Short Stories

This story first appeared in Lost Worlds, Volume 8, No. 6, April, 1996.

THE GREEN BOTTLE

copyright 1996 by Nora M. Mulligan

I remember the last time we opened the green bottle together, Lauren and I.

We were at our parents' house, at a family get-together in honor of our parents' anniversary. As usual, the house was crowded with relatives of all sorts, and Lauren and me. Dad was wandering around the living room, refilling the champagne glasses for the adults, when Lauren caught my eye. She raised her right eyebrow and winked her left eye, and then politely excused herself from Aunt Kate, who, by the looks of it, was boring her with some long, involved story.

I counted to fifty after I saw Lauren disappear upstairs. Then, trying to be unobtrusive, I eased my way through the crowded living room to the stairs.

Very loudly, I closed the bathroom door, and then returned to the linen closet. I opened the door and pushed aside the false back and scrambled up through the piles of sheets and towels.

Lauren was waiting for me in the attic. She handed me the bottle.

It was so small and so beautiful. I remember when we first found it. It was empty then, and the stopper was buried somewhere else, in one of the corners of the attic, covered in dust. We had been exploring, and it was just there, and we knew immediately that it was magic.

"It's waiting to be filled," I remember I said. "What'll we put in it?"

"We'll put ourselves in it," she said, her eyes sparkling.

"What? And disappear in it?"

"No, silly. Our kid selves. Like concentrate, you know? Then when we're grown up, we'll be able to open the bottle and be ourselves the way we are now. And then we can put our kids selves away, and be grown ups again."

She was ten, then, and I was eight, and it seemed like a good idea to us. Lauren decided that we should breathe in it and think about the things we liked to do together and those thoughts would translate into the essence of our kid selves and fill the bottle. We must have been there for half an hour, breathing into the little bottle.

"Now we'll put it away," said Lauren, "and only you and I will remember where we put it. It'll be our secret, and we'll have a secret signal so that we can know when we're both going to go up and take it out."

It wasn't until she graduated from high school that we actually tried it out, and discovered that it really worked.

There we were, one minute two teenagers, thinking about cars and dates and jobs and all that kind of stuff, and then the next minute, after we'd opened the bottle and inhaled from it, we were goofing around again. There was that secret code that we'd invented, that we never used anymore -- after we inhaled from the bottle, we were talking as fluently in the code as if we did it every day. And instead of being two teenagers in separate worlds, which Lauren said we were turning into, we were the Invincibles, the Two Against the World that we had called ourselves when we were kids. I even thought Lauren looked different when we inhaled from the bottle. I thought she looked younger, her face softer, the way she looked when she was ten. She said the same thing about me, that I looked like a kid again. That struck us both so funny that we went into a giggling fit and ended up rolling around on the attic floor, raising such a cloud of dust that we choked on it and were still coughing hours later when we came downstairs from the attic.

After that, we would do the bottle from time to time when we were both at our parents' house. We didn't tell anybody else about it, and when we inhaled it, we would stay up in the attic until its essence had worn off.

She let me open the bottle this time. I inhaled deeply, and the feeling fothe spring day so many years ago filled me. I closed my eyes and could see us exploring the attic that time.

"Don't be a hog," said Lauren. "Pass it here."

I opened my eyes, and was a little surprised to see how adult Lauren looked, how much like our mother. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath from the bottle. It was as if the dust rose around her, obscuring her from my view for a few seconds. And when she put the bottle down, the dust seemed to settle, and she didn't look a thing like Mom. She just looked like Lauren, and she grinned.

I grinned, too. "Well, fellow Invincible," I said, "what do you think of the party downstairs?"

"Infiltrated," she answered, "infiltrated by the G.U.'s."

"Worse than G.U.'s," I responded. "F. G. U.'s"

We talked about them, then, our family members, using the code names we'd had when we were kids. And the little part of me that hadn't completely slipped back into my childhood noticed how close I felt to Lauren. It must have struck me because since we no longer lived with our parents, we didnt' see as much of each other, and we didn't talk to each other the way we used to. I realized that I missed that. Maybe she did, too. Maybe that was why she was always eager to go for the bottle.

Anyway, we were up there for half an hour or so. Then I began to feel different, as if I was breathing stale air or something. We looked at each other, and Lauren looked more like our mother again. "I guess we should go downstairs," I said. "Before someone misses us."

She grinned. "Yeah, like they'd really notice that we're not there."

"I'll go down first, okay?" I asked.

"Sure. And I'll do the 50 count. I don't want anyone to find out about this, do you, Dave?"

"No, of course not."

"I really like having it. Knowing that we can do that. You think we'll always be able to?"

