Help Me, Jacques Cousteau

by Gil Adamson

  Rosalie jumps in to save me and tells Ginger to lighten up, what’s the point in getting upset, and those are the last words I hear, because I tune out again. I know that if Rosalie wasn’t here, Ginger would be pulling out the big guns and talking about my parents, maybe saying I’m unbalanced because of them, or maybe that it’s my fault what’s happening to them, and therefore to me. Everything she says is familiar, and it all translates into You are getting on people’s nerves. I watch the cook scrape the grill with a spatula, the oil rolling up under it, the thin hiss of metal on metal.

  My mother comes into the living room and looks at me and Andrew. Andrew is reading the TV Guide, sequentially, as if it were a novel, and I’m spying on the Drapers. Mr. Draper is home and I can see he’s throwing sofa cushions around. I wonder why a man would come home early from work to do that. I stop and look up at my mum. She has another fish book.

  “This is for when you fish-sit.”

  “Oh … yeah,” I say. “When is that?”

  “I can’t remember, but I’ll call her and ask.” There is the sound of something smashing next door. Mum bends down and looks through the curtains. “Maybe I’ll wait a while,” she says.

  I stare at my mother in disbelief. This is incredible.

  “I have to fish-sit for the Drapers?!” I say. But she’s looking at Andrew where he sits, his face four inches from Thursday night.

  “What are you reading, dear?” she asks and strokes his hair. Without looking up, Andrew raises the TV Guide.

  It’s night. On top of being a zombie all day, I can’t sleep properly either. I wake up every hour or so to seethe with frustration. I look through the binoculars but there is never anything to see anywhere. Why can’t these people do something interesting? Aren’t there neighbourhoods where people are up all night killing each other? Tonight, I decide to do something useful. I read about fish.

  Fish are pitiful pets, really, but I can see why someone might want a tank in their house; some of them are lovely. There are Japanese fighting fish with their long tails and mutating colours. Glass catfish that are completely see-through. Mollies. Tetras. There are sharks the size of a stick of gum. Hatchetfish with their fat bellies. Piranhas with underslung jaws, which can grow to the size of trash-can lids. I gaze at photos of iridescent scales and emotionless eyes and small snapping mouths. I gaze, half dreaming, at photos of dissected fish, the mushroomlike frill of gills, the strange little sacs and organs all balled up together. There is a plastic ruler, measuring the wreckage; a white pointer, indicating nothing.

  Andrew comes into my room and we sit together on my bed with our backs against the wall, reading. Neither of us turns a page for half an hour, but our eyes move, wandering over lines of print. Andrew still won’t talk. My mother kisses his hair; my father squats and whispers to him and presses his forehead to Andrew’s; nothing works.

  Tuesday, 9 a.m.: excellent. The most excellent things about today are that my mother is calling the movers and that I have the twelve-minute run at school. Ginger claims she has her period, but the two phys-ed teachers stand in the door to their office, not buying it. They’re both huge, spongy, and blond, and they wear stopwatches that hang to their groins. One is a man, the other a woman, and no one could ever see the difference between them. Rosalie and I get dressed while Ginger begs for her life. She’s just going to have to hurry in the end and get into her gym clothes like the rest of us. Marty comes in, her jean vest looking even tighter than usual, and we all stare at her as we change. She strips quickly, and a dozen pairs of eyes gaze openly at her body, knowing she will start last and finish first. With a body like that she could walk through walls. Marty is my friend these days because, as she puts it, I’m a freak like her.

  Lilac bushes and mock orange float past over an undulating field of nausea. I feel like I have needles in my lungs. Every time I run into the sun I feel ten pounds heavier, and every time I pass under a tree I feel human again. When it’s over I sit in the change room and sleep with my eyes open. As people dress and leave, two doors swing open, then swing closed, and a sliver of the hallway can be seen. Marty is out there waiting for me, smoking.

  When I’m ready, we go for fries and gravy. We smoke and eat at the same time, which grosses out the waiter. As usual when I am with Marty, I chatter like an idiot and she listens to me in amused silence. I make up weird facts and theories about things, such as that curly hair means your mother didn’t get enough sleep; these are things that I know would bug Ginger. Marty almost never talks; she gives me room. Marty has failed school for two years already; she’s older than any of my friends and she lives by herself in an apartment. Once in a while her twin brother, who looks nothing like her, pulls into town on his bike and she disappears for a week or two with him.

