Edna Lovejoy, in her faded floral print dress and her black-cloth house slippers, puttered around the house, moving from wandering jew to spider, geranium to arrowhead vine, Boston fern to China doll and others, carrying a watering can in her right hand. The house still smelled of ozone from the thunderstorm that had awakened her just after dawn, but sunlight was streaming in through the generous east windows.
She always watered the plants on Sunday. Or was it Wednesday? She frowned. The passing of the days concerned her less since the passing of her husband, Ed. She smiled at that turn of a thought, the passing of days, the passing of Ed.
Ed had been her clock and her timer and her reason. His schedule had given her days the depth of life in addition to the height of space and the breadth of time with which they showed up each sunrise. She was out of bed precisely a half-hour earlier than he was each day, and he went to bed exactly a half-hour earlier than she did each evening. The former enabled her to have the coffee and his breakfast ready before he went to the field, and the latter enabled her to complete her chores without him under foot.
Six days a week, Monday through Saturday, Ed worked in the field, plowing or planting, fertilizing or weeding, reaping or turning the stubble under to prepare the ground for the next plowing. When he wasn’t in the field he was working at the edge of the woods that abutted it, keeping the brush at bay or felling dead trees.
On days when the weather didn’t want him in the field, he worked in the barn or his shop, sharpening this, cleaning that. Twice a year he walked the fence row, mending the fence where necessary and carrying a large pump container of white vinegar to turn the tables on the poison ivy. When he was certain nobody was watching, he laid out a salt block or two for visiting deer.
No matter Ed’s schedule, she made him breakfast every morning and supper every evening. When he was close to the house, he’d come in for dinner. When he was at the far end of the field or in the woods, sometimes she’d pack a picnic basket and a red and white checkered table cloth they’d found at an auction. Then she’d find him and they’d have dinner on the ground just like after services at the church on Sunday.
If she came walking up with dinner in a basket, Ed grinned and stopped whatever he was doing. He always apologized for his dirty hands, always graciously accepted the bottle of washing water and the cloth she brought him to clean them.
On days when he didn’t make it to the house for dinner and she didn’t make it out to find him, he marked it up as a day when he shouldn’t have dinner. He’d slap his trim midsection and laugh. “Help me keep an eye on my girlish figure.” As far as Edna knew, it was the only joke he ever told.
That was their routine six days a week. Every day but Sunday.
Sunday. That reminded her of what she was supposed to be doing. Watering. Every Sunday. But she hadn’t gone to church this morning, so it must be Wednesday. It was one of those church days, wasn’t it? That didn’t seem quite right. Or maybe it was Friday? She smiled. Plant watering day was definitely Friday.
Friday wasn’t a church day, but it was related. Friday was fish day. It was a Catholic custom, but she and Ed had adopted it years before. It just made sense to work fish into their diet regularly. It was brain food, after all, and both of them were getting up there in years. Neither of them were spring chickens. She shook her head, and the weight of the watering can in her right hand reminded her again of her chore. Watering plants. Every Sunday. No. She frowned. Every Friday. And Friday was fish day too.
Friday was still fish day, but Ed wasn’t getting any older. All those years he was her regulator. Breakfast varied a little. Sometimes it was bacon or ham or sausage patties and pancakes with butter and syrup. Ed liked the butter and syrup heated together in a small pan, then poured over the cakes. He liked the bacon crisp and he ate it with his fingers, dipping it in the syrup and butter.
Sometimes breakfast was eggs with ham or bacon or sausage and potatoes. Ed liked the home fries best, when Edna would slice the potatoes like thick potato chips only cut at angles and then deep fry them when the grease was hot enough. The outside was crispy and the inside was tender and light. Sometimes breakfast was only oatmeal or grits with maybe a little sugar and butter. Anytime there were no pancakes involved, there were plenty of homemade biscuits. Ed routinely took a few of those to the field with him too.
But supper was set. Supper was steak and peas and potatoes on Monday, and ham steaks and beans and baked potatoes on Tuesday. On Wednesday they ate leftovers from Tuesday, but Edna still had work to so, cutting the ham steaks and potatoes into small chunks, mixing them into the beans and heating the whole thing up without burning it. On Thursday it was pork chops and mashed potatoes and green beans with Edna’s thick mushroom gravy.
