Lori Gottlieb - Farallon Films

	Fish Girl by Lori Gottlieb

	This is the story of how I came to be known as Fish Girl. Suffice it to say that both mentally and physically, my family doesn't have the cleanest bill of health. On the mental front, our entire lineage is totally whacked and although more than one doctor has suggested replacing our summer pilgrimages to Maui with a stay at McLean, no one has heeded this advice. The physical picture doesn't get much better: both grandfathers died young from heart disease, one grandmother had cancer, and the other was stricken with Alzheimer's. (Moral: Be careful what you wish for. Nana spent thirty healthy years pretending to have Alzheimer's when convenient.) But as a kid, far as I could tell, the blackest mark on our family's medical history could be found on my mother's and brother's charts: allergies. Put their noses near pollen, and out came the industrial-sized boxes of Kleenex. Get them near furry pets, faces reddened, rashes emerged, and noses spewed forth thick streams of liquid rivaling eruptions from Mount St. Helens (often accompanied by ET-dying-on-the-gurney-like wheezing). So much for getting a dog. Or a cat. Or even a measly hamster. Still, there was no way I was going to be stuck with a token goldfish. I wanted a "real" pet, something that crawled. Nixing birds (fly) and snakes (eat furry mice), I settled on turtles. They may be slow, I reasoned, but at least they had legs. Legs indeed. In the wee hours one night, not content to be confined to a shallow bowl with cheesy plastic rocks, Rocky and Bullwinkle crawled their way to freedom. After a bumbling search effort reminiscent of O Brother Where Art Thou -- Mom ("Didn't I say we should have gotten a goldfish!"), Dad ("If they don't turn up alive, I'm sure they'll turn up - eventually."), brother ("Okay, think: If you were a turtle, where would you go?"), 5-year-old me (shrieking "MAKE THEM COME BACK!") and our Guatemalan housekeeper Maria (singing "Here little turtles" in Spanish) -- we finally caught up with them, Rocky under my parents' bed, Bullwinkle behind the refrigerator. Post-reunion, I acquired an enormous appreciation for the turtles. Suddenly they seemed adorable, and never again did I call them "stupid moron pets." (As an adult, I discovered a similar reaction to boyfriends I'd previously cared little about: they became infinitely more desirable once they disappeared.) Unfortunately, a few weeks later at breakfast, my newfound love for the pint-size reptiles was shattered when my brother and I barfed up our Cap'n Crunch and the pediatrician informed us that the turtles carried a communicable virus and had to be put to sleep. I cried hard enough to give myself a 103-degree fever. Stuck in bed all week, I trotted out my marble collection and, in response to a combination of boredom and loneliness, soon began anthropomorphizing them. "Who are you talking to?" my mother asked, overhearing my chatter one morning.. "I'm not talking," I explained matter-of-factly. "My marbles are." By sundown, my parents had replaced the colored glass balls with a clear glass bowl containing a goldfish. "Your sister's lost her marbles," they told my brother, by way of explanation. "Look on the bright side," my father offered consolingly, when I earnestly declared that nothing could possibly replace the turtles (except, of course, a brand new puppy). "At least goldfish stay in their bowls." Bowls or not, I didn't see a bright side to being stuck with a lame-o goldfish. My first act of rebellion against this non-pet pet was to name her Goldie. Boring pet, boring name. Making no effort to bond, I was Susan Smith before there was a Susan Smith. Almost: I didn't actively try to kill my new ward, but I didn't put much effort into keeping her alive either. Cleaning the bowl? You try preventing a flopping fish from accidentally tumbling down the drain. Fish food? You try remembering to sprinkle pellets in each morning before rushing off to first grade. I knew, of course, that Goldie wouldn't die of starvation, because as soon as I left the house, Maria dumped in half the box of fish food. Three months later, I woke up to find what appeared to be a large orange gumdrop floating near the top of the bowl. Goldie had died of obesity. And my negligence had killed her. Cut to: Goldie II. And Goldie III. And Goldie IV. Overwhelmed with guilt, I replaced Goldie with a successive series of fish. But despite my now-conscientious care, none lasted long because the second I left the house, Maria would overfeed them. It was like the Stepford School of Fish: all were named Goldie, all had the same