Fish Heads and Duck Skin

by Lindsey Salatka

  “Wait one moment,” said my comrade and then spoke to the man in a stern voice while he filled out a second triplicate, this one half the size of the first. When he was finished, he tugged out the pink copy, also with great care, and slid it toward me.

  “Take pink paper to that desk to pay,” she said, pointing to the only desk in the lobby we hadn’t visited yet which apparently housed the cashier. “Then take blue paper to third floor.”

  My shoulders sunk as I saw the line for the cashier curve around the desk and turn at the wall. “Please, is there any way to speed up this process?” I pleaded. “My husband is in a lot of pain.”

  “Not much longer now, okay?” she said brightly, as though we were waiting in line for Space Mountain. Then she leaned down and squeezed my sleeping kids’ feet.

  I walked over to the cashier’s desk with notably less bounce and enthusiasm and pulled another number. I looked at the monitor; twenty-three spots until our turn.

  “What’s that?” I whispered two hours later, eyes bulging from my head as I clutched our third paper number du jour. Daniel moaned softly in the chair next to me. Piper was taking laps around the waiting area with her eyes closed. Lila blinked her big blue eyes and played with her toes, entertaining throngs of idle sneezers.

  We’d finally made it to the third-floor x-ray department, which felt both like significant progress and no progress at all. I felt despair enter my throat and begin to seep toward my chest when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a small movement in an empty gurney parked against the far wall in the x-ray waiting room. Then I rejected the ludicrous notion—movement in an empty gurney! Until I saw it again, one tiny motion.

  “Oh my God, Daniel. I think there’s a cat in that gurney.”

  “What?” he mumbled from his pain-induced haze.

  “There’s an animal in that gurney. I think it’s a black cat; I’m going to look. Holler if you see your number come up, okay?”

  He didn’t answer. I stood, feeling the vinyl chair peel away from the backs of my thighs like a sweaty band-aid. I tiptoed forward and poked my head over the corner of the gurney. I stood abruptly and quickly walked back.

  “Holy CRAP,” I said.

  “What? What is it?” Daniel asked, opening his eyes.

  “It’s a baby,” I said. “There’s a baby in that gurney.”

  “A human baby?”

  “Yes, a newborn human baby. Where’s her mother?” I stood and looked around. “Daniel, I don’t think anyone’s in charge of that baby. I just noticed her, and we’ve been here for a while. No one else has gone close to that gurney.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions. Her mom is probably in the bathroom. Or getting an x-ray. I bet she’s on her way back to her as we speak.”

  I looked at him, feeling the furrow between my eyebrows deepen. “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  “That does it,” I said, three minutes later. I stood and put my hands on my hips. “I’ve waited long enough. No one’s on their way back to that baby. I’m going to find someone to tell me what’s going on.”

  Daniel closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Needless to say, there was not a lot of English being spoken in the X-ray department. Or anywhere. But I’m nothing if not persistent, and so finally, an old guy who’d played peekaboo with Lila earlier said he could translate for me. He was confined to a wheelchair and his head was wrapped in gauze. I pushed him toward the reception window where he struck up an argument.

  “What did he say?” I asked him once the yelling tapered off.

  “He say baby have no mama. No baba. This morning baby left at back door of hospital.”

  “What? But why? Just look at her! She’s gorgeous!” I swallowed and pointed emphatically at the gurney where she lay, blinking, not making a peep, her cheeks pink, her head covered in an explosion of black fuzz.

  He shrugged. “Girl baby,” he said, as if that was some sort of explanation.

  “But girl babies are good! I have two girl babies!”

  “Yes.” He looked disappointed for me.

