by Alice Ozma
First, we had a moment of silence. It went pretty well until someone started hammering a few yards over, which upset a neighbor’s baby into a screaming fit, which was quickly followed by the barking of nearly every neighborhood dog. Rather than fight it, I suggested that we beautify the din by singing a song in Franklin’s honor.
I had initially planned for us to sing “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell, because I loved the lyrics and because my father had recently ordered a picture book version of it and informed me, to my dismay, that his students hadn’t cared for it much. I knew better. But we quickly realized how confusingly repetitive the verses were. The more confused we got, the more we laughed. Well, they laughed, and I tried to keep them on track. Once it was clear that no one would actually be able to make it to the end, I resorted to my second choice song, “O Holy Night,” which I chose because it was both emotional and loud. The family knew most of the lyrics this time, even though Christmas had passed a few months ago. When they got shaky, I sang even louder until the dogs started barking again. At the end of the song, I clapped. I later learned that no one ever claps at funerals, or at least the ones I’ve been to—not even after beautiful songs.
Franklin had been prepared for burial, at my request, in one of his fish food containers, because fish food was the thing Franklin liked best in the world. My father placed the container into the small hole I’d asked him to dig. He left the side with the ingredients facing up, but that seemed tacky. I had him turn it to reveal the photo of a bright orange fish eating tiny pellets. I asked if anyone had any comments before my father gave the eulogy. My sister began.
“It is a shame that the food pellets look pretty much the same as fish droppings. That must be confusing to them. I hope fish don’t get the two mixed up.”
My mother shot her a look, and my sister looked at the hole for a minute and tried again: “But Franklin never would have made that mistake, because he was such a smart fish.”
I nodded approvingly and turned to my mother, who shook her head as if in great pain.
“It’s hard. Well, we all loved Franklin very much. He liked to swim in circles and look at things. Sometimes when we forgot to tend his bowl, the living room smelled really bad.”
She got choked up, and I went to pat her back until I realized that she was laughing. I turned and saw that my sister and father were laughing as well, behind their hands. I threw my arms up for silence.
“Enough of this disrespect! It’s time for Dad to say some kind words to help us remember Franklin. Dad, have you prepared some notes that you would like to share at this time?”
My father removed an index card from his pocket. Although he tried to hold the card facing away from me, I glanced at it and saw names of students from his classes, some with checkmarks next to them. I assumed that this list somehow inspired him to really remember Franklin for all his greatness. He looked down at the card and began.
“Franklin was a good fish.”
“Amen,” my mother said, nodding encouragingly.
“Amen,” I said. “Wait, is that it?”
“No, I was just agreeing. We can say amen to let Franklin know that we all agree.”
“Amen,” I repeated again. I put my hand to my heart like I was saluting the flag at school.
“Franklin was a good fish,” my father continued, “And a beautiful one, too. He had bright orange fins and a very particular sense of humor. Whenever I told a joke, Franklin wouldn’t laugh at all. That’s because my jokes weren’t funny. He was waiting for a good joke. Now, there’s no more waiting.”
“Amen,” we all said.
“Franklin’s favorite television program was The Brady Bunch, because he missed being a part of his big family back at the pet store. But he loved his new family, even the cats. When the cats would stare at him through the glass, he would send them good wishes. He once wished for Brian, who should have been his natural enemy, as a cat, to find a delicious bug for lunch. Well, that’s exactly what happened. As you can tell, he had a big heart.”
“Amen,” we all said.
“Franklin had many hobbies and interests. He was especially interested in antique ladders. He would often ponder all the creative and practical uses for a good antique ladder, but he decided it wouldn’t go well with the blue stones at the bottom of his bowl. That’s another thing about Franklin—he had impeccable taste in art and home design.”
“Amen,” we all said, though I was starting to wonder where my father had gotten his information. Whatever was written on that index card, it wasn’t jogging his memory too well.
“But he is probably best known for his passionate enthusiasm for competitive table hockey. When he first expressed his interest to me, in private, I told him that it was foolish. I told him that fish didn’t play table hockey. Boy did he prove me wrong. No sooner had I told him he couldn’t do it than he became the local champion in the fish league. He fought long and hard to have table hockey included in the Olympics, and the committees are, at this very moment, considering his request. He made great progress for both the sport and the fish who love it.”
“Amen,” my sister and mother said, but they were smiling.
“Hey wait a minute, I don’t remember any of this stuff.”
“And,” my father continued, “who can forget his masterful skill at tailoring outfits for special occasions and events. Why, it seems like just yesterday that I came down the stairs and saw—”
I looked up to see that my mother and sister were doubled over, tears streaming down their faces. But they were not mourning. They were laughing.
“None of that ever happened, and this is a serious time!” I shouted.
They quieted down for a moment, and I stopped my father before he could continue his speech.
“I have an announcement. For the rest of my life, I am giving up fish and sea creatures of all kinds. In honor of my good friend, Franklin the fish. Thank you all for coming. Please leave before you disrespect the grave of such a beautiful creature.”
