Bottled Time

The perfume jars started accumulating before Gemini’s birth, an accidental collection in which Francine felt no real interest for many years. The first was a gift from Francine’s college roommate, who brought it back from a trip to Egypt on the mistaken impression that anyone as interested in her appearance as Francine would also love perfume. She did not. To her it smelled like a chemistry lab and gave her headaches, but the little glass jar was pretty and she couldn’t smell the contents when the stopper was in. She hadn’t meant for it to be a collection, but when she saw a matching jar on their package trip to Turkey, she bought it for a souvenir. Then one that Dennis’ sister found in the gift shop of a Mediterranean restaurant. Honestly, that one is a little tacky.

One of the first things Gemini ever bought with her own money was the yellow one with the hummingbird, a bargain at a junk shop. It was Francine’s favorite. From there of course it had become a collection, for what else was she going to put on the little carved shelves of the vanity table? She detested little knickknacks and the shelves were only two inches wide and had a little rail around them, so nothing could hang over at all. Gemini once put her little dolls up there and played that they were on the deck of a ship until her mother came in and fussed at her for standing on the vanity table.

Gemini was named not only for her December birthday, but also for the brother who died in the womb they shared. Francine was torn in two about the whole thing. Twin babies, a boy and girl, a perfect family formed all at once at the age of 24 when one pregnancy would not do her figure too much harm. Becoming the mother of this perfect family was the dream of her life, her shot at doing right all that her mother had done wrong, so the loss of one twin was a devastating blow that laid her out on her bed for days, Dennis coming home evenings to lie beside her and whisper into her hair that she had to pull through for the sake of the other one. 

Never feeling a kick in his own body, Dennis could sympathize, but never really understood loving a thing half-formed and never seen. He did not resent this week of grief, the one period of his married life when dinner was not ready and smooth-edged wife did not greet him at the door, but he was disoriented by it. His relief, when Francine pulled herself up and buttoned down her loose edges, was not only for her but also for himself and the yawning years of taking care of her rather than being taken care of that had loomed in his imagination.

Gemini was adored from the first day of her life, but she was not twins, and the empty space of her extracted brother remained in their lives until a new brother was made to fill the hole. 

But those days were gone, and the question of the moment was what to do with the vanity table. Gemini voted that it should go with Fracine to the assisted living facility, but she had been away while Elliot and Dennis had overseen her decline, watching as she sat hour after hour at the table, no longer opening creams or filing nails, but just running the jagged deeply lined ones over the little perfume jars. Alabastrons Gemini now knew at least the ancient version of them would have been called.

“Doesn’t that mean she wants them?” Gemini argued. “What will happen if she can’t sit here?”

“When she isn’t sitting here, she’s a person again. I’d rather get rid of the table and keep her here than send the table with her,” Elliot contended.

He was right. She would need to take the table in the downsizing or let it go out of the family. Dennis was moving to an apartment. He had not married to be a caretaker but to be taken care of. He’d even looked into divorce as a solution to the expense of the home until his children’s horrified expressions took the option off the table. 

Gemini agreed to ship the vanity to her apartment at an expense of three times its value and brought up a stack of newsprint to wrap the jars in. Reaching first for the yellow one with the hummingbird, Gemini tipped it on its side with no thought to contents. She knew her mother did not wear perfume, so the too sharp smell of the leaked fragrance surprised her. 

Even as she recognized the painful pierce in her nose of too much, she described it to herself as pleasantly floral before it swept her away and she floated on the billowy clouds of the scent through time and space. 

Elliot wriggles in his father’s arms, not more than a year old and struggling in the way of much-loved babies to get into the arms of another by simply flopping into them and trusting he’ll be caught. He flops into Gemini’s boney arms, never-cut wisps of baby blond hair swept every direction, two tiny razor-sharp bottom teeth making the whole of a grin so dimpled beautiful it makes floating Gemini feel a physical ache for the baby he was before she lands inside the body of her young self and can feel only what she felt in the moment. The baby smell of his head and the satin of his skin, the folds of fat in his tiny arms.

Dennis leans into the baby and kisses him on the mouth. Elliot, just able to pucker, makes an exaggerated “mwa!” sound, showing his unfathomable dimples. 

“Oh, that was a nice one! I don’t think it’s fair to keep that one. I better share it with Mama!” he declares to the infant, who gestures emphatically and babbles what is clearly a sentence of total agreement that contains no human words. Dennis pulls Francine to him by her waist and plants the kiss on her lips.