  “Can you ask the man where this baby will go? Who will take care of her?” My mind jumped to the women I knew at home, so many of them battling infertility. I was all too familiar with that struggle myself. And here lay this perfect baby, unwanted, a casualty of her sex. I could have named five women off the top of my head who would give their right arm to love this baby. I leaned over and grabbed the vinyl pads of the wheelchair armrests, bringing my face close to that of my translator’s. “You tell the man I want this baby. I can take her, today.” I glanced at Daniel after I said this. His eyes were closed again. He had no idea what I was doing, but that didn’t bother me in the slightest. In my naive little fantasy world, my commitment to finding a family for this child was all I needed. Women all over the globe yearned for this unwanted child lying in front of me, swaddled in a rumple of sheets, so quiet and all alone. She could have a good life, this gurney baby; I could bring that to her. I felt energized as I waited for my translator’s permission.

  “Baby stay here,” he said after speaking to the man at the window.

  “What? No! For how long will she stay here? And then where will she go?”

  He shrugged.

  “Can you please ask the man?”

  He shook his head. “Before, I ask him; he say he don’t know. Later someone pick up baby.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!” Spit flew from my mouth as I yelled. “No one’s even paying attention to her, and I can help her now! I can find her a good family!” I wiped my chin and burst into furious tears.

  Daniel shuffled up. “My number.” He pointed with his good arm at the monitor, either not noticing or ignoring my distress. I turned to look at the monitor, but my attention was drawn to the red sign above the door behind it—Emergency Exit. My tears evaporated as my brain worked a plan.

  “Yeah, okay. See you in a bit,” I said. I didn’t tell him that once he was finished, I would enlist his help to steal this baby.

  17.

  I didn’t steal the baby. As the plan was hatching in my mind, the girls suddenly, urgently needed to go to the bathroom. When we returned, the baby and gurney were gone. I burst into tears as Daniel told me a woman in a white outfit had just come and pushed the baby down the hall and around the corner. I sobbed and tore at my hair for a while as Daniel looked on, glassy-eyed. Apparently, while prepping him for his x-ray, they had given him something for the pain. He told me in a jumble of thick-tongued words to get over myself; he needed to wait in one line to get a cast, and I needed to get downstairs with the kids to wait in another line to pay for it.

  “You’ll need this,” he said as he dug a crumpled pink slip out of his shorts pocket with his good hand.

  “I don’t want to go back down there by myself,” I said, sniffing, wiping my eyes with my t-shirt.

  “You won’t be alone; you’ll have the kids. Besides, if we don’t divide and conquer, we’ll be in this dump all night,” he said. “And, today’s—”

  Right then Lila started crying.

  The sweat inside my fist dampened the fourth deli number of the day as I closed my eyes and tried to picture my happy place. I drew a blank. I eventually paid twenty dollars for a cast I would have paid 100 times more for had it been available ten hours earlier, when we’d first arrived at this abysmal place.

  I felt a draining sensation in my heart as we pulled away from the hospital. I looked at Daniel and my eyes filled. There we sat, he, broken-armed and I, broken-hearted. Our legs were touching, but I felt miles away from him. That was when I realized what he’d been trying to tell me earlier—it was his birthday.

  I took a deep breath and attempted to sound upbeat. “How should we celebrate?” I smiled at him and then looked out the window. It was 4 p.m., and our taxi idled on a raised, six-lane road in a mass of black-cloud spewing, horn-blaring, immobile mayhem.

  Daniel scratched at his cast and turned toward me. “You know what I re
ally want? A good Chinese meal,” he said. “I know we’ve been avoiding it because the smells make you gag and the mysterious meats—”

  “Because I don’t want to eat somebody’s dog, Daniel.”

  “Just to clarify, no culture eats their pets.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you wouldn’t be eating somebody’s dog; you’d just be eating a dog.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. “That’s not comforting.”

  He nudged me with his good elbow. “I can’t eat microwaved pizza from the Century Bar again. Please? I promise not to order from the dog section of the menu, okay?”

  “Sure.” I nodded at him. “Whatever you want.” It was his birthday after all and so far, all he’d gotten was an arm wrapped in twenty pounds of plaster, an old school cast from the seventies. The back of his neck was already pink and chapping from the weight of his cast in the pleather sling.

