Spring! The season of new life and rebirth! Unless, of course you’re a goldfish in our home, in which case spring is a time of death, plain and simple. Last spring, the death knell rang for the pet we’d come to know ironically as Survivor-Fish, as he joined his brethren on the other side. The good and bad news is that there were a lot of brethren to join—at least four fish from our house alone.
It’s not that we don’t take good care of our goldfish. Our fish are exceptionally well-maintained; their bellies are kept full, their water is changed regularly and the landscape of their tank is designed to please, with shells and rocks and ceramic scuba divers. Our house is a marine life paradise…except for the occasional, but fatal, close encounters engineered by our daughter.
Seconda likes to sleep with the fishes. Literally.
Let me clarify up front that Seconda, who is five now, hasn’t slept with a fish in years. The fish-out-of-water missions were executed way back in the days of yore when she was three, and thus, a raving lunatic. Also in her defense, her acts, though fatal, were motivated by good. She thought her pets might like a cuddle.
See, Seconda loves animals. I don’t mean that in a generic sense, like she casually enjoys them or finds them amusing. I mean that she feels a profound affinity for them, even more than what she feels for human beings. Her love of animals does not discriminate on the basis of species either. One summer afternoon at the Mermaid Day Parade, I turned to find Seconda’s tiny shoulders draped with a gigantic, green-and-black snake. Not a stuffed toy but a real, live black mamba or anaconda or some such terrifying viper. My husband, David, was snapping a picture of Sec’s smiling face while the animal’s owner, who was holding a bucket full of snakes (not, I’m guessing, the approved way to transport your serpents in public), gave my daughter instructions. He was probably telling her something along the lines of, “That’s great, perfect . . . just don’t make any sudden movements or he’ll shoot you full of deadly venom faster than you can say ‘Coney Island Freak Show.’”
Another time, I took Seconda with me to pick Primo up from a friend’s house, and I found her sitting criss-cross-applesauce next to an empty cage as two pet rats—big, gray, beady-eyed—darted up and down her arms. I watched aghast as she leaned over and kissed one of them on his furry head.
“Can we get a rat, Mommy?” she asked, her blue eyes full of optimism,
“Pleeeeeeease?”
Since she was old enough to speak, the child has pined for a pet; she craves a furball sidekick, some loyal, adoring, non-verbal companion. Of course, I want to fulfill this dream of my daughter’s. But part of being a good parent is knowing your limits, and I know that having to feed and clean and hold another living creature—to say nothing of walking it and collecting its poop in little baggies—would put me over the edge of sanity.
Which is how we ended up with fish.
It wasn’t my idea to adopt Swimmy the goldfish; he was produced out of a magician’s hat at my son Primo’s fifth birthday party. But, I did agree to keep him, mostly because I had no choice. It ended up being a moot point, because within three days, Swimmy was, well, no longer swimming. His replacement, Bandana, was belly-up within a few days too. Beethoven, the beta fish, made it almost a week.
“What the hell are we doing wrong?” David, my husband, lamented after we’d conducted our third burial at sea via the toilet bowl.
“They are goldfish,” I replied. “They’re not known for their longevity.”
“Well, I can’t stand idly by as all these fish die,” David said. “It’s hard on me. It’s demoralizing.”
The next day, David went back to the pet shop and brought home a state-of-the-art aquarium filter and two new fish.
“I think the others might have been dying of loneliness,” he explained as he poured them from the plastic bags into pre-treated tank water.
He might have been right. Mr. Black, so named by Primo because of the cluster of dark scales near his fin, and Mr. Orange, so named by Seconda because he had no distinguishing characteristics whosoever, lived one whole week, then two, then a month. David waxed romantic about the value of companionship. I figured it was the filter. Three-year-old Seconda checked on her pets every morning before nursery school and every afternoon when she came home. She fed them, with David’s supervision, every night.
“Just a little pinch,” David reminded her, lifting her up to reach the uncovered tank which we kept on a high dresser in the kids’ bedroom, “Remember, if you feed the fish too much, they can die.”
Two months passed, then four, then six, and Misters Black and Orange thrived—which is to say, did not die.
Then, one afternoon when Seconda was about three-and-a-half, I noticed that I hadn’t seen or heard from her in awhile. Usually she was impossible to ignore, tearing through the apartment with a baseball bat or drawing on the furniture with Magic Marker. But on this particular afternoon, she’d been quiet. Too quiet.
I got up from my computer, and walked past Primo playing Legos in the kitchen, into the kids’ bedroom. Nearing the bunk beds, I slipped on a puddle of water.
“Seconda?” I ventured uneasily.
A blanket-covered lump on the bottom bunk shifted.