  I grab Marty’s cigarette and finish it while she fishes another out of the pack and lights it. No one has seen Marty for quite a while, and she’s made no mention of her brother, which is intriguing. When I ask her where she’s been lately, she grabs the butt out of my mouth, stubs it out.

  “You’re tired,” she says. “Go home and sleep.”

  But I can’t go to sleep. Today is the day I have to go over and meet the Drapers, get instructions about their stupid fish, and my mother has made me promise to thank them for the jam Mrs. Draper made.

  I drag Andrew along for moral support and he follows me like a sleepwalker. When Mrs. Draper meets me at the door, her face jumps out at me, younger than I thought and more friendly too. I’ve stared at that face many times but never seen it up close. Andrew glares at Mrs. Draper through his glasses until she invites us in and takes us around the house to look at what she calls her “babies.”

  There are tanks everywhere, built into walls, standing in hallways, a big long one separating the living room from the dining room, and all of them have sheets of paper taped to the glass. On the papers are written instructions, the names of the species of fish, and pet names with quote marks around them. “Dingus.” “Ralphy.” “Slow Learner.” In the fridge is a canister of brine shrimp and lettuce for the shark, Arnie, and a shallow dish of larvae for the rest of the fish. I look at the larvae lying inert beside the Parmesan cheese. I make a mental note to tell my mother to throw out Mrs. Draper’s homemade jam.

  Mr. Draper keeps his distance from me but I can smell booze on him from where I am, a stink like orange juice that has been left in the sun. Andrew, who Mrs. Draper tried in vain to butter up, is staring now at the lists of names and dates, the feeding and saline instructions, as if he’s committing them to memory. I have to drag him by the elbow as we go from tank to tank. Every time I look at Mr. Draper, he looks over at his wife with a shallow, wary grin. She’s leaning close to the bright blue tanks and gazing intently at the fish where they swim in slow, pointless patterns. Then she tries to show me a sick crab, which I can’t find among all the greenery and pebbles and toy castles; everything I see turns out to be a rock. She tells me that if the crab dies while they are away, I shouldn’t blame myself.

  A car horn goes off in the driveway and Mr. Draper says, “Jeff.” A furious look comes over Mrs. Draper’s face and she hustles us out the door, making me promise to thank my parents for offering my services. Andrew doesn’t need to be pushed and is already halfway back to our house. The Drapers wave goodbye to us and wave hello to Jeff. I recognize him; he has red hair, is not as thin as I’d thought, wears sandals, and he has a pair of mean blue eyes. I pause on our porch to see Mr. Draper give Jeff a long, affectionate bear hug and slap him on the back.

  “I think that man is their son,” I say to my mother. She’s in the living room, tossing the cat in the air and saying “Yikes!” over and over. The cat is as limp as a doll and he’s purring.

  “What man?”

  “The one you thought was having an affair with Mrs. Draper,” I say.

  “Shh!” She looks absurdly at the wall as if they might be able to hear us through it. “Really?”

  “The husband gave him a
big hug.”

  “Well, they could all three be … you know …”

  Marty is whistling into the empty school hallway. She says the only way to find out about the Drapers’ visitor is to come right out and ask Mrs. Draper. This is typical of Marty, who has the social graces of a snake. I can picture Mrs. Draper standing on her doorstep stunned, and then fainting. The only surefire way to find out is to sic my dad on the Drapers, but Dad has opinions about whom he will bother pumping for info, and he thinks the Drapers are creepy.

  “Fish,” he has said. “Fish is typical of that couple.”

  I’m thinking about that when Mr. Butcher comes down the hall and I elbow Marty. She lowers her arm, in which she has a cigarette. A No Smoking sign hangs in the cloud over our heads. Marty is taller than me, so Butcher doesn’t see me until he is quite close. The look on his face changes then, from nervous to blank. “No smoking, ladies,” he says as he passes us, and after a second Marty snorts two pencils of smoke from her nostrils.

