Read Online Bats or Swallows by Teri Vlassopoulos - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Teri Vlassopoulos
Tags: Fiction
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riptide, you should just float on your back and allow the riptide to carry you away from shore until you’re beyond the pull of the current. Fighting against it is what sucks you under. Once you’re out in the distance, you can wave or yell for help, find a safe way back. She wrote that down too.
W HEN I MET NICK, I thought he was nice. A little dumb, but nice, and he didn’t go to my high school, which was the most important thing. He came over while my parents were out and I played him “Country Feedback” on my guitar. As I fumbled between E minor and G, he leaned over and kissed me. The top of my mouth, underneath my nose. He missed. Nick’s mouth tasted like toothpaste, and that night as I brushed my teeth, I got dizzy just thinking about it.
Nick was cute; he had these cheekbones. My aunt Lydia had a soft spot for paintings of Jesus, the airbrushed kind with photorealistic details. The strangest, my favourite, was of Jesus before the crucifixion. It’s a close-up of his face. His eyes are rolled heavenwards and thin dribbles of blood are sluicing down his forehead, pooling in the gaunt hollows under his eyes and spilling over his cheekbones. Those cheekbones were as sharp as a supermodel’s and when I was sixteen I was jealous of their definition, even if it was the blood drawn by a crown of thorns that emphasized them. Nick had cheekbones like the painting, like Jesus.
I kept falling for guys who looked like Jesus: long, wavy brown hair, too skinny. Hippies. After describing Nick to my best friend, Laura, she said, “Again with the Jesus guys, Esther?” I didn’t know what she meant and when she pointed out the common thread between Nick and the last two guys I’d claimed to be in love with, I realized that I had a type and that type was Son of God.
My mother and Aunt Lydia immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when they were in their twenties. They left behind two other sisters, three brothers and their parents. They’d intended on returning, but then they both got married in Canada and stayed put, making up for their absences at family gatherings with gifts of money. I’d never met these relatives, but I knew their birthdays by the trips I’d take with my mother to a small store downtown that specialized in Filipino foods and had a counter in the back where she could wire money to her family, quickly and cheaply.
Lydia married another Filipino immigrant from her church, but my father was Irish, part of a family that had lived in Canada since the eighteen hundreds. They met at their first jobs: Mom was a secretary in the admissions department of the school Dad was teaching at. She was the first non-Anglo-Saxon to marry into his family.
After my mother and Lydia got married, their lives took divergent paths. The most obvious impact on me was that Lydia’s children (three of them) went to Catholic school while I (an only child) went to an all girls’, secular private school. My father was an atheist and my mother said she believed, but not enough to go to church and definitely not enough to get me baptized and confirmed. When I was a baby Lydia took this as a personal insult, some kind of forsaking of their shared childhood, but eventually the rift was mended. Whenever we visited, Lydia pushed bowls of pancit and adobo and lumpia my way, hoping that if she couldn’t get through to me spiritually, she could at least physically stuff me with heritage.
I met Nick through my cousin, Mary. We were the same age, but by the time we entered high school had very little in common. We spent time together out of familial obligation and nostalgia for our childhood friendship, but judged each other in the passive-aggressive way only possible between relatives. She kept inviting me to her Catholic school parties because she was “concerned” that I wasn’t meeting enough guys since I went to an all girls’ school. While it was true that my life lacked daily male interaction, I managed to maintain a
W HEN I MET NICK, I thought he was nice. A little dumb, but nice, and he didn’t go to my high school, which was the most important thing. He came over while my parents were out and I played him “Country Feedback” on my guitar. As I fumbled between E minor and G, he leaned over and kissed me. The top of my mouth, underneath my nose. He missed. Nick’s mouth tasted like toothpaste, and that night as I brushed my teeth, I got dizzy just thinking about it.
Nick was cute; he had these cheekbones. My aunt Lydia had a soft spot for paintings of Jesus, the airbrushed kind with photorealistic details. The strangest, my favourite, was of Jesus before the crucifixion. It’s a close-up of his face. His eyes are rolled heavenwards and thin dribbles of blood are sluicing down his forehead, pooling in the gaunt hollows under his eyes and spilling over his cheekbones. Those cheekbones were as sharp as a supermodel’s and when I was sixteen I was jealous of their definition, even if it was the blood drawn by a crown of thorns that emphasized them. Nick had cheekbones like the painting, like Jesus.
I kept falling for guys who looked like Jesus: long, wavy brown hair, too skinny. Hippies. After describing Nick to my best friend, Laura, she said, “Again with the Jesus guys, Esther?” I didn’t know what she meant and when she pointed out the common thread between Nick and the last two guys I’d claimed to be in love with, I realized that I had a type and that type was Son of God.
My mother and Aunt Lydia immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when they were in their twenties. They left behind two other sisters, three brothers and their parents. They’d intended on returning, but then they both got married in Canada and stayed put, making up for their absences at family gatherings with gifts of money. I’d never met these relatives, but I knew their birthdays by the trips I’d take with my mother to a small store downtown that specialized in Filipino foods and had a counter in the back where she could wire money to her family, quickly and cheaply.
Lydia married another Filipino immigrant from her church, but my father was Irish, part of a family that had lived in Canada since the eighteen hundreds. They met at their first jobs: Mom was a secretary in the admissions department of the school Dad was teaching at. She was the first non-Anglo-Saxon to marry into his family.
After my mother and Lydia got married, their lives took divergent paths. The most obvious impact on me was that Lydia’s children (three of them) went to Catholic school while I (an only child) went to an all girls’, secular private school. My father was an atheist and my mother said she believed, but not enough to go to church and definitely not enough to get me baptized and confirmed. When I was a baby Lydia took this as a personal insult, some kind of forsaking of their shared childhood, but eventually the rift was mended. Whenever we visited, Lydia pushed bowls of pancit and adobo and lumpia my way, hoping that if she couldn’t get through to me spiritually, she could at least physically stuff me with heritage.
I met Nick through my cousin, Mary. We were the same age, but by the time we entered high school had very little in common. We spent time together out of familial obligation and nostalgia for our childhood friendship, but judged each other in the passive-aggressive way only possible between relatives. She kept inviting me to her Catholic school parties because she was “concerned” that I wasn’t meeting enough guys since I went to an all girls’ school. While it was true that my life lacked daily male interaction, I managed to maintain a
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