Bats or Swallows

Home > Other > Bats or Swallows > Page 9
Bats or Swallows Page 9

by Teri Vlassopoulos


  WHEN PEN MEDITATES, she doesn’t immediately slip into a state of thoughtlessness. She needs to first transport her inner self elsewhere. She tells me that she always ends up in the same place: a beach, nighttime. She’s never been to this beach, but she can imagine it clearly. She’s standing barefoot in the cool, white sand and there are tall outlines of reeds swaying in the breeze. She’s surrounded by salty, inky darkness. She peers up towards the sky and stares, and this is when the real meditation starts, I guess, as she pictures herself straining at the sky, the scattered universe.

  We’re sitting in yoga class and I steal her trick. I try conjuring her beach. But I get distracted. Do I imagine a beach by the ocean? Or a lake? I haven’t spent much time near the ocean, but I imagine that its vastness must be powerful, more conducive to spiritual enlightenment. What does salty air feel like? Is it like a smoggy day in the city? Heavy like the air after a rainstorm? I open my eyes and look around the room. Pen’s sitting in front of me and I can see the even, gentle heave of her breath. She’s counting stars.

  Pen’s level of concentration reminds me of my older sister Audrey as a child reading curled up in the big chair in the living room. I would do everything I could to distract her, but she’d remain perfectly absorbed in her book. Sometimes I climbed up on her chair, pressed my knees against her thighs and stuck my face in hers. I stared at her freckles and counted them out loud. Uno, dos, tres. I’d picked up some Spanish from a television show and wanted to show off. Audrey would get annoyed and shove me away, but it wouldn’t be until I counted to twenty or higher, some number that I didn’t know in Spanish. Once, she pushed me so violently that I cracked my head against the coffee table and it took four stitches to close it up. When she was older she smeared cream on her face, a skin lightener, to remove the freckles. But they never went away, and in the summer multiplied into big blotches. Her freckles were the most gorgeous things and she hated them.

  I started joining Penelope at yoga when I turned thirty. I thought I should exercise as I got older, but couldn’t bring myself to go to the gym and had fooled myself into believing that yoga would be easier and kinder to my body. I was surprised when I left that first class with achy muscles, insecure about the inability of my body to fold itself over. When had I lost my flexibility?

  The class always kicked off with a five-minute meditation session that made me more tense than relaxed. Five minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but once we were sitting there, the silence pressing against me, the minutes would stretch out slowly, like sticky, dripping honey. The part I liked most was shivasana at the end when the teacher would turn off the lights and we would lie on our mats in the dark. It was more like naptime than anything else.

  Then I got pregnant and decided to keep attending class, hoping that yoga would foster a calm atmosphere for the baby. When I’m there I imagine that for an hour-and-a-half the fetus gets the chance to float in a serene salty bath, like I’m sending it off to the spa.

  I haven’t told Penelope I’m pregnant. I told our yoga teacher because I wanted to make sure it was safe for the baby, but I asked her not to mention it. “I won’t say a word, Sara,” she said to me. I could never remember our teacher’s name and I couldn’t believe she remembered mine. Then she smiled such a kind, trusting smile that it made me hate her a little.

  Pen and her husband have been trying to have a baby for a long time. They wanted children when my husband and I were still preoccupied with student loans and starting careers and figuring out what to do with our lives. The thing about pregnancy is that you spend so much of your life trying to avoid it that it feels like a slap in the face when it doesn’t happen right away. I assumed it would take me as long as Penelope, or at least three or four months, but after the first few weeks of seriously trying, I knew something in my body had changed.

  I even waited a day before telling my husband, worried that he would be freaked out by how quickly it happened. I was freaked out. So I called Audrey. I hadn’t spoken to her in months, but I thought someone removed from the situation would be the best person to tell first. A sister seemed like a good candidate. I dug up the last phone number I had for her, some small village in Ireland, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial it. I had to look up the country code online. There was a weird international ringtone, like a long beep or Morse code, and then a monotone accented voice told me that the number was out of service.

