Junior, the Goldfish

 

GOLDFISH

 

 FROM AGE EIGHT Anne-Marie sought refuge from her parents’ loft in the tranquility of Sacre Coeur. The odor of incense and candles was better than the smell of oil paints. The choir was sweet unlike the raucous debates at home.

“She’s the white sheep of the family,” Anne-Marie’s mother claimed.

“Must be your side.” Her father referred to his wife’s brother, a priest.

Anne-Marie watched from her mattress as her mother gave a face shrug, pursing his lips, lifting her eyebrows pushing her chin forward.

The child touched the triptych of the Blessed Mother her uncle had sent Anne-Marie for her birthday.

“We’ll hide it from your father in this box,” her mother said when it had arrived. She arranged the screen providing limited privacy for the girl in the studio that doubled as a home and studio.

 

Despite her begging, Anne-Marie’s parents refused to send her to convent school. They did pay for a secretarial course after she’d passed her bac. By then they had given up trying to interest her in painting.

*

For her first job at France Telecom, Anne-Marie bought a blue suit and several scarves. The clothes didn’t make her half as happy as the chance to fill pristine paper with neat words and numbers. She lined up pencils like a marching band and arranged paper clips on the square magnetic holder she’d bought on sale at Mono Prix. Sliding the top drawer open, she stuffed the divisions with letterhead, second sheets, forms and envelopes.

Intrigued by her computer, she asked Jean-Claude from data processing to borrow manuals. She studied them page by page. After that, anyone asking for help was told to ask Anne-Marie. Although she knew which buttons to press for the results she wanted why they worked. After praying for courage, she asked Jean-Claude.

“Take a programming course,” he said. Three days later he brought her a sheet announcing an evening course.

She enrolled. When there was an opening in data processing, she applied and was selected. No problem was too complicated for her.

She and Jean-Claude ate together almost all the time. “I wanted to be a nun,” she said.

“Why don’t you now?” he asked.

“My parents.”

She noticed he had lost weight. One night when they worked late, he started crying.

“What’s wrong?”

When he told her, she made a decision.

After Anne-Marie’s parents met him, her mother said, “He’s translucent.”

“He looks sick,” her father said.

Anne-Marie said nothing.

“We never thought you’d marry,” her father said.

Still, Anne-Marie said nothing, but moved to his apartment.

 *

They didn’t share a marriage bed. Jean-Claude slept in a hospital bed decorated with intravenous bottles and an oxygen tank. The paraphernalia rested in the center of the living room.

France Telecom allowed Anne-Marie to work at home. She changed sheets, washed sores and sent her last program through her modem. The only reasons she left the apartment were errands and to go to church.

He rallied so often the pattern of crisis and recovery no longer aroused hope. During the good times they drank tea from bowls, listened to music or talked. Although she wasn’t interested in politics, she repeated comments she’d heard from her childhood. Jean-Claude would nod in agreement.

His former lover died of the same disease. Anne-Marie held her husband while he cried. She wondered how much more time he had. It took him six more months.

She kept his apartment. Each night she returned from work, she walked around the hospital bed that was no longer there. The shelf that had held his medicines now held laundry detergent, bleach Monsieur Propre, furniture wax and lipstick.

 *

Her parents invited her to dinner on the first month anniversary of Jean-Claude’s death. When she arrived, they were so caught up in their painting that they’d forgotten to cook. Her mother threw a stew together. They dipped spoons into the pot. Her father had used the last soup bowls for palettes.

“Want to sleep over?” her mother asked.

Anne-Marie glanced at her old mattress piled with her father’s canvases and paint supplies. The screen had disappeared long ago.

“You’re alone too much,” her father said.

“I’m getting a pet.” Until that moment the idea had never entered her head. She written to an abbey in Limoux but wanted to give herself time to adjust to Jean Claude’s passing before making any life decisions. “Maybe a bird that sings.”

 *

Walking through the pet store to buy a bird, a flash of gold caught her eye. A fish, one of fifty or so, pressed his nose to the glass. “Fish don’t need much care,” the salesgirl said. She started to scoop another out, but Anne-Marie insisted on the one that had caught her attention.

She put his/her bowl on the divider separating the living and dining areas. Two floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on a small park.

“What shall I name you?” A photo of Jean-Claude when he was healthy stood on her desk next to a geode. As Anne-Marie looked through the bowl, the reflection of the light and movement of the water made it look as if her late husband was walking out of an amethyst cave. “Jean-Claude, Junior. She reduced the name to Junior and figured by the time the fish died, she would be ready to enter a convent.

