Fishes

I was walking down the hall at the local Y a few weeks ago when I saw a glass display case filled with art projects the preschool students had done. One was called a “fish print.” It was an imprint of a fish: the scales and fins were delicately rendered in red paint on white paper.

“How the HECK did a preschool kid do that?” I wondered, suddenly awash with jealousy at some grubby-faced three-year-old. There could be only one way they did it, I determined. The preschool teacher bought a fish at the store, had the kid paint one side of it and pressed it onto a piece of white construction paper.

It was the perfect idea for Simon’s birthday present. While Simon is not particularly fond of fish per se--unless they’re for eating--he does like colorful art. And this sort of thing was something Clara could help with, and would probably even enjoy. She likes fish, as a concept and as a food.

I envisioned two or three bright fish prints, tastefully framed and hung above the desk in his home office. I started thinking about what kind of fish I could use. The imprint in the hall at the Y looked as though it had been done with a larger fish, like a CATFISH, or a big TROUT, or maybe a SALMON. I imagined myself giving Clara a huge salmon, dripping with red paint, to smack against a big, white canvas. It occurred to me that the splatters of red paint flying away from the imaginary canvas--spraying the side of the fridge, say, and the tile floor--would necessarily be engorged with smelly fish oil and scales.

No matter. Good art does not always preclude stinkiness. And babies and kitchens can be cleaned.

As I thought about it more, I realized a whole one of those bigger fish might be rather expensive, and if I bought one for the fish print, I would probably feel obliged to cook it for dinner after. I imagined Clara and me trying to wash green and blue paint off the fish, me trying to explain to Simon the weird colorfulness of his dinner without spilling the beans.

It would need to be a cheap fish. Something we could throw away after.

The next time Clara and I went grocery shopping, I stopped by the seafood case and peered inside. There was the usual array of wilted, anemic aquatic life you’ll see in a typical southern Idaho supermarket: rubbery-looking scallops, floppy fillets of Dover Sole on ice, octopus tentacles desperately clutching sprigs of parsley like bridesmaids in an ill-advised wedding. Everything arranged to look as though it was plucked from the sea five minutes before.

But there, near the back, was a pile of small fish, their scales and fins and eyes intact. The sign next to them said, “Smelt.”

“That doesn’t bode well for their odor,” I muttered.

“Mommy, I want this one,” said Clara, standing on tippy-toes, nose pressed against the glass, pointing to a whole lobster.

“I have no idea how I might even cook that,” I told her. My culinary expertise runs to tuna melts and roasted vegetables. Lobster is something Gwyneth Paltrow cooks. This lobster was dead, or at least cryogenically frozen, but I remember reading somewhere that the best lobster is cooked alive, in a giant pot of boiling water. And they scream in pain as they die (although I also read somewhere that Gwyneth has an ingenius way of snapping their little necks, pre-pot, to spare them suffering. Gwyneth Paltrow: patron saint of lobster.)

I bought two Smelt for two dollars. Cheap enough to trash them after the art project.

A few mornings later, I unwrapped the Smelt on the kitchen table. Clara looked at them, dumbfounded. A whole fish in the store was one thing. A fish lying inert on our table in the morning sun was quite another.

“Those are fishes. Two fishes,” she said. She ventured a finger forward to poke one. The fish’s flesh was sort of like a Memory Foam mattress. The small indent where Clara pressed her index finger stayed for several minutes.

“Yuck,” she said, recoiling. “This is yucky.”

“Oh, it’s just fishes!” I said breezily, waving the air with my hand. Wilbur sat on his haunches, watching vigilantly, the pool of drool at his feet growing steadily.





I swabbed the side of one Smelt with green paint and pressed it onto a yellow piece of construction paper.

“Look,” I said. “We pet it and push it onto the paper-- good fishy, nice fishy-- and then we pick it up and…..voila! It leaves a print of its body on the paper.”

Clara was less impressed with the print the fish made than with the act of painting the fish itself and comforting it as she pressed it into the paper.




“It’s okay, fishy, I will give you strokes,” she whispered to each of the fish, gently petting their fins. “This is the ‘Mommy’ fish and this is the ‘Baby’ fish,” she said, pointing to each one.

When we were finished, I quickly re-wrapped the fish and tossed them into the garbage before Wilbur could get his hopes up. I gave Clara an infinitesimally small dot of Soft Scrub on each of her palms and helped her rub her hands together under the tap.

I thought I’d probably just store the prints in my jewelry drawer until I could frame them. My jewelry drawer is at the top of my chest of drawers and right next to the drawer where I keep all my maternity underwear (I’m about six-and-a-half months pregnant at this point).

Storing the fish prints in the jewelry drawer was not the best of ideas.

“For the love!” I shouted the next day when I opened my maternity underwear drawer. “Did something die in here besides my hopes to ever be a size eight again?”

It was the fish prints in the neighboring jewelry drawer, leeching their fishy goodness through the copious cotton folds of my ginormous panties. It was as though I’d replaced the lavender satchels at the bottom of the underwear drawer with Moby Dick, two days dead.

I put the prints out in the garage until I could find the time to go buy frames for them. To be continued…