  “Do you know what restaurant you want to go to?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I could call Richard—”

  “Wait, I have a better idea.” I grabbed my phone and dialed Kristy.

  “Yo! New kid!” she sang into the phone.

  “Quick question, Kristy. I want to take Daniel to dinner for his birthday tonight. Can you recommend a decent Chinese place walking distance from our apartment?”

  “If I tell you, can we come?” Kristy asked. “It’s Saturday, which means we’re all just sitting around, pushing each other’s buttons.”

  “Of course! That’ll be fun.”

  18.

  “This restaurant has the best duck in all of Shanghai,” Kristy’s husband, Andrew announced in a British accent so thick that, initially, I wasn’t sure he was speaking English.

  I cleared my throat and looked at the fish tank next to me. It hadn’t been cleaned in perhaps a decade. It didn’t smell, or at least I couldn’t smell it over the cigarette smoke. When a hostess approached Andrew, he beckoned for us to follow him.

  We walked by row after row of tables, each covered in a maroon tablecloth and under their own dusty brass chandelier. When we got to our table, Andrew directed everyone to their seats.

  “You should sit here.” Andrew looked at me and smiled, patting the chair on the other side of him. “I can help you order.”

  “Doesn’t Kristy know how to order?” I looked at Kristy, trying to sound casual, to keep the begging tone from my voice. He seemed friendly enough, but I had a pounding headache and didn’t want to strain to understand someone. I did that all day long.

  Kristy shook her head. “He’s way better. Plus, you and I should be on either side of the kids. You know, in the interest of containment.”

  “True,” I said. I felt uncelebratory.

  Daniel sat on the other side of Andrew, his giant cast resting between them. The girls and I had decorated his cast when we got back to the apartment from the hospital. It boasted a large purple castle adorned with many red flags, a moat, a drawbridge, several upside-down Ws (a.k.a. flying birds), and two pink princesses. Plaster had its upsides, or at least, an upside.

  Piper had already unleashed herself from the stroller and plopped into a chair next to Jeremy. They stared at each other for a while, sniffing. Then Piper poked Jeremy’s arm and smiled, perhaps because it wasn’t broken. He looked confused at first but then poked her arm and smiled back.

  Jeremy turned to look, first at Andrew, then at Kristy. “Mama, I can please go look fish with him?”

  Andrew responded first. “Look at the fish, Jeremy. And Piper is a her, not a him.”

  “With her, with her! At the fish! Please, Baba!” Jeremy bounced in his chair.

  Piper crossed her arms and shook her head. “I don’t want to look at the fish,” she grumbled, a straight-up lie, one I recognized from my own DNA. She just wanted the fish-viewing to be her idea.

  “I go with me then, okay Mama?” Jeremy said.

  “I’ll go by myself,” corrected Andrew.

  “Duì de,” said Jeremy, nodding.

  “Don’t go out the door,” said Kristy.

  “Shénme?” Jeremy said.

  “Bùyào cóng nàgè mén chūqù!” Kristy barked.

  “Hǎo de, Mama,” Jeremy said and ran between the tables toward the front of the restaurant. I pulled Lila onto my lap.

  “What’d you tell him?” I asked.

  “Not to leave,” Kristy said.

  Andrew exhaled. “That’s the downside of local schooling—if you want them to follow instructions, you need to say them in Chinese in the loud, stern voice a Chinese teacher would use.”

  “Wow, that’s something else,” Daniel said.

  “The language acquisition is eventually supposed to even out, at which point they’ll speak both languages fluently,” Kristy said.

  “When does that happen?” I asked.

  “It depends on the child,” Kristy said. “Most kids Jeremy’s age are already there. Some of them switch between three or four languages depending on who they’re talking to. But Jeremy just seems more confused by all of it.”

  “He’ll get there,” Andrew said, skimming the menu pages. “I’ll order duck for all of us plus a few other plates since I can see we’re getting quite hungry.”

  Daniel said, “Oh man, thank you, I could eat a horse.”