“Mmm,” she says, with a relishing half-close of the eyes, as though it were a chocolate truffle. “You’re right. Come here, baby, you gotta try this one!” She says, planting the kiss on Gemini’s lips with a crinkle-nosed expression of adoration.

Gemini giggles delightedly and kisses her baby brother’s lips.

“This is it,” her mother declares, “the best minute of my whole life.” There is a joke in her voice, but her eyes brim with joy as her husband turns to plant the baby’s kiss back on her lips a second time.

“Not you too!” declared Elliot. The breeze from the window he’d opened to cut the smell floated Gemini out of her child body and back to the table, where a puddle of perfume was soaking through the newspaper.

She shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, confused. “I just remembered something from when you were a baby.”

They had to descend all the way to the first floor to get the reeking newspapers out of the house before the thick scent worked over Gemini’s head. Dennis called for their help dismantling a bed and they were distracted from the task. 

But the rest of the day it tugged at her, the pull back up to the vanity and the reality of the memory it triggered. Memory was a wholly inadequate word, hardly different from a description. Even deja vu evokes only the feeling associated with a past time, not the details of word, facial expression, texture. It was more like transport through time. 

When Dennis and Elliot were finishing up for the day, she wandered off upstairs to think alone.

She rebelled against her mother’s idea that the love of a man was enough, that devotion to him could be an identity, that a shared family kiss could be the best that life had to offer. And yet, the emotional landscape that revisited moment had plunged her into had felt filling in a way work had so rarely. She lifted the stopper from another jar to see if the smell would affect her again.

Before she could consistently smell the scent, it visibly swept through the room leaving colorful tracks like the speed marks left by a cartoon race car. The wind tracks lifted her away and set her down into her child body. 

“Gemini!” Elliot’s voice broke through with a volume and urgency that showed it was not the first or the second time he’d called her name. 

She blinked into herself, looking down in surprise at her adult body, her sensible clothes.

“Where were you?” he asked, partly joking.

 “I was at a tea party with you and Camellia.” She smiled at the image of them in her mother’s beach hats and sunglasses, singing silly songs to toddler Elliot to keep him from crying. Her heart ached for the girl her cousin used to be, before heartbreak and prescription pills got between them. But all she said aloud was, “Something about this scent triggers my memory.” She downplayed the experience, aware that calling it time travel would alarm him and she was having enough trouble coping with her own alarm.  

“I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour,” he said and looked at her suspiciously. “Don’t get lost here,” he said finally, both thinking of their mom.

Packing up more items the next day, the three of them were back in the attic bedroom. She opened the door at the right side of the vanity table and was surprised to find a dozen identical crystal perfume bottles with angles cut like gemstones and labeled with raised metallic lettering.

“What’s this?” Gemini asked over her shoulder toward her dad and Elliot. “Why did mom have all this? She hated perfume.”

“Hated perfume?” Dennis asked, approaching. “She loved perfume. I always got her perfume for special occasions.” He crouched down. All the bottles were unopened. He shook his head in confusion. “But… she…”

“Was it this?” Gemini asked as he sat down in the chair. She pulled the long stopper out of one of the exotic perfume jars and waved it under her father’s nose.

Dennis is floating on a scented wind that seems to leave colored trails behind him. He spins a few times, gently but irresistibly in the current until he finds himself approaching Marie from behind as she stands before the bathroom mirror, replacing her earrings, her blouse still open. He reaches inside it and cups her smooth breast. She responds in a way his wife never does. For Francine it is always for him, her own pleasure never weakened a knee or turned her toward him despite the need to leave, as Marie turns now. Still, Marie does have to leave, not only because she has a meeting, but especially because Francine will be back from tennis and lunch by 2:30.

Marie sprays perfume in front of her neck and leans into it, which presses her backside against Dennis and he reaches for her again. As she turns to kiss him, one hand replaces the perfume bottle on the tiled ledge above the sink. She sinks into him and he thinks how much he’d like to hold on to this passionate moment, this refuge from the prosaic sameness of life.

“Dad?” Gemini said, actually snapping her fingers in front of his face.

“Then it wasn’t hers,” he said, withdrawing from the fifteen-year-old affair with a sucking kind of resistance he can almost hear. 

“What wasn’t whose?” His eyes focused on his now-adult daughter, and he understood he could not say aloud what he has realized: that all the time he thought he was buying the brand of perfume his wife liked, he was just buying the brand his mistress had left on the sink. He slumped in the seat and covered his face with his hands. Francine must have known too.

