Time in a Bottle

For Gemini the idea of motherhood, maybe womanhood itself, lives in one memory: hovering around her mother’s legs, crossed at the ankles, while she sat at her vanity table in her dressing gown. The bottles and tubes--5 creams for after bath, a different one for feet, legs, hands, face, and eyes--each had its smell: thick and oily in the pot, the light, close smell of safety and acceptance on the skin, for, just occasionally, while staring adoringly up at the process of transforming steaming, damp, prettiness into elegant perfection, Gemini got scooped up and nuzzled inside the dressing gown, right up next to the love-scented skin. 

More often, Gemini sat on the floor among ten carved legs--four on the table, four on the velvet-backed chair, and two on Francine herself. Once in a while, she was blessed with a dollop of cream to rub into her scabbed little-girl knees, but she never asked. Attention from her mother was an unlooked-for blessing, but her awed silence was not induced by fear. Francine was often busy, sometimes distracted, occasionally impatient, but never sharp.

She was, however, present while she sat at the table, unlike in recent years. Certainly even then the vanity table was a refuge. Certainly, she spent more time there than was required to maintain her beauty. She studied her skin in lighted convex mirrors as Dennis studied his language samples, with both perplexity and sheer appreciation. But in those days she was studying something, some presentation and an understanding of what she was in the world.

Gemini awakened to her parents’ attic room when those slant-roofed depths still contained cedar chests rather than dressers and the mattress still sat on the floor. The vanity and its chair were the only pieces of real furniture, just recently bestowed upon her as a peace offering from her father at the death of Francine’s mother and at the foot of which she’d had her own training in how to use her good looks most to her advantage.

Carolyn, Francine’s mother, had grown up in a shack on the overgrown edge of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, not close enough in to go to school with the professor’s kids nor to want to go to Southern Miss herself, but close enough to see the two salient facts of her youth: 1. Money and college went together, though which caused the other or if both were caused by some third thing, she didn’t much know or care and 2. Free and forward-thinking girls turned the heads of rich boys no matter how deeply those heads were buried in books. By free, she meant free of stockings and by forward-thinking she meant thinking forward to the house she’d own as the wife of one of them.

Carolyn’s plan was a trap, pure and simple, a fact that she did not hide from her only daughter, thinking it a matter of universally accepted belief that all women were in a conspiracy against men, whom they tolerated and flattered for the sake of their paychecks. For Carolyn, any man stupid enough to let a pretty face cloud his judgment deserved no better than he got, and they were all stupid enough.

Under Carolyn’s tutelage Francine grew up understanding that her place in the world depended first and foremost on the bat of her perfectly painted eye, the toss of her shining curl, and the hint (but only the hint, for showing one’s wares discouraged purchase) of the curves beneath her dress. 

But Carolyn constantly underestimated the sway that Joseph had over the daughter he worshiped. It’s true that he was stupid in his way and uncommonly responsive to his wife’s charms. But all that a wife will respect in a man are not the same qualities that a child will adore. Francine watched her father return from work daily to the glow of his wife’s love and daily she saw that love extinguished in her mother’s calculating eyes as soon as Joseph looked away. But the love in Joseph’s eyes stayed alight as he tossed his girl in the air and made her braids fly. Under his tutelage, she learned that her place in the world depended first and last on the true loving care of a man.

It was almost inevitable, then, the rift: the pull to one side of the practical mother needing her friendship to keep the edges of her life glued down, to be the satisfying answer to why all this pretending was really necessary, something she could point to and explain that, after all, the life she’d bought with deception wasn’t just a working refrigerator and a set of decorative plates—to the other of just plain dumb love, devotion so pure and deep that Francine was sure that, had he known, he would have just done it anyway. And maybe he did. 

Maybe the whole process of getting knocked up so he’d have to marry her was really Joseph’s duping Carolyn, for surely she could have just put it on the table: “I’m going to play a game in which I make you believe I just need a little money for a terrifying back alley abortion that will leave me bereft and mourning for years. I’m going to guilt you into a marriage that will probably get you disowned, but that will not matter to me because even the laborers at the factory where you do the accounting earn more money in a day than I’ve ever seen together in my life.” 

And he would have said, gently taking her hand, “Carolyn, we don’t have to go through all that.” For he too believed that nothing he’d done in life entitled him to drive a Cadillac and spend his many spare hours hitting balls across manicured lawns while most of the food she’d eaten in her life she’d killed, found, stolen or dug out of the ground herself. 

Francine, knowing none of this could stir in her father any regret and annoyed to death by the damned infernal pretense of it all, inevitably one day rebelled. 

“She’s never loved you! You’re just a path out of poverty,” she shouted into his face.

Carolyn heard, and, without warning, melted to the floor under the utterly unexpected fear of losing not her breadwinner but the love of her life, the man whose adoring eyes not only gave purpose to her good looks, but saw right past them into her very soul and did not flinch but on the contrary found there something just as beautiful and worthy of awe as the flawless face itself.

