A Dare to Sniff the Stinky Cheese and Other Childhood Memories: An Exclusive Guest Post From Jessica Anya Blau, Author of Mary Jane

When I was a kid the house of my best friend, Debby, had a kitchen as clean and organized as a showroom. Posted on the side of the refrigerator, on a calendar page, was the dinner menu for the month. Each day listed the main course, two sides, and a dessert — something like Meat Loaf, Iceberg Wedge with Russian Dressing, Succotash, Sherbet with ‘Nilla Wafers. On Sunday it said Smorgasborg, as that was Debby’s mother’s one day off. The inside of the refrigerator reflected the order in the house itself. Nothing had to be moved aside so that you could find or see something else. And the food looked lovely. There were lunch meats in plastic packs, each slice like a layer of skin. Orange soda bottles nestled in the door. The cheese was packaged in tidy, cellophane slices. That house, that kitchen, that refrigerator, even reading the monthly menu, was joyful for me.
I won’t bother telling you about the tumult and disorder in my childhood home. If the house were a body, the refrigerator was the heart, and that heart exposed everything. In my memory, only the cartons of milk were easily identifiable. Everything else was a guess. There were Reynolds Wrapped balls that, when unfurled, revealed either green fuzz, gelatinous blobs, or a stink that was so putrid, you’d quickly reball it. Every jar was oily. Things that looked like pinky toes or curled-up sea monkeys floated in those jars. There was one cheese, always obscured in tin foil, that my sister, Becca, dared me and our brother, Josh, to smell. Becca would say something like, “I’ll make chocolate pudding for you if you sniff Mom’s cheese.” Josh never took the dare, but he’d watch during the dramatic opening of the fridge. Quickly, I’d peel open multiple odd-shaped things in search of the cheese. Once it was found, I’d stand in the theatrical light of the open fridge door as I unfurled the foil, sniffed, and then screamed. Becca, Josh, and I fell into laughter as I quickly closed the foil and wedged the cheese behind other bags and balls of who-knows-what.
I grew up in Southern California. Mary Jane lives in Baltimore. But refrigerators are more or less the same across America, and so I took those two fridges — mine and Debby’s — and each became the beating heart in the homes between which my protagonist toggles. Mary Jane was given the scrubbed, tidy fridge, and then I confronted her with the fetid clutter of an unattended fridge. It was a gift to my childhood self when I let Mary Jane clean out and organize the Cones’ refrigerator in an effort to bring order to an emotionally and physically chaotic house.
We rarely get do-overs in life. But one of the great joys in writing fiction is recreating a slice of the past but with a different outcome. One of the great surprises in writing fiction is discovering that embarrassing childhood memories can be seen with warmth and tenderness when they’re played out by characters we love. My fridge today has so much white space, you could project a slideshow inside it. But I would love to have it gunked-up for just one day if my brother and sister were guaranteed to show up, stand beside me, and shout out a dare to sniff the stinky cheese.