  By the time I’m in school the next morning I understand that I’m disappearing again, like a TV signal bizzing into a simple white dot. One minute I’m by the window in G44 with an untouched test in front of me and the sun is shining through and I can see my hands lit up on my lap. The next minute I am in a basement hallway, on my way to another class, looking at a pipe. Rosalie grabs my belt loop and drags me to art class. She got bored waiting as I stared at a pair of initials gouged in the drywall next to the pipe. I don’t know whose initials they are. Just two people. Maybe it’s all over between them, maybe they aren’t even in school anymore. I tell Rosalie we should scratch a crazy date in there, 1902, and see if anyone notices. It’s exactly the kind of anal little thing that annoys her about me. She shoves me into a chair, then crosses the room to get away from me. I watch the teacher’s legs come out of her shorts and her elbows that never straighten.

  It’s only the second night I have to feed the fish, and I’m already in the habit of leaving the lights off when I walk through the Drapers’ house. I like the way the blue tanks light up everything and shadows of fish move like clouds over the walls and carpet. The tank lights are on timers and the water is heated, so all I have to do is check the temperature, use the saline meter to make sure the water is salty enough, and give the fish a tiny amount of food. Fish eat practically nothing. I open the wall units at the top, slide back the grill, and drop in a pinch of food. It’s a foul-smelling kind of lumpy mess. Some of it floats on the surface and some of it drifts down through the water in clots. When I get up on the chair, the fish go wild and they dart at each other, stab right into the air at my fingers, and shoot from the top of the tank to the bottom, scattering the little blue stones. The crabs tuck in under their shells and the snails sucker themselves tight against the glass, as if a bomb was going off.

  Arnie the shark stops moving when I come upstairs and into the hallway, his lidless eye looking at me sideways. He’s only as big as my thumb, but I think of him as dangerous. The books say sharks refuse to mate in tanks; they’d rather chew each other up. Arnie drifts closer to the glass, staring out at my white T-shirt suspended in the gloomy hall. I drop a lettuce leaf in and he stabs and nips at it. The leaf flips and drifts in the lighted water like a sheet carried away on the wind.

  Later, I sit with my feet up on the dining room table and watch the fish or spy through the front window with my binoculars. I have a whole different perspective on the neighbourhood from the Draper house — I can see clearly into different rooms. At about nine-thirty, the lady with the cat usually calls someone on the phone. She pulls her hair around and looks at the split ends up close. She points her finger at the air like she’s giving an invisible person a lecture. My guess is that it’s her sister on the phone. I bet there’s a lot of fibbing going on, sentences that start with: “And I told him, I said: ‘Look! …’”

  Soon, the cat lady hangs up, eats out of a small tub of ice cream, and watches TV. Then her cat gets up on the coffee table and licks her toes. It hunches over, looking urgent. I can hardly stand it — I have to get up and scratch my scalp and walk around the room in the dark. I also learn that zit-cream boy shaves his armpits. Maybe he’s a speed swimmer or something. Maybe not. Then there’s a teenager I think is the Bison’s daughter. She smokes, leaning out her window, and stubs the butts out on the shingles and lets them roll into the eavestrough. Downstairs I can see Mrs. Bison cutting things up: fish, carrots, sausages, frozen lasagna, hunks of grey meat. Mrs. Bison is good with a knife.

  But it’s all so dull, really. And so it occurs to me to look around inside the Drapers’ house. They have a few sexy books on the shelf above the bed, books with creative suggestions, but they’ve kept these next to a medical dictionary with horror-show diagrams and photos. It’s a combination guaranteed to put the idea of sex right out of your head. I look in drawers, open the bathroom cabinet and inspect bottles and clippers and foams. But it’s a bleak search. No rubbers or sex devices. No drugs. No embarrassing poems or letters. No medications for anything gross or sad. I spend a long time and come up with nothing.

  I make my way downstairs in the dark, Arnie whipping back and forth in a panic as I pass, and I grab my binoculars and head for the door. But something stops me. I don’t really want to go home these days; I don’t know what to expect when I come in the door — maybe one of my parents fuming silently, or talking to Andrew, trying to communicate with Mars. I stand in the Drapers’ hall and look through the binoculars at our front door. The doorknob appears, big as a pumpkin, motionless and strange. I swing the binoculars round, trees dissolving, colours and shapes blurring and reforming into the outline of my father.

