How Did You Get This Number (17 page)

A rational parental response to a nine- and a fourteen-year-old’s tears shed over a dead goldfish is to stop buying goldfish. My parents decided to up the ante. They installed a four-by-four-foot saltwater fish tank in the middle of our living room.

It should be noted that although this was the 1980s, we did not live in a particularly 1980s house. The fish tank, unaccompanied by leather sofas or miniature Zen sand gardens, was severely out of place. We had no fiber-optic sculptures or splatter paint of any kind. The only neon in sight would come years later, and was actually outside the house. As a joke, my sister’s friend installed a pink neon frame around the license plate of my sister’s car, which lit up along with the headlights. The car was tan. It was never meant to be in such close proximity to anything so aggressively pink. But my sister developed a Fluorescent Nightingale complex toward the device. I had no such affection for the number-obscuring glow, which brought me both ridicule and a vehicle violation ticket. I was a child of the ‘80s but a teenager of the ’90s. I spoke flannel, not glitter. When I asked my father to cut the wiring, I was met with an
Aww, but look how happy it makes her!
This identical tone would later be used in response to our house cat vigorously licking her anus on my lap.

The fish tank, however, I didn’t mind. It was our one tribute to the decade, our sole acknowledgment of that impulse to capture the exotic corners of the world, shrink them down, and sell them. Instead of having vials of ash from Mount St. Helens and chunks of the Berlin Wall, we had clown fish, sea anemones, starfish, tiger fish, tangs, and that disc-shaped yellow fish I can never remember the name of. Oh, and sea horses. The mortality rate among sea horses is not to be believed. Because the difference between a dead sea horse and a living sea horse is imperceptible, selling dead sea horses would make a very good pet store scam.

Certainly it would have been better than what our local pet store was actually doing. Which was putting chemical drops into the tanks of transparent fish to knock them out and painting hot-pink and -blue stripes on their unconscious bodies. Unless you are Assyrian, which I doubt you are, you are not allowed to tattoo, paint, or pierce your animals. This includes people who dress their pets up for Halloween. Stuffed reindeer antlers are a gateway drug. Before you know it, you’ll be roofie-ing your rabbits just to glue extra cotton to their butts, watching the confusion unfold once they regain consciousness. You are a sick, sick person.

“We can do your initials if you want,” the pet store guy offered.

We had just gotten the tank, and I was still learning about fish. It was an educational tool and a time-suck in one. I grimaced at the engraving proposition. They didn’t have to anesthetize the roses in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
to paint them. That’s because they were plants. And fictional. And
plants.

My father was across the tank showroom with the owner, enmeshed in a conversation about the hazards of introducing a blowfish to a narrow tank.

“No, thank you,” I said, turning to face the dye-smeared fish. They were clear from gill to gill except for their bold artificial stripes. If you blurred your eyes, the effect was a tank full of floating computer cursors.

The pet store guy shrugged, mildly offended.

“My middle name starts with a G,” I explained.

I could barely write a cursive G on paper. It seemed an especially cruel letter to inflict on a fish.

When my father returned, he had a bag of goldfish in his hand. The fish wavered in size as they swam between the corners of the bag. Unlike the fat gold balls that perished in our tiny bedroom tanks, these were thin and frantic. And many. There were sold by the dozen. I knew that the saltwater tank had been more of a financial commitment than my parents had bargained for, but fish-by-the-yard seemed like a far cry from a miniature shark.

“They’re feeder fish,” my father said.

This seemed wrong. Surely this was an unfortunate nickname, but they had real names, like our other fish. If I were a tiger fish, I would tease a fish called “feeder” mercilessly. Although if I were a clown fish, I’d probably keep my mouth shut.

“For what?”

“For him.” My father stepped aside. The pet store owner appeared with a portable tank. Inside was a gray stingray, pushing himself back and forth from the edges like a broken Frisbee.

Herb. Herb was the worst stingray ever.