 

Three years passed. Junior needed three replacement bowls, each one larger than before. The last dominated the divider.

Her routine pleased her. She went to mass mornings before work. Her neighbors, an elderly couple, invited her to dinner on Wednesdays. She watered their plants when they visited their daughter in London. They offered to feed Junior if she wanted to take a holiday.

Most nights she arrived home by eight. Junior watched her set the table. She never ate from a pan but used china and cloth napkins. When she finished, she would get Junior’s fish flakes.

One night as she dawdled over her herb tea, she heard a tapping. Junior batted his head against his/her bowl. It must be my imagination, she thought but fed him anyway. After she poured the flakes into his bowl, he swam in two circles before eating.

The next night Anne-Marie delayed feeding to Junior to see what would happen. He tapped. She responded. “You’re welcome,” she said as the fish swam in two circles before eating.

She started chatting with him.

“I’ll be home before eight. Be good.”

“Today is Saturday, I’ll be home all day.”

“I’ll iron in here to keep you company.”

“There’s a Depardieu movie on France2 tonight or we can watch Sacre Soirée.”

When Anne-Marie added a plant to his tank, he started playing peek-a-boo with her. She always felt he won, but she wasn’t sure of the rules. Maybe he cheated.

 *

“You need to get out more,” her mother said on one weekly visit. At work, Anne-Marie’s female colleagues complained their mothers would visit and straighten things. Anne-Marie’s mother always left a mess.

“It’s not healthy only working and living with a fish. There’s a new artist your father met and…” her mother said.

“Mother.” Anne-Marie’s tone said the last thing she needed was another artist in her life.

“My mother actually tried to play matchmaker,” she complained to her colleague Elisabeth.

“Mothers are like that,” Elisabeth said.

Anne-Marie invited Elisabeth to dinner. On the Metro, she told her about Junior.

After dinner, Anne-Marie waited for Junior to tap. Nothing happened. After Elisabeth left she flicked her wrist dropping his food in the water. Junior tapped and circled.

“Brat.” Anne Marie turned out the light and went to bed.

 *

Anne-Marie’s parents came to dinner the third Thursday of each month. In July, the fourth year after Jean-Claude died, Anne-Marie served rabbit in wine sauce and potatoes seasoned with sage. Her parents had given up complaining how the flowers, tablecloth and china all matched.

Before they ate, Anne-Marie moved the yellow roses, which she’d bought in Motte-Piquet Metro station, from the center of the table to the mantle. The reflection in the mirror doubled the the bouquet.

“C’est bon.” Her father kissed his fingertips then wiped the last bit of sauce from his plated with bread. “You’re an angel of a cook.”

Anne-Marie blushed.

Her parents were dressed in their usual paint-splattered jeans and sweatshirts. Her mother’s hair, salt and pepper wild curls, hid most of her back.

Her father was now egg-shell bald.

As he raged against the Paris mayor, her mother arranged cheeses: brebis, Roquefort, chevre and a gouda cumin with her father’s uncorked burgundy. Each person broke of a portion of breads, which less than four hours before had been in a baker’s oven. A sampling of cheese, a bit of bread, a sip of wine fueled a communion cleansing.

“I’ll never understand you,” her father said. Junior paced up and down the side of his latest enlarged tank.

“You don’t have to Papa. Think of me as a black and white minimalist. For the first time, she felt at ease with her parents.

Her mother smiled at her daughter. “That’s almost poetic.”

Junior tapped twice.

After her parents left, Anne-Marie found a Bach Sonata on YouTube.

Before going to bed, she said her rosary. In the middle of the night, she woke and decided to go on retreat at St. Hilaire Abbey in Limoux. Junior would just have to do his antics for the couple upstairs.

 *

The cot with crucifix on the opposite wall, the rough dress and scarf holding back her hair, the sisters walking without speaking, the silence broken only by birds and footsteps were all as Anne-Marie had imagined. The quiet let mind careen between childhood memories and programming problems rather than the prayers she was supposed to be concentrating on.

After lunch on the seventh day of her two-week stay, she slipped into the gray-stone chapel. It was narrow and buttressed in a medieval style. Despite the heat outside, the stones felt cold on her knees.

She began her rosary. Halfway through the third Ave Maria, she looked up. Two plastic round lights hung from the ceiling. So out of place.

The next day, she left the convent, bought a bottle of local white wine for her parents and another to thank Junior’s fish sitters.

Check out www.dlnelsonwriter.com.