The Other Side of Water
by Dominic Preziosi
(Continued)
She thinks he seems happy about this, still amazed from the summer, almost like a little kid might be. His fingers are doing a drum beat against his skinny thigh the whole time. He’s got his cell phone clipped to his belt, on vibrate, and she can hear it going almost nonstop. Hers hasn’t rung once. A few blocks later, waiting at an intersection, he says: "So would you ever like something like that?"
"Like what?"
"A wedding like that. Christmas in July."
"No," she says, embarrassed that he’d even bring it up. "I don’t know. I mean, don’t ask about that kind of stuff, all right?"
The light changes. "Sometimes," he says. "Sometimes, I think, that’s the kind of thing a girl should have."
Something occurs to her. "How’d you even know about it? Why were you there?"
"Just helping out. A business connection."
"I didn’t know you worked at weddings."
"Who said I was working?"
It’s not much of an explanation, but she can tell by the way he gazes through the windshield that he’s said all he’s going to say about it. She tries to imagine him, moving on his skinny legs over those piles of snow, in July.
Lately, Joanna’s mother doesn’t like to party close to home. She’s worried it’ll get back to Joanna’s father.
"Not like I care," she always says, "but the last thing I need is that skinny, short-tempered bastard hearing about it." He gets crazy, she says—sudden and out of nowhere.
"Unpredictable," she says, "and that’s an understatement."
Her mother goes to the bars on Third Avenue. She likes a good time. "What’s so wrong with a good time? So friggin shoot me," she always says. Cosmos have been her drink since the second season of "Sex and the City," and that’s what she has whenever she’s getting ready to go out. "Just to get started." She always wears a black push-up bra, and the lace shows when she leans over to meet the glass halfway.
"How come when I want to dress like you’re dressed you say I can’t?"
"Because," her mother always answers, "you still have lots of time to ruin your life."
She’s not kidding when she talks about word getting back to Joanna’s father. His cousins live all around here still, and sometimes they’ll walk back and forth past by the house, staring up at the windows. Spies, her mother calls them. "We live in a fishbowl," she says. "Remember that."
Lately her mother’s been saying she wants to move. Down to Bay Ridge, away from all these lunatics with murder in their eyes. She’s been telling Joanna about an apartment she saw on Ninety-Fourth Street.
Joanna knows that it’s some guy’s place. She doesn’t want to move in to some guy’s place, down in Bay Ridge, down by the bars on Third Avenue, and she says so.
"Yeah?" her mother answers. "Who says you’re invited anyway?"
Most of what her mother says doesn’t bother her, but these are the things that do. Joanna hasn’t said it aloud to anyone, but she thinks it can happen. Her father did it already. What was there to keep her mother from floating away next?
Her father gave her a fish once. He said he didn’t know what kind it was, that he just got it from a customer. He said its name was Adam.
"For a fish?" she asked.
"After Adam Graves. The ninety-four Rangers. The team that won the Cup?"
"I’m not going to call it Adam."
"It’s your fish."
So she just called it "the fish." It was black, and it sort of fluttered through the water, moving in the way the gown of a horror-movie heroine moves when she’s being chased. The bowl sat on her bureau, and twice a day she dropped in a single pellet of food—once before school, and once before bed. Most of the time, the fish stayed at the bottom of the bowl, doing nothing.
"Some pet," her mother used to say, standing in the door with her arms crossed. "At least you don’t have to scoop its poop."
In the beginning, when she saw her father, he’d ask: "So how’s Adam Graves?" But after a while he stopped. She bought a plastic buccaneer ship at the pet store and sank it to the bottom of the bowl. It was just big enough for the fish to hide behind. Sometimes, she had a hard time finding the fish, and even though she knew there was no way for a fish to escape a bowl she thought maybe, just maybe & until she got a glimpse of a fluttering fin or tail.
Then one day the bowl really was empty. She leaned in close to look at it, then held it up in her hands, peering through the bottom. She thought the fish might be hiding behind the plastic buccaneer ship, but no matter how she held the bowl she couldn’t find it.
"What happened to the fish?" she asked, confronting her mother in the kitchen as she came in from work.
"Honey," she said, dropping her bag on the counter, "that thing was belly-up when I walked by this morning."
"It died?"
"You must have overfed it."
"I didn’t," she said, thinking: Did I? "So what did you do with it?"
She reached into the sink and pulled out a ladle, which she waved in front of her. "Fish soup, anyone?" She laughed; Joanna didn’t. "Seriously? I flushed it. Not much else I could do."
"You could have left a note or something."
"Yeah," her mother said. "I could have."
When she saw her father next, he said: "I haven’t asked in a long time, but whatever happened to Adam Graves?"
"He died."
"Is that right?" he said, sounding unsurprised. "I guess they’ll do that on you."
After that, no one mentioned the fish.
Dominic Preziosi's fiction has appeared in Avery, Cezanne's Carrot, Front Porch, Menda City, Spindle, Storyglossia, and elsewhere. A new story will appear in the anthology, "What's Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey," slated for release
by Word Riot Press in Spring 2010.