On Saturday they always ate sandwiches made with Edna’s homemade light bread and cheese, and hot homemade tomato soup, and on Sunday, after having enjoyed dinner on the ground with all the ladies pitching in, they skipped supper. Sometimes Ed enjoyed a small bowl of ice cream on Sunday early evening just to let his stomach know it hadn’t been forgotten.
They ate fish on Friday, fish of all kinds, and Edna always picked and Ed always ate it. Fish is brain food and neither of them were getting any younger. Of course, Ed wasn’t getting any older. She smiled, then noticed the watering can again. Why was she holding it? Oh yes, Friday. Friday was plant watering day.
She looked at the watering can, carried it into the kitchen to refill it with water.
The body of the can was painted all around with farm scenes. Ed in the field walking behind a plow mule, her hanging laundry out back. Ed out back loading corn into the crib, her shucking corn with a bushel basket at her feet. Ed pumping water over his head near the barn before he came in to supper, her putting food on the table.
Of course, the figures weren’t actually Ed and her, but she liked to think they were. It was comforting to see them working together as they had from childhood until he’d gone on ahead three years ago.
Beneath the spout of the watering can a morning glory vine was intertwined with a grape vine. Ed would say the two plants looked tangled. Together the vines grew up along the spout, wrapping it in thin green lines punctuated now and then with broad grape leaves and the heart-shaped morning glory leaves. Peeking from among the leaves were small purple grapes, and draped over them in places were blue or red or white flowers.
Ed and Edna had grown together for over sixty years, their lives intertwined and punctuated with Edna’s dreams of children. Unfortunately, that dream had never come to fruition.
The watering can truly was beautiful, especially that its job was to hold life-giving water. The grape leaves were Ed again, broad, stout and bristly, and the softer, pillowy, heart-shaped morning glory leaves were Edna. She always saw happy, smiling children’s faces in the morning glory flowers.
Ed called morning glories weeds even when they weren’t encroaching on his fields. “They choke the beans,” he’d said in the years when soybeans were the crop. “They choke the wheat,” he’d said when the field looked like a plain of golden grass. “They choke the corn,” he’d said when the field was filled with stalks in stout rows.
Still, she nurtured them along the old bit of slat fence he’d left standing for her when he tore down the fence between the barn and the back of the house. They were so pretty growing back there, twining around the slats, running along the cross members as if to rest, then continuing their climb to peak just above the fence.
Funny, as the slats and the cross members got older and more weathered and more rotted, the prettier the fresh new morning glories were.
The water began to run over the sides of the watering can, and she looked up quickly and turned off the tap. “Waste not want not.” Then she poured the excess down the drain. She muttered, “Then again, leave too much in the can and I’ll have water all over the house.”
Of course, water is a good thing. All the best doctors and scientists say people are mostly water, except a few who talk at the sub-atomic level and say a person is mostly space. That was just silly. If people were mostly space, you could see right through them.
Besides, last she’d heard, they hadn’t yet been able to actually see an atom, so they certainly couldn’t see parts smaller than atoms. She grinned. Maybe that’s why they thought it was mostly space. Because they were unable to see it.
But Edna agreed with those who said a person is mostly water and that drinking plenty of water is good for you. It all made sense in the big cycle of things. After all, fish live in water, and certainly fish are good for you as brain food, and a lot of that probably comes from them being in water their whole lives, so the whole thing just made sense in a big circle kind of way. And brain food is certainly necessary when a person isn’t getting any younger, though it isn’t necessary anymore when a person has stopped getting any older.
Since Ed went on three years ago, Edna had taken all that advice to heart about drinking a lot of water and eating fish. That fish are brain food is irrefutable, and that water is good for you is irrefutable since a body is mostly water, but also secretly she thought maybe it worked both ways.
Maybe fish are better brain food because they spend their lives in water, and probably water is good for a body because of all those fish swimming around in it. Surely some of what’s good for you in fish, some of what makes fish brain food, rubs off into the water. So it works both ways. The fish feed the water and the water feed the fish and both feed the brain. Just makes sense.
Then she remembered what she was supposed to be doing. She was rinsing out the watering can, wasn’t she? She sloshed it about for a moment, then poured the rest of the water down the drain. Then she dried the outside of the can with a towel and set it in the window over the sink.