I could feel my adult self flopping over me, like an overcoat, something dark and practical. "Always is a long time, Lauren."

She made a face at me. "You'll always be my brother. Why can't we always be able to do the green bottle?"

"I didn't say we couldn't. I just don't know that we can."

"I can't imagine what would ever get in our way. Go. I'll start counting."

I shrugged my way out through the linen closet, and rearranged the shelves behind me. True to her word, Lauren waited for a while and then appeared in the living room later. When someone asked her where she'd been all this time, she said something about some old papers of hers that she'd found in her former bedroom, and that was the end of it.

It was maybe a week later that I met Jenny. We were at a party, and we hit it off. She was completely different from the women I usually went out with, but maybe that was the attraction. She didn't like the things women usually liked about me -- my goofiness, my talent as a mimic, my party tricks. She liked my seriousness, how hard I worked on the job, some depths she alone recognized in me. I think I was crazy in love with her; I spent all my spare time with her for weeks and weeks, and the more time I was with her, the more I became the things she liked in me. I started neglecting everything but work and Jenny.

I was so enthralled by her that I lost my ability to see the rest of the world. That's my only explanation for my bringing her to the family dinner at Thanksgiving when nobody in my family had ever met her before. I guess I thought she would like my family and they would like her and it would be just a greater bond between us. Okay, so I was wrong. It was a mistake anyone could have made.

My parents were reasonably polite to her, and the aunts and uncles fawned over her and made jokes to me about getting serious about someone at last. And I think Jenny could have gotten through the occasion without too much trouble if it hadn't been for Lauren.

The two of them sized each other up when I first introduced them. I saw the look in Lauren's eyes and expected the worst. And I had never seen Jenny's eyes narrow like that before. It almost made her look ugly to me. Expecting disaster, I made a point for the first hour or so of keeping the two of them apart. However, because Jenny and I were together as if we had been joined at the hip, that meant I didn't spend any time with Lauren either, and that turned out to be the mistake.

Lauren had been trying to catch my eye almost from the time I'd arrived at the house. I made a determined effort and ignored her. Lauren did not take well to being ignored. She dropped a glass on the floor so that it smashed, and when I, along with everyone else in the house, turned to see what had happened, she gave me the secret signal.

No, I thought, not now. This would be the worst possible time, and Jenny would never understand. I shook my head.

Lauren repeated the signal. I shook my head again.

"What's the matter, Dave?" asked Jenny. "Is something wrong?"

Before I could answer, Lauren came over to us. She grabbed my arm firmly, but it looked as if she had just laid her hand lightly on my arm. This was a trick she used to use when we were kids. "You'll excuse us for a minute, won't you, Jenny?" she asked. "I have something I have to show Dave."

"I'm sure," said Jenny, in a tone I'd never heard from her before, "that if Dave wants to see something with you, he'd tell me himself. I'm not holding him here."

Lauren looked at me then. "Is that true, Dave?" she asked. There was an undertone in her voice, too.

I snapped my arm out of her grip. Because she had hidden the strength of her grasp, I'm sure it looked like I used excessive strength to flip her off. "I don't want to go," I said, furious at her for setting up this confrontation.

"We don't get too many chances to be together anymore," said Lauren.

"Not now, Lauren," I said sharply.

Jenny was watching us with the avid interest of someone following an intense basketball game. "Oh, please," she said, "don't let me get in your way. If you two want to talk about something, I'm sure I can amuse myself among the rest of your family. Obviously Lauren will not leave you alone until you have this talk, so why not get it over with?"

Lauren was angry, really angry. I had seen her lose her temper from time to time over the years, but this was different. I could think of only a couple of times in my life that I had seen her look at anyone with such a look of hate.

"Right, then," I said, taking Lauren's arm and spinning her away from Jenny before either of them could say anything else. "I'll be back in a couple of minutes," I added to Jenny.

"The hell you will," said Lauren in a very quiet voice, so that no one else in the room could hear her.

"In the den," I suggested.

"Upstairs," she retorted.

"No, I'm not going upstairs. Especially not to the attic," I replied. I was steering her towards the den, which was far enough from Jenny that we could actually talk about this -- or argue, which seemed more likely.

Once we were in the den, she snapped her arm out of my grip. "What was all that about? Why won't you go upstairs? What's with you all of a sudden?"

"I don't feel like doing the bottle right now, all right?"

"Why not? Don't want to take a few minutes away from your girlfriend?" she asked scathingly.

"No, as a matter of fact, I don't. I came with her, I want to stay with her. She doesn't know anybody here, it's only polite that I help her."

