Up For Review:
Fish Tank - The One That Got Away
My mother asked me to help her lug the old magazines in her basement out to the road for recycling. Forty years of Scientific Americans and Natural Histories and Better Homes and Gardens and National Geographics all neatly stacked, all bound together by antique twine - it was nearly an all day job, and as the hours went by and the trips up the stairs and to the road got longer and the bundles got heavier, I wondered how many of these periodicals my parents had actually read. And whatever happened to that single copy of Playboy? It was from the days before Playboy showed pubic hair. Bare breasts back then were enough for me. More than enough. Coral pink nipples poking bravely through coarse fishnet were not the only secret inches of that long ago Miss May I'd memorized in those hurried, dangerous half-minutes, but they were the ones that still stuck firmest in my mind these many years later. By now that Miss May might be a grandma.
"Whew!" my mother said when I'd hauled the last bundle out to the road and hoisted it to the top of the magazine fortress. "That's a load off my mind. I just hope it doesn't rain." She looked anxiously up at the sky. "The truck's not coming until day after tomorrow."
"Don't worry," I told her. "I saw that old tarp down in the basement, the one I used to use in Boy Scouts. I can cover the magazines with that."
"Would you?" my mother said, obvious relief in her eyes.
The rolled-up tarp lay on a shelf off in the corner next to my Boy Scout canteen. I took the canteen from the shelf and shook it. Empty. One time I'd filled it with Coca-Cola. Didn't take long for me to discover that warm Coke is not refreshing on a five mile hike across parched farmlands. Seemed like yesterday - gurgles of Coke choking from the spout, staining the powdery roadside dirt a dreary brown. I smiled and swallowed and set the canteen back on the dusty shelf. My parents, for better or for worse, had kept everything. There in the furthest corner was my glass fish tank.
It wasn't really a fish tank. It was a fish bowl, and it was smaller than I'd remembered. A gallon? Maybe less? I had no idea. For boys back in those junior high school days, aquariums were all the rage. Twenty gallons was standard. Some kids had thirty, forty, even one hundred gallon tanks, with motorized aeration pumps, thermostats, lamps, heaters, beds of special bottom sand, luxuriously willowy underwater plants, shipwrecks, treasure chests, caves and coves and miniature castles for the fish. Ah, the fish! Gloriously colorful fish. Schools of them weaving smoothly through perfectly tuned tropical waters - Ahlies and Angels, Meeki and Moorii, Tigers and Tetras and Zebras. One kid, fat Paul Shreck, even had a pair of illegal piranha. Big as parking meters, they prowled a coffin-sized tank in Paul's basement. To feed them, Paul kept a second tank of small goldfish, and fall afternoons following school, bunches of us would stop by Paul's house to watch greedily as he snagged netfulls for the predators' supper. "A pig falls into the Amazon - " Paul would tell us each afternoon, a fresh goldfish dangling above the piranhas' tank, "two second later bare bones bob to the surface." And with these words, Paul would release the fish to his fate. The feast never lasted long, but in my life up to then little had been as thrilling. Hard to choose between Miss May's breasts and bottom, and piranhas eating goldfish, except that the piranhas were real. Part of me longed for a miracle, part of me wanted the goldfish to get away. But of course none of them ever did.
Occasionally, girls would come to these afternoon feedings. That made me a little nervous. It didn't seem quite proper. It didn't seem quite right that they stared into the tank as fascinated as us. One day Barbara Cox, the smartest girl in our class, and her pal Jenny Morrow were there. I'd had the hugest secret crush on Jenny ever since the end of second grade, and on this day I found myself standing at the rear, just behind Barb and Jenny, and rather than watching Paul feed the fish, I watched the way Jenny's neck shifted into shoulder, the way her shoulder smoothly became her back, the way her back disappeared beneath the fuzzy terrycloth of her shirt.
"Aren't you afraid they'll mate?" Barbara asked. She waited. Barb looked at Jenny, and Jenny looked back at Barb, and their eyes shared something gleeful, something naughty, something impossibly secret. I shivered. That a girl could use the word "mate" was almost inconceivable to me. The fish tank motor hummed, fat bubbles glubbed upwards, the nickel-plated killer fish drifted silently and serenely, oodles of goldfish in their fist-tight tummies, and no one said a word. In fact, a few days before this, though on a day when no girls were present, the subject of the piranhas' sex life did come up. The fish had seemed momentarily to kiss, and Timmy Fray asked Paul, "Do you ever see them do it?" Paul assured us that the piranhas were both boys. "Maybe they're homos," Robbie Peters suggested. "Maybe you're a homo," someone told Robbie. Now Barbara Cox's question about mating hung hot in the nervous air.
"Piranha's eat their babies," I said. I don't know why I'd opened my mouth. Maybe because I was nervous. Maybe because I wanted to impress Jenny. Maybe because I was afraid one of the guys would say something about the fish being homos.
Everyone looked at me.
"It's true," I claimed. "I read it in one of my dad's magazines."
"Magazines don't know everything," someone said.
"Yeah, if you're so smart, why don't you stick your finger in the tank?"
"Yeah, stick your finger in the tank. I'll give you a quarter if you do."
I started to blush.
"What's sticking his finger in the tank got to do with fish eating their babies?" Jenny said.
Oh, I was so much in love.
I stopped going to Paul's house.
Nevertheless, that night I began begging my parents to let me get an aquarium. "I'll buy it with my own money," I said. "I'll do all the feeding and cleaning and everything. Please."