  “Really? Because I think they have horse here.” He skipped ahead a few pages.

  Daniel looked at me nervously. “It was just a figure of speech.”

  “I’m familiar with the figure of speech; I just wasn’t sure how adventurous you might be feeling.”

  I cleared my throat. “On the adventurous scale? We’re a one. Maybe closer to a zero than a one. Mainly because this,” I waved my hands in the air, “this whole thing is an adventure. So I’d rather keep the menu unexciting if at all possible.” I opened my menu. “I can’t read this.” I closed the menu, dropped it back on the table, and dropped my chin into my hand, moping.

  “What are you looking for?” Andrew asked, leaning over.

  “You read characters?” I asked him.

  “Yes, well, menu characters and street signs,” he said.

  I paused and looked down. “This will probably sound strange …”

  “Oh?” Andrew said, his smile fading slightly.

  “I know this is a Chinese food place—”

  “Not just a Chinese food place, the Chinese food place!” Andrew laughed and drummed the table with his index fingers.

  “It’s just that, I’m not crazy about Asian food, and I’d give anything for a salad. Nothing elaborate, just your basic side salad.”

  “But this—”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I raised my hand and smiled. “I’ll try the food you order, but it’s been a rough day and it’s really warm and smoky in here. I just feel like crunching down on a fresh piece of cold lettuce.”

  Andrew frowned. “In China, they don’t eat raw vegetables.”

  “I know, I know, and I don’t mean to be high maintenance, but since this restaurant is more upscale than any place we’ve been so far, I was hoping they could accommodate my craving.”

  “It’s really not a good idea,” he said as the waitress walked up and stood between us.

  I craned my neck around her waist and smiled. “Thanks, Andrew, I so appreciate it.”

  When Andrew went to the bathroom and Kristy took a phone call, Daniel came over and squatted between the girls. “You okay?” he asked softly as he attempted to position his cast between the chargers.

  “What? Yeah, I’m great. I just asked Andrew to order me a salad.”

  “A salad? Do they even make those here?”

  “I’m pretty sure they do.”

  “Tina …”

  “Hey, what are these little things?” I tilted a large white plastic bowl that had been plunked on the table toward myself. It was filled with what looked like a mixture of peanuts and small, unidentifiable silver objects the same size as the peanuts b
ut flatter. I picked out a few of the nuts to sample. “I’m not sure—”

  Piper hollered, “Mommy don’t hog it!” She pulled on the lip of the bowl, nearly toppling it.

  “I won’t hog if you won’t grab,” I said and held the bowl for her. She reached in with both hands and smashed the contents into her mouth.

  “What are these silver things?” I passed the bowl to Daniel. “Bleh, they’re really salty. They almost taste like—”

  “Fish heads,” Daniel said, holding one up to the light.

  “Holy crap!” I wiped my tongue with my napkin.

  “Look, Piper!” Daniel took a fish head and air-swam it onto her plate. “I’m delicious!” he said in a Donald Duck voice.

  “They’re so cute, Daddy! And yummy!” She grabbed the nut bowl and deposited it in her lap, wrapping one arm around it for protection as Lila screamed.

  “You can have the bowl later,” I said to Lila, patting her chubby fist as she pounded it on the table.

  “No, she can’t,” Piper mumbled as she hunched over the bowl, picking out the fish heads and creating a stack of them on her plate. “There are millions and millions of fish heads in here, Daddy! And look, this one has a body!” She picked it up and held it an inch from her nose. She made her voice squeaky and said, “Hello there, Mr. Fish, how are you today?” She switched to her deep voice. “Well, I’d be better if I was just a fish head. This body’s too heavy.” Back to squeaky, “Well here, let me fix that for you.” She ripped the head from the body, tossing the body onto her plate and the head into her mouth. “Look! It’s raining fish heads!” she proclaimed, picking up a pile and sprinkling half of it around her plate. “And even in my mouth!” she dropped the other half onto her tongue, looked up, chewed, and smiled.