by Susan Juby
“Oh wow. Did I just hit something?”
Mom unclenched her jaws and said: “Yes. Yes, you did hit something.”
Geraldine spoke up: “Oh, my neck! It’s wrenched.”
Mom snarled at her: “It is not.”
Then she turned to Pit.
“Do you always drive like that? For God’s sake, that was the most terrifying experience of my life! Our insurance is going to go through the roof. My children are in the car. Jesus H. Christ.”
I couldn’t help but notice our placement in my mother’s list of concerns, but decided not to remark on it just at that moment.
Pit responded: “Oh wow. I’m really sorry.”
A small bristly-mustached man stormed over to the car. His face was red and his mouth frothed as he screamed: “What in the hell tarnation was that? You hit ma trailer! You hit ma freakin’ trailer!”
He was wearing combat fatigues and had a bowie knife in a belt at his waist.
Pit gingerly rolled down the window.
“Was that your trailer?” she asked.
“What the freakin’ hell do you think?” he shrieked. “A course it’s ma freakin’ trailer. And a good thing for you, lady, I got my fish outa there afore you hit it. Two minutes earlier and you’da taken out a thousand dollars’ worth of killies!” As an afterthought he added, “And my wife, too. If she’da been in there, she coulda been injured.” Only the way he said it sounded like “inured.”
Pit kept apologizing, and Mom and Geraldine and I staggered out of the car, our fear-sick legs buckling as we tried to use them.
MacGregor leaned over to the front seat.
“You brought killies to the show?” he asked.
The enraged little man peered in at MacGregor, who sat gripping his bucket of hopped-up, traumatized fish between his knees and said, “Yeah. I brung a bunch of killies to the show and auction. Got the dried eggs too. How ‘bout you? Whatcha got there?”
Pit, Mom, Geraldine, and I stood in a little huddle off to the side waiting for our knees to stop shaking as MacGregor and Mustache talked fish. Apparently killies are some type of seasonal, just-add-water type fish, and the little man was the foremost breeder in the country or something. He, in turn, was supplied by another top breeder who lives in a compound in Montana, which is where he was originally from.
Deep in conversation, MacGregor and “Call me Pete. Yeah, I been working on the German Chocolate killie strain for two years now” walked past us into the community center. Pete paused briefly to glower at Pit and tell her he’d be back for her insurance information later.
Pit and Geraldine got their drums out of the car, and Mom and I followed MacGregor and Pete into the gym.
Thank God for MacGregor and his fish. If it had just been stinky Geraldine and Hairy Pit, I think Pete would have used that bowie knife. An American in combat gear at a fish show is not someone to be messed with. Pete’s probably one of those militia guys who’re waiting for the end to come so they can revert to their preferred diet of squirrels. Those killies sure sound like the ultimate survivalist fish.
The gym had a stage set up at one end and plastic chairs in rows facing it. In the back half of the gym about fifteen tables were set up. On each table sat several fish bowls or small tanks. Behind the fish containers sat the proud owners and breeders.
MacGregor stood over by Pete’s table. Pete had a table all to himself with about twenty bowls on top, each containing a little fish or pair of fish. A downtrodden, fish-hating-looking woman who must have been Pete’s wife, the one who barely missed being “inured,” was slumped behind the table. There were at least two other militia-type guys, one standing behind some fancy guppies and one behind a bowl of tiny, darting cardinal tetras.
The other people showing off their finned prizes were a motley assortment, even by northern British Columbia standards. There were some intense-looking children and a few bored-looking children with intense parents, a couple of bikers in leather and tattoos and scars, a 4-H fish contingent, and some earnest scientific types, whose bowls and tanks were obscured by pipes and tubes and other odd filtration arrangements.