mildly pleasant appearance, and all wore the same vacant expressions as they swam listlessly through faux seaweed and expensive ceramic castles (also bought to assuage my guilt). Within months, each Goldie would blow up like a Ballpark Frank, float to the top of the bowl, and stare lifelessly (big bloated fish eyes popping out like a bad case of thyroid disease) at my horrified, hovering face. The image of those glazed fish pupils, fixed and dilated, but accusatory nonetheless, made it impossible for me to stop replacing each dead fish with a brand new clone. In order to be redeemed, I vowed to keep just one alive. Lucky for me, for reasons unrelated to goldfish-induced bulimia, Maria had just been fired. (My mother went through housekeepers almost as quickly as I went through goldfish.) So off I went, back to the pet department at Thrifty Drug Store, to pick out Goldie V. And then I saw her. Amidst an aquarium full of interchangeable, garden-variety goldfish swam a distinctive, silver, bright-eyed... what? The pimply tenth-grader carrying the big green net (name tag: Roger) asserted that this fish was still considered a goldfish, even though it wasn't gold. "The silver ones are twenty cents cheaper," he added as a sales pitch, "since no one wants them." Hmm. No one, I felt, wanted me either (see "mentally whacked family," above). My interest piqued, I immediately named it Amelia. (I'd just learned that "ameliorate," a word on that year's honors spelling bee list, meant "to make better," and I figured if I named her Amelia, this fish might have a better outcome.) After handing over my quarter, I carried Amelia, darting frantically back and forth in her flimsy plastic baggy, five blocks home. From that moment on, everything changed. No longer jealous of kids with yellow Labs or calico kittens, I finally felt like I had a real pet. I spoke to Amelia in exaggerated high-pitched tones ("Oh, he-llooo! Yessss, he-lloooo lil' fishy"); taught her commands like "come," "stay" and "roll over" (using a tapping-on-the-bowl system that would have made Annie Sullivan proud); and bought mermaids and castles for her bowl the way my friends bought bone-shaped chew toys for their dogs. I even showed her off when my friends came over, although, for the most part, they seemed unimpressed. "Hey, what's wrong with your fish?" perky-blond Kathy with the adorable Beagle asked one day. I gave her a quizzical look. "Whaddya mean wrong?" "I dunno," Kathy replied, scrunching up her face distastefully. "It just looks so...different. It's scrawny and sliver and stuff. Is it retarded?" After I explained to Kathy that first of all, Amelia was a "she" and not an "it"; and second of all, if anyone was retarded, it was Kathy, her mother came to pick her up. Sure, Amelia may have been different, but then again, so was I. In 1970s Los Angeles, a girl who competed in chess competitions instead of acting auditions seemed as freakish as a goldfish who was silver. In Amelia, I'd found a quirky kindred spirit. So much so, that when Mrs. McCarey assigned our second-grade class "the creation of a diorama that tells people who you are," I took the project a nautical mile further and transformed my entire bedroom into a fish bowl complete with turquoise rocks, 4-foot cardboard castles, and Saran Wrap "glass" walls. In my accompanying essay (most classmates went with, "I AM A DANCER" or "I AM A BASEBALL PLAYER" mine was entitled, "I AM A FISH"), I explained that while I lived in a neighborhood rife with lavish castles, I felt like I was trapped in a tiny bowl. The next day, a somber-looking Mrs. McCarey sent me home with a sealed note to be delivered to my parents. I don't know what it said, but I did notice that in the ensuing weeks, Amelia grew suspiciously fatter. Meantime, when I wasn't teaching Amelia new tricks (tap tap = "heal"; taptaptap tap taptap = "play dead"), I'd sit transfixed in front of the TV watching Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha in "Bewitched" wiggle her nose and announce presciently, "Hmm. Something smells fishy here." Soon her toddler Tabitha, a pint-sized sorceress herself, was able to use extrasensory perception to detect when something seemed not quite right. "Hmm," I'd say, mouthing the words along with the mother-daughter witches on screen, "Something smells fishy here." Fishy indeed. At home, I traced the fishy smell to our new housekeeper, Carmen. "Do you think Carmen's secretly feeding Amelia while I'm at school?" I asked my mother when Amelia became too pudgy to do the backflips I'd taught her. "I have no idea," my mother replied innocently. "But in any case, don't