The Stars Above The Dirt Below: March 2007

a story by my flatmate.

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My brother Matt and I each won one goldfish, our first pets, at my elementary school’s spring fair when I was in 4th grade. Matt was four, old enough to want to tag along as I walked home from the fair with my neighbor Molly and her older brother Michael. Michael was in high school, ninth grade. One day after school, Molly and I stole his copy of Flood and memorized the words to “Particle Man”, my first music love. We had a dance routine. I always had to be Person Man, the loser. Michael thought we were total dorks.

Michael had a bundle of helium-filled balloons and a goldfish in a bag. He looked like the balloon man, I said. He told me to stuff it. We walked around the corner, out of sight of our parents, and he said, “Hey. Wanna see something cool? Hold these balloons.” I took the strings. Matt wanted to hold one. I gave him one. There must have been about 20. I let a string slip, up went a yellow balloon. “Watch it. We’re going to need these, idiot.” I tied the balloons to the wire fence.

Michael attached the goldfish bag to one balloon. He tested the weight, and tied two more to the bag. “Fuck it. Gimmie a bunch.”

“Don’t say that!” I said.

Molly mimicked her brother, rolled her eyes. “He can say whatever the fuck he wants!” She said “fuck” with a high pressure puff of air in my face. “So can I. See? Grow up.” Molly loved regurgitating her brother’s teasing and bullying. Lately, she’d been big on telling me to grow up and be more mature, pronouncing it “ma-tour.”

“Yeah! Grow up, Abby!” Matt put his hands on his hips like our mom and stared me down.

“Be quiet”, I said, because he’d tell mom if I said “shut up”, “I said you could come only if you stayed quiet.”

Michael took 6 balloons, tied them to the bag, and held them at arm’s length. The balloons and bag balanced. He opened his fist, one finger at a time, until the bag was on its own. It hesitated and then started to go up. I watched the balloons rise above the trees lining the school field, going up with the same speed as the yellow balloon I had liberated earlier. I thought, maybe it’ll come back down. Water is heavy. But it kept going. I looked for the yellow balloon and couldn’t find it. Maybe it popped. One time I let go of a balloon and watched it go up, but when it got really high, I saw it pop. If the balloons with that fish get high enough, they’ll pop. Maybe the bag will pop too. Either way, that fish is fucked.

Matt started to tie his balloon to his goldfish bag. “Mine next! Radical!” Radical? He probably heard it on TV.

“No, Matt. You’re going to kill it.”

“No I’m not! It has water in the bag!”

I didn’t want to explain, so I grabbed the string. He couldn’t tie a knot well anyway. “Hey!” Matt started to scream. “Moo-oom! Abby took my balloon.”

“Mom’s not here.” I tried to get him to shut up. Mom was about 50 yards away. “If you make your fish go up with the balloons, you’ll never see him again. Don’t you want a pet? What did you name him?”

“Mr. Dude.” He was distracted, for now.

“Well, Mr. Dude will miss you if you tie him to the balloons.”

Molly took the rest of the balloons off the fence “Hey losers, you can’t do it anyway. I need the balloons for my fish.” Molly repeated her brother’s steps, down to releasing the strings one finger at a time until her fish hesitated and flew up.

I tied the last balloon, the one I took from my brother, to his goldfish bag. “Here, now he’s lighter. But hang on to him. He won’t float.”

** ** ** **

I named my goldfish Goldie. “Goldie?” my mom said, “isn’t that boring?” I got the name from the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven. Goldie was a receptionist in the pet afterlife. I liked her New York accent.

Mr. Dude lived for a month. He never grew like Goldie did. Goldie was fat. Mr. Dude was the same as he was that first day in the plastic bag. I found him floating in the fish bowl when I went to feed our pets. I told my mom, and she told me to scoop him out with the green net that we kept next to the fish food. “Quickly!” I head my mom say, “Matt’s coming back with dad. He can’t see you.” I ran with Mr. Dude in the net at eye level, and a couple of drops of water fell from the mesh onto the floor. After I sent Mr. Dude to the sewers, I sidestepped through the kitchen, facing my brother and dad, with the net behind my back.

My brother noticed ten minutes later. My mom told him that Mr. Dude had to go away.

