Jitterbug Perfume

In a series of short prefaces, titled “Today’s Special,” “Seattle,” “New Orleans,” and “Paris,” the author introduces us to several of Jitterbug Perfume’s main characters and themes.

In “Today’s Special,” the narrator introduces the beet as being a “melancholy” vegetable. He quotes a Ukrainian proverb: “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil” (2).

In “Seattle,” we are introduced to Priscilla, who the narrator reveals lives modestly in a Seattle studio apartment built during the Great Depression. She returns home from a typically bad day of waitressing, counts her money, recalls a sexual advance from a female coworker named Ricki, and takes a bath. Then, just as she begins a late-night experiment over a chemistry lab installed in her living room, she hears a knock at the door. When she answers it, she finds an unaccompanied beet.

In “New Orleans,” Madame Devalier concocts a perfume with the assistance of V’lu. She works into the wee hours of the morning within her home and shop, Parfumerie Devalier, in the French Quarter. She is known far and wide as the “Queen of Good Smells.” When she turns in to go to bed, she finds a beet mysteriously deposited on her sleeping cot.