The Story of a Year

The family settles in Florida and buys a short-sale house. The family’s a/c breaks and is repaired.

The family is happy, and the family does what happy families do: The family buys a fish tank. The family pours in the gravel and sinks the plastic plants. The father positions at the center of the tank a glass bottle harvested by his father from the bed of the St. Lawrence River. The father fills the fish tank with water, then adds the right chemicals so the fish will not die in their new home.

The fish die in their new home.

Not all of them, but a sizeable enough margin as to be noticeable to the twin daughters, who are three and who need not be noticing such things. Surreptitiously, the fish are replaced.

The fish are named for Disney characters: Mickey and Dopey and Cinderella and Belle. The girls have not seen these movies, but Disney, somehow, is in the air, pumped in, perhaps, through a device installed in the house by the people who fixed the a/c, pumped straight from Disney an hour down the road through ductwork one imagines glistens brighter than Epcot’s geodesic dome.

Finally, the fish tank stabilizes and the fish are happy and the girls are happy, and the family decides there is room enough in the tank for a frog.

The frog dies.

The children are told that the frog was lonely and has been returned to the pet store where he can swim and splash and cavort with his froggy friends. The girls ask for another frog, but the father of the family has read Donald Barthelme’s story “The School,” and he knows what happens once you start down this road, how a dead amphibian leads to a dead dog, and, before long, grandparents are dropping like flies. The family does not buy another frog. They are a one-frog family.

In spring, the family receives a politely worded letter from the neighborhood Homeowner’s Association informing the family that their front yard looks not entirely unlike the surface of the moon if the surface of the moon had weeds growing out of it, and furthermore informing the family that they would do well to sod the front yard. The family does not pay heed to this notice.

The a/c goes out, and the family spends a night at La Quinta, and the a/c is repaired.

The family is busy. There are birthdays to attend and swim lessons to attend and dance classes to attend. There are shoes to be purchased so as not to be caught dancing in the wrong kinds of shoes. There are recitals and neighborhood gatherings and hayrides out of season.

There are preschools to tour. There are forms to fill out in triplicate. There are shots to be gotten, which means screams to be endured and tears to be dried and Band-Aids to be found, later, affixed to car seats and to the bottoms of shoes, and one, remarkably, inexplicably, to a banana, and though the father will understand that a banana’s peel is very thick and that it is therefore virtually impossible that whatever was on the underside of any Band-Aid might have contaminated the fruit within, the father will nevertheless find himself unable to peel or to eat the banana, and will, despite his reputation for frugality, drop the banana into the trash and, just to be safe, tie the bag shut, thinking all the while about blood-borne pathogens and food-borne illnesses and pediatrician waiting-room contamination and how this banana is no longer just a banana—this banana is the perfect storm of bananas—and, having deposited the banana–Band-Aid–laden bag into the outside trash can, he will resist the urge to drag the can to the street a day early because, hey, he’s not crazy.

And, suddenly, it’s summer, and...