you think you should be spending more time with your friends instead of with that silly goldfish?" A few weeks later, I woke up to find Amelia floating near the top of her bowl. I did a taptap tap tap taptapTAP, our special code for "stop playing dead," but when Amelia failed to swim back down, I realized she was truly dead. Holy mackerel! How could a perfectly healthy fish suddenly grow fat and croak? Then it occurred to me: Something fishy had killed my fish. Carmen? My mother? It didn't really matter: I knew I was swimming with sharks. Back at Thrifty Drug Store, I plunked down another quarter for another silver goldfish and named her Tabitha. I taught her a modified nose-twitch (tap taptaptaptaptap tap) like her onscreen namesake's, and carried her food supply with me at all times, so that no one could feed her behind my back. And while my family insisted that my firm belief in a subliminal connection with cold-blooded aquatic vertebrates was a figment of my imagination -- if not downright pathological -- outward signs confirmed a bona fide, well, finship. Consider: In fourth grade, I won a state-wide spelling bee by correctly calling out the letters in a randomly-selected bonus word that hadn't appeared on our study list. The word: ichthyophilia, love of fish. Consider: In fifth grade, when I became anorexic, I felt extremely uncomfortable eating just about anything other than a daily serving of frozen Pioneer Fish Sticks (calorie count: 270). My pediatrician explained this phenomenon to my parents with, "She loves fish and food is love." My reply, "Why would you eat someone you love? Isn't that cannibalism?" Consider: In sixth grade, the day after Tabitha died (of natural causes, nothing fishy), the boy I had a crush on -- the boy every single girl in our grade referred to as a "total dreamboat" -- walked up to my table in the cafeteria and cast this line: "Um, so, me and my dad are going fishing this weekend...wanna come?" No girl at our school had ever been asked to go fishing. By Monday, the entire sixth grade knew about our fishing trip. By Tuesday, classmates made kissy fish noises as we passed by in the halls. By Wednesday, graffiti on the playground read, "The Fish has been caught by The Dreamboat." (The very UN-Dreamboat-looking author of this message later became a sitcom writer.) By Thursday, this same sentence appeared on a wall in the boys' bathroom, and by Friday, someone had crossed out "the" and added "Girl" after "Fish." The message I saw when I sneaked past the urinals to take a peek now read: "Fish Girl has been caught by The Dreamboat." And so by Saturday, it was official: I'd been crowned "Fish Girl." The Dreamboat's family sailed away at the end of the school year, but my identity as Fish Girl remained anchored in place. After all, dating The Dreamboat for an entire semester had earned me a certain legitimacy. I was no longer a fish out of water. While my proclivity for fish once marked me as a freak, now it became not just a trend, but a hip cult following: kids wore day-glo fish T-shirts to class; KROQ's stoner DJ "Jed the Fish" became my classmates' #1 idol; and in the halls at Beverly Vista Elementary School, seventh and eighth graders communicated using phrases like, "I totally fished," "Ah, go fish yourself!" "He's such a fisher." "Fish it, will ya?" "Gone Fishin'." "Are you fishing me?" and "That's so fishin'!" (derived from the Valley Girl mantra, "That's so bitchin'!") But I wasn't the Big Fish on Campus for long. My glorious reign ended abruptly in ninth grade, when I went from being from a big fish in the little pond of elementary school, to a puny fish in the big hormonal ocean of high school. About mid-way through our first semester, my friend Teri called out, "Hey, Fish Girl!" at the very moment two hulking 12th-grade football players happened to be tramping by the lockers. "Fish Girl?" Jock #1 smirked to Jock #2 before turning to me. "Is there a reason your friend calls you Fish Girl?" "Something smells fishy," Teri whispered urgently. "Let's go." "Ooooh," Jock #1 continued, suddenly pinning me up against my locker. "Something smells fishy alright." Glancing over to see Teri making a run for it down the deserted hallway, I knew I was dead in the water. "Hey, Fish Girl?" Jock #1 went on suggestively. "You smelling fishy today?" "Fuck you," I mumbled with all the authority of a scared-shitless freshman. "Fuck me?" Jock #1 repeated menacingly, pressing his body up against mine. "Fuck your fishy-smelling pussy?" "Huh?" I had no idea what a pussy was, nor did I know that it could smell, well, fishy. "She's clueless," Jock #2 said, bursting