fish dreams

Apartment half full of half-full boxes. My bones feel out of place. Writing won't help me sleep tonight. The boxes have other people's interests on them. Petco. A George Foreman three-in-one combo (grill, ten-cup coffee maker, shower radio. All translucent aqua blue.) A picture of an office chair. (Not so interesting.) Moving won't help this headache. In fact, it makes it worse. A pretty turn of phrase, a magic charm to help me sleep. I packed those already.

Begin again. The way my foot looks when it's half in and half out of the lake, half deadpale and half lifelike. Starry sky half-covered with cloudbank. Glass of wine half full, full, full. Not interesting enough.

Begin again. Annie's half-heart locket. Halfhearted applause. (Maybe I have a rib out of place. I twist my trunk. No good.)

Begin. Half-moon reflected, the long white moon-path I'd swim along were I not so afraid of what's below it. Half-dead underwater skin, half-goosebumped, half-puckered. The other day I wrote a lie I hate to re-read (wait, I'll go get it):

Lie #2: I love eating live fish from fishtanks. I love the
way they flip around in my mouth, and the way they go
limp when I bite down. I keep the limp body in my
mouth for a second before I swallow. It makes me feel
powerful.

Sometimes, half-awake in grey morning light, I imagine there are dead goldfish in my bed, near my feet. It's all I can do not to flail away from them. This has happened more than once.

Larger dead fish don't bother me so much.

Again. No closer to sleeping. No closer to anything, except I just finished my water. I drink bottled water. You're not supposed to do that anymore.

Begin again. Should I be numbering this? Would that make it easier to read? Would that make anything easier?

I remember a dead fish on a lakerock. I didn't know what it was at first, and I asked my grandmother to get it for me. She was visiting. I don't remember what happened then. She didn't pick it up or anything. No screaming. Somehow we discovered it was a fish. It was shiny silver. It was on its side. Strange, the things you never forget.

Also the fish in our fishtank, having babies one morning before church, right after Dad got the new car. All the babies swimming around, and then we realized that the mother was eating them. Mom put a glass pitcher over the mother, to keep her from eating her children. But they died anyway. I don't have that picture in my mind, thank God. Just of them swimming around, big-eyed, and the mother gulping them up, which is bad enough.

Now I'll probably have those fish-dreams again.

If I ever fall asleep.

These days, I don't close my eyes in the shower for long. But I used to sometimes imagine fish floating around my ankles in the backed-up water. I haven't thought about that in a long time.

I hate fishtanks, but love aquariums. At the Boston Aquarium I saw a school of silver fish, moving fast, all in the same direction, except for one that was dead. The body was sort of moving in the same direction, but not really keeping up. Its eye was wide and staring, but then all the live ones' eyes were too. (I wrote it's and changed it. Maybe I am getting tired.) I didn't mind that dead fish, but I still remember it.

I can hear the trashtruck picking up the dumpster in the street below our apartment. It picks it up and shakes it into itself, and there's the sound of glass breaking. I bet it smells like fish. Dead fish. That's what they usually smell like.

I had a scratch-n-sniff sticker that ostensibly smelled like dead fish. On it was a picture of a trashcan with a limp fish on top, with an x for an eye. The dead Boston Aquarium fish did not have an x for an eye.

In college my next-door neighbor had one leg. (This detail is not an integral part of the recollection.) He was very good at skiing. Skiing and banging on girls' doors in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in. He never banged on my door, though. (That's not integral to the story either.) He was going away on a skiing trip and he had a fishtank (oh ho! she gets to the point) and he asked if he could leave the fishtank in my room while he went away on his trip. He promised that he would take me skiing later in the winter if I fishsat for him. Reluctantly, I said okay (this long recollection is breaking whatever form I had established for this piece. Nevertheless.) I remember him standing next to my dorm room window, after having put his fishtank on the windowsill. He moved slightly awkwardly, but was really barely hampered by only having the one leg. He was pouring water into the tank and I was looking on with dread, and I finally said, "I can't do it. I hate fish." It was awkward, but I knew I couldn't handle it, a weekend with fish in my room.

Begin again. Still about fish -- I also don't mind when the lake fish bite my toes. It's startling, but okay. I kick at them, and they go away. They have hard mouth ridges, not differentiated teeth. At least, that's what it feels like. I assume that to be true.

I assume a lot of things to be true that may not actually be true. Perhaps that's one of my faults. Or strengths.

I have a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. We have eaten almost everything in the apartment, in preparation for moving. But the bag of shrimp is still there. It's been there for a long time, because the last time I thawed some of those shrimp bodies and ate them I realized how similar to fish bodies they were. "Come on," L said, "don't do that to yourself. You love shrimps." I do. But the fact remains, they are little dead fish bodies. Not quite as slippery as goldfish, at least. I think it would actually be better if they were the peel-and-eat kind, with legs on. Peeling them would distract me, I think. Now, that is odd. Why do I make these distinctions?

