The Other Side of Water
by Dominic Preziosi
She runs for the door because it has to be him, and she’s been waiting.
"Not ready yet?" he asks from the stoop. "What gives?" He’s not on time either. It’s the one trait they share, forever behind like this.
She peers out at him. "What happened to your eye?"
Her father faces her full on. His left eye is black and swollen all around and red on top, and there’s a hole that looks like a puncture at the edge of the lid. It looks like something inside exploded. Behind him, a city sanitation truck lurches down the narrow street. There’s a huge stuffed octopus strung to its grille, with dirty pink fur and thick, girlish lashes. It’s nothing you’d ever find in the ocean. "Fell on a pencil," he finally says. "You going to let me in or what?"
Joanna hears her mother shuffle through the kitchen, trying to move quietly on her bare feet, as if she’s not there to eavesdrop.
"You know I can’t," she whispers. She risks a look over her shoulder. Her mother’s wearing the same clothes she went out in last night. There’s a hand-shaped bruise on her thigh, just where the hem of her skirt ends. She’s sipping her coffee through a striped plastic straw. She takes them by the box-load from work. "Give me a minute," Joanna tells him.
"Yeah, that’s what they all say." He slips out a cigarette and cups his hand against the breeze to light it, then tosses the match off the stoop and shrugs his narrow shoulders. He’s skinnier than ever, Joanna thinks. She wants to ask if he’s eating enough, but that would sound too much like her mother, or maybe more like his mother. He peers at her through the smoke. "Thirteen. What could take so long at your age?"
"Just a minute," she says again. But he’s not angry. She can see before she closes the door that he’s smiling—sort of, anyway, as much as he can with his eye the way it is.
He builds fish tanks, big custom aquariums for restaurants and doctors’ offices and anyone else who wants to pay. Sometimes he takes her to see them. The last time it was a Polynesian place out on Staten Island, with plastic tiki torches lining the entrance and a footbridge over a shallow, streaky pond in the lobby. A bunch of old people were sitting around a table, drinking out of ceramic cups shaped like pineapples and coconuts. Her father ordered a whisky. The tank was up against the wall, and giant tiger-striped fish moved like submarines through the water. They were almost too ugly to look at.
"What are they?" she asked.
Her father swallowed his drink and looked at the readout of his cell phone. "I just build the things. I don’t care what’s inside."
The smiling owner put a couple of plates of fried food in front of them.
"So what do you think?" Joanna’s father asked.
"It’s okay," she answered, chewing on something spicy. One of the old ladies at the table laughed, a sound like the screech of a gull.
"People," her father said after a minute. "They don’t notice what’s around them. Like it all just gets there. Like it all just appears, without anyone having to do anything."
She didn’t realize until they were on the bridge back to Brooklyn that he’d been asking about the tank, not the food. She felt awful, and she wondered how to fix it. "It must have taken so long to build," she finally said. "It holds a lot more water than the others you showed me, doesn’t it?"
Her father squinted through the windshield at the tall, grime-coated backs of the trucks ahead. "Traffic," he said. "Your mother won’t be happy if I have you home late again."