MacGregor found the table he had been assigned, and Mom and I helped him get set up. Mom wanted to make his area special and homey, so she put a woven cloth runner under his three bowls, but a fish official came by and made us remove it because it was unfair to the other fish. MacGregor transferred his fish from their bags into bowls. He polished the bowls to a shine and deftly removed a bit of poop hanging down from the betta with some tweezers, a tip he’d picked up on the Internet. Then he set up their little placards. Betta splendens—male, unmated. Pterophyllum scalare—mated pair. Pterophyllum scalare—juveniles, unsexed.
It was all pretty exciting, I have to admit. I could feel hereditary competitiveness begin to wash over me. I forgot about the whole objectification-of-fish-protest thing and got swept up in the magic of the precompetition moment. MacGregor’s shining cheeks, his cords, his boots, and his fishbowls were too beautiful to criticize. In spite of my familial will to win, I found the other contestants (the owners, not the fish) kind of cool, too, as they futzed around with their show animals, completely oblivious to how weird they were. The contestants walked around asking each other earnest questions and praising each other freely.
A curly-haired, apple-cheeked, glowing-with-health young man appeared at our table and was soon talking earnestly with MacGregor and shaking our hands.
“Great to see you, Mac. Glad you could make it.”
Polite, friendly, he couldn’t have been nicer. After greeting me and my mom with gentle sincerity, he began introducing MacGregor around.
“Hi, Chuck. This is MacGregor MacLeod. We could learn some things from his approach. Good, solid fish-keeping skills …”
Conversations hummed around the gymnasium.
“So that’s a great-looking oscar. He chase everyone else out of your tank?”
“I’ve never seen a rasbora that size. What are you feeding?”
“Tell me about this German filtration system. I read about it in The Freshwater Aquarist News, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one.”
Mom and I joined MacGregor and Colin, the curly-haired young man, on their socializing rounds. We read other people’s placards, and MacGregor asked a few questions. No one seemed to notice that he was only ten years old. It was really something to see him having a heart-to-heart about betta constipation with a drop-dead beautiful 4-H girl, and talking fin fray with a three-hundred-pound biker. One stuffy cardigan-wearing man was a bit condescending when MacGregor asked him whether his discus weren’t too delicate to show, but Mom, who is not always uncool, looked closely at the man’s fish and asked him if hole-in-the-head disease would make a difference in the judging. Colin, the Ken Doll of the fish world, quickly hid his smile behind his hand. The man sputtered and my mother strode away.
We eventually settled down behind MacGregor’s fish, and Mom hauled out the lunch basket. MacGregor was off having some groundbreaking conversation about the finer points of the biotope aquarium, so Mom made me take Pit and Geraldine their lunches.
“I don’t know where the drumming room is.”
“Just follow the noise.”
“More like follow the smell,” I muttered.
“Alice, you promised to be civilized. We are here to help MacGregor. This is his day. So help.”
“Yeesh.”
She was distracted again. “And take a sandwich with you. You know how you get when you don’t eat.”
I shot her a glare that she was too busy being competitive to notice.
As soon as I got out of the gym, I ditched my sandwich in a garbage bin and headed off through the Terrace Community Center. The people hanging around looked just as frumpy as the ones who hang out at the community center in Smithers. I put my headphones on so none of them would try to engage me in conversation. I stopped to look at some photos of local sports heroes in the hallway. One soccer player had a mustac
he drawn on him and the word prick written in crayon underneath. It made me want to check out the washrooms to find out who was considered the slut in town. Who can fail to appreciate passion and honesty wherever they appear?
The truth is, I was dawdling. I really don’t care for Geraldine and Pit, and in fact was worried that I might actually be allergic to them. The thought of bringing them their lunches as though I somehow wanted to help them in their pursuit of increased emotional and physical messiness, well, it was almost more than I could bear.
The drumming workshop was announced down the hall by the smell of incense and the degenerate rhythms of the various drummers. As luck would have it, I got to the door just as they were about to take a break. That foiled my plan of dropping the lunch bags outside the door with “For Geraldine and Friend” written on them. I couldn’t bring myself to call Pit anything but Pit, and even I don’t think that is an appropriate name to put on her lunch bag.