  During shivasana the yoga teacher walks between us and presses down lightly on our shoulders and touches our foreheads. Sometimes the touch makes me stiffen, but this class I like it. Her fingers are warm. I decide that tonight I’ll tell Penelope about the baby. She’d be offended if I waited too long. Our teacher starts speaking again and then the lights go on and we head to the change room in a post-yoga daze.

  Penelope and I don’t speak until we’re outside. The cold slaps us, wakes us up. Spring hasn’t quite settled in, but it’s slowly edging out winter and the fresh air is a relief. “Do you want to get dinner?” I ask.

  “Sure, why not? We have nothing to eat at home anyway.”

  We start walking towards our regular noodle house, our mats slung against our backs.

  I knew Penelope’s twin sister Kelly before I knew her. Kelly and I were assigned roommates in our first year of university. Penelope switched to our school halfway through second year and it turned out that we had more in common. When Kelly still lived here, the three of us often went out together. I learned that there’s nothing more powerful than twin girls. Different hair and clothes, but those faces side by side can knock a person flat. And their voices in unison, like angels, something holy or strange. It’s magic, I guess, how an egg can split in the womb and make two girls instead of one.

  In my family Audrey managed to get the best genes. The perfect combination of Mom’s face and Dad’s skinniness. The grey eyes, like my grandmother. Her red hair seemed to come out of nowhere, some great-great aunt no one remembers. I got the average genes, a slight chubbiness, brown hair, although sometimes in the sun you can see glints of that red. When my husband and I talked about having children, I imagined my genes mingling with his like they were at a cocktail party waiting to pair off. I silently rooted for the good ones, for that great-great aunt to make a repeat appearance.

  It wasn’t until I met Kelly and Penelope that I considered my relationship with Audrey. Even when living in different cities, the twins were close, and they talked or sent emails to each other all the time. Audrey and I, on the other hand, were friendly to each other, but we weren’t friends. She was a few years older than me, but wasn’t the type to dole out advice and I didn’t ask for any either. By the time it occurred to me to regret this, Audrey had moved away. I started sending letters to her first, writing as if we were more familiar with each other than we had been before she left, and was happy when she wrote back to me in kind.

  The last time I heard from her, she included a photo of her two-year-old daughter, Jo. It’s a picture of the two of them on some lush green Irish hill, all red-haired and radiant. Jo was lucky to get Audrey’s hair. I don’t know much about Jo’s father other than that he’s an Irishman from her commune named Patrick. Maybe he has red hair too. At the commune they do things like spin their own wool and knit Fair Isle sweaters. They milk cows and churn their own butter and it sounds perfect, except for the fact that it can’t be. Those kinds of things never work out the way they’re supposed to.

  That Audrey ended up in a commune in Ireland isn’t entirely surprising. In high school she turned into a hippie. She grew her hair out long, almost the length of her back, wore bell-bottoms and these ugly purple-tinted glasses that I hated more than anything. Sometimes a friend would trace henna outlines on the insides of her hands. She didn’t drink, but she smoked pot, and had a hippie boyfriend named Hayden. He had shiny long blonde hair and blue eyes and I was always too shy to say anything to him when he came over.

  Audrey moved away when she was nineteen. She graduated from high
school and didn’t have any plans to go to university. She lived at home, idle, but then one day she picked up and left. Despite her pothead tendencies, she’d spent a few summers working at the Dairy Queen at the mall and those saved ice cream earnings funded a plane ticket to Europe. She was going to travel. She cut off all her hair and I didn’t even get the chance to hug her goodbye because her flight to Paris took off while I was in school.

  At first I assumed she’d return. She came back once for six months and another time for three, and then only when her passport required it. The last time she was here she told us about Patrick, but she didn’t have a picture of him. The next time we heard from her, she was married (eloped on the commune) and we expected them to visit together. Thanksgiving passed, then Christmas and my birthday and her birthday, and still she was gone, no visit planned. My mother tried to convince her to come back, but it never worked. When I got married I hoped she would show up, but by then she was pregnant and said she couldn’t risk the flight overseas.

