Aquarium Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re hot. That’s one reason. Steve did his chuckle bounce, and my mother smiled despite herself. And you can wrestle containers and cranes, so that’s useful. In case I’m ever in a situation where containers are coming after me.
    My mother gave one of his biceps a love punch.
    But what’s your favorite fish? I asked.
    Maybe from childhood, Steve suggested.
    She never talks about that, I said.
    Oh.
    Wow, my mother said. There’s no limit to how far I can sink during this dinner. Okay, one fish. I must be able to think of a fish. I’m thinking of the supermarket, the fish section, but I’m guessing you want something not on ice or wrapped in plastic.
    Steve laughed. He was the nicest man she had ever brought home. Looking back, I can see he was delighted by her right from the beginning, genuinely delighted.
    Okay. We lived in a shitty place. A shack on the highway, water dripping through the ceiling. I’m not going to say more. But next door, sharing the same dirt, we had a family from Japan. Asians are supposed to be rich, but these ones weren’t. I don’t know what went wrong. But the man dug a pit, and we thought he was going to roast a pig. We thought he might be Hawaiian. But he lined it with plastic and rocks and some plants and made a pond, and had four koi carps in there.
    That sounds nice, Steve said.
    A pearl in a toilet, my mother said. One of the koi was orange and white, the colors swirled together, and I named her Angel. And the man put an old wooden chair beside the pond so that I could sit. He never used it. He always stood. But he left this chair for me. I never even spoke to him, or thanked him. I feel so bad about it now. We were really racist back then. This was the early seventies, when I was about your age. But he gave me a place to escape to. I’d always sit out there, usually in the rain, and watch Angel gliding around her tiny pond as if she owned the palace ponds. And I liked that the rain never touched her. I could see the drops on the surface. She’d tilt up to grab food, but otherwise she was hovering just below, safe and removed from everything.
    Steve and I didn’t say anything. We all sat in silence, my mother looking down at the table, lost in another time, and I remember thinking she was just like me, as if I had lived already, more than twenty years earlier.

S teve spent the night. I could hear their breathing, and small cries from my mother as if she were hurt, but I knew to stay in my room and keep quiet. My mother had explained many times that some parts of her life were hers. I had my three pillows, my pillow palace, a kind of nest or cave, and I sank away there.
    In the morning, Steve made cinnamon toast, which was something new. Butter and then sugar and cinnamon. He put one piece faceup on my plate and then cut another piece on its diagonals to make four triangles, and with these he made a pyramid.
    Egyptian toast, he said. With cinnamon from the Nile.
    What fish are in the Nile?
    The Pharaoh Fish, Steve said, and raised his eyebrows. He leaned in close and whispered so my mother wouldn’t hear. They have scales of red marble, very heavy, and fins of gold.
    There are no fish like that.
    Have you been to the Nile?
    No.
    Well I used to live there, at the bottom of the river. Don’t tell your mother. The Pharaoh Fish gathered all along the bottom as if they were a garden of gold. They had big lips but never opened their mouths. They were very quiet. But they were keeping all the gold for the next pharaoh.
    How come I haven’t heard about the Pharaoh Fish?
    Well you have now, and you have to keep it a secret because of the gold. Five thousand years ago, someone told, and the biggest fish had to leave the river and burrow through sand and try to hide. The Great Pyramids are their fins sticking up out of the sand. They were the biggest Pharaoh Fish.
    I laughed and punched his arm the way my mother did. No fish are that big, I said. The largest fish is the whale