The Goldfish History

Hope is a goldfish in a plastic bag of water: the weight of the bag in your hands, how the cold bundle must be cradled to prevent jostling the poor creature inside; the transparency of the bag, how white your hands look through the water, the plastic wrinkles that gather around the ridges of your fingers; the goldfish itself, which isn’t really gold, or just gold—it bobs around, and if you’re driving home from the fish store, riding beside your roommate, there’s the inevitable moment when the fish will ease into his surroundings, float to the bottom of the bag resting in the warm palm of your hand, and as the car rounds a curve, you feel the flutter of his translucent tail against your skin through the plastic.

This goldfish meant hope because we hoped the one in our bag would be one to survive. Not just three weeks, but years, the way goldfish are supposed to. We hoped it wasn’t one with that goldfish parasite called “Ich”—short for “Ichtyopthirius,” but everyone thinks is “Ick” because it’s a parasite, which is gross. We hoped we wouldn’t have to flush the fish in a few days if we found him with his pale belly turned toward the ceiling of the water. We hoped that buying all this fish stuff wasn’t wasting our money.

But also because of the delicacy involved—floating the bag in the new bowl for an hour to allow the fish to adjust temperatures, treating our Chicago tap water with mysterious chemical drops—the goldfish was hope: this fragile thing who was dependent on us and our care, silent and colorful and ours to name.

I can’t remember if it was my roommate Kim or me who first thought of getting a goldfish. And I can’t remember who suggested his name—Rufus—though it was probably me. After Rufus Wainwright, our favorite singer at the time, and the man I called my boyfriend because I had the biggest and most hopeless of crushes on him, and because I didn’t have an actual boyfriend. I used to say that Rufus the man brought me more pleasure than any of the men I’d actually dated. His picture was taped to the refrigerator door, I owned all his albums, went to every nearby performance—that kind of thing. Rufus the fish was always supposed to have a companion, another fish that we planned to name after a cute actor from some TV show whose name I can’t remember, but we never made it back to the fish store.

So on a bright Sunday afternoon in Chicago in March, Kim and I ripped open a sack of brown gravel and dumped an inch in Rufus’s new glass bowl. The guy at the fish store had steered us away from pointy plastic seaweed and gave us instead a clipping of some soft green vine—an actual plant—that coiled through the water like a spiral staircase. We also got a chunk of driftwood instead of one of those pink plastic castles or bubbling sunken treasure chests. The moment we untied the watery sack and poured Rufus into his bowl, we stared at him swimming around, and it felt good, because it was something we could share, and something that we needed.

Kim and I had been best friends for five years, since our freshman year of college. After I graduated a year ahead of her, I moved to Chicago. A year after that move, one weekend when she was visiting, I came out to her—she was the first person to ever hear me say, “I am gay.” When I told her, we were standing in a gay bar. In the women’s restroom of the gay bar—a bar we’d been to several times before that night. In this private bathroom, giant mirrors stood all around us with their backs against the walls; as I told Kim what I had to tell her, I watched our dim and infinite reflections do exactly what we were...