  I could’ve flown to Ireland to visit Audrey myself, but I wanted her to come back to us first. Anyway, she never invited me. Some families can deal with being far-flung. They book plane tickets to each other’s homes, have long-distance plans. Pen and Kelly’s family was like that, all of them situated at different points in North America, and they still managed to get sick of each other, to know everything going on in their lives. In our family no matter how much we missed each other, we weren’t sure what to do about it.

  But there were the letters. Not emails because, according to Audrey, the commune was too deep in the countryside. “Not even dial-up?” I’d asked, but she’d ignored the question. Instead of writing to us by the glow of a computer screen, Audrey would sit at her kitchen table with a candle and a stack of stationery. It’s strange, but this place feels like home to me, she wrote once. I know Mom misses me, but I can’t stand the thought of living there anymore. I’m sorry.

  Maybe it wasn’t Audrey herself that I missed, just the potential of our relationship, the idea that we could translate our letters to each other into something real and breathing. Still, when I read that letter I wrote back, it’s not just Mom who misses you.

  The last letter she sent me was right before my thirtieth birthday, a year ago. Unlike previous letters, it was unsettling. The picture of Jo was nice, but everything else was odd.

  There were too many loose ends when I left, she wrote. I was in denial back then. I was too young and every time I came back to visit I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I’m coming to terms with it now. Something about turning 35 (thank you for the birthday card) and getting closer to 40. My therapist has helped a lot. Do you remember Mr. Richards? He was married to our babysitter when we were still living at our first house. My therapist helped uncover some memories I had blocked. Mr. Richards molested me when I was six. Maybe five. I’m sure he didn’t do anything to you. You were too little, just a baby. You probably don’t remember him. I blocked it out, but I always knew deep down.

  There wasn’t much more. For a few days I doubted what she’d written. I didn’t know that Audrey had been seeing a therapist. Did communes usually have therapists? I also didn’t remember Mr. Richards or that babysitter. We’d moved and the only babysitter I knew was a woman who’d come to our house and sometimes bake cookies with us.

  I asked Mom about Mr. Richards when I saw her next, unsure of whether or not Audrey had mailed her a similar letter. My mother talked about how much she’d appreciated Mrs. Richards for taking care of us when she went back to work. “Mr. Richards? I didn’t know him very well. He was nice enough. How come?”

  I didn’t write Audrey back right away. I eventually believed her, but I felt guilty about my initial reaction and I didn’t know what to tell her. Her letter made me feel sick and angry and sad, but mostly I felt futile. Imagine that you’ve done something wrong and would like to atone for it. Imagine that you don’t know what you’ve done wrong, but would like to apologize. That’s how I felt. How could I say anything? I put a response in the mail more than a month later and only briefly acknowledged what she’d written me. She didn’t write back. Mom and Dad got a Christmas card later addressed to all three of us, but there was no return address. The postmark was different from the commune, out of Dublin this time. No news about Patrick, but Jo sent her love.

  You need to do things at crucial times. When I told Penelope that I was trying to get pregnant, she foisted fertility literature on me, books that outlined how the menstrual cycle worked. Everything depends on perfect conditions. Our genes don’t mix like elegant rich people at a cocktail party I learned. They don’t linger like that. Genes get slammed together, more like sweaty teenagers in a mosh pit, desperate for connection, foregoing tenderness for physical contact. It’s easy to miss your chance.

  I know that I should’ve written to Audrey right away. Called her. I choked. I don’t blame her for not giving me her new contact information. I should’ve tried harder to track her down and tell her, Oh god, I’m so sorry. Fuck Mr. Richards. Come back home.

  At the restaurant, I’m nervous and the squeeze of muscles in my shoulders makes me think of the baby even more.

