Fish, Love, and Fireworks

Derrick Lennox

I didn’t hear my wife leave the bed and when I found her, she was in the kitchen fussing with the coffee maker. I traced the line of her back with my eyes as she leaned over the counter. Neither of us had showered and she was wearing gray pajamas pants with an old shirt of hers that had a handful tucked into the back of her pants. I said good morning and sat down in front of the newspaper but did not pick it up. Out the back window I saw the yard was cluttered with junky plastic toys.
“How did you sleep,” I asked.
“Slept fine.” Emma said.
“The kids have got to begin cleaning up their things.”
“They’re just kids.”
“It’s never too soon to clean up after yourself.”
“So tell them when they wake up.”
Underneath the newspapers were my cigarettes and a book of matches. They hadn’t moved since last night. I rested one between my lips and struck a match—it was the morning’s first.
“Terry.”
I looked over at her. She was trying to find a pan in the beige cabinets beneath the counter.
“Terry, please.”
“What.”
“Not in the house. It already smelled like cigarettes when I came down here.”
I had been smoking in the house for years, so I asked what difference it made. She answered by pivoting towards me and leaning back on her hips.
“Fine,” I said and put it out softly inside the mouth of an empty Coke can. I left the rest of the cigarette on top of the can.
“What are you cooking?”
“Fish.”
“For breakfast?”
“It’s going to go bad if we just leave it in the fridge.”
“What rush are you in?”
“I’m busy today,” she said, “I have to run errands.”
“I’m going to pick up the dry cleaning this afternoon.”
“That’s good.”
“No, I mean I can come along if you want company,” I said.
“I’ll be fine.”
She took the fish, wrapped in wax paper, out of the refrigerator and dropped it in the pan.
“I’m not hungry right now,” I said, “maybe later.”
“That’s fine,” she replied.

Krampf & Nicholson was only my second serious job. I worked in a cubicle doing purchasing during the week and on the weekend, I sneaked through some trees to play tennis on the grass courts of a countryclub. I was pretty fast back then and wasn’t half-bad either. Emma was also young and had just started as a secretary. We always call our anniversary the Fourth of July because that’s when we met, at the company picnic. She worked in a different building than me so I had never noticed her until that day.
The picnic was scheduled at a pond by the offices. The tables were covered in bright yellow table cloths and set up in a grassy area by a old lodge and boat house. It felt humid and almost too hot to smoke. Just as well though, since I didn’t like doing it in front of coworkers. I remember thinking that when I was older, I would move away from the Garden State humidity.
She introduced herself to me at the grill and we ate and talked. That afternoon we got drunk and circled the still pond until everybody else left. After a while, we stopped and laid down in the boat house where the wooden flanks a 20-footer rapped against the dock like a patient metronome. My back and chest were damp from the heat. We watched the fireworks being volleyed beyond the horizon and when they quit, an unexpected wind washed warmly over us.

Once Emma got everything settled on the rusty stove burners, she poured two cups of coffee and sat down across from me. She reached indiscriminately for a section of the paper and started reading.
“You were out fast last night.”
“I was very tired.” She said without looking up from the news.
“I guess the massage really put you out.”
“Thank you for it.”
She kept on reading the paper so I lifted her chin up with my finger and asked if anything was wrong.
“Nothing,” she said.
“If there was, would you tell me?”
“Yep.”
“Really? Was it the massage?”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“You fell asleep right after, you just laid there,” I said.
“The massage was fine. I mean, I don’t expect you to be a professional.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s just that the next day, I’m always sore.”
“Sore?”
“Yeah, you know. Whenever you try to make it into something else.”
“You could always show me how to do it the way you like. I’m not perfect, you know. I didn’t go to school for this shit.”
“Don’t get tight about it. I’m just saying-”
“Screw it. Don’t worry about saying anything.”
“Fine.”
We both watched our papers, staring at the print. Like usual, she the first to break the silence without saying much of anything. How’s quitting smoking going? she asked. This time I really wish she hadn’t.

I didn’t learn until a week after the picnic that she already had a boyfriend. Or a something. I never wanted to know the exact details. I dealt with that for a full year until we moved in together. After all this time, Emma’s always had a lot of love to give.
We got married, bought a house (last remodeled in the seventies), had kids, and worked steady jobs. Emma began working part-time and stayed home with the kids and cooked. I started working more and playing tennis less. I’ll admit that if I came home to a dirty house, there were times I would ask her things like what she did all day with her time. Those nights got interesting; sparse bursts of energy reminding us that there were still flickering signs of life.
Oh, and the big plan to kick smoking hasn’t gone so well either.

Emma said that she was going to take a shower and reached to untuck the bottom of her wrinkled shirt. She pulled it away and for a short moment the small of her back was uncovered. It looked softer than I remembered it being and I wondered how the sight of her bareness had become so unfamiliar. Before she walked away, she got up and took a long look in the pan. Then, in almost the same way that she looked at the fish, she looked over at me. She told me to watch the stove.
I stood over the burner just staring at the thing. The fish’s mouth gaped stiffly and he watched me with his one dead eye. I felt bad thinking about how happy he must have been swimming through ponds or rivers or fish farms or wherever he was from. The ashen ribs and silver tail were the only parts of the fish that reminded me that he was once alive. The fish. The dead fish. I gave him a nod to let him know that he was still good in my book. The grease around it hissed and popped and the meat began to turn brown. A strand of gray smoke slipped out from under it’s spine.
I pushed open the screen door and listened for the upstairs shower from the overgrown backyard. The running water was all that I could hear from inside the decaying gray fence that surrounded the yard, which was cluttered with shit. I turned a plastic lawn chair right-side up and cleaned it off. I sat down for a while and watched as each cloud passed from over the house until it disappeared past the top of the fence where I could see it no longer. When there were no more clouds to pass me by, there I remained, finishing off the rest of the pack and lighting matches like tiny fireworks.