The card is currently sitting upside down in a glass Pyrex on the back porch under a tea towel, and Cole has agreed not to go past the screen door until Tom from the co-op tells me whether we need to bag the bench. It’s a Father’s Day card. From CVS. It cost $7.99 with my ExtraCare. I will be filing a complaint with somebody, I just have to figure out who.
Here is what happened. I went in for elderberry syrup and a refill and walked past the seasonal endcap, which this year is a kind of plywood-and-burlap diorama meant to evoke, I think, a man. There was a card with a little die-cut saw blade glued to the front, and the saw blade said SCRATCH HERE FOR WORKSHOP SCENT. I am a journalist of the home. I scratched it.
Reader, it smelled like a tire fire in a Yankee Candle. It smelled like somebody had crossed pine-tar soap with a freshly Zambonied rink. Cole came in from dropping Ember at soccer and said, and I am quoting, “what is on fire, is it the dryer again,” and the card was on the counter twelve feet away with the saw blade face-down.
I set it on the mudroom bench overnight because I did not want it near the children. By 7:14 the next morning there was a perfect rectangle on the bench where the polyurethane had lifted like a Band-Aid coming off a knee. I can peel it. I have not peeled it because I want a witness present. The wood underneath is a different color than the wood three inches over. A card did this. While we slept.
I went straight to Scent Strips and the People Who Trust Them, which is a private Facebook group with 19,000 members and a pinned post that is just a photograph of a microscope. The pinned post explains that scratch-and-sniff is something called microencapsulation, where the smell is sealed inside tiny plastic balls made out of “urea-formaldehyde,” and you’ll never guess which of those two words is formaldehyde. It’s both of them, basically. The fragrance itself is allowed to be labeled “fragrance,” which under federal law can mean anywhere between four and three thousand ingredients, none of which have to be told to you, the mother, holding the card.
My sister-in-law Renee, who runs the front desk at the pediatric office in Weaverville and is basically a nurse, said “scratch-and-sniff exposure” is something they have a whole drawer about but cannot legally bring up unless a parent says it first. She said the magic phrase is “novelty fragrance card” and once you say it the doctor is allowed to nod. I find this chilling and I find it clarifying.
I texted the cul-de-sac group chat and it turns out CVS is running an entire line of these. Mark across the street got “Garage,” which his wife Diane described as “Pennzoil and a memory.” Steve and Beth next door got “Cigar Lounge,” and Beth has already thrown out a tablecloth and one of the good trivets. We are talking about a coordinated release, in May, into the homes of fathers, of cards that are off-gassing whatever the FDA does not regulate because cards are not food, even though my four-year-old absolutely tried to eat the saw blade.
I called CVS corporate and was transferred three times, and the last woman, who was lovely, said, and I wrote this down, “ma’am, the cards are intended to be displayed, not interacted with.” The cards have a sticker on them that says SCRATCH HERE. I read her the sticker. She put me on hold and did not come back.
So this year Cole is getting a card I am making myself, out of a piece of beeswax-rubbed cardstock, a pressed fern from the creek, and one (1) word in pencil, which is THANK YOU. It will not smell like anything. That is the entire point. If you have already bought the Workshop card, do not panic, but do open a window, do move it to the garage, and please, for the love of God, do not set it on anything you love.