| Anna's Fish
Story by Doreen Ihara |
| Doreen Ihara is an art teacher
and writer who lives in Concord, Massachusetts. This is her first
published story. “Good morning little fish,” Anna said, as she pressed the light switch on the lid of the aquarium, and a captive bit of underwater life flickered into view. She conducted her daily census, counting the fish as they chased after sinking flakes of food she sprinkled over the surface. Five Red Twin-bar Platys swooped in diagonal paths from the top of the tank to its gravel bottom, stopping suddenly when their paths were about to cross and reversing direction. Five Zebra Danios, flitted about the upper reaches of the tank, the largest asserting his dominance, nipping at his silver-striped brothers. Five Harlequin Rasboras swam together, their formation echoing the triangular markings at their tails. And two Bandit catfish searched the aquarium floor for the flakes the others missed, the black masks around their eyes turning them into prowlers. She’d been greeting the fish each morning for the past four years. Since soon after she’d finished chemo. Once her life was threatened, plans and dreams had attained a sense of urgency. Stuck in traffic on the way to the clinic, or watching medication drip from a plastic bag overhead to one more bruised vein in her arm, her thoughts had often begun with the same six words— “If I get through this I’ll....” But when the months of radiation and chemo were finally over, what she most wanted to do had surprised her. Watching giraffes run free in Africa, visiting Petra and Agra and Ankor Wat, and swimming in a hot spring pool surrounded by the ice of Antarctica all remained dreams; but she wanted no big rewards for having survived, didn’t want to travel around the world just then. She wanted to be at home with Rob and Bobby. She resigned from the job she thought she’d loved, let her days unfold slowly, rushed outdoors when she heard the Canada Geese fly over the house, and kept one easy promise she’d made to herself during treatment, buying the aquarium. Four years. One year away from that magical five year survival goal post. Holding her breath like she did when she found herself next to a smoker, waiting to be able to breath freely again. Holding it at one, then three, then six month intervals. Finally able to exhale briefly when her oncologist assured her the cancer had not come back, and waiting for the next exam. Holding her breath like she did when Bobby came home, relieved when he returned to school, the awful tension between them over till his next vacation. This Christmas had to be different. “I’m going to clean your tank today,” she told her fish. First she’d make some coffee. Make another pot when Rob and Bobby got up. While the coffee brewed, she set out test kits for ammonia, nitrate, and PH levels on the kitchen counter. Then she sipped from a mug while performing her once-a-week role as lab technician, squeezing droplets of chemicals into test tubes of aquarium water, holding the tubes up to color charts. Ammonia, fine. Nitrates, okay. She’d need to raise the acidity a bit, but things were under control. The day she’d come home with the aquarium and all the other supplies, she’d found Rob and Bobby trying out a new flight simulator program at the computer, absorbed in the runway on the screen. “I need some help,” she’d said, speaking to the back of two matching heads of straight black hair, Bobby’s arm draped casually over his father’s shoulder. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff in the car that needs to come in.” “What’s all this?” Rob had asked, as she put the tank in his arms, filled it with plastic bags of groceries and aquarium supplies. “There’s a store next to the supermarket…and, I’ve always wanted an aquarium.” “Where are the fish, Mom?” Bobby had asked. “I’ll go back for them another day, after I’ve got everything set up.” “Can I come?” “Sure,” she’d said. “Can you handle all that?” He’d grabbed the heaviest bags. The ones with the gravel. “Plastic plants, Mom?” Bobby had teased after she’d cleaned the aquarium, placed it on the old pub table near the bottom of the stairs, and was poking imitation fronds into the gravel she’d rinsed and scooped into the tank. “I know. I wanted real plants, but the saleswoman at the shop discouraged me. Said living plants require much more maintenance. They need light, and light causes algae growth.” Some days later, she and Bobby had gone back for the fish. All along the length of the Fish Nook, there were tanks sitting on shelves one above the other, three tanks high, one or two kinds of fish in each tank. They’d walked back and forth looking at all the choices. Some of the most interesting fish were the most expensive, and she’d wanted to begin cautiously, knowing how vulnerable they were, that it took time to get the right biological balance. They were told to begin with three fish, wait three weeks or more before adding another three. One needed to be a catfish, a bottom feeder. “I like the Bandit Cat,” Bobby had said. “Okay. What else do you like?” “You choose Mom.” “Do you think we should get a pair of the same kind or try two different kinds of fish?” she’d asked. “Let’s get two of the same, so they don’t feel lonely.” “How about these bright orange ones with the turquoise eyes? They’ll be colorful, don’t you think?” “Yeah, I like those. We can get another kind next time.” They’d watched carefully as the saleswoman netted the fish they’d chosen, freed them into plastic containers filled with tank water, then poured water and fish into plastic bags. She’d double-bagged the Bandit, explaining that catfish can pierce the plastic. Bobby held the bags of fish in his lap on the way home, laid them on the surface of the aquarium water, and snipped an opening in