out laughing. "Come on, let's bail." Frozen, I held my breath and waited. After what seemed like an eternity, Jock #1 gave me a lingering once-over, dramatically mock-sniffed my body a few times for good measure, then decided to set me free. "See ya around, Fish Girl," he winked. As both jocks bounded out the door, I slid my body down the lockers and curled into fetal position on the floor. Even from down there, I could still hear the words "Fish Girl" echoing off the ceiling. The next day, my terrified fish minions and I went undercover. Instead of Fish Girl, I was now known by an inner circle as The Fish. (We'd just seen The Godfather and "The Fish" sounded tougher, more Cosa Nostra.) The less we used fish phrases publicly, the fewer we remembered, so that by 12th grade, fish as a spoken language fell off the radar the way others tongues, like Latin, died of disuse. Astonishingly, though, the Fish Girl moniker lingered on. I kept the title due to the belief among my friends that, just as dogs hear sounds on special frequencies, I sense certain phenomena on "fish frequency." To wit: As an adult, I've used fish frequency to correctly forecast marital breakups, car robberies, suicides, unwanted pregnancies, studio takeovers, and unlikely romantic pairings. I've used it like feng shui by telling a friend not to rent an apartment that two months later burned to oblivion in a hillside brushfire. I've used it to track down the woman who stole my identity after snatching my wallet -- where else? - at a sushi bar. But recently, an old friend called me up, pushed "play" on her voice mail and said, "Listen to this message on fish frequency. Smell anything?" I listened. The guy had a sexy voice. Deep. Smooth, but a little gravelly on just the right vowels. "Let me take you to dinner," he practically purred into her machine. "Well?" she asked. "Does he like me, or do you think he'll use me to get his project into development?" I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to use my fish frequency to rate this guy on my "fish scale" (pun intended) -- a five-point measurement of a person's fishiness, five being the most slimy. (e.g., "Bill Clinton? F5.") "So?" my friend asked again. I didn't know what to say. Along with everything else that grew softer once I turned thirty, my fish frequency had lost its acuity. In fact, I'd begun to wonder whether this fish thing had any validity in the first place, or if it had simply been a construct I created that allowed me to swim safely through the childhood equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Was it no more than ichthyology mythology? "F2," I finally offered, and my friend hung up satisfied. But the guy could have been an F3. Or an F4 or an F1. Who the hell knows anymore? Lately I've been re-evaluating my relationship to fish. Not long after that phone call, I noticed a fish painting on the wall of my therapist's office and decided to tell him about Fish Girl. I thought it was an amusing story but he, being a shrink, seemed to find it meaningful. On that particular day, I'd planned on discussing why I missed an ex-boyfriend even though I was the one who insisted we break up, but my therapist preferred to talk about fish. So he said things like, "Don't you find it interesting that overeating meant death for your goldfish, and as a preteen you believed it meant death for you, too?" When that got no response, he added something about the "betrayal" I must have felt at Amelia's clandestine murder after Mrs. McCarey's mysterious note home to my parents. Again, I wasn't biting. Finally he got to the point: "When your first four goldfish died, even though you didn't miss them, or even love them, you cried each time. You said you felt guilty for hurting them, right?" I stared at the fish painting on the wall. Was it possible that I felt guilty about breaking up with my ex-boyfriend? That I didn't miss him after all? That I never really loved him in the first place? Was it possible that I'd infused everything I wanted so desperately to believe in -- love, fish, you name it -- with meaning that didn't really exist? My shrink raised his eyebrows. "Don't you want to explore this fish theme further?" he asked. "I dunno," I shrugged, looking away from the fish painting. Then I said out loud what I'd been meaning to admit to myself for a very long time. "Sometimes a fish is just a fish." Lori Gottlieb later got parakeets, which you can read about in her memoir, Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self. Lori's website is www.lorigottlieb.com © MMI. Lori Gottlieb. 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