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The fish keep dying.
First, Gold Dubloon, a prize from summer camp, who thrashed around and turned sort of gray and swam upside down in manic circles until my husband urged me to take the children to another room. Then his replacement, Scooby Doo, who enacted a similar twitchy death dance on our bookshelf while my husband and I ate a silent dinner and tried not to watch.
We waited a few weeks, traveled a bit, came home, and during the first week of school made a Monday afternoon pilgrimage to the pet store for two fighting fish, one black and one orange. We christened them Scooby Too and Scrappy, and the babysitter pronounced them “D-E-A-dead” when I got home from work Tuesday.
LittleMan has myriad theories about our fish and their failure to thrive. “The problem is our fishbowl is too small,” he suggests.
“I wonder if it’s because they came from two different tanks,” I hypothesize. “They are exposing each other to foreign fish germies, kind of like going to a new school.”
“Or maybe it’s because we don’t have rocks in the bottom of our fishbowl?” LittleMan replies. “Most good fishbowls have rocks.”
“It’s that pet store,” declares my husband. “We need to try a new pet store.”
“Let’s give it some time,” I plead. “Then you and LittleMan can try a new pet store, and put some rocks in the bowl.” In the meantime, I rearrange the bookshelf and move the fishbowl to storage.
Unfortunately, childhood is rife with opportunities to win fragile, possibly sick pets. October finds us at LittleMan’s school Bazaar, a weekend-long carnival with the requisite dunk tank, mini-golf, and fishbowl toss. I volunteer as a room parent for most of the weekend, managing the kiddie games in the lower playground. My husband gamely shepherds our two children through a long day of festivities.
As closing time draws near on Saturday and anyone with any sense takes their small kids home to bed, I hear a breathless voice coming from the upper playground and look up to see LittleMan hanging off the fence above me, silhouetted in the lowering sun. “Hey Mommy!” he shouts. “Daddy won me TWO goldfish and they came from the same tank so they can’t die now!”
Over LittleMan’s head, my husband gives me a grinning two-thumbs-up. My heart sinks. “That’s awesome, LittleMan!” I yell back, then mutter to the women sitting next to me: “Those fish will be dead by morning.”
Fast forward an hour, when we make our bumpy way home through North Beach in the mad throes of Italian Heritage Weekend. The two hapless fish slosh around in their plastic cup, no doubt experiencing some fish equivalent of shock and fear. The kids are exhausted but wired on jumpy houses and too many Tootsie Pops. Bedtime will either be a sudden crash or a long, sugar-fueled battle. My husband and I talk strategy in murmured tones. I declare that I would kill for a beer.
But first things first: setting up the fish in their new home is non-negotiable. The lights haven’t even been turned on and we pull the fishbowl out of the storage closet and fill it from the Brita pitcher in the fridge, figuring purified water is our better bet. We add the de-chlorination drops. We wait a few minutes, preheat the oven for our own late meal, ready the kids’ room for bath and bedtime. The fish hunker down at the bottom of their cup, waiting for the next assault. The orange fish twitches its tail. The white fish drifts, ominously.
Finally, with the bath run and waiting, I transfer the fish to the fishbowl while LittleMan looks on expectantly, chirping words of encouragement to his new pets. The white fish rolls over instantly and floats to the surface. “He DIED?!?” demands LittleMan, more flabbergasted than sad.
“He wasn’t the strong one,” offers my husband gently.
“We’ll feed the orange one tomorrow morning,” I say.
“He’ll have more space now.” LittleMan’s brave declaration makes us hope even harder.
“We can get another friend for him tomorrow,” encourages my husband. “First stop, I promise.”
Later, as I put the kids to bed, my husband goes online to research the water. (The water that kills fish. That we use to hydrate our children. Not that I’m silently panicking about that on some level. Because obviously, I’m not.)
Our water is too warm. Our water has too much chlorine. Our water needs at least 24 hours for the drops to take effect. A single goldfish requires at least a 10-gallon tank.
Some people out there in InternetLand take their goldfish SERIOUSLY.
I am not one of those people. My nameless childhood goldfish — who, for the record, lived for eight years in a bowl in my room that often went forgotten for weeks at a time while I was away at college, and survived on the green slime that developed on the glass — did not require all these care steps.
They just don’t make them like they used to. (Or maybe the water is just more deadly now. Again, totally not panicking.)
On Sunday I head back to the lower yard and my husband and the kids have another go at the goldfish toss, where my husband spends a few extra dollars to secure an extra-energetic fish. “We got another orange one!” LittleMan calls to me. “And he’s bigger and stronger than the ones yesterday!”
“I worked hard for this one,” says my husband, all business, a reassuring hand on my back. “I think this is The One.”
I carry the cup home myself, past the Columbus Day Parade, walking slowly and carefully to minimize the sloshing. We ready another, separate bowl for the new fish, de-chlorinate for at least an hour, transfer gently. He dies before the 49er game ends. We decide to take the kids out for dinner.
On Monday, the last surviving Bazaar fish takes a rest on the new rocks at the bottom of the bowl and does not wake up. For the first time in seven fish, LittleMan cries on his kitchen stool and I wrap my arms around him. There isn’t anything to say.
No more, I write to my husband in an email.
No more, he replies.
At breakfast, Babygirl points to the bookshelf. “I wanna look at the fishies!” she insists.
“They DIED, Babygir,” replies LittleMan. In their place, I have framed a terrific picture of LittleMan and his dad, with his godbrother and his dad, on a raft on the Truckee River. It takes up most of the space where the fishbowl used to be. LittleMan turns back to his yogurt, asks if we can get a cookie after school. And so we move on.
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