each to allow for an exchange of water in the bag and the aquarium, just as the saleswoman had instructed. Three weeks later, when Anna suggested they go back to pick out the next three fish, he’d said it was her aquarium, she should get whatever she liked. Those few weeks between the purchase of the first three fish and the next seemed a turning point, the time Bobby had begun to cool towards her; but she knew that he’d been trying to create some distance between them long before that, even before she became ill. “I’ll tell you something,” he would say, “but you’re not allowed to ask any questions.” And he wouldn’t offer the telling until she’d agreed. She’d been able to live with that, knew things had to change. She’d read about cultures where boys moved out of their mothers’ dwellings at a certain age, lived in a men’s house until they married and had homes of their own. Read that young men of the plains tribes were not permitted to speak to their mothers directly. Communicated through others. “Please tell my mother that my new moccasins are fine,” one might say, or “Tell my mother she has cooked the buffalo too long.” There were rules that helped a mother let go, a boy become a man. But she and Bobby had no such guidelines, had to create their own path. And sometime after the aquarium was set up, that path had become difficult to navigate. She rinsed the test tubes, put them and the color charts away, then mounted a small step ladder she set up at the aquarium. She lowered a vacuum tube into the tank and started to siphon a stream of water into a bucket. She’d been pleased that Bobby sought out his father more as he tried to pull away from her. And he and Rob had become particularly close while she was ill. The illness had postponed an inevitably difficult time, arrested that natural process of distancing, and kept Bobby close all through the ordeal. And then, when her treatment was over, when it seemed she would get well, Bobby had been freed. Freed to resume the pulling away, freed to behave badly. And he’d gradually become equally cold to both Rob and her. In his last year of high school he became a distant presence at home, accepting hugs reluctantly. His bedroom door always closed. She’d hoped time away at college would make a difference, but he was now in his sophomore year, and still seemed to examine her with cold appraisal, was secretive, and took a near-sadistic pleasure in arguing against her opinions or suggestions. She missed his trust, his willingness to share thoughts and feelings, his good company. These seemed like treasures lost. She imagined herself a shy beggar holding out her skirt and asking him to drop into it a description of a friend, how he had spent last Sunday afternoon, something, anything; but he’d become unwilling to part with any story of his life, responding to her questions with short, flat sentences like, “ A friend,” “A few guys,” “Places,” “Okay.” She drove the vacuum tube down into the gravel and stirred to release wastes that had accumulated there. A cloud of excrement and unconsumed fish food floated up from the bottom, and she drew it into the tube. On Columbus Day weekend, with Bobby home, she’d been careless with this operation. Had probably been thinking about him instead of attending to the task. He’d arrived home late, after she’d gone to bed—still tired all the time—and he was still asleep in the morning when she peeked into his bedroom. He’d been clean shaven when he left for school before Labor Day, but the sleeper she saw wore a devilish beard and moustache. Had some graffiti artist crept into their house during the night? Scrawled whiskers onto an otherwise ideally serene face, like that of a model in a mattress ad guaranteeing a good night’s sleep? She’d smiled at the notion, closed the bedroom door quietly, and tiptoed barefoot down the stairs, her blue and white Japanese robe unsashed and dragging behind her. She stopped mid-flight to gaze at the arched windows of the front doors, golden, filled with the fall color of the sugar maple on the front lawn. That was the view she’d hoped for when she’d planted the tree, running in and out of the house, up and down the stairs, moving a stake in the lawn until the position seemed right. Would gold still fill the windows when it grew taller? She checked the level in the bucket. Half-full. When she’d been thinking of Bobby that October morning, the siphoning had been slow; and when she examined the hose, she noticed something dark where it joined the vacuum tube. Separating hose from tube, she’d plucked at the blockage before realizing what it was. A tiny Zebra Danio was caught, eyes open, gills quivering. She’d gasped, quickly pulled the cap off the tube, shaken it over the tank, and freed the fish. The dark stuff she’d plucked at was the Danio’s tail, and there was a stump where the tail had been. The fish retreated to a corner at the bottom of the tank, and she feared her carelessness would cause its death. Each day after that, when she turned on the aquarium light, sprinkled the fish food, greeted and counted her fish, she’d look for the maimed Danio. If it hadn’t survived, it would not have been the first death in the tank—fish were fragile creatures, but it would have been the first death for which she could clearly blame herself. Whenever she found a fish floating upside down and scooped it out with the net, she wondered if it had died of old age, something brought home from the pet store, or some unintentional abuse on her part? She’d asked Mr. Kramer, the owner of the Fish Nook, but he’d just shrugged, said there were too many possibilities, asked her if she was testing her water properly, changing it every week. She’d started counting her fish after the time the water had turned bright magenta, the test for nitrates