Herb hung out unviciously at the bottom of the tank, making the sea horses look caffeinated. He was a depressive, colored a bit like a black-and-white cookie, with about the same capacity for free will. And he shed. Little gray bits of him became trapped in the sea anemones. We’d have been better off with a dress-eating giraffe. Herb was just biding his time until that great journey to the surface. If he had any inclination toward appearing majestic or graceful, he kept it to himself. His only activity was to eat, which he did rarely. Though it was a sight to behold if you happened to be in the room for it.

In the wild, stingrays will corner their prey against a piece of coral or a slab of rock. But Herb insisted on trapping the feeder fish against the glass of the tank and slurping them up through the hole in his belly while two dumbstruck little girls stood agape in their pajamas, watching nature unfold. Otherwise, he played dead at an Oscar-worthy level. One day his performance was so convincing, I thought he had willed himself to die just by staying still for too long. I went running to get my sister so that she could confirm rigor-ray-tis. Of course by then she had grown bored of Herb and, by association, me. She spent more and more time away from the house, off in some cavernous movie theater or food court with her friends. Or with her pet-less wonder of a boyfriend. I grabbed a thin gold necklace from her room and lowered it into the tank in an attempt to rouse the patient. More than waking him, I wanted him to become the graceful ribbon of the sea that was his destiny. My sister had let me stay up to watch
The Abyss
the last time she babysat. I knew how this thing was supposed to move.

I dangled the necklace into the deep, probing for life. This expedition continued for a good four seconds before I dropped it. The chain landed on a piece of salmon coral. The mineral balance of saltwater tanks is fragile. This is the reason the tank is not to be found in my parents’ home right now. After a few years, they would tire of cleaning it, of checking the thermometers, and especially of forgetting to check the thermometers. They would figure out cheaper ways for their two girls to bond. Like television. And that eventually, we’d bond ourselves with the lending of the driver’s licenses for the buying of the beer and the not telling on of the older one when she lit the garage on fire trying to smoke weed out of a Coke can.

But this was before that. The saltwater tank was pretty much it. So I scurried out of the family room to the kitchen, where I found salad tongs long enough to retrieve the necklace. But by the time I got back, the necklace had vanished. I scanned for it, tongs frozen above the surface, ready to act. It wasn’t in the coral or the gravel or the corner of the glass. It wasn’t one of my sister’s favorites, but I worried she might notice it missing from her collection. I combed through the gravel with the tongs. I could sense Herb staring at me, judging me through his invisible eyes, located somewhere above his turgid tummy. He was dead by midnight.

The hamster rarely acts alone. Similar-caliber animals tend to be present in a house if there’s a hamster upstairs. Our hamster, for instance, was accompanied by a turtle. My parents liked the idea of these two animals, so disparate in texture and temperament but tallied on the same receipt. Kind of like their children. Or the tortoise and the hare.

My sister named her turtle Fred. Because I’d use any means possible to get closer to her, I named my hamster Ginger. Plus, it worked with her coloring. Fred and Ginger were impulse pets, twin symbols of our parents’ good intentions gone wrong. They were acquired during one of those record-skipping moments in which people who have two children still manage to mix up their spawn. Upon meeting us, you would know that I am the turtle person and my sister is the hamster person. You would not be required to give birth to us to gain this insight. My sister is not especially hyper, and I am not especially slothful, although, truth be told, we’re a little of both those things. However, if there were such a thing as the Sign of the Hamster, I would not be born under it.

I used Ginger to gain access to my sister’s room, because Ginger was a hell of a lot more interesting to her than Fred was. My sister bonded with that tailless rat. I would put the plump beast in Barbie’s Corvette and have her “drive” the car down the carpeted highway and into my sister’s room. Hamster feet are quite thin, like miniature chicken feet. They’re hairless and flexible, so that if you force one to grab a plastic steering wheel at ten and two, it looks freakishly realistic. If you are ever presented with the opportunity, I suggest you take it.

But caring for Ginger wasn’t worth the price of admission to my sister’s room. I was the one who had to live with Ginger, but I was far from her ideal keeper. The wheel in her cage squeaked in circles all night long. When she gave that a rest, she’d start in on the metal ball of her water feeder. Once I sneaked down to the liquor cabinet and put a couple of drops of vodka in her water in an ineffective attempt to sedate her. More than once I covered her soiled wood chips with a layer of fresh ones.