"I don't know," my mother said. "I don't know where we'd put an aquarium. And what if it broke? Imagine the mess."
"They're very sturdy," I said. "I can make space in my room. All the guys have one."
"You're not all the guys," my dad said. That ended the discussion for that night.
But two days later my dad surprised me. A fish bowl. A goldfish inside. Not a very big bowl, not a very big goldfish. Not even a very bright one. Pale, about the size of my little finger, it wobbled and willowed slowly through the plain water. This fish was one a first-grader might own. A kindergartner. It was the kind of fish Paul would feed to his piranhas. I regarded it glumly.
"What are you going to name it?" my mom asked.
"None of the guys name their fish," I said.
"You're not none of the guys," Dad said. "The fish's name is Duke."
At the dinner table each evening after that, Dad would ask, "How's Duke?" "Fine," I'd always answer. And then after supper but before starting my homework, I'd tweezle half a pinch of dried fish food into the bowl resting under the window at the back my desk. Invariably Duke arrowed towards the floating flecks, nipping at some before they sank. I scowled and pretended to look away, and the fish nibbled his food and pretended I didn't exist.
A week passed. The leaves were starting to color, a few had even fallen to the sidewalk, and I was kicking them into the air when Jenny Morrow caught up to me. "Hi," she said. "You walking home?"
"I guess," I answered. "You?"
"Right," she said.
Side by side we strolled a few steps. I tried to think what to say. "Where's Barb?"
"Piano lessons on Tuesdays."
"Oh."
"We were at Paul's yesterday."
"To see the piranhas?"
"Yeah. We wondered why you weren't there."
"Yeah, well," I said.
"I guess it gets old after a while."
"Yeah," I said.
We walked quietly for almost a block.
"Actually I have a fish," I said. I hadn't intended to tell anybody. Not that it was a secret, but, well, it was a secret. It just came out.
"Really?" Jenny said.
"Well, not much of a fish. Just a goldfish. It's name is Duke."
Jenny laughed. "Funny name for a fish. I bet he's really pretty."
"Not so pretty. Just ordinary. Maybe even less than ordinary. My dad named him."
"Cool," Jenny said. "Is he big? Can I see him?"
"I don't know," I said. "He's not too big."
"Well, I'd still like to see him."
"Okay," I said. "If you really want to."
Jenny followed me into my house. I'd never had a girl in my house before. I was thinking maybe Jenny would like Duke. Maybe she'd think he was cute. Who knew what girls would think? I stopped at the foot of the stairs. "You know what I said about fish eating their babies ..." I started to say.
"I know," Jenny said. "My dad told me that sometimes cats eat their kittens. Not just lions and tigers, but regular house cats. I think that's sad. Life can be so strange."
I nodded.
We went up the stairs.
The fish bowl was on the corner of my desk under the window, right where it should be, but halfway across the room I could tell something was wrong. I turned to Jenny.
"What is it?" she said.
"Nothing," I said. "I mean ..."
"Is it your fish?"
"Yeah," I said. I stood aside so Jenny could see. The bowl was empty. No Duke. Not even any water.
I looked at Jenny.
She looked at me.
I shrugged helplessly. "I guess he got away."
"Neat," she said, and she smiled.
It was a strange sort of smile. I didn't know what it might mean. I felt myself moving towards her. Drifting, although in reality I wasn't moving at all, in reality she was moving towards me. For a moment we couldn't be closer.
"Oh, there you are." It was my mother. "Who's your little friend?"
"I ... we ... we were ..." I stammered. "We were just, um, looking for Duke."
"Poor Duke is dead," my mother said. "Jumped right out of his tank, poor thing. Maybe the water got too hot for him. Maybe you overfed him. You've got to take better care of your things. I flushed him down the toilet."
"Oh," I said.
"I'm sorry you lost your fish," Jenny said. She looked at me. A strange sad look. And she smiled, a strange sad smile, and I felt I was going to burst into tears. I didn't want her to see. But her eyes were looking right into mine. That strange smile. It felt so soft. It felt like it was inside me. I could feel my eyes watering. I could feel ... I could feel everything. A tear drop slid out, slid slowly down. Jenny watched. Fascinated, Jenny watched me cry. Maybe it was only a few seconds, but it seemed like forever.
"I'd better go," Jenny said. "Jimmy Wakeman said he'd take me for a ride on his new go-kart. See you." And with that she turned and skipped down the stairs and was gone.
Mom said, "If you ask your dad real nicely, I'm sure he'll get you another fish. A Duke the Second."
I wiped my eyes. "I don't want any more fish," I said. "I don't want any more fish ever again."
After all those magazines, the tarp didn't seem too heavy. I carried it out and covered the magazines. I anchored the tarp with a couple of old bricks, then I went inside and took a shower, and Mom and I had dinner, German pot roast, one of her specialties. After dinner we sat in the living room and we talked for a while, and then it was time for me to go.
"Can I take this with me?" I asked Mom.
"Your old fish tank," Mom exclaimed. "Why sure. Here, let me wash it out for you. All that dust. I never did understand why you never got any more fish after that first one died. Why you just let it sit empty on your little desk year after year."
It was dark when I left, and while I was driving it started to rain. It was one of those endless night time rains, and it was still raining when I parked the car and went to the house. Against my body I cradled the fish tank.
"Duke!" Jenny said. "Oh, Duke, it's so good to see you again."
I put the fish tank on the table right next to the bed so we could see it while we made love.