This makes me sound like I am obsessed with fish. But really I only think about them once in a while. They're on my mind because I just read a passage in a book about a girl's fish dying when someone unplugged their tank overnight. The girl and her father flushed the fish down the toilet. That is not what we did in our family. Our plumbing was too unreliable, so we buried our fish in margarine containers.

Begin again. I am beginning to wonder if this will ever come to a natural end. I am beginning to think I will have to end it abruptly. But perhaps some better images to end with? Something to keep me from thinking about fish when I try to sleep again?

What is the opposite of dead fish? Polar bears? NO! Bears eat fish. Iowa? Yes, that. Somewhere as far away from water as possible. Wide plains-n-prairies. Buffalo with their shaggy dusty coats and formidable horns.

Packing boxes half-full of not-fish. (Ah, symmetry.) Eyes heavy-lidded, mind clear of fish, mind full of tumbleweeds that bounce along a dusty, deserted street, leaving no trails.

awake

Night, on a motorboat big enough to stand on, cruising over a black lake with stars above. Seventeen, and I thought now my life will be like this.

caught

Tonight the ocean on TV, dark blue water and wide-clouded blue sky and a boat going up and down over the choppy waves.

I know that boat smells like rotten fish, and I know you could chop off a finger or two on the gear it carries. Live lobsters pinch; and they stay dangerous even when they're dead, when they're boiled red, black eyes sightless but shells still hard. Even after you pull off the thick wet rubber bands from the lifeless claws you cut your fingers, no matter how careful you are when you crack and bend the shells to get to the meat that you'll dip into butter bubbled white on top, the little metal cup of butter that makes a dark stain on the wood of the picnic table. You go too fast and cut yourself and those little lobsterspine cuts will sting for days.

I doubt I'd last a day on a lobster boat, but I long for it anyway, long to lie in bed at night feeling like I'm still rising and falling with the boat over the water, limbs tired after a day of physical work, eyes dry from the wind, skin sunburned tight.

Or at least I long for that picnic table, the sweet reward of a slow meal, the table set on a rocky beach with boats resting at anchor, and mountains blue beyond the bay, the fishermen at rest, too, gone home to their dinners and beds.

I can't describe how much I miss it, the shock of the cold Atlantic numbing my feet at the beach, the water coming in and going out around my cold white skin, how it looks like I'm what's moving, not the sand and the water. Watching the fishing boats move from trap to trap with their clouds of gulls and their blaring radios, circling, circling.

I miss the sea-and-skyline, the neverending noise of wind and water, the bell buoy calling, lonely, bobbing in an empty patch of dark blue sea.

age ten

My new best friend's new house smelled like new carpets. She had a blacktopped driveway and her garage smelled like golden retrievers and her basement smelled like laundry detergent and her refrigerator made ice cubes. Now and then we would stop to fill heavy glasses with ice and water. But we didn't have time to stop for long. We were playing our new game, stumbling around the house with our eyes closed and arms outstretched, trying to find our way.

never

And late one night, after the others had left, they were in a building dark inside but outside bright with falling snow. They could hear the snow piling. And they were strange but familiar to each other, and when they had decided to go and avoid catastrophe, he pulled her back for one more moment in that strangely-lit room.

Eakins Oval

Today they staged a disaster
over by the art museum.
We thought about watching
but didn't.

skin

She had never noticed the freckle above her lover's navel. Not until that afternoon, as he lay on the bed with his shirt pulled up, humidity-sweat dried by the fan's weak breeze. How had she never noticed? Maybe she had and forgot, and she wondered what else she had forgotten, what peculiarities of other lovers' bodies.

She wondered if mothers forgot or if they memorized every inch of their babies' clean, unbroken planes of skin and remembered them always. How would it be to be a mother and see a beloved child's skin pierced, reddened, by jewelry? Or inked by tattoos or broken by misfortune? How would it be to rush a child's compound fracture to the hospital, seeing the bright white bone no one was ever meant to see, laid out like a myth, an excavation, to be studied and reburied changed, documented, no longer a secret.

What would it be like to give a child up, to let it grow up and go away to a lover who would know the adult body better than a mother ever could?

And why didn't she treasure his body, the skin that she alone viewed, she and he together and separately and daily? How could she not notice, but then how could she? It was impossible to live on the plane of the first flush of love, when lovers sat at each other's tables and devoured the details of each other. After that first feast, they took the crumbs of details as they came: summer hair brightened by sunlight, knees that ached in movie theaters, skin pulled tight over shoulder bones. And these things changed and changed and changed.

