. Marlene blew the Stadium Sunday out around the third quarter, mostly to humor me, and Trent ate three more bowls of chex mix and did not once try to bite the beeswax. The Panthers lost. The candle is, as of this morning, sitting on Marlene’s porch railing, lid back on, where she said she would “think about it.” I will be checking.