Bats or Swallows Read online

  BATS OR SWALLOWS

  Teri Vlassopoulos

  Invisible Publishing

  Halifax & Toronto

  Table of Contents

  Bats or Swallows by Teri Vlassopoulous

  A Secret Handshake

  My Son, the Magician

  The Occult

  Art History

  Hushpuppies

  What Counts

  Baby Teeth

  Swimming Lessons

  Tin Can Telephone

  Bats or Swallows

  What You Want and What You Need

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  THE SUMMER I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD and my brother Mitch was fourteen, we had a secret handshake. It was subtle. Often when people invent secret handshakes, they are complex, acrobatic things involving thrusts, fists, snapping. Ours was quiet. The secret part: when you shake hands, you do this thing with your right foot, pivot it a little. Because, we decided, what was the point of a secret handshake when anyone could see what you were doing, when someone could be watching with a spycam hidden in their lapel, studying your hands or anticipating pressure points? No one looks at the feet. We took our handshake seriously and that summer we discussed it while we sat by the pool in the backyard. How could we introduce it to a real secret society? Should we just start one ourselves? And if we started a secret society, who would be allowed in?

  Mom sometimes hovered in the background of these conversations, adjusting the sprinkler, fishing stray leaves out of the pool, wiping down patio furniture. One evening after listening to us she said, “You know, Ray was a Freemason.” She said it all breezy and casual, and we watched her pick up the sprinkler, move it to a dry patch and walk back to the house without getting wet.

  When my mother was nineteen she married her high school sweetheart. Ray was twenty-one and from the pictures I’ve seen, gorgeous. I know that everyone looks good when they’re in their early twenties and in love—there’s that glow—but Ray was honest-to-god movie star good-looking. I mean, he was cool. And then Mitch was born. Mitchum. Ray wanted a name that was trustworthy and respectable, but had a tinge of Hollywood to it. There are pictures of the three of them, my mother and Ray grinning down at baby Mitch. They looked happy.

  Three months after those photos were taken, while Mitchum was asleep in a laundry basket, drooling over their white shag rug, Ray was killed in a car accident. It was an icy night and another car lost control and hit him from behind. Barely one year later, Mom remarried. Her second husband, my father, was someone she’d also known in high school. I was born soon after that.

  I grew up with this story, accepted it without question, and it wasn’t until that summer, the summer of our secret handshake, that it occurred to me how strange it was: within two years my mother had married and had a baby, lost her husband and remarried.

  After Mom told us about Ray’s direct involvement with a real secret society, Mitch and I were silent for a good minute.

  “Ray was a Freemason?” I asked. Screamed it, maybe.

  “Weird.” Mitch’sresponse was less enthusiastic and shrieky than mine. He didn’t say anything else and so, embarrassed, I got up from where we were sitting. I walked through the newly positioned sprinkler to get damp and then I jumped into the pool. Mitch didn’t join me. He didn’t say much for the rest of the evening, but I could guess what he was thinking.

  Mitch was still just young enough that he could tolerate and even enjoy random research projects with me. Freemasonry was one of the secret societies we studied at the library. We had found a book about it and memorized a few facts. It was the kind of society whose rituals were passed along bloodlines. I knew that Mitch was thinking that if Ray hadn’t died, he would’ve passed on its secrets to him. Mitch would’ve had connections that could carry him through life. He would’ve stood a better chance of being Prime Minister or a CEO or even the owner of a chain of fast food restaurants, like Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, who was also a Mason. Instead Mitch was stuck inventing stupid handshakes with his kid sister.

  After my swim I went to see Dad in the kitchen. I stood by the counter and thought about asking him about Ray, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know. I fidgeted until he told me to help him with dinner. He was making stuffed tomatoes and peppers and was heaping tablespoons of rice and ground meat into their open cavities. I would only eat the stuffing and Mitch preferred the skins, so we would usually trade plates halfway through these meals. It was a good deal. That evening Mitch refused to eat with us. He made a big production of making his own dinner of toast and peanut butter and sitting by the pool alone. Mom and Dad tried to force him to come to the table, but he ignored them, and they let it go. It was his first silent tantrum. There were more that followed, but at the time it was something new and unexpected. After dinner Mom scraped my discarded tomato and pepper skins into the garbage can and the thwack of the vegetables hitting the bottom of the bin was heavy and wet.

  The new information about Ray unleashed something in my brother. I could see him mulling it over, letting it bloom in his bloodstream and knot in his face. Mathematics were introduced into our family: I wasn’t Mitch’s sister, I was his half-sister. Our nomenclature was also called into question. Mitch grew up calling Dad “Dad,” but slowly he started addressing him by his first name. “Jim.” He tested it out tentatively, but then gained confidence and I would hear him say his name with gusto, incorporating a perfectly timed eye roll. But at the same time, when he mentioned Ray, he still called him “Ray,” not “my father,” and thankfully not “Dad.” I braced myself for that moment.

