Happiness

Dancing Fish

Dancing Fish The first time his brother died, Seth was fifteen. It was November of 1973-Raphael's first weekend home since he'd started at U Mass--and Seth woke early from a dream of smooth, dark, faintly bitter skin, of warm breath across his ear. He swept off the striped woollen blankets and pulled out the sticky mess of the top sheet to roll up for burial in the bathroom hamper. Standing naked on one leg, then the other-Rafe had mentioned in one of his letters that he, like Nietzsche, slept in the nude now-he dragged on jeans and an old green Saint Jude's sweatshirt. It was warm for this early in the morning, too warm for November. He made a chink in the blind with two fingers. There was dense white fog where the road should have been. From the kitchen below came his mother's voice, 53 singing. Built by his father from a kit the year Seth was born, the house leaked sound through every cedar pore--a house in which it was impossible to be alone. My feet could step and walk, Louisa's voice informed her son through the floorboards, my lips could move and talk. Hugo, the aged basset hound, lay in his usual spot in the hall, blocking the stairs. As Seth stepped over him, he lifted his face with its built-in expression of grief, then turned back to Raphael's dosed door. "I wonder will this--Lucy-will she like red meat and chocolate, do you think?" At the sink, Louisa Godburn held a sheaf of bright green lettuce under the faucet. The room smelled of tarragon and basil and overripe bananas. A fat fly that had overshot its lifespan bumbled against the fog-filled windows. "Why not?" Hearing the name, Lucy, Seth realized that that was who his dream had been about. Though Rafe's letters--notes, really, and only two of them since September-had barely mentioned her, just her age, almost twenty-two, and her skin, the color of which his parents did not yet know about. He got a box of cornflakes from the shelves that lined one wall and sat down at the wide oak table. "And then, should we eat in here, or-If Louisa turned around. Her face was rosy with anxiety; her greying hair had frothed up from running wet fingers through it. "Mother. The fog'll dear soon. Busdrivers know how to handle it, anyway." Frowning, Louisa turned back to her lettuce. She shook each leaf, patted it tenderly with a thin white cotton towel. While he ate, Seth could hear her humming, low-voiced, into the soapstone sink. The Godburn family never talked about what Raphael had done the winter before; maybe that was why it never left them, why Rafe himself was always there somewhere, on the edges of their minds, even when he'd gone two hundred miles away. Only Louisa, once in a while, would look as if she were on the verge of saying something: her full, chapped lips would part; and then she'd sing, instead. Hugo clacked care£ully across the linoleum that he could no longer see and crept under the table. There was some moaning as he settled -Seth saw his mother wince--and then the sour smell of dried pee drifted upward. Louisa sat down across from her son and said confidingly, "We need a helium pump." 54 Dancing Fish "A helium pump." "Whatever they're called." She reached over to open a grey cardboard box. It was filled with uninflated balloons, all blue. "Won't he be surprised? Remember that time at India Point Park, when you boys let off all the balloons into the air? I want them to float," Louisa said. "Float. Run ask your father do we have one. He wanted you out there to split wood-I forgot." She looked at Seth's half-empty bowl. "Better go now. You know how he gets." Seth stood up. Usually when his mother got into this mood, the mood his father called Dear Nonsense, it irritated him; today, for some reason (oh-Rafe was the reason, Rafe coming home), it was catching. Grasping his mother's solid forearms, he pulled her out of her chair. He began to dance her, laughing, protesting, around the oak table. We two are the ones who...