“Seconda,” I repeated, pulling the blanket to reveal my daughter, knees drawn to her chest, with no clothes on. “Where are your clothes?”
“They got wet,” she replied.
“How did they get wet?” I asked, getting shrill.
“Promise you won’t get mad?” came her reply.
Never words that bode well.
“He’s just such a cutiepie and I just wanted to cuddle him!” she said in a rush, “So I—I—I put him on my pillow.”
I strode over to the tank and there, floating belly up, deader than a doornail, was Mr. Black.
“Seconda!” I cried, trying to keep from shouting, “Why? Why did you take him out of the tank?”
“The thing is,” she took a deep breath, “Mr. Black is so shiny and cute and I really, really, really wanted to feel what his scales felt like and I just thought it would be so nice for him to snuggle with me in my bed so I climbed on top of the toy chest and then I climbed on top of the dresser and then I just scooped him up with my hand and guess what? Fish are really slimy. I didn’t know that. Did you know that? So then I put him on my pillow and we snuggled and it was so fun and he really liked it. You know how I know that? Because he did a little dance! Like this—”
She threw herself on the floor, made her body rigid, and flopped around in an impressive impersonation of a fish gasping for breath.
“And then I heard you coming so very fast I threw him back in the tank but then he stopped swimming. Maybe he doesn’t like the water anymore. Maybe he wants to stay on my pillow.”
“Seconda,” I said slowly, “Mr. Black is dead.”
She ran to the tank and cried: “No he’s not!”
“I know it’s upsetting, but yes,” I replied firmly, “he is.”
“No, Mommy, he’s not!”
“Would you just listen to Mommy?” I snapped. “The fish is dead. For good.”
“But Mommy!” Seconda cried, “He’s swimming!”
I looked up at the tank to find Mr. Black, indeed, swimming. Not very energetically and with sporadic upside down visits to the surface, but still, definitely alive.
“It’s a miracle,” I gasped.
I sat Seconda down right then and there and explained to her as clearly as I could that fish can not live outside of water. I told her that she must never, ever take the fish out again. I had her repeat back what I’d said to be sure she understood.
“I must never take the fish out of the water or they will die,” she intoned solemnly. It was very convincing. Hell, she probably really meant it at the time. But a few weeks later, I was putting laundry away in the kids’ dresser and noticed that Mr. Black was belly-up again.
“SECONDA!!!” I shouted.
“I DIDN’T MEAN TO!” she shouted back over her shoulder as she ran to hide under my bed.
“You killed the fish!” I shrieked, “AGAIN!”
I pulled her by her hand to the tank so she could face the consequences of her actions. And as we stood there, silently watching Mr. Black float on the surface of the water, something unexpected happened. The fish flicked his tail.
“He’s alive!” she shrieked jubilantly. “He came back to life again!”
That’s when we started calling him Survivor-Fish.
Despite his apparent possession of superpowers, David and I knew Mr. Black wouldn’t make it through another close encounter. So that night, David gave Seconda a stern talking-to, and afterwards he told me, “It’s OK, she gets it. She won’t do it again.”
Which made him very surprised when she did a week later. This time, it wasn’t Mr. Black but Mr. Orange who was floating at the surface. I stood there waiting for Mr. Orange to spin over, flick his tail, make his little fish belly expand, but there was nary a movement to be seen. I waited a good five minutes before pronouncing the time of death. This time, there’d be no resurrection. This time, dead was dead.
We had a ceremony for Mr. Orange in the bathroom. David wiped away tears as he flushed the toilet.
Seconda was silent as she watched the fish spiral down out of sight.
Then she said: “But how will he get back into his tank?”
It was at that moment that I realized the kid was only three years old. No amount of explanation would make her understand the sequence of events leading to Mr. Orange’s untimely demise. So, after the funeral, David and I moved the fish tank into the living room, where Mr. Black, who appeared forlorn and had taken to playing dead (we think as a survival strategy), could be monitored. Then we bought a nice, sturdy lid which snapped tightly over the top. And like magic, Mr. Black lived for another two years, until last March when he finally met his maker, through no fault of Seconda.
David maintains Survivor-Fish died because of complications resulting from his adventures on land, but I like to think it was of old age. I like to think Mr. Black has been reunited with his old, dear friend Mr. Orange in Fish Paradise and that right now they’re regaling the other fish—Swimmy, Bandana and Beethoven included—with wild, wonderful stories of life with Seconda
“And I was just like, ‘HEY, EINSTEIN! MOVE THE TANK!’ But you know humans, they’re just so dense,” Mr. Black is probably saying. “Ah, what are you gonna do? Kids will be kids, right?”
To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog, A Mom Amok, at amomamok.com.
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