"She doesn't know anybody here and she doesn't want to. She doesn't want you to, either. She wants to keep you from all of us, and especially from me," snapped Lauren.

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," I replied. "Where'd you get a stupid idea like that?"

"I got that stupid idea from watching her tonight. And from watching you. She's trying to make you over, Dave, and it's working. She's trying to make you like her. She's trying to dissolve everything that makes you yourself. Like your ties to your family."

"You know what your problem is?" I demanded. "You just can't let go. You can't stand the thought that there's anybody else in my life, can you? You think you can keep everything the way it was when you were ten and I was eight, well, it's not going to happen!"

"It can happen. It does, every time we do the bottle."

"Get it through your head," I said, "I don't want to do the bottle with you tonight. I don't know if I ever want to do it with you again, if this is the way you're gonna act. Bottle, ha! You don't need to inhale from that stupid bottle! You're already stuck in childhood, aren't you? You're still trying to keep from being a grownup, and trying to keep me from being one, too!"

She flinched. We'd fought when we were kids, but never like this. "I don't need it to keep in touch with my childhood," she said. "I need it to keep in touch with you."

"Making a scene like this is no way to keep in touch with anybody," I snapped. "You can start to get on the right track by apologizing to my girlfriend, and then acting like a grownup."

She looked at me and didn't say anything for a long time. When we were kids, I used to think I could read Lauren's mind, though probably it was just that we were together so much I could read all her facial expressions. But at this moment, I didnt't know what was on her mind, or why she was looking at me like that. "I'll pass," she said, and she turned and stalked out of the room.

By the time I had gone back into the living room, she was gone. I could hear the motor of her car revving up, and a grinding noise as she slammed it into gear and drove away.

"What was that all about?" asked Jenny, taking my hand as I stood by the window.

"Later," I told her, and we went in to have dinner.

When I was taking Jenny home, she raised the subject. "Is there something wrong with your sister, or what?"

"No," I said. I was surprised how reluctant I was to talk about it.

"What did she talk to you about?" Jenny was suddenly very curious.

"Oh, just a thing we used to do that she wanted to do again."

"What kind of thing?"

I had never told anyone about the green bottle. Lauren and I had always treated it as our secret. But I was angry at Lauren, and I was in love with Jenny, and I thought Lauren had acted inexcusably, and Jenny wanted to know, and I thought she deserved the truth. So I told her.

Jenny listened to the story in silence. "Do you really believe that?" she asked at the end.

"Yes," I said. I felt a little funny for having told her about it.

"She believes it, obviously," said Jenny thoughtfully. "I think it's really sick, if you want to know. I think she's got some serious problems, acting the way she did tonight. And that bottle thing is either a symptom or a cause of what's wrong with her. She'll never get a life or let you get a life as long as that thing's up there."

"But she can't open it without me," I said. Actually, I didn't know if that was true, but it seemed true. "So as long as I don't open it with her, she can't do anything with it."

"Except use it to drag you back into her little web," said Jenny. "She obviously feels threatened by change, and she figures that if she can keep you childish with this little bottle thing, you won't change. But you are changing. You don't have to be what you were when you were a kid. You can grow up. You can become more serious, more adult. I'm already seeing that in you, whenever we're together."

Lauren sees that, too, I thought, and wondered if that was behind her behavior that night. "Well, you know, even adults have families, Jenny."

"But not families that are determined to keep them children forever. Honestly, Dave! You've been there so much that you can't even see what she's trying to do to you, or what the rest of your family's trying to do, but I can see it. They're a threat to your maturity, Dave, your life as an adult."

"Aren't you being a little melodramatic?" I asked, trying for a light tone. "They're not trying to kill me or anything."

"No," she said, "but they'd be happy to see you split up with me."

Lauren certainly would, I thought. "Let's stop talking about this," I said, feeling really uncomfortable about where this was going. "I'm not going to break up with you just because Lauren doesn't like you."

"It's not me she doesn't like," said Jenny, "it's you -- the way you are when you're with me."

This was a little too close for comfort. "Can we stop discussing this? It's making me feel a little . . . weird."

"Certainly, Dave," she said smoothly. And she didn't talk about it again that night. We got to her house, and made love, and she was wonderful. It was the best sexual experience we'd had yet, and I dissolved into sleep without a care, or a thought, in the world.

I'm trying to explain, see. I think the great experience we had that night was why I went along with what Jenny suggested the next day. I think I would have done anything she wanted, after that, no matter how bizarre, and the way she presented it, this didn't sound that bizarre.

"I just want to see it," she explained as we were driving to my parents' house. "I want to see if it looks magic or what."

"My parents don't know about it."