I marched back inside to set the example, lifting my legs high and waving my stiff arms.
“When do you think you’ll go back to eating fish?” my sister asked, as she marched behind me.
“If you were listening instead of clowning around, you might have heard that I said I will not be eating fish or sea creatures of any kind for the rest of my life.”
“Oh, yes, for the rest of your life. I forgot,” she said.
Franklin, if you are listening: I am twenty-two years old. I haven’t had fish or sea creatures of any kind since the day you died. Please excuse my family’s disrespect.
PS: I never knew how much you liked table hockey.
CHAPTER SIX
Day 440
But Mama is far ahead, and she doesn’t look back. She is somewhere else.
—Patricia MacLachlan, Journey
I always hated Thanksgiving. With a stomach the size of a pincushion, I never got into the idea of a holiday devoted to eating. I liked to eat, of course, but I also liked stopping when I was full. And I didn’t like turkey, or stuffing if it had been in the turkey (name one other food that people prefer to eat out of a carcass), or gravy, or cranberry sauce. Plus, we always floated from aunt to aunt while everyone else I knew went to the same house every year. Recently, we’d started eating at home, and I still didn’t like the food. So I never had high expectations for the holiday, and this cloudy November afternoon was no exception.
In fact, the only thing worth devoting any enthusiasm to was the cloudy sky. Three years ago, it snowed on Thanksgiving. It didn’t seem entirely impossible this year, if the weather held. I loved snow. I had the best sled in town, hands down—a smooth surfboard that just so happened to be the fastest thing on the hill every year. I also had a great collection of jackets and scarves, which looked particularly good with little flecks of white on them. I had already picked out the perfect combination—a bright blue jacket with a unicorn scarf—and hid them under my bed.
Leaving them out in the open would be jinxing it. But I felt pretty certain. Today, it would snow.
My father was outside raking, since taking any sort of day off made him antsy, and I was dutifully fulfilling my role in the process. As soon as he brought the leaves to the pile at the front of the yard, I would jump in them and let him know that it was a good amount, but more would be even better. This provided inspiration for him to keep raking. I told him this every time he asked me to get out of the pile so he could get some work done.
I was standing in this pile when I noticed my mother carrying some boxes to her car. I looked at her for a while without moving, watching her take several trips, but I was unable to figure out what she was doing. I felt like Encyclopedia Brown and enjoyed piecing together the clues, just like him, to try to come to some sort of a conclusion about this mystery. My father said that though he loved the Encyclopedia Brown books as much as I did, they gave kids unrealistic expectations—some of the things the boy wonder knew were things even my father, a teacher and voracious reader with a college education, had never heard. I knew mystery solving was a challenge, but unlike Encyclopedia I didn’t have a nemesis like Bugs Meany breathing down my neck. I needed to close my eyes and think deeply, the way he did at the end of every story, but I couldn’t watch what my mom was doing with my eyes closed. I remembered that the eye-closing part came only after Encyclopedia had lots of information, so I observed.
At first, I assumed my mother’s actions had something to do with the meal. Even though our dinner was small (my sister was an exchange student in Germany that year, so it was just the three of us), I imagined that it would take a few hours to get everything ready. I felt bad for not offering to help. I liked leaves better than the kitchen, but she seemed really busy, and whatever she was doing looked exhausting. I still couldn’t figure out what the boxes had to do with dinner, though. Had she borrowed pots and pans from someone? Probably. Neither of my parents cooked often. I thought my dad might offer to help her carry the boxes, but he’d moved to the backyard and apparently didn’t notice her. I decided that Encyclopedia must have had more clues than this. Finally I went inside.
The first thing I noticed when I came up to my parents’ bedroom was that my mother’s perfumes and jewelry, usually jumbled together on a white tray on the bureau, were gone. All that was left was a green earring, which I picked up. These were the sort of earrings that my mother wore to her job as a high school English teacher. I thought everything she wore to work smelled like her school, a comforting smell of coffee and perfume. I put the earring to my nose and smelled nothing. I looked for the rest of her jewelry. My initial reaction was that it had been stolen, until I noticed my mother crouched beside the bed, cramming her books into boxes.
“What are you doing?” I asked, suddenly noticing how empty the room was.
She was clearly annoyed.
“I’m moving out,” she said. “We talked about this. We’ve been talking about this for months.”
“Yes, but today?”
“Right now.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t deny it—I knew she was going to move out someday, she had brought it up before and even asked for my advice picking out an apartment. But the idea seemed distant, almost hypothetical: she was going to move out in the same way that I was going to drive a car. Someday. Eventually.
“Well, on Thanksgiving?” I asked.
In my mind, I remember her turning to me and saying, “You don’t even like Thanksgiving.” But actually, I don’t think she knew that about me. It wasn’t something I started verbalizing until later. It seemed unpatriotic and I felt guilty.