I could tell Pit and Geraldine were in their glory. Everywhere they looked, they saw their fashion sense and value system reflected back at them.
Everyone at the workshop had long hair and badly maintained cotton clothing. There were middle-aged women obviously in the throes of a midlife crisis and some disgruntled government employee–looking men, dressed conservatively but with a statement feature, like a rattail or moccasins. They all looked shyly proud to be in the company of such countercultural (if passé) people as Pit and Geraldine and the drum workshop leader guy.
When I walked in, Pit and Geraldine made a big show of how “groovy” it was to see me. I pretended that I couldn’t hear them and just held up their lunches. The leader, a sock-and-sandal-wearing bearded type, decided that I represented the perfect opportunity to educate the drummers on the excitement of introducing rhythms to the repressed.
“Welcome. Welcome,” he boomed as he strolled over.
I pretended that I couldn’t hear because I was listening to my headphones. I bobbed my head a bit and furtively eyed the door. Before I could get away, Jesus of Terrace and Pit and Geraldine had me cornered and were standing in a semicircle around me.
“You know what is so cool?” said Jesus, gesturing for me to take off my headphones, while the whole class stared at me with that dumb, openly welcoming look on their faces.
“The ability drums have to bring people together,” he continued.
I was beginning to get this paranoid feeling they had been talking about me before I showed up.
Jesus turned to me.
“How would you like to join us for a jam?”
If he had been much heartier, he would have hurt himself. Everyone was staring at me. I couldn’t pretend not to hear.
Before I knew it, he had me sitting in the middle of the room on a low stool with a big drum between my knees. He sat facing me, and the rest of the class sat in a circle around us.
Now, apparently going for a look of intuitive intensity, with a lot of long pauses between eyelid blinks, Jesus of Terrace told me to follow his lead. I, cowardly worm that I am, did. He began hitting the drum with this vaguely obscene soft slap. I, head retreating into my shoulders, did the same. It made my stomach curl and soften. Jesus picked up the pace and I followed. All the time he stared at me, bug-eyed.
Jesus gave the sheep the sign, and they all began to join in. The sound was almost visible. It got louder and louder. Some of the more susceptible types began to sway. They all stared at me. And the really sick thing was that I was starting to get into it. I was moving back and forth a bit on my stool, and my hands were following the rhythm almost against my will. It was pure voodoo. People began breaking off into their own rhythms, my shoulders began doing this boogie-dip thing, and my head was bobbing up and down. Powerless. I was powerless over the beat.
When it was finally over, I felt shame, sickening shame, at how easily influenced I am. Why am I always liking things I’m supposed to hate? The drummers all clapped, and I nodded a bit and grabbed my huge headphones and ducked out of the room. I guess it was just another example of my lack of character, my lack of personal integrity and strength, my overwhelming weakness. I’m never going to make it as a cultural critic if I keep liking the worst things our culture has to offer (Buffy not included, of course).
When I got back to the fish show, the judging was underway. The judges were a group of three middle-aged men. They wore dress shirts and shiny slacks, and one of them was seriously overweight. They moved as a unit, from one fish container to the next.
The fish owners squirmed and answered the questions put to them by the judges. The judges—Bill, Jim, and Randy, according to their name tags—made no effort to put the contestants at ease. Even the militia members seemed quiet and submissive.
I could see Mom beginning to deconstruct a bit as the judges neared our table. Her competitiveness made her body twitch and her eyes bulge as she peered over at the competition. As the judges looked at our tablemate’s show fish—a vicious-looking black veil tail with what appeared to be a bit of fin sticking out of his mouth, suggesting that he used to be one of a pair—Mom put on her best Confident Mother of Successful Children look. Bill, Jim, and Randy stopped in front of MacGregor’s betta bowl first.
“Hmmm,” they said.
MacGregor looked up at them. Mom, ambition leaking from every seam, asked if they needed any “background on the fish?”