  “We’re getting wine,” Pen says. “I need it. Work today was awful, and yoga didn’t help.”

  “I would drink,” I say. “But I shouldn’t.”

  “How come?” Pen studies the menu and doesn’t see my expression.

  “Well…” My voice drifts off and Pen puts down the menu. I tug at my hair.

  “Oh my god, you’re pregnant?”

  I nod and feel tears coming on. They bubble up in Penelope’s eyes as well and soon we’re both crying at the table.

  “I’m so happy for you,” Penelope says and grabs my hand. I’m so relieved to hear her say this, happy that she didn’t flinch. The waiter comes to take our orders and we laugh at how silly we look, mussed up from yoga class, streaky faced, but he doesn’t seem surprised, like he sees this kind of thing all the time.

  Later when we’re slurping our noodle bowls and talking about maternity clothes, Pen’s cell phone rings. It’s Kelly, who lives in Vancouver now.

  “What’s up?” Pen twirls noodles around her chopsticks and listens to her sister. “I’m having dinner with Sara. I have lots to tell you. Big news.” She gives me an excited kick under the table. “Not my good news. Listen, I’ll call you later.”

  Often, not all the time, but enough that I’ve noticed the timing, soon after our yoga class Kelly will call Pen out of the blue. Unprovoked. Like, “I just thought of you; I wanted to say hello.” I’ve already asked Penelope about whether or not they have a psychic connection, but I ask her again at the restaurant after she puts her phone away. She makes a face. She’s been asked this millions of times in her life.

  “Nope,” she says, but then tells me something she hasn’t mentioned before. “Sometimes it works like a tin can telephone. Usually it’s just a pair of rusty cans and some frayed rope, but every so often I can hear Kelly on the other end. Or she can hear me. I don’t know if it’s a psychic connection or like, a kitchen sink science experiment that works by fluke. It’s probably just coincidence.”

  “Probably,” I say, but I’m not really sure. We finish eating and leave the restaurant.

  “It’s too early to tell if it’s a girl or a boy, right?” Pen asks while we’re walking.

  “I have a feeling it might be a girl. It’s just a hunch.”

  Pen hugs me and tells me again how happy she is for me.

  “You’ll get pregnant soon too,” I say. “I know it.”

  She pokes me in the belly. “Don’t feel guilty.”

  We separate and as I walk to my bus stop I think of her and Kelly. It must be the meditation that does it, that clears the air and prompts Kelly to call so regularly after class. I wonder if I can steal their trick to get Audrey to call me.

  My bus arrives. I sit up straight in the seat and resolve to think about Audrey while I’m medit
ating, not fleetingly, but purposefully. I will count Audrey’s freckles while Pen stares at the stars on the beach. I start practicing right there on the bus, chanting Audrey’s name in my head, concentrating on turning my thoughts into a radio wave and fortifying whatever weakened connection exists between my sister and me. I’m sorry, I miss you, I’m sorry, I miss you, call me, call me, call me. If I do it right, if I’m lucky, maybe the atoms in the air will align themselves correctly, pull themselves taut like a telephone wire so that my message will reach her clearly without interference.

  "MY TEETH," FRANCES SAID, “They fall out of my mouth when I speak.” It was the beginning of summer and she was telling me about a dream she’d had the night before. “They’re falling and I keep spitting them out like they’re cherry pits, but no one says anything about it. You were there, and you ignored it, but I think you kicked a tooth away when it landed too close to your foot. You were barefoot. I was too, even though we were on Yonge Street? Somewhere downtown, anyway. I don’t think anything’s wrong until I take a deep breath, and it feels like I’m eating something minty, you know, really fresh? So I find a mirror and see my gums, empty. And then I panic and wake up.”

  Dreaming of tooth loss can be a symbol of death or sudden monetary windfall. Frances was worried.

  “Maybe you’ll win the lottery?” I suggested.

 

‹ Prev