"You think they don't know about it. I bet they do and never let on that they do."

I shook my head. "No, we've been careful. We never even hinted at it." Until you came along, I thought, and I told you everything. The thought made me feel vaguely uneasy, so I squelched it.

She shrugged. "So, we'll make up some excuse. You don't have to tell them about it even now, if it makes you feel funny. Just say you're showing me the house without all the crowds around, and I'm sure they won't think anything of it."

And they didn't. They seemed to think it made perfect sense that I wanted to show the old homestead to my new girlfriend. My heart was pounding as I opened the linen closet and pushed the clothes aside to show Jenny the secret door. She looked around her with almost casual interest.

The attic was dustier than I remembered, and I felt bigger, more awkward, scuttling around it. It took me a while to find the bottle, too, but I did find it, and brought it over to Jenny.

She turned it over and over in her hands. "Very pretty," she said. "So this is what's making your sister so nuts."

I felt very uncomfortable having her hold it. "Here, give it to me." I reached for it.

She pulled it away. She had no intention of letting me get my hands on it again. "You should break it," she said.

"What?"

She was holding the bottle away from me, and whispering, "Just break it. Drop it out a window. Smash it on something. If it's not here, she won't be able to hold it over your head anymore."

It looked so fragile in her hands. My throat was very dry all of a sudden. "She doesn't hold it over my head."

"She's going to use it to come between us. I know it. I could see it yesterday. That's not waht you want, is it? It's certainly not what I want. I want to keep you. And if you don't care enough about me to do a simple little thing that I ask you to do --"

"Simple little thing?" I could feel my heart racing at the thought.

"A simple little thing," she repeated, "that could remove a major threat to our relationship. If you won't do that, then maybe you secretly want to keep your sick relationship with your sister instead of your healthy relationship with me. Maybe you do, Dave. Now's the time." She ran the backs of her fingers across my neck, a sensual touch that reminded me of the sex the night before. "You have to make up your mind, don't you?"

"No," I whispered. "No, I don't want to give you up, are you crazy?"

"Here," she said, and she gave me the bottle. "Break it. Free yourself from her. Free her from this sick obsession she has. Break it."

"Not here," I said. I put the bottle into my pocket. "I'll take it outside and do it."

"Great," she said with a smile. "Somewhere she can't find the pieces and put them back together."

That wasn't what I was thinking at all. I just couldn't do it here, where all the magic had started. We left the attic, and spent some time wandering around the rest of the upstairs, but I couldn't concentrate on anything. The weight of the bottle in my pocket seemed to be increasing every minute.

We were driving up the hill away from my parents' house when I finally nerved myself to do it. I took the bottle out of my pocket and threw it out the window. I heard it shatter on the asphalt, and the pieces shivered down the hill. But more than that, I felt it shatter, as if it had happened right inside my ear, and some of the pieces lodged in my nerves. It was all I could do to keep the car going forward. I stopped at the stop sign and put on the brake. I was too dizzy to go on.

Jenny took over the driving. "It's all right," she said. "You'll be fine. Just the power of suggestion, you know." She drove me back to her place.

She kept telling me it was the power of suggestion that made me feel so sick. I didn't know what it was; it felt like guilt, but a guilt that was almost physical. I was sick the way you are when you're a kid, and you're convinced that you're going to die because it's not possible to be so miserable and continue to live.

Jenny took me home that night. I think she would have wanted to make love again, but I was in no shape to do anything that strenuous. As soon as I staggered in the front door, I heard the insistent ring of the phone.

It was my mother. "Dave! Where have you been all day? We've been trying to reach you."

"What's the matter?" Dread enveloped me at the sound of her voice.

"It's Lauren," she said, and then her voice broke. "She's dead."

"Dead? How? When? Just yesterday -- "

My mother was not able to speak to me coherently. My father took the phone. "We don't know what happened. They think it happened sometime today. There's no obvious cause of death, so they're doing an autopsy -- "

"I'll be right over," I said, and hung up the phone. But I knew the cause of death.

What do they call it when you kill your sister?

The whole drive over to my parents' house, I choked on my guilt. I didn't blame Jenny. She had no way of knowing how important that little bottle was to the two of us. But I did, or I should have.

They never did figure out why she died. Jenny was with me at the wake and the funeral. She didn't say anything about it, and I never told her what I thought.

But ever since then, it's like I've been a different person. People have remarked on it. They say I'm not goofy anymore. I seem so much more serious, so much deeper, so much more adult. So much more the man Jenny wanted to make me into.

It wasn't just sororicide, when you think about it. In a way, it was suicide, as well.

And sometimes I wonder if Jenny did know, after all.