She asked me to help load some of her things into boxes, and I did, because I didn’t know what else to do. She had a lot of things. Even after she moved out, that is something I always remembered about my mother—all the things she had. Boxes and bags and things absolutely everywhere—so many things that she hadn’t even had time to unwrap some of them after buying them. There was a lot more than could fit into her car, but she said she would come back for more tomorrow. That was a little comforting. If some of her stuff was here, she might decide to stay. I put the green earring that didn’t smell like her or like anything into my pocket. Now she had to come back for something, no matter how much she managed to cram into this trip.
We carried the boxes to the car, which struck me as a lot roomier than I remembered. We made trip after trip before I realized that she hadn’t told me where she would be staying.
“Remember the apartments we looked at five minutes away, by the high school?”
“The one with the ducks?”
“No, the one with the pool.”
I must have perked up at this, because she smiled a little.
“I’m not really leaving. I’ll be right down the road, and there will be a pool, and you can have your own bedroom.”
“Do I have a bed?”
“Of course you don’t have a bed yet. I don’t have a bed yet. You’ll get one.”
Even then, for some reason I found this too hard to believe. Where would she get the money for one bed, let alone two? In my mind, my mother did all of the spending and my father did all of the earning. It didn’t matter that her job as a Catholic schoolteacher came with a fairly reasonable salary. We were in debt. I didn’t know how much debt, but judging by how often the phone rang and creepy, insistent automated voices spoke at the other end, we probably owed someone a lot of money. And I never knew my father to buy anything at all, so as far as I could tell, my mother was in trouble, and she would be in trouble no matter where she went.
It was as I was taping one of the boxes shut that I noticed she was not crying. My mother cried over everything, from Christmas cards to friendly teasing, so this shocked me. I could not take my eyes off of hers. They were small and brown and puffy—perhaps she had been crying earlier?—but they were dry. Noticing this had a stronger impact on me than her tears ever had. Those had become commonplace, but these new eyes, dry in spite of what I knew to be a monumental change for both of us, were alarming. Like the boxes I’d seen her carrying to the car, these eyes took me a few minutes to interpret. But when I finally came to a conclusion, it was that she was really leaving and was happy to go.
This made sense. My mother and father rarely spoke to each other; more often, they yelled, and whatever speaking was done was never constructive. A discussion about whether or not to turn on the air conditioner could easily result in two or more hours of intense battle, my mother crying for every minute of it and my father methodically making his points until he realized she wasn’t the most captive audience. Considering myself an expert at debate, I always took a side, but defended both parents almost equally, on different days.
I had even been able to defend, on my more skillful days, my mother’s phone calls with men. She was sad and lonely. The men would call while my father was not around, which struck me as strangely polite, and she would talk to them in hushed tones on the basement steps. I don’t know if she ever met with the men in person, but she was not flaunting these men in his face; her phone calls and e-mails—and visits, if they happened—were barely more than a distraction in most cases.
I wondered, as we struggled to close the trunk over our final load, whether any of these men would be at the apartment.
“Of course he’ll come visit,” she said of her current boyfriend. “But he won’t live there.”
Which was just as well, because I didn’t want anyone taking my room, bed or no bed.
As my mother was backing out of the driveway, I couldn’t tell if she was finally crying or squinting from the sun, which was now peeking out curiously at us from behind the clouds. My hopes for snow were dashed, and I went inside to watch a cartoon marathon, though I hated cartoons.
Half an hour later, my father came in.
“You know your mother did not come out once to offer me a glass of water?” he called to me from the door. He took his gloves off as he walked to
the oven and opened the door. Seeing nothing inside, he asked, “What’s the deal with the turkey?”
“Huh?” I’d been trying to braid my hair for months and I was finally making progress on a nice thin one across my forehead.
“What’s the deal with the turkey?” he repeated. “Don’t those things take hours?”
He looked at the clock. It was dinnertime, or close enough.
His confusion didn’t register with me.
“Well, are you going to make it?” I asked, not looking up from my braid.
“Why would I make it? I just spent six hours raking, and I’m not even done in the backyard. Can’t your mother do anything around here? Where is she?”
He called up the stairs, “It’s five o’clock in the library!”
As you might imagine, anyplace where my father was, especially our house filled with books, was “the library.” The phrasing didn’t surprise me, but the action did. Until I realized.
“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling very guilty without knowing why. “Mom left.”
“Mom left? Where did she go? When’s she putting the turkey in?”
“No, left left. Moved out.”
My father didn’t seem to hear me but wordlessly moved up the stairs and to his bedroom. I heard him walking around up there, opening the closet and an occasional drawer. The creaks of the house were familiar, and I knew when I heard him pause in front of the window that he was looking for her car. After some time, he came back downstairs. I turned off the television.
“Do we still have the turkey?”
I checked the fridge, then the freezer, and handed it to him.
“Do you know how to make this thing?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to say no, since it seemed like something interesting to try. Also, I’d seen other people do it. Turn on the oven, put in the turkey, cut it up. Simple. But my father didn’t seem to think so, because he said, “We don’t know what to do with this thing.”