“But Abby got to keep Goldie! I want Mr. Dude.”

My mom told him that Mr. Dude had gone to live with a family of poor people who needed a pet to make them happy more than we did, and that he should be thankful that our family was fortunate. We’re thinking about getting a dog, they said, and that’s a lot more responsibility than a fish.

My brother wouldn’t quit crying about Mr. Dude. He’d go look at Goldie at the tank. “Why’d my fish have to go? Why did we keep Goldie?” This went on for two months. Goldie survived car trips to the beach house and back. I held her in my lap in a Ziploc bag.

My parents decided that they didn’t want to deal with another fish for Matt, and he hadn’t forgotten about Mr. Dude like they thought he would. We weren’t going to get a dog either. My parents had a proposition for me.

“We can’t take care of Goldie anymore. You’re starting school again in the fall and you won’t have time to feed him.”

“Her.”

“Don’t talk back.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.

“We think that you should get rid of her.”

“Who will we give her to?”

A pause. My dad said, “We think you should flush her down the toilet.”

My mom said it was just a fish, and it was probably going to die soon anyway. They thought it would have died before now, in all honesty. They were getting fed up with my brother crying near the fish bowl and they told me to be a good big sister and help them make him feel happy and forget about Mr. Dude. Besides, my mom was sick of changing the water.

“I’ll change the water. Just show me how.”

Another pause. My mom took out a twenty-dollar bill. “We’ll pay you.”

I knew the right thing to say from the movies. “I don’t want your money.” My dad smiled. I was pouting.

The bill went off the table, a little too soon, I thought. They were going to kill Goldie whether I helped them or not. I should have taken the bribe.

My mom sighed, went to get the fish bowl. “Either you do this right now, or I will do it for you.”

“I’ll do it.” I didn’t want Goldie’s last memory to be my mother dumping her into the toilet and yelling “good riddance.”

I picked up Goldie in the bowl and walked towards the bathroom. My parents followed. My mom said, “I’m going to be right behind you. If you can’t do it, give me the bowl.” She didn’t trust me. Last summer I lied for two weeks about keeping a baby bird I found in our yard. I kept it behind my dad’s tools in the garage, brought it worms from our compost box. Dad found it, eventually, and told me he took care of it. But then he told Mom.

“I’ll do it. Just wait, OK?” I poured the water into the toilet and watched Goldie swim against the stream until she plopped out. She swam around the toilet a couple times. I watched. I wondered how long she could live in the gross toilet water. My mom reached for the handle.

“No!” I pushed her arm away “I can do it.” My jaw was so tense that it started to hurt.

“Well, we don’t have all day.”

“Sara…” my dad tried to calm her down. She was all worked up.

“I refuse to spend my afternoon in the bathroom.”

“I can do it. Leave me alone.” Goldie swam down under the hole in the bottom of the toilet bowl and came back out, then circled once more.

My dad got my mom to leave the bathroom “I’m taking the bowl. And the cup.” She grabbed the water glass next to the toothbrushes on the sink and walked out.

The door closed, and I could hear my mom and dad’s back and forth, muffled. My mom was all hisses and my dad was a low rumble.

“Well, bye.”

I looked at Goldie, put my hand on the handle, and pushed.

When the tar baby fails to respond to Brer Rabbit’s pleasantries, the rabbit angrily punches him in the face—and is stuck. When the tar baby ignores Brer Rabbit’s demand that he be let loose, the rabbit hits and kicks and butts his head until he is thoroughly trapped in the tar. At this point, according to Chandler’s Uncle Remus, the fox comes out of hiding, “‘Howdy, Brer Rabbit,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee. ‘You look sorter stuck up dis mawnin’,’ sezee, en den he rolled on de groun’, en laft en laft twel he couldn’t laff no mo.’”

Soon after becoming White House press secretary earlier this year, Tony Snow used the imagery of this folk tale to explain why he was not going to try to discuss in detail and try to justify the NSA’s secret telephone monitoring program. “I don't want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program – the alleged program – the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny.”

A few weeks ago, Massachusett’s Governor and president prospect Mitt Romney explained the dilemma caused by the continuing problems of the “Big Ditch” tunnel construction project in his state. Speaking to a crowd of supporters in Iowa, Romney said, “The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can.”