Meanwhile, I kept a watchful eye out for Fred, inquiring about the frequency of his feedings and the clarity of his water.

“Do you think you should change it?”

“It’s supposed to get a little disgusting,” my sister would say, rescuing Ginger from the driver’s seat.

And she was right. But when the muck is so clouded you mistake a rock for your pet, you’re abusing the system. I don’t know why we didn’t switch pets. Maybe we didn’t want to hurt our parents’ feelings. Maybe we didn’t understand our parents. It was probably because of a deference I had toward my sister. Some animals have a maturity stamp, and I believe she felt it was wrong for her to own a hamster at her age. Playing with a hamster was like playing with a plastic recorder or a little sister. I didn’t see why she would feel this way. Ginger was the only one of us to drink
and
get behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Fred and Ginger died on the exact same day. Caught in star-crossed pet affection, my sister found Ginger, and I found Fred. Sad as I was for Fred, I will say that a dead turtle is easier on the eyes than a dead hamster. Their joint deaths enabled us to mourn at the dinner table under the guise of the other pet’s passing. We could air our grief out in the open as neither of their habitats had been aired out when they were alive. When we dragged ourselves upstairs after dinner, my sister cried. Then I cried. Then she kicked me out of her room.

During my formative teen years, my father’s favorite thing in the world was to joke around with visitors and guests about our blind dog. He’d claim that after the guest left, he was going to rearrange the furniture just to see what happened. Turn the ottoman a few degrees and see how she fared. The dog panted on the edge of the sofa, her coffee eyes clouded white, as if someone had dropped a dollop of cream in each and forgotten to stir. A purebred bichon frise, the dog had sudden-onset cataracts at three months. As if her being inbred wasn’t enough to put a dent in my affections, I cursed her for her genetic distance from a normal-sized canine. I lamented our inability to “get a real dog.” I had seen scrapbook pictures of a lovable golden retriever and a standard poodle towering over me as an infant. What happened to their ilk? Bichon frises are dogs for cat people. They won’t fit in a purse, but they will fit in a beach bag, which is philosophically the same thing.

In the winter, we’d let her play in the snow. We made this mistake every year. And every year she blended in so perfectly, we lost track of her just as she’d lost track of us.

How many preteen girls in America hate their dogs? It was unnatural. Should I also be pouring salt on slugs and tearing the wings off moths? I did not want to grow up to become a sociopath. So I tried to love the dog as best I could. When that failed, I could always fall back on the fact that she was never supposed to be mine.

“A puppy” had been my sister’s request. Yet the feeding and walking of this thing fell to me. Did this make it okay when I ignored her whimpers for foul-scented soft food and gave her dry instead? Did it make it okay for me to let her off the leash to go play in the street before school each morning? Did it make it okay when I’d forget to open the screen door, causing her to jump straight into it like a bird? Probably not.

“It’s not her fault,” my mother would say, slyly gesturing at the dog’s eyes, as if she could see through them.

“I don’t hate her because she’s blind,” I’d argue. “I hate her because of who she is.”

“You said a mouthful there, kiddo,” said my dad, handing me the pooper-scooper.

The bichon was a long-standing wish of my sister’s, granted just in time for her to leave for college, as was the habit with my parents. By the time you’d sufficiently hinted at something (a minimum of two years was generally required for an inanimate object, four for a living one), you had outgrown it. This led to several instances of my father providing a scavenger hunt of clues around the house, culminating in the formerly desired gifts. My mother must have feared she’d raised two rather stupid children, as the clues would have been obvious were they better timed. Instead, I’d open a note that said something like “You’re the most stable person I know!” hinting at the My Little Pony dream house I’d begged for when I was eight. Or my sister would tear open the wrapping around a can of tennis balls, indicating the purchase of tickets to a sporting event in which she had shown no recent interest. She’d crack the can open, searching for a more tailored clue, only to recoil at the scent. Then she’d hand the balls to me—my parents’ actual tennis-playing child. Ever the mastermind behind this process, my father would grin with anticipation. And we were compelled to reciprocate the expression as a placeholder while we scoured our brains for the answer, eyes as glazed over and useless as the dog’s.