1. Late Bloomers
They spend a few years in high school together before they notice each other. In their final year, she hears from gossip-Lucy that he likes her. “Do you like him?” Lucy asks, her voice, syrupy-smooth. She stands in the kitchen, staccato breath, the phone cord wrapped around her fingers, tips turning red.
He composes a piano piece and names if after her, performs it when they finish eating the chicken he roasts, Greek lemon potatoes, honey-sweet baclava for dessert. They lose their virginity in a suburb of Vancouver the night of the piano performance, after he woos her with his music and poetry. She doesn’t remember much about the act itself, only that they keep the lights off. They are still in bed when his parents show up early, high beams spilling through the slats in his basement room blinds. He rushes her out the front door, just as his parents enter through the back. A slight cramping in her low belly, she listens to the swooshing of her heartbeat meeting her eardrums, until she is home. Only then does she discover the small dot of blood in her underwear. Her body is hollow, as if she lost something.
After time spent apart traveling, writing fat tear-stained letters, they meet up in his grandfather’s village on Naxos. Slow days are spent swimming in the Aegean, sipping ouzo, snuggling on a moped through windy, sleepy streets. She leans against a short rock wall, the expanse of the blue-green sea behind her, posing in her white t-shirt and purple paisley shorts, her brown curls piled high in a messy bun. It’s here he tells her he loves her over and over again until her insides kink and coil and she asks him to stop. Years later, when she thinks back to the gradual demise of the relationship, she returns to this point, presses play and rewind like a mixtape.
2. Fake
I’m at my mother’s house sitting on the couch, book in hand, sipping strong coffee and breaking off squares of dark chocolate while my six-year-old watches Laurel and Hardy in the next room. I read parenting books, ones that tell me not to let the baby cry it out or punish with time outs. I’m guilty of doing both these things plus so many more procreator faux pas that I’ve lost count, and I wonder which of my wrongdoings my son will choose to talk about with his future therapist. “This book says you can’t show a child too much love,” I say. My mother glances up from her newspaper, reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose. “What a load of shit,” she says, waving her hand across her face.
When I ask my mother about the three words, her face puckers, like she’s eaten something sour, and she tells me she doesn’t like the expression. “It’s so overused and sounds fake. If you say it too much, it loses its meaning. Besides my parents never told me. We didn’t say that in Czech. I just knew.”
The next day I speak to my mother on the phone. “I love you,” she says as we say goodbye. I wait a beat, maybe two. Then we both erupt into laughter. “I thought I’d try it out,” she says, catching her breath.
3. Hard to Get
Six months into the relationship with your future husband you accidentally blurt it out during sex. A long pause fills the room before he says it back. Instead of believing his words you feel anxious that you have become one of those women who traps men into saying things they don’t mean. And you flash back to your childhood room lying on your bed with your piano phone, about to dial a number, when your mother barges in and tells you not to chase boys. “Let them come to you,” she says. “Don’t be so easy. Guys like it better when you play hard to get.”
You don’t talk about it for a couple of days but when you can’t stand it anymore, you ask him if he really loves you and he grins, teases you about the way it slipped out, and all you can feel is relief.
4. Foghorn
You play a game with your son where you hold him on your lap and press your mouth to his ear and say I love you and hold the ou sound like a song or a foghorn and he laughs and squirms and pushes your face away, but really he wants you to say it again and again, so you do.
Claire Sicherman is the author of “Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation” (Caitlin Press, 2017). Her work is featured in the anthology Don’t Ask: What Families Hide (Demeter Press, 2023), Grain Magazine, Isele Magazine, Hippocampus, The Rumpus, the anthology Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food (Anvil Press, 2017), and elsewhere. Claire is a teacher, speaker, and mentor, supporting writers in bringing the stories they hold in their bodies out onto the page. Find her at https://www.clairesicherman.com/
Lost Balloon 