Aquarium

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My mother drove an old Thunderbird. Apparently she had imagined a freer life before I came along. The front hood was half the length of the car. An enormous engine that galloped high and low at the curb. It could die at any moment, but it was going to finish off all the gas in the world first.

Two-tone brown paint, lighter along the sides of the car, peeling all across the hood and roof, like galaxies opening up, silver suns in clusters too far away to name.

The door swung wide like the counterweight for a crane, thousands of pounds. I always had to pull with both hands to try to bring it back.

How were the fish?

Okay.

Make any friends? This was my mother’s joke almost every day, about my making friends with the fish. I wasn’t going to tell her that today I actually had made a friend.

I finally got the door closed, and we sputtered off. We didn’t wear seat belts.

My mother worked in the container port, basic labor. She wore heavy work boots, brown Carhartt overalls, a flannel shirt, her hair back in a ponytail. But she was starting to do some rigging of cranes and hoped someday to be a crane operator. They made a lot of money, sometimes over a hundred thousand. We’d be rich.

How was school?

Okay. Mr. Gustafson said next year our grades will matter.

And they don’t now?

No. He said sixth grade doesn’t matter. But seventh grade matters a little bit. He said nothing really matters until eighth grade, but seventh matters a little.

God, where do they find these people? And it’s supposed to be a better school. I had to lie about our address to get you in up there.

I like Mr. Gustafson.

Oh yeah?

He’s funny. He can never find anything. Today we all had to look for one of his books.

Well that’s a great recommendation. I take back everything I said.

Ha, I said, to show I understood. I was looking at all the graffiti, as I usually did. On the rail cars and walls, fences and old buildings. The artists made sequences, like flip books. MOE in bright green and blue, tubular, heading uphill, cresting next in orange and yellow, sinking in gold and red, rising again in blue-black, endless path of the sun. The city something that had to be viewed at speed, but we were always locked in traffic. Five and a half miles from the aquarium to our apartment, but it could take half an hour.

Alaskan Way became East Marginal Way South, which was not as romantic. Hard to dream of going there. If our ride home were a cruise, one of the stops would be Northwest Glacier, which was not ice falling in great slabs but ready-mix concrete, sand, and gravel in great bays and silos chalked white.

We lived next to Boeing Field, an airport but not one used to go anywhere. We were in the flight path of all the test planes that might or might not work. The businesses in our area were the Sawdust Supply, tire centers, Army Navy Surplus, Taco Time, tractor and diaper services, rubber and burgers and lighting systems. On most sides of us, you’d find concrete only, stretching for several miles, no trees, enormous parking lots, used and unused, but you wouldn’t know that when you arrived at our apartment. We looked out on the parking lots of the Transportation Department, endlessly shifting stacks of orange highway cones and barrels, yellow crash barriers, moveable concrete dividers, trucks of all kinds, but the eight buildings of our apartment complex had trees all around and looked as nice as what you’d find in a rich section of town. Subsidized housing with bay windows, pastel colors, pretty wooden fences with latticework. And constantly patrolled by police.

The moment we arrived home, my mother always collapsed on her bed with a big sigh, and she let me collapse on top of her. Cigarette smell in her hair, though she didn’t smoke. Smell of hydraulic fluid. The soft strong mountain of her underneath me.

Bed, she said. I’d like to never leave bed. I love the bed.

Like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

That’s right. We’ll have our heads at opposite ends and just live right here.

I had my hands up under her armpits and my feet slid under her thighs, locked on. No frogfish ever gripped a rock as tightly. This apartment our own aquarium.

Your old mother has a date tonight.

No.

Yeah, sorry salamander.

What time?

Seven. And you’ll need to sleep in your room, in case your mother gets lucky.

You don’t even like them.

I know. That’s usually the case. But who knows. There’s a nice man out there every once in a while.

What’s his name?

Steve. He plays harmonica.

Is that his job?

My mother laughed. You imagine a better world, sweet pea.

How did you meet him?

He works in IT, fixing computer systems, and came to fix something at work. He was around at lunch, playing Summertime on his harmonica, so I ate lunch with him.

Do I get to meet him?

Sure. But we need to have dinner first. What do you want?

Sink dogs?

My mother laughed again. I closed my eyes and rode her back as it rose and fell.

But finally my mother rolled over, as she always did, crushing me to get me to let go. I’d never let go until there was no breath left, then I’d tap out against her shoulder like a Big Time wrestler.

Shower time, she said.

Steve did not look like a computer guy. He was strong, like my mother. Big shoulders. Both of them wearing dark flannel shirts and jeans.

Hello there, he said to me, so cheery I couldn’t help smiling, even though I had planned to be mean to him. You must be Caitlin. I’m Steve.

You play harmonica?

Steve smiled like he had been caught with a secret. He had a dark moustache, and that made him seem like a magician. He pulled a silver harmonica out of his shirt pocket and held it out for me to see.

Play something.

What would you like?

Something fun.

A sea shanty, then, he said in a pirate voice. And we can kick up our heels a bit. He played something from a ship, merry but slow at first, kicking out one toe and then another and turning and speeding up as my mother and I joined, linking our arms, and then he was hopping and frog-legging all around our living room and I was going mad with joy, shouting and my mother shushing me but smiling. An unconscious child-joy that could explode like the sun, and I wanted Steve to stay with us forever.

But they left on their date, left me sweaty and wound up and with nothing to do, pacing around the apartment.

I hated when my mother left me alone. Sometimes I read a book, or watched TV. I wanted a fish tank, but they cost too much and weren’t allowed because they might break and flood the apartment below through the floor and do thousands of dollars in damage. Nothing was alive in our apartment. Bare white walls, low ceilings, bare lights, so lonely when my mother was gone. Time something that nearly stopped. I sat down on the floor against a wall, gray carpet extending, and listened to the wires in the light above. I hadn’t even asked him what his favorite fish was. I asked everyone that.