  Rather than discuss the issue, Mitch withdrew into himself and, to my surprise, Mom and Dad let it slide. For a few weeks the house was simply tense, on the cusp. Mitch, as if to further emphasize that something inside of him had changed, stole some of Mom’s menthol cigarettes and smoked them in the backyard when Mom and Dad were at work. He didn’t hide it from me and from my bedroom window I saw him take drags of those long, skinny cigarettes while he looked up at the sky. My own lungs contracted as I thought of all those times we had begged my mother to stop smoking. Mitch had even once broken the toilet in an attempt to flush them away. His behaviour confused me, but it also slowly infuriated me since it bled into my summer too, distorted it into a different version of what I had expected.

  Ray’s parents, Mitch’s grandparents, lived in Quebec and although they consistently sent Christmas and birthday cards to Mitch, they rarely called or visited us in Toronto. Mitch asked if he could visit them. He had never been, but now decided that he should be given the chance to know his grandparents.

  “You already have grandparents,” I said to him. “Two sets. You don’t need any more.”

  “You can visit them as long as they want you to visit,” Mom said, ignoring me. “It’s not polite to invite yourself.”

  Mitch must have contacted them before Mom’s etiquette tip because a train ticket arrived via FedEx the next day. I watched Mitch accept the envelope. He threw his shoulders back and deepened his voice when he spoke to the deliveryman, sloppily signing the clipboard handed to him. He went to his room and shoved his clothes into a duffel bag, even the dirty laundry piled on the floor.

  “I guess I’ll see you when school starts,” he told me. It was only the beginning of August.

  “You’re going for the rest of the summer?”

  “Yup.”

  I stood at his door. “They’re letting you stay that long?” I’d peeked at the ticket on the kitchen table and the return date was in a week, not a month. I didn’t believe they would allow Mitch, a stranger despite being their grandson, to move in just like that.

  When it came time for him to leave, Mom brought him to the train s
tation and I stayed home with Dad.

  “What if Mitch doesn’t come back?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “He doesn’t even know French.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dad said. “He’ll be back by Sunday.”

  Four days later Mitch called and told Mom that he wanted to stay. I heard the phone pass from Mom to Dad, between Mitch and Ray’s parents, and then they hung up and the taut tranquillity of the past few weeks was broken by the sound of my parents fighting. “Just let him stay,” Mom said and eventually my father conceded.

  There were only three weeks left of summer. I’d taken a stand against enrolling in day camp for my remaining time off and with Mitch gone, I was alone during the day when I wasn’t with my friends. Dad would come home for lunch to keep me company, but mostly I read and the time slipped away slowly. For a few days everything was calm again.

  One afternoon I saw Dad’s car pull into the driveway. I went back to my book and when I looked up he was driving away.

  “The strangest thing happened this afternoon,” he said to Mom and me when he came home that evening.

  He had returned for lunch and checked the mail first before coming in. He noticed that one piece of mail wasn’t mail at all, but a red tube. It looked like a stick of dynamite, the way dynamite looks in Bugs Bunny cartoons. He was convinced that it was actual, real dynamite and that it might detonate and blow his daughter and house to bits. So, he stuffed the rest of the mail back into the box, put the tube in the trunk of the car and drove back to work.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he told us. “It seemed like the safest thing to do, to put it in the car and drive away.”

  “I was almost blown up?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe you put it in the car,” Mom said. “I would’ve thrown it in the neighbour’s yard.”

  The red tube was a piece of junk mail. He spread its contents on the counter. There was a fake plastic key and an official-looking letter stating that our family had been selected to win a new car if we called the number printed at the bottom of the page. We were almost winners!

  After discovering the tube, my father drove to work, parked the car and called the police, who brought in the bomb squad. They popped open the trunk, carefully removed the tube and discovered that it wasn’t a bomb, it wasn’t dynamite. It wasn’t even close. My father apologized and to my disappointment filed a complaint against the company responsible for it, which must have lowered our chance of actually winning anything.

  This was probably embarrassing for my father to go through in front of his coworkers, but he didn’t seem sheepish. His gut instinct had been to leave me oblivious while he risked his life to drive the dynamite away from his home and me. What if it really had been a bomb, what if the car had exploded somewhere between the house and his office? He would’ve been a hero, speeding away to save his daughter.

  “Can you believe it?” I said after he left the room. I was proud of him. Mom didn’t answer me and I sensed that she didn’t share the same level of pride.

  “Dad has been under some stress recently.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. My pride was replaced with something more worrisome: confusion. I wanted to talk about this with Mitch, get his insight. I hadn’t spoken to him since he left for Montreal, but I thought he would be able to illuminate the situation for me, tell it to me straight so that I would understand. The next day while I was home alone, I found Ray’s parents’ number and called. Mitch answered after two rings. When I heard his voice, I wanted to cry. I missed him.

  “What are you doing?” I blurted out. “Are you having fun?”

  “I am,” he said. “I love it here.”

  “But none of your friends are around.”

  “I’ve made friends.”

  “You have?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t,” I said. The conversation was going all wrong.

  “Then why are you calling?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. We hung up soon afterwards and in the end I didn’t tell him about the bomb.

  Mitch returned Labour Day weekend. He brought a bag of cheese curds and before he’d even taken off his shoes he gave me a handful to try.