“These bottles are weird,” Gemini said. “Hey, how was mom when you saw her this morning?”

“She was…” it took Elliot a moment to consider. “She was really good, actually. Maybe sad. But very lucid.”

“These bottles…” Gemini brushed their tops with her hand. “How long do you think she’s been…declining? I mean the fading out episodes?”

Elliot’s tone was soft. “Gem, it’s like 15 years. Since I still lived at home.”

Dennis responded to the words “15 years” with a slight start: around the time of that first found bottle.

One of the jars broke in the move. Not the dragonfly one, thankfully. She had taken exactly one of the unopened perfume bottles from the vanity door and put the others up for sale on ebay. The vanity table sat against the wall in her bedroom, the mirror and glass perfume jars still wrapped in paper for weeks as she went off to dig up temples and more weeks while she simply ignored them and then days more while she waited for the tiny funnel set to arrive by mail.

As soon as the paper was torn back from the mirror she could see herself as her mother would: misplaced strands of hair and manly hoodie, natural prettiness sagging with age and sun. She hesitated before pouring the contents of the crystal vial into the Egyptian glass, wondering if the magic was made by the table, the jars, the scent, the house, her mother’s phantom presence or some combination. But she was not superstitious. How could she be, making her daily bread desecrating ancient temples? She knew that the all-absorbing vividness of the visions she’d had in her mother’s room were influenced by the emotions of her decline and her moving. And yet, she wondered. Wondered if her mother too hadn’t been lost at all but had been there, wandering through the house at other times. The moments Gemini had visited had both been her mother’s memories, both bound inside the house. Could the scent take her somewhere else?

She removed the spray nozzle and held the bottle to her nose. It was just a smell, both pleasant and excessive, but not evocative, not transportative. She smirked at herself for the notion. Thought I had a portal to other times, here.

But the very second the scent funneled into the glass jar in her left hand, she was wafted away to a darkened theater. The wind swept her in a colorful pass over her own head, still free of any gray, and that of her best friend from graduate school, Liz. Present Gemini had a split second to recognize it as the day their first joint paper had been accepted for presentation at a conference, before she is plunged into her slimmer, drunker self. 

Onstage a trio of string musicians are performatively competing against each other for the audience’s approval with their fourth running— still sawing away on the instrument on her shoulder—up and down the aisles in search of a volunteer. Onstage one of the women reaches around the cello player with her bow and begins playing along with her, comically bitter facial expression showing that she’s trying to undermine her, while the actual music is glorious. The audience howls laughter.

As Gemini watches the show, Liz has caught the attention of the violinist and is pointing with both hands toward Gemini, “It’s her birthday!” she lies in a stage whisper. The violinist pulls Gemini to her feet to a roar from the crowd and she makes her way to the stage.

It’s bright and hot and for just a second she doesn’t know what to say when the blonde pianist with the microphone asks her how old she’s turning. But then she belly laughs and hollers, “It’s not my birthday! Liz Bailey just said that to get me on stage!” And in the ruckus, Liz is identified and pulled up on the stage as well. 

She reaches out for her friend’s hand and thinks, “This is who I want to be. A thoroughly unstuffy intellectual: the PhD at the party.” She pictures her dad’s felt elbow patches and mentally peels them off, leaving shabby holes to match the ones in the jeans she’s wearing. She smiles at Liz.

An alarm asserted itself with increasing force. Four notes, the first the loudest and longest, obviously an alarm, but the edges digitally rounded off. For a moment, onstage Gemini resists, wanting to stay with Liz, but the alarm was adamant. Gemini saw that her left hand lingered on the funnel and glass perfume jar, while the store-bought crystal bottle was on the table, forgotten. She refocused her view, taking in the phone, the light through the window. It was morning. The alarm was her wake-up alarm. She had sat here time traveling the whole night. 

It gave her pause, certainly. The part of her that dug sacred artifacts out of the past wanted to preserve this, study it, find the source of its power. The part of her that wanted to preserve time in a bottle. But she thought of her mother, escaping the life that wasn’t enough, after all, to dwell in the moments that were. It was no way to live; the moments had to be created.

The alarm still rang as she threw the jars, forcefully, hoping they would shatter, into the trash, and then yesterday’s coffee grounds down on top, just to discourage changing her mind. As she picked it up to shut off the alarm, she was already composing a text to Liz asking her to call this evening. It had been too long.