Every Day is Marne Gras

somewhere between nonfiction and not. prompt: put a goldfish in a story. prompted by the first chapter of I Am Not Myself These Days, by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

They finally give in when I turn seven. My sister is nine. She sleeps on the top bunk in our bedroom. The walls in our bedroom are white. Our carpet is pink. We are getting a goldfish.

Looking back, I don’t think it took so long for them to say yes because they wanted to protect us from early lessons on love and loss. I think they had been preparing to say no to a puppy and were thrown when we aimed low, but we didn’t want to go on walks in the rain and pick up steaming shit with plastic bags, either.

*

The notes start coming home in my backpack on my teacher’s happygram stationery. One at a time, months apart at first. Marne enjoys reading. Marne is a very bright little girl. Marne seems bored. Please call the office to set up a time for a parent teacher conference.

*

The tank comes when I am at my own birthday party. It is my birthday present! I am seven years old and my fish tank is clear with a pink lid. It has sparkly gravel lining the bottom and two plastic stalks of wavy seaweed, but the best part is that it is a Little Mermaid fish tank and there is an Ariel standing in the middle of the gravel, with her arms up high over her head. She loves this tank. We fill it with water from the kitchen and two goldfish.

*

They want me to take a test, because I can read. It is unclear whether or not I am actually “special”. I have the social skills of a three year old gorilla. I do not really understand two digit subtraction and I cry during the first few weeks of math lessons. But at reading time the class is divided into three groups: the slow group, who read Henry and Mudge, the fast group, who read Frecklejuice, and me. My teacher excludes me from our class’s weekly spelling tests. School is like eating breakfast: something I do with one hand, ignoring the ketchup dripping down my shirt so I can a better look at the newspaper. I am well-behaved and quiet; I am mostly left alone.

*

One fish is orange and black stripes like a tiger, but we don’t like the name tiger so we call him Pokey because his eyes poke out of either side of his head. The other fish is all white with one orange spot. He blows a lot of bubbles. We name him Bubbles. I feed Pokey and Bubbles twice a day. I don’t want to be one of those kids who begged for a dog and never walked it.

*

The test happens through a door I thought led to a janitor’s closet at my elementary school, in a small room with a grey table and two chairs overlooking the playground. A teacher I have seen before but never met asks me questions as I watch first the empty playground and then each grade go out one at a time for recess. She says the test stops when I can’t answer the questions anymore. I memorize and spell and point to pictures of rectangles. I miss second grade recess. I miss fifth grade recess.

*

I feed Pokey and Bubbles dutifully for a year. They live on top of my sister’s dresser. Our television set lives on top of my dresser, but the remote lives on the top bunk with my sister. Our window faces south and in the afternoon when I get home from school a square of light discolors the picture on the tv but makes the gravel in the fishtank sparkle. I imagine the goldfish are sunbathing.

*

No one tells me how I do on my test, and I don’t get to make up the recess I miss. I do get to go through the lunch line in our otherwise empty cafeteria all by myself, for an ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes indented for gravy on a styrofoam tray with a chocolate milk. I feel famous, and then I forget about the test. Ten years later I find a dot matrix printout I’ve never seen before hidden in the folds of my baby book. It takes me several more years to figure out how to interpret it, how to read the numbers on the bottom of the paper, and come up with a number that leaves me shattered and vacant for days.

*

I think Bubbles might be tired. Bubbles is cuddling my Little Mermaid Ariel figurine, nestled between her goddess perfect arms, palms raised towards heaven, warrior one. I would swim between those arms all day too if I was a fish, but three or eight days go by of Bubbles not moving from his lovely arm perch and even though it will be years before I experience the human equivalent (a 36 hour fuckfest in a Great Barrington bed and breakfast) even I know that either Bubbles has attachment issues with fishtank Ariel, or we have a wildlife emergency. I squeeze between the dresser the fishtank sits on and the wall, until I am behind the dresser, looking at our bedroom from the opposite direction, pleased by the novel view. Now staring at Ariel’s back, I can see that Bubbles is impaled on of her fingers. There is a gaping hole in his backside. Pokey has taken the liberty of eating most of his insides. I have been looking at an empty shell for days.

*

My parents go to school to talk to my teacher, possibly in my second grade classroom. Maybe they sit at my desk, which is a fake oak paneled top covered in dried up day glo glue, which I enjoy playing with when I am bored. My desk is full of crumpled papers, bits of broken crayons, old tests, and a few leaves, turned brown and disintegrated after a fall show and tell (By fifth grade I will become a neat desk perfectionist, spending my extra time in class cleaning the stray line out of my perfectly lined up notebooks rather than reading). Maybe they sit in our story corner or in the front of the room, where the spelling list is kept on the board in chalk. No one tells me about their conference, but later I gather that my second grade teachers loves me but thinks I should go to a special school.

*

I hold a funeral for Bubbles that my best friend and babysitter attend. I dig a hold in between two pine trees behind our house. I write RIP BUBBLES on a flat rock in crayon, and then we do the Ouija board, which my mother lets me take outside. I cover his grave with the rock. We say he was a good fish and we argue about whose hands are moving the Ouija board.

*

One parent, and then both ask me if I’d like to go to a different school. Casual but worried, in moments specially picked out for the nonchalant quality of the day. I say I like my friends. I like my teacher, she lets me read books during class I want to stay at my school is that okay? I imagine they feel relieved, but they are conversations I will never remember. When it arrives, the Stanford Binet envelope is tucked deep into the book my mother reserves for class pictures and report cards, and my second grade teacher gives me a book of phonics and the last four parts of the little house on the prairie series to work through. Nothing changes.

*

We want another fish, but we don’t want Pokey anymore, and we don’t want one fish, and they won’t buy us two. Little Mermaid Ariel grows filmy green algae in her armpits. I stop feeding Pokey until my sister and I finally give him away to our neighbors, two little girls who made an aquarium out of blue and green construction paper while they waited for their parents to give in and let them have their very own pet. The tank disappears. The next year we get a cat, and I forget about the mermaid. And the fish.