Here So Far Away(37)
As I made the sweet stew, I stewed about Francis, who was in the living room, sewing new buttons onto a jacket. Had I seen a guy sew before? My own coat had a button that had been hanging from its last thread for weeks. I’d also never heard someone refuse to eat because they didn’t like it. My parents used to make us eat disgusting foods a few times a year—sauerkraut, liver, the chewy seaweed dulse—Dad because it was “character building,” and Mum because she was terrified we’d turn up our noses at a meal at someone else’s house. If we’d ever done that in front of her, she would have excused us from the table and tearfully wrung our necks.
I moved on to “Something in the Way” from Nevermind, which I’d discovered in the cassette deck that Francis had tucked next to Rupert’s old record player. Rupert began to sing: “It’s okay to eat fish / Cuz they don’t have any feelings. . . .”
He caught my eye. “I take in more than people think,” he said.
Since we were on the subject of fish and had been on the subject of Elizabeth Bishop and possibly because I thought Francis might be listening, I griped to Rupert that Miss Aker had assigned us the poem “The Fish” for homework and I thought it was cheesy. Francis dropped everything, literally, ran upstairs for his collection of Elizabeth Bishop poems and thumped it on the kitchen table. “Cheesy,” he said. “Cheesy.”
The poem, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is about this woman—or this person, I don’t remember if it’s a woman—who catches a huge fish. As it’s flopping around she sees that it’s got fishing lines in its mouth from tearing itself free in the past, like ribbons hanging down from war medals. Relics of former battles. But she’s caught the fish, and this could be the end of the line for it, so to speak. Except . . .
“She lets the fish go,” I explained to Rupert. “I know she comes to appreciate it, to see it differently and all that, but . . . she lets it go.”
“Sounds like you’re not big on a happy ending,” Rupert said, “and Mick here is.”
“She said cheesy, not happy.”
“Cheesy because it was the obvious thing to do,” I said. “It’s like, why does every romantic comedy end with someone running through the rain to tell someone they love them? Why can’t, for once, people just shake hands and wish each other well?”
“So it would have been better if Bishop had defied expectations?”
“It would have been more interesting. Nervier.”
“But maybe she chose that ending in spite of the fact that it seemed like the obvious choice.”
“How’s a person supposed to know that?”
“Does anyone read a poem without asking themselves what it means? It’s poetry, not reportage. There’s subtext.”
“It’s sentimental, Francis.”
“Yeah, it is, Frances. That’s what makes it brave.”
The rally over, I became aware of how long I’d been looking into Francis’s absurdly blue eyes. I didn’t want to be the first to look away, was determined not to flinch—until Francis grinned. “Why don’t you give it another chance?” he said.
I read the poem again. Near the end, she describes how she “stared and stared” at the fish, this veteran of at least five previous battles, and begins to understand the size of her victory as a pool of oil spreads a rainbow around the engine that soon encircles the entire boat—
—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
“Well, maybe,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
I read the lines again, nodding. The important part seemed to be before she let it go.
Rupert squinted at the book. He couldn’t read much without his magnifying glass and we hadn’t yet made the daily rediscovery of it. “So no one eats this fish?”
I escaped with Shaggy to the soft-floored tack room of the barn. It was steeped in the deep scent of old wood and hay and the earth itself behind a stone wall sculpted around the hill slope that intruded inside. A few dusty bridles still hung from nails. Miscellaneous trash had gathered in corners—piles of yellowed newspapers, empty pop bottles, paint cans, rusted tools. I reached for a silver lozenge tin overflowing with ancient cigarette butts, meaning to dump it into the garbage bag I’d brought with me, but then thought better of it. It was like a still-life painting, a picture of Rupert before he had his heart attack and gave up smoking, before he started leaving his magnifying glass in the fridge or on the side of the tub and in other improbable places. I could almost see him leaning against the corner of the stable, cigarette dangling from his lip, in his baggy jeans and suspenders and a soft flannel shirt with its plastic pocket protector, which always held two pens.
Shaggy announced Francis’s arrival with a loud squeal. He could be like a dog sometimes, as excited to greet you after you’ve come back from the bathroom as he would be if you’d returned from months at sea.
Francis scratched him between the ears then took a ten-dollar bill from his back pocket and handed it over. “Rupert can afford to buy his own slippers. Believe me, I’ve helped him with his banking. But you know this is a guy who lived through two world wars and the Depression.”
“My mum’s like that too. Frugal for life.”