indicating things had gone wild. She’d replaced bucket after bucket of water, finally emptied the entire aquarium and washed all twenty-five pounds of gravel, before finding a decomposed fish, the source of the problem. Death could be a lot of work. With the bucket nearly filled, Anna took the vacuum tube to the kitchen sink to rinse, then hang to dry on the front porch. The empty branches of the sugar maple were wrapped in ice. A white crust glittered on the lawn. And the red, green, and blue of the Christmas lights Rob had strung along the front porch roof were reflected on the drive. She shivered. Too cold. The water drops clinging to the inside of the tube would freeze before they dried. She brought it back inside. Hung it instead in the small shower stall of the first floor lavatory. By Thanksgiving, the little Danio had proved himself to be a true survivor, chasing after the flakes of fish food with the others, working harder than the rest. They just flicked their tails, while he had to swing his whole body from side to side. The fish had started to regrow his tail, the sugar maple had shed its leaves, and Bobby, home again, had replaced the devilish beard and moustache with a series of vertical stripes on his cheeks and chin. He looked like those Assyrian warrior statues in the Museum of Fine Arts. “What do you think of your son’s new beard?” she’d asked Rob, up before her for a change and finishing his breakfast at the kitchen counter. Bobby’d gone out with friends soon after his return. She thought she’d heard him come in at about three, didn’t expect him up for breakfast. “You know,” Rob said, ignoring her question, “last year, when he first went away to school? You were crying all the time, missing him so much. And I was okay. I’ve been thinking all this time that this is where Bobby belongs, that being away at school was a temporary thing. But now I realize it’s just the opposite—him being at home is what’s temporary.” Rob’s shoulders had seemed to give way under the burden of his new perception. She’d put her hands on them, run her fingers over the edge of his shoulder blades, stroked his upper arms. He’d turned to her and they’d embraced, each pulling hard to the other. Poor Rob. His vision of family life had been threatened again. She rinsed the charcoal filter in the bucket, then replaced it. She would wait a few days before putting in a new filter. Let the old one take in whatever was left of the stuff she’d stirred up. She carried the bucket around the house, using the water to feed her house plants. She hadn’t been able to say anything to Bobby about the Danio until she was sure the fish would live. Thanksgiving weekend she’d tried to make her fish story an amusing tale. After all, like everything in her life, it was a small thing—not Moby Dick or The Old Man and the Sea. But it had taken on the tone of a guilty confession, weighted by the strain in their relationship. For years, each thing Bobby said or did had felt like a challenge from an opponent on the other side of a chess board. She’d gotten used to assessing how each move she made might be received, anticipating the moves that might follow. She’d learned it was easier to wait for Bobby to speak first, wait for him to approach her. He’d responded to her fish story with a cultivated disinterest. “You ought to be more careful,” he’d said, looking not at her, but out the window, at the few remaining leaves falling from the Norway Maples. The house plants fed, she carried the empty bucket to the kitchen sink, turned on the faucet and dropped in the thermometer from the aquarium. The replacement water needed to be the same temperature as the water in the tank. She stirred it with the thermometer in her hand, mixing cooler at the bottom with warmer at the top, thinking about Bobby, about the conversation she’d been rehearsing for the past week. Rob had offered to tell him, but she wanted to do it herself. When the water temperature was right, she carried the bucket back to the hall, remounted the stepladder. She heard movement upstairs. A toilet flushed. Rob or Bobby? She emptied the bucket into the tank, folded the ladder, started the coffee maker again. When she thought of other possible deaths, sudden deaths, she was grateful for her cancer. For the time cancer gave her, to prepare, to prioritize. She’d had years and had begun to breathe normally, begun to think of herself as a survivor, like her Danio, who wore a tiny tail for Christmas. Bobby wore something new for Christmas too, a greeting on his face—MERRY on one cheek, X-MAS on the other—days worth of dark stubble forming letters against pale, carefully shaven skin. He must have worked hard on it, but it was a flawed greeting—created in front of the mirror, the letters reversed. When he finally appeared in the kitchen, yawning, hair uncombed, his sleep-swollen face surprised Anna anew, and she had to giggle. “I know,” he said, with a crooked smile, “pretty silly looking, huh? I was planning to shave before I went back to school. Maybe I’ll do it today.” He sat at the counter, sniffed the air. “I’ll have some of that coffee, if you’ve got enough.” “There’s plenty. I made it for you and Dad.” She took out his favorite mug, poured the coffee. “Thanks, Mom, and thanks for the book. We had to read some Billy Collins in class this term. I like his stuff.” “You’re welcome,” she said, crossing to his side of the counter, putting her hand first on the back of his stool, and when he did not pull away, on his shoulder. “I thought you’d like his poems,” she said. She touched her lips against the stubble on his cheek. Not yet. She’d wait. Maybe after he’d shaved. She could not deliver bad news to someone with such a strange, merry message on his face.
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