Fat Randy declined her offer, and Bill and Jim gave her a disapproving look. Mom smiled at them gauntly, like a starving she-wolf, as Randy and Bill and Jim moved along to purse their lips at MacGregor’s pair of angelfish.
“Hmmm,” they said, with slightly more inflection this time, or so it seemed to my ears. They looked back and forth from the angels to their fry for a few minutes. I could see Mom struggling to control herself. MacGregor, interested but unconcerned, watched the judges watch his fish. When the judges asked the age of the fry, MacGregor answered truthfully. The little flotilla of judges moved off, and my mother, exhausted, slumped back into her chair for a moment before beginning to whisper furiously at me about the nuances she had picked up in “hmmm.” She was convinced that the question about the fry was really significant.
My mother is a lunatic. The stress was too much, and I was forced to go outside. Watching her in the throes of maternal competitiveness was awful. I know that she is only rarely able to indulge it. After all, so far I am not a winner in any area of life. In fact I am not even in the game, for the most part, and MacGregor, being young, hardly ever enters the playing field. I am sure that when he’s won a Nobel prize for his work on behalf of fish everywhere, Mom will be able to sit back and relax, but until then she can’t resist the urge to help.
Wanting to be proud of one’s offspring is a sickness. I wish I could help my mother with her sense of self-worth via my own success, I really do. I just don’t see any parental pride-making activities or events in my future.
Later
I was sitting outside the community center beside the cross-country track, staring at page thirty-five of The Fellowship of the Ring when he jogged by. At first he looked like a normal jogger. But as he got closer, I realized there was something strange about the way he moved.
The cross-country track is a dirt path about two miles long that goes around the community center, back into the trees, and around behind the police station. According to legend, school officials once tried to hold an Alternative Schools Sports Day in Terrace. The organizers had the students run the cross-country path. Of course the Smithers behavior cases met the Terrace behavior cases, and instantly the trail was littered with truants in trees, smoking pot and planning small-scale break-and-enter jobs. The teachers got in a lot of trouble, and that cross-country run was the first and final event of the one and only Annual Sports Day. I’m just surprised it wasn’t worse. I bet there are still Alternative cases lurking around the track, sort of like Vietnam vets who don’t know that the war is over. Apparently several kids didn’t get back on the bus when the Smithers juvenil
e delinquents were shipped back in disgrace.
Anyway, when he jogged by on the root-studded running path, I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t look very athletic. His hair looked like he’d been at it with the nail scissors. He wore a threadbare yellow T-shirt. His stride was strange—the steps too long and high, his arms shooting out in all directions. It looked more like the flapping of a small goose than a workout. As he got closer, I realized that it wasn’t just his running form that was bizarre. His shoes were peculiar too. Baggy pants pulled up past his ankles to show that he was wearing big yellow leather work boots, their tongues and laces slapping around as he charged by.
As he ran past me, he looked over with open interest on his small face. He smiled broadly and then, incredibly, leaped onto a post set in the ground to mark the entrance to the running path. One work boot landed heavily on the post, and he kicked out his other foot, wrenched his head around to look at me again, and then crashed off down the path.
He was great. I couldn’t believe it was possible to be so unselfconscious. My God, who was this Gooseboy? He was everything I wanted and everything I’m not.
In a turmoil, an inner frenzy, I stayed seated beside the running path. Should I stay? Should I go? Would he come around again? Was he doing laps? Was it possible to do laps in boots like that? Would he be tripped up on a root or a rock, injured, and I would never see him again?
I sat, practically writhing in an agony of nerves, and said a silent prayer of thanks that I was wearing all my best Prince George thrift finds. I straightened my headphones, pulled down my lime velour stretch top, smoothed my red-and-white-checked pants, rearranged my silver vest, fixed my barrettes, and wondered if he would notice me. I imagined seeing him again. I would say something meaningful that would let him know that I saw him clearly and appreciated him. Or better yet, I would just show him that I was a kindred spirit.
