Paprika
Linda Legters

Our goldfish, Paprika, had spent the week resting on the bright blue gravel at the bottom of the fish bowl exercising one gill, so it wasn't a surprise when she died during dinner.
We had gone to great lengths to keep Paprika alive. New water, new water treatments, a heat lamp, a toy, a new castle. Every once in a while, to test the fish's strength we would swirl the water around with a finger -- or my husband Larry might use a number two pencil -- and watch while Paprika came to life. Maybe this goldfish just slept a lot.

*

We have two dogs, two cats, a hamster and a son, but it's the goldfish that caught Larry's attention for awhile. He brought the thing home in a bag one day, along with a bowl and the gravel and a few fake plants, a list of instructions -- a list longer than the one in Timothy's baby book -- and a small canister of smelly flaked food. While I fed the two dogs, the two cats, the hamster and Timothy, Larry fed the goldfish. While I walked the two dogs, changed the cats' litter box, the hamster's newspaper and did Timothy's laundry, Larry watched Paprika, and collected tales of her feats, how fast she had gone, how she had swum to the side to look at him a long time, how fascinated she was with the pot of ivy nearby.
"Maybe she needs a real plant in her bowl." So he got her one, along with a bowl big enough for two.

*

Timothy, our son, not quite eleven, is on the verge of the adolescence I have always dreaded. Already there are girls on the phone, and giggles over sexual innuendoes, my fear of drugs and drunk driving and cigarettes, clothes I have to bite my tongue over, and a buzzed-cut head.
Timothy sat at the dinner table watching Larry watch the fish.
"Hey, Dad. I've got baseball try-outs."
"Do you see how she swims toward the light?"
"Have you been practicing?" I said. "Maybe Dad could go out and have a catch with you. Larry? Could you do that?"
"Maybe it's too dark in here." He squinted up at the ceiling. Timothy, elbows on the table, fingers drumming lightly, looked at me, looked at Larry. I smiled, tried to slide over the moment, got up to make hamburgers, but that night when Larry plugged a small lamp with a forty watt bulb in the outlet next to Paprika, Timothy said "Do you know my door has been squeaking for a year?"

*

While Timothy was at school I got the oil can out, but all I managed to do was change the order and the octave of the notes the hinges made. That night Timothy's door woke me when he got up to go to the bathroom; the hamster scratched around the bottom of its cage.

*

"What's with this fish, anyway?"
"I just like it," Larry said.
But by now Paprika was spending its days on the bottom. Larry would peer in at it every time he went by the bowl, last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Keeping it going took on huge importance. As if our success with that would lead to other things. Sex. The lottery.
But the fish became more pale and more listless. I thought the new reddish spot by its mouth was probably a hemorrhage.

*

"You're feeding it too much," Larry said. "I'll bet you're feeding it too much."
"I'm not feeding it at all."
"Is Timothy feeding it? Maybe Timothy is feeding it."
Soon I was peeking in its bowl every time I walked by it, sticking my finger in to wake it up, although I might have been shocking it. Larry called home from his plumbing supply store more than once to ask how she was.
"This is ridiculous," I said. "Goldfish are impossible to keep alive. He cost a dollar."
"She. She cost a dollar."
I reread the list of instructions. A friend told me goldfish produce too much ammonia. I tried bottled water. Kosher salt. And everything I tried seemed to perk it up for a few hours, but then I would come by and there she would be listing at the bottom, on one labored gill.
Larry carried the bowl around the house trying to find the place with the most constant temperature. He bought different food, took out the plant. But one morning, he didn't check on her, and after that never checked on her again.
So I was the one who worked and worked, who got up in the night to be sure the water hadn't gone cold, changed the water a small percentage at a time, smelling it for ammonia. I allowed Paprika only the food she could consume in two minutes. Watched her pretty film tail flutter her around slowly. Forgot to walk the dogs.

*

"Give up," Larry said. "Want me just to flush it?"
"No," I said. "I think I have it figured out."

*

"Is it dead yet?" Timothy asked when he came home. Timothy made the baseball team. "But not by much," he said.

*

During dinner, I felt something go wrong. Pale, close to the top, Paprika floated in her bowl.
"Woops," Timothy said.
"I should have flushed that thing days ago," Larry said.
I cursed. "I wonder what I did wrong."

*

The next morning I was sitting having coffee, looking through the newspaper, when I remembered I hadn't put earrings in my pierced ears for three days. I knew I should get up and find earrings to put in before the holes closed over and healed. Paprika's bowl sat near me on the counter with the blue net we had taken her out with leaning against the side. Oh, the old guy who lived up the road has died, here is his obituary, and an article about some group in town trying to get industrial park zoning, and I should get up before I forget about the earrings again. How fast do holes close up, anyway? And a hundred year old oak tree on Main Street got hit with lightening last week; now they have to bring the rest down.

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