She had overlooked the freckle before, but at least she knew now.

the archivist

As a child, she collected Gouda cheese wax, molding it into a ball that reached softball proportions. She collected Strawberry Shortcake dolls and My Little Ponies (checking them off on back-of-the-box lists and sending off for free extras with berry points or Pony points). She collected bottlecaps and business cards from every restaurant her family went to, every hotel they stayed at. She went home from the beach with buckets full of shells and rocks. Once she made a person-shaped figure out of Prince Edward Island vacation mud and brought it home, dried and heavy, and set it on her bookshelf.

She saved all of her high school binders, full of worksheets and quizzes and papers and notes. She saved her journals in a fireproof box. She saved her high school swim cap, even though it disintegrated into powder over the years. She saved all of her ragged racing suits. When her other favorite clothes started to wear out, she stopped wearing them, in order to preserve them for special occasions.

She saved the lighter a friend gave her in college, even though she didn't smoke. She saved the McDonald's toys she got when they went out for late-night snacks. She saved programs for plays. She saved movie tickets and put them into a binder with plastic pages and little pockets. She saved concert tickets, sports tickets, raffle tickets. She saved beer mats, writing the date on them and what she ate or drank at the restaurants she stole them from.

She tried to get extras of things, one to use and one to save, one to display and one to keep in the box. When her favorite shampoo or conditioner was discontinued, she saved a little bit of the last bottle in a jar, so she would always be able to open it up and remember the scent, how her hair had smelled at a certain time of her life.

She became a teacher. She took pictures of each of her classes on the first and last days and on special occasions. She kept her pictures in the envelopes with the negatives, wrote the dates on the outsides and ordered them in a plastic waterproof box. When she got her digital camera she kept all of her pictures in computer folders and sub-folders, carefully labeled with dates and details. She took many pictures, trying to depict things from all angles, never knowing what she would find most important later on. She made a new music mix every month, and chose a picture to go with each and typed up the song list and dated them and organized them oldest to newest.

When she cooked special meals, she took pictures, and put the pictures in a book with the recipes copied out underneath. She saved wine corks, and wrote notes on them about the meals the wines accompanied. She kept the pads of paper she doodled on when she talked on the phone. She dated the doodles. She saved calendars (stickered with different stickers for days she exercised, days she practiced the guitar, days she wrote in her journal). She saved datebooks, bank statements, emails, she archived her emails into folders and downloaded them in zip files and sometimes she printed them and put them into binders.

She often dreamed about packing. In the dreams, she was always in a hurry, and she always had to decide what she'd need to bring with her. Sometimes she had to get out of a burning house, and she had to choose what to save.

She never lost things, not even pens. She could always account for all of her belongings at all times. When she traveled she counted the number of bags she brought with her and she stopped to re-count every time she sat down or stood up or relocated. She put her boarding passes in special pockets. She opened her bag every once in a while and touched them, to be absolutely sure they were still there. She saved the airplane itineraries she printed for trips. When she traveled, she collected spoons, shot glasses, postcards, little plastic license plates with her name on them. She collected Christmas ornaments, then Halloween decorations, then Easter. She collected corked glass bottles full of sand.

After hikes she pressed pine needles and sweet ferns and autumn leaves into her hiking journals that mapped her routes.

She kept all these things, neatly organized and labeled. Someday she might want to look back and see how she had lived.

coffee run

They got L's Coolatta wrong again. Thick with cream that coats the back of the tongue, not nearly enough ice. I tried to suck the syrup out -- still not right. It's in the freezer now, straw bent down. I'll drink it tomorrow.

berry picker

In August they worked in the blueberry fields. Most berry fields were raked by migrant workers and high school kids, making their way down long lanes of berry bushes, the lanes marked by white strings. But not at this farm. Here they picked the berries by hand, a whole crowd of children and their benevolent boss.

She wanted to be just like her boss, tan and strong and funny, with beautiful light blue eyes. She sat as close to her boss as she could while they picked berries and listened to the radio, sometimes talking but often not. Her brother was nearby, with his best friends. And her best friend was there, too. Sometimes she and her best friend talked about the school clothes they would buy with their berry money. Her best friend had lists and bookmarked catalogs of all the outfits she wanted.

Some days the berries were bad, and she picked only six pints or so, six dollars' worth. On her best day she got 25. Some days it rained too hard to pick berries, and some days it just misted and they went out and got wet.

The sky was usually wide, August blue. The air smelled of berries, and when she was hungry she could eat berries and when she was thirsty there was a communal Coleman thermos of clear, cold well water. Berries squished into her shoes, stained her clothes. At night she dreamed of berry bushes. She learned to roll the berries into her hand, get a handful and then transfer them into the green cardboard pint box and then put the pint box in a row of others like it in the wooden flat.

From berry picking and from her boss she learned what it was to build exactly the life you wanted, bit by bit.