Carolyn was hospitalized with severe low blood pressure, but her fears were unfounded. Francine had been right; her father’s devotion was unwavering. Nevertheless, Francine was never forgiven, and she struggled through the last months that she had to share a roof with her mother comforted only by the sincerity of the love Carolyn now poured onto Joseph. His role in his daughter’s life was reduced to sending money and begging over the phone for visits they both knew he couldn’t receive until Carolyn’s death 12 years later of lung cancer. 

So the grandfather and the vanity table entered Gemini’s life at the same time, age five.

The perfume jars were an accidental collection in which Francine first felt no real interest. The first was a gift from Ruth, 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 the stopper kept the scent in. She hadn’t meant for it to be a collection, but when she saw a matching jar on their package trip to Turkey, their only trip abroad, she bought it for a souvenir. Then the tacky one that Dennis’ sister found in the gift shop of a Mediterranean restaurant. 

One of the first things Gemini ever bought with her own money was the yellow one with the hummingbird, found at a junk shop and worth far more than she paid for it. It’s Francine’s favorite. From there of course it was 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 June birthday, but also for the brother who died in the womb they shared. 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. It was the dream of her life, her shot at doing right all that her mother had done wrong. 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, and his relief, when Francine pulled herself up and buttoned down her frayed 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 perfect and 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. She was six, the vanity table and grandfather had been fixtures for a year when Elliot finally made her perfect family complete.

But those days were gone, and so was the grandfather, and the question of the moment was what to do with the vanity table. Dennis was retiring and moving to an apartment rather than to the retirement home with his wife. 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. 

“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.

Gemini had been away while Elliot and Dennis had overseen her withdrawal from life, watched 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. 

“Doesn’t that mean she wants them?” Gemini argued. “What will happen if she can’t sit here?” Dennis concurred; newspapers were gathered. 

Even as she recognized the painful pierce in her nose of too much, Gemini 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’d 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 made floating Gemini feel a physical ache for the baby he had been before she landed inside the body of her young self and could 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’s a chocolate truffle. “You’re right. Come here, baby, you gotta try this one!” She plants the kiss on Gemini’s lips.

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

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

**

“Not you too!” cut in the voice of adult Elliot as the breeze from the window he’d opened to cut the smell floated Gemini out of her childbody 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. 

And then there was the table itself, on her mind for the way it crashed into her life decisions. If it was her image of motherhood, maybe the looming decision about whether or not to freeze her eggs could be settled at the table. When Dennis and Eliot were finishing up for the day, she wandered off upstairs to think alone.

Gemini considered, what had she learned at the foot of the vanity other than ultimately unused lessons in skin care? Gemini persuaded a friend to cut her hair in a straight line across the bottom once a year and embarked on a serious course of running and weight training every January first until her interest dwindled around mid March. The rest of the year, digs kept her in passable shape, but there was no attempt to keep herself attractive for a man nor a man to do it for. Beers after work occasionally led to brief affairs, sometimes with much younger men smitten with her work, but they could not compete with the work for her attention.

She sat at the table with this on her mind: what she had learned was to rebel against the 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 moment had plunged her into had felt filling in 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, spinning 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 was plunged into her slimmer, drunker self. 

 **

“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 out of the past and into her adult, sober self. “Oh, sorry. 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 her suspiciously. “Don’t get lost here.” He said finally, and they both thought of their mom.

“What’s this?” Gemini asked Elliot and her dad over her shoulder. A dozen or more identical crystal bottles of expensive perfume sat inside the vanity table’s little side door. The bottles themselves were beautiful, angles cut like gemstones and labeled with raised metallic lettering. “Why did mom have all this? She hated perfume.”

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

“Was it this?” Gemini asked as he sunk in the chair. She pulled the long stopper out of one of the exotic perfume jars and waved it under his nose.

Dennis floats 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 mirror in his bathroom, replacing her earrings, her blouse still open. He reaches his hand 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 pulled her toward him despite the need to leave. Still, Marie does have to leave, not only because she has a meeting, but especially because Francine will be back by 2:30.

Marie leans into the perfume spray in front of her neck, which presses her backside against Dennis and he reaches for her again. As she turns to kiss him, one hand replaces the crystal 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.

“We have to get rid of this stuff,” Elliot declared waving his hand--unsure if he meant the table, the scent, the jars, all of it--“It…does things to people.”

“Then it wasn’t hers,” Dennis 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 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.

“Throw it away,” he said, standing, practically fleeing the room.

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 actual power. The part of her that wants to preserve her own moments in a bottle, like her mother, escaping the life that wasn’t enough, after all, to dwell in the moments that were. The past was no place to live. Dennis was gone to see her mom, and Gemini dumped the whole collection.