  “Listen to the way they squeak,” he said. His facial expressions were different. Smug, maybe. He had longer hair. I chewed and swallowed and nothing squeaked, but I didn’t tell him.

  While Mitch had been away, I had kept up my interest in secret societies and borrowed more books about the Freemasons from the library. The society, as it turned out, wasn’t really so secretive. There had been investigative reports over the years, so all of their secret stuff was out in the open: their handshake, their code words, what they did at their lodges.

  Freemasons have certain positions they make when they enter a room. They stand a certain way or maybe make an arm gesture. One of these positions involves arranging their feet into a square corner, their bodies tall and straight representing the rectitude of their actions. When I learned this, it made me feel as though our secret handshake, with the foot movement, wasn’t so original. When Mitch finished talking about Montreal, I told him about this new development, but it didn’t resonate with him the same way it had with me.

  “That’s cool,” he said. Case closed. He was floating in the pool on his back, his eyes shut. I jumped in and joined him.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “I know the handshakes!”

  There’s a distinctive handshake depending on your level within the society, your degree. First degree Masons put pressure with their right thumb on the knuckle of the other man’s first finger. Second degree Masons will do the same shake as the first, but with the pressure on the other man’s forefinger. Those in the third degree, the highest degree, will use his right thumb to apply pressure between the knuckles of the other man’s middle and third finger.

  It was confusing reading about these handshakes, like learning how to knit from a diagram or interpreting wordless toy assembly instructions. I kept forgetting which finger was the forefinger. It had to be practiced with another person.

  “Mitch, try it with me.” We were bobbing in the water. Mitch held an inner tube.

  “You can’t do the handshake if you’re not a part of the society,” he said. “It’s not right.”

  “But maybe if you shake someone’s hand the right way and it turns out they’re a Freemason, they’ll think you’re interested and invite you to join.”

  “I don’t think it works like that.”

  “It does! I read about it. They like people who are interested.”

  Mitch took a deep breath and jackknifed himself underwater so that all that was left was the black rubber tube. He came up behind me. “Why do you care? Girls aren’t even allowed in.” He climbed out of the pool. “I need a smoke.”

  To qualify as a member of the Freemasons you must believe wholly in a Supreme Being. The being can be anyone—God, Mohammed, whatever—as long as he/she/it is deemed legitimately Supreme somewhere in the world. The Masonic umbrella term for this being is “The Great Architect of the Universe.” Mitch and I thought it sounded funny, like the name of a ride at Canada’s Wonderland. Because the term is so long, Freemasons use the acronym TGAOTU in their printed texts. I figured that as long as I found a GAOTU to believe in, I would be a shoo-in. But, Mitch was right about girls not being allowed. It was the first thing I had learned, even before the GAOTU, and then had promptly, conveniently, forgot.

  Mitch sat on the picnic bench, smoking. This time he had his own cigarettes. Dad must have been watching from the kitchen because he ran out and yelled, “What are you doing?” and then slapped him.

  We both looked blankly at Dad. And then Mitch swore and the two of them started yelling at each other. Mitch’s voice had a low tone to it, something that sounded too adult for his fourteen years. They fought like grown-ups. Dad had left the sliding do
or open and I saw Moonie, our cat, peeking out. Moonie was an indoor cat and I was constantly scrambling to close doors quickly and keep her inside. No one else cared as much. Mom came out back as well, but she just stood there watching.

  I dunked my head underwater, and the commotion was dulled down, cottony, padded by the sound of my own breath. When I came back up Moonie had leapt into the backyard while Mitch and Dad screamed and Mom stood still, simply watching.

  I hauled myself out of the pool to catch Moonie and told myself that I needed a secret thing too, that I deserved one. Not Masonry, not cigarettes.

  Okay, I thought. Fine. I’m ready.

  MY SON, JEREMY, was usually a fireman, police officer or businessman. I liked it most when he was a businessman, the way he looked in the cut of his suit and his dress shoes all shined. He tied his tie carefully and slowly standing in front of the hallway mirror. It reminded me of the way he used to practice tying knots when he was a child in the Boy Scouts, that same look of furrowed determination. As a businessman, he wore aftershave, slicked his hair back and carried a briefcase that he found in the basement. Fred, his father, my ex-husband, left it behind when he moved out.

  Jeremy it out loud, but I know he preferred being a police officer. I could tell by the way he carried himself. Taller, with an aura of self-confidence. He enjoyed the way people looked at him—a man with real authority—when he walked down the street in his uniform. He was most embarrassed when he had to be a fireman, and wouldn’t change into the uniform until the last minute. It’s hard to look conspicuous in a fireman’s outfit in a subdivision, and the hat was difficult to hide. The material of the coat was cheap and shiny like a Halloween costume and probably flammable.

  Jeremy was a stripper and most of his gigs were at night. When he wasn’t doing a bachelorette party, he stripped at a club downtown. I saw him infrequently, but sometimes he would get a night off, no other plans. On those evenings I would come home from work and find him sitting on the couch in jeans and a t-shirt, eating fried eggs or spaghetti and drinking beer. “Hey Mom,” he would say. “I made eggs for you too. They’re in the kitchen.”