by Lori Weber
“I think these fish are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life,” I say, my voice cracking.
“Do you? Well now, isn’t that great. You know, not everyone feels that way about the fish.”
“Yeah, I bet they don’t,” I say. He must be talking about Mrs. Dwight. I bet she barely glances at the fish when she feeds them.
I move closer, so close I’m almost leaning against him. My heart is racing. I imagine the blood in my arteries gurgling up from the deep like the bubbles coming up through the filter. Part of me knows it’s wrong, but the way I feel about him is so strong, I can’t stop myself. It’s like there’s some kind of cosmic force, stronger than gravity, pulling me toward him. And he must feel the same way. Why else would he want me here, with no one else around?
If Mr. Dwight kisses me, my whole life will change. The old me will be washed away, like yesterday’s dirt. My life at home will change too because none of it will matter anymore — my parents can do what they want, they can have ten more children and their boring old lives won’t affect me. I’ll have this special thing with Mr. Dwight and they won’t be able to stop me. Even Einstein knew that some forces, once set in motion, can’t be stopped.
I lean closer, more heavily, against Mr. Dwight. I can feel each hair on his arm against my own. He shifts, as though to support my weight and help me settle in. But then, suddenly, he turns away and clears his throat, startling even the fish.
“Let me show you something really neat, Alberta, over here,” he says. I follow him to a corner shelf holding a plain tank with nothing but a slab of rock in it.
“Know what this is?” Mr. Dwight asks. Two reddish-gold triangular fish are swimming inside, looking for something to do. Maybe Mrs. Dwight set this tank up and he wants to show me how pathetic it is.
“No.”
“It’s the breeding tank.”
“The what?”
“Breeding tank. You know, where I put fish in to breed. These two are angelfish.”
“I didn’t know you needed a separate tank for … that.”
“Oh yeah. It’s really important. They need peace and quiet, away from all the other fish. They need to get to know each other.”
“You mean, like a date?”
“Yeah, kind of,” he chuckles. “See the way they follow each other around, like she’s playing hard to get.”
I nod, trying to stay cool, but blush anyway.
“Ah, you know something about that, I see.” He stops talking and watches the fish for a while. “I’ve been using this same tank for years and it’s never let me down. Most of the fish in this room started off as fry in this breeding tank.”
“Fry?”
“Yeah, baby fish. I guess you could say it’s kind of like the honeymoon suite.” Mr. Dwight laughs again.
Mr. Dwight and I are kind of in a separate tank right now, with the door closed, getting to know each other, just like the breeding fish. That dream kiss comes back to me, the one where Mr. Dwight puts his strong arms around me and pulls me close. It would be so easy to do. He’s just inches away. And nobody would know. The kids are in the other room. Mrs. Dwight is miles away and my parents are across the street, probably fretting about me being here, but never imagining that I’m busy watching fish breed.
“Well now,” Mr. Dwight says, clearing his throat. “Let me finish showing you how it works. You see that piece of slate in there?” he asks, pointing to the long, gray slab. “That’s where the female will spray her eggs. She can lay as many as a thousand at one go. Then the male fish will follow behind and spray to fertilize them. It’s a pretty easy system, don’t you think?”
I can’t believe Mr. Dwight and I are talking about ways to make babies, here in this magical room. My face must be scarlet, it’s so incredibly hot in here. I don’t want my father’s voice in my head, but suddenly I can hear him talking about appliances. How the electricity charges them and turns them on. He says power creates more power, like a chain reaction. But it starts with one small move.
I reach out my hand and touch his, very lightly. It’s like a spark igniting, my skin against his. He doesn’t move away. He turns toward me. My lips are tingling, as though he’s kissing me already. My heart is beating so loudly it’s going to burst through my rib cage and smash the glass.
He opens his mouth and I brace myself, sucking in my breath. “Angela and I fell in love watching fish swim, at a pet store,” he says.
I freeze.
“Now, we give each other fish for every occasion, birthdays, Christmas. The birth of our children. See those small tanks over there?” Mr. Dwight asks, pointing to the wooden shelf that he ignored earlier.
I can barely nod.
“Those are kissing fish. Angela’s favorite. I get her a new tank every time she has a baby. I’ll be getting her another one soon.”
“You what?”
“I’ll be getting her one soon. When she has the baby,” he says.
“The baby?”