  “Dad,” I say.

  He is standing in the backyard of our house, in the dark, with his hands in his pockets. He’s just standing there, thinking. And suddenly I see my father for what he truly is: kind, confused, and moving day by day into a future he can no longer elude.

  HIPPIES

  ……………I’M SITTING ON THE ROOF OF my house with my legs hanging over the edge. I’m squinting, taking turns putting one running shoe, then the other, over the parked cars below. Four roofs over there’s an orange cat with a fat head regarding me balefully. I’ve never seen him before. Maybe he lives up here, eats birds out of the air. He swivels his big head and looks down at the sidewalk, where someone is standing.

  “Oh my God!” cries a voice.

  It’s Mrs. Baze. She’s four foot something, wears funny hats, and has badly crossed eyes, one of which she has angled up in my direction. She moves her head around to get me fixed with the other eye, then legs it up the steps and into my house.

  “Uh-oh,” I say. “Mrs. Baze and her gaze.” That’s one of my mother’s.

  Our TV aerial creaks in the wind as I lie back and let the sun fall on me. The cat steps away over the gravel and soft tar.

  Sometimes I come up here at night and look out over the city, at the twinkling lights and the cars going down the streets. Planes pass overhead, invisible except for the flashing lights, the tiny faraway hiss of engine. Looking up, I can feel the house sinking under me and the soft black sky spreading out like something alive.

  The best thing is when people go down the alleyway and I can drop pebbles. They look at the ground for a while, cogs turning in their heads; finally, they look up. I have to laugh. I see people walking along below, swinging their arms. My father passes down the alleyway with the lawn mower, and he tells me to cut it out, without looking up, without stopping.

  But Dad doesn’t really care. And there’s the porch roof one storey down, so why worry about me falling? But a kid on the roof is the worst thing for Mrs. Baze. I feed her idea that young people are wild. For example, she’s convinced that hippies congregate in the park out back of her house and throw their empty bottles of hooch over her fence. It might have happened once, but in her mind, the debris is always flying — it’s a neighbourhood emergency. The world worries Mrs. Baze: she sees trouble and inconvenie
nce everywhere. She takes her worries to the police, the firemen, the hydro guys, door-to-door salesmen, her vet, any neighbour who stands still too long. I’ve seen her in the Safeway, bending over the bags of sugar, saying, “This can’t be the price!” Boys in red aprons just stamp the goods and shuffle along the floor away from her; they keep stamping, keep shuffling.

  “Don’t let her catch you again, or I’ll kill you,” my dad says. He and Andrew are scraping at pots that got burned during one of our disastrous dinners. We all cook together now that my mother is gone; it’s a daily duty. This fact bugs my mother so much I have to make sure never to mention food in front of her.

  “Why didn’t he think of that when I was living there?” she said when she first found out.

  Dad’s unusually pissed off today; maybe it’s the heat. He hacks at a snarl of rock-hard spaghetti.

  “I had to go look at her birds to shut her up,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe the stink.”

  Mrs. Baze has a knack for being present when birds get swiped by cars. She takes them to the vet, sparing no expense to save the dwindling life. The vet begs and reasons with her, but it does no good. Once the vet kept an unconscious patient overnight for “observation,” and then put it down in secret. But Mrs. Baze caught on to that. Now she follows him into the back room, watches his every move while the vet keeps up a vain monologue on “prolonging the inevitable.”

  “I’d change vets,” she told my dad, “but this one gives me a discount.”

  Mrs. Baze has an old parrot that has been with her for ages, and two badly addled pigeons, Valentine and Bigs. None of them flies farther than sofa to chair; Bigs walks into walls.

  It’s Tuesday. A stifling, humid day when the trees droop and the street seems to fade into nothing halfway down. Andrew sprays me with the hose and then I spray him. I hold the dog down in the mud while Andrew soaks his coat, and the dog groans under my weight, snapping irritably at the stream of water. Dad comes outside, so we go after him, and it doesn’t go over well. He stomps inside to change his pants.