“Yeah, she’s pregnant. Didn’t you know? I thought she’d have told you by now. She always has a hard time being pregnant in the summer. She did this last time too, with Annie. Had to spend a few weeks in the hospital, out of the heat. I guess if we had air-conditioning, but we can’t afford it. We put all our extra money into these fish.”
Mrs. Dwight is pregnant. And Mr. Dwight sounds so happy. I thought he was going to tell me that she doesn’t understand the fish. That she doesn’t find them beautiful. That they don’t strike her as graceful in the water.
I thought he was working up the nerve to move closer to me, to finally kiss me. But here he is, still going on and on about Mrs. Dwight, like I care.
“But Angela wouldn’t want it any other way. We usually bring the kids in here at night, a sort of bed-time treat, you might say. Other kids might have video games or computers, but we want them to learn to love the fish as much as we do. You can’t do that with those other things. They’re just machines, not alive.”
I see my father’s dead machines, sitting on the shelves in his workroom. My dad spends all his time bringing them back to life, but I’ve never once been mesmerized by any of them.
“I get them all involved though, making our tank decorations with scraps of fencing, plastic-coated, otherwise it’s too corrosive. Certain metals can’t take any bit of water. They rust up immediately, which, of course, would kill the fish. You’ve got to be really careful about ammonia poisoning too, the nitrogen and all that. They’re finicky things, fish. Kind of like Angela herself. She needs all the right conditions when she’s pregnant. The move was probably too much for her, all that packing and unpacking. We should’ve waited, but we needed more space and I thought it’d be better now than with a newborn. I blame myself, really.”
As he’s talking, I look around at the tanks and see the fence sculptures again. Except this time, they look stupid. They are nothing but scraps of lopsided metal, obviously put together by the Dwight kids.
“You’ve got to have the right filtration to remove the waste and you need to regulate the PH. The electrical hook-ups in this room alone are pretty phenomenal, but I keep all that hidden, behind the tanks. Cords for the lights and filters and …”
Mr. Dwight goes on and on, sounding just like my father. I thought they were polar opposites, but now I’m not so sure. I didn’t notice before, but the whole room is buzzing with the whir of electricity, like the room itself is plugged in.
It doesn’t run on magic.
“Well, I guess I should go collect Angela now,” Mr. Dwight says, finally coming to the end of his speech. In the dim light of the room I can still see his deep dimples.
But they mean nothing to me now.
THAT NIGHT, WHILE my parents are outside drinking their evening tea, I sneak into their bedroom. It isn’t a room I enter often. There has never been any frolicking together on the family bed, joking and laughing. There are no fascinating fish to marvel at. There’s just the boring bedroom suite, with its matching nigh
t-tables and dressers, hers with mirror, his without. And in the corner, my father’s suit stand, standing like another person, Einstein maybe in his early days at the Swiss patent office, tagging new inventions.
If a new invention is what my parents want, I’ll help them get one. I still think their idea of having a baby is ridiculous, but I don’t care. What does it matter that my father is old and my mother worries too much? If the Dwights can have another baby, why shouldn’t my parents? The Dwights are just as annoying in their happiness as my parents are in their unhappiness. They’re like mirror opposites, one on each side of the street.
I take out the key to the Dwights’ secret room and slide it between my parents’ mattress and box spring, on my mother’s side. I push it in pretty far, so it won’t fall out when she changes the sheets on Sunday. I hope it will work as some sort of fertility charm. There is magic in the fish room, just not the kind I hoped for. I can see the Dwight clan, cozy together in the secret room, admiring the beautiful fish. In the middle of them stands Mrs. Dwight, her belly rounded and protruding like a separate tank of its own, and inside it the little fry that Mr. Dwight gave her swimming about in its own fluid.
Back in my room, I pull my covers over my head and lie in the dark, listening to the sounds of my parents getting ready for bed. I think of Einstein’s theory of relativity, or what I can understand of it, which isn’t much. I see myself on that supersonic train zooming at the speed of light, taking me back to my childhood, back to when life seemed simpler. But that train will never exist. There is nowhere to go now but forward, into the rest of my teen years, and then eventually into adulthood.
There is no way to stop it.
Photography: Marilyn Gillespie
Lori Weber is the author of many books for young readers, including Klepto, If You Live Like Me, and Tattoo Heaven. Her acclaimed novel Lightning Lou, published by DCB, was shortlisted for the QWF Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. A native of Montreal, Weber lives in Pointe-Claire, Quebec and teaches English and Creative Writing at John Abbott College.
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