She leaned against the sink for a moment and looked through the window. She could almost see Ed out there in his coveralls and that dirty off-white long john top, walking behind that plow mule. He was so young and handsome. And wiry and strong. And later on he retired the harness straps and lease-purchased a tractor, and he was a little older but still wiry and strong. She looked again. She could almost see him out there, but not quite.
Soon after Ed had gone on ahead she read more about all those doctors and scientists and water and fish, and what they were saying made perfect sense. The first time she saw Ed outside that kitchen window after he’d already gone on, she pulled herself back by the one tiny thread of her mind that still knew he wasn’t there. She decided there was no more time to waste. She got in the car and drove to the grocery, resolved to improve her mind. She bought every kind of fish they had, and she took it home and cooked it.
She cooked all day, off and on, sprinkling rosemary and thyme here and there, a little pepper maybe, some lemon. She ate a little throughout the day as she was cooking, tasting this, testing that. And she remembered to drink water all day too, and the fish and water she ingested mixed, she was certain of that, and their secret ingredients mixed and made her stronger and made her brain better.
The results were both immediate and incredible. The more fish she nibbled on and the more water she drank, the easier it seemed to remember to eat more fish and drink more water. But she didn’t rely only on the immediate results. She looked out through the kitchen window several times that day, making sure her glances were sporadic, to test the effects of the fish and water, and not one single time did she see Ed out there. Near the end of the day, she stored what she wasn’t able to eat in pint jars and set it on the cabinet near the refrigerator.
Ed had built the cabinet just as he had built the house and everything in it. But he’d built that cabinet specifically so the space beside it would fit one of those fancy side by side refrigerator-freezers as soon as they could afford it. For a few years the space between that cabinet and the wall dwarfed their small Frigidaire with the ice box in the top.
Finally one cold winter day he came in from the field, washed his hands and arms and ate supper, and asked to see the books. Edna kept the books, but Ed was attentive and knew what was what. It was only wise, he said. She’d brought the ledger to him and after he’d studied it for a half-hour or so, he closed the ledger, grunted and handed it back to her. “I’m goin’ into town,” he said. “You wanna go or you wanna wait here for a surprise?”
“I’ll take the surprise,” she said, having felt a cold coming on and not wanting to tempt fate by getting out in the weather.
He’d nodded, donned his coat and hat, and drove the pickup into town. When he’d come back not quite an hour later, he hadn’t said anything about a surprise, but the following morning two burly young men in a Nelson’s Appliances truck had delivered the new side-by-side refrigerator-freezer.
When Ed had come in from the field for dinner he’d barely kept himself from yelling when he saw that slip of paper held against the white, smooth surface of the freezer door with a black magnet. He tore the paper and the magnet off and threw it in the trash.
Edna retrieved it after he went to bed and secreted it in the back of the dishtowel drawer. Then a few years later, after he’d gone on ahead to keep the pearly gates pure and gleaming and magnet-free, she’d put it back on the freezer side door. Of course, the slip of paper was different from the one Ed had swiped away. This slip of paper was her grocery list and she hadn’t changed it for three years. It read Fish.
As she went to put away the pint jars of fish, she opened the refrigerator door, the wide one on the right, and that slip of paper on the narrow freezer door caught her attention. It was there all the time, so she hardly noticed it anymore, but this time it was calling attention to itself.
She thought she knew what the single word on the slip of paper was, but she couldn’t cement it in her mind. It was wavering as if it were fluid. She frowned as she looked at it, trying to decipher it as she picked up each jar of fish from the cabinet with her left hand, passed it from her left hand to her right, and placed it with her right on the second shelf in the refrigerator.
When her left hand didn’t close on anymore jars, she closed the refrigerator door and the sound reconnected something in her mind. She promptly forgot why she’d opened the door in the first place, but it didn’t matter. Her attention was still riveted to the note, which graciously had stopped wavering. She recognized it as a grocery list. It read Fish. Given all that she’d read, it was a good grocery list.
The very next day the thought occurred that now that Ed was gone she should eat fish more often. There was no reason to hold herself to eating fish only on Friday, especially considering what she’d been reading from the doctors and scientists. She got in the car and drove to the grocery and bought every kind of fish they had and took it home. She cooked all day, eating a bit now and then as she cooked. Near the close of the day she stored what she hadn’t been able to eat in pint and quart jars.
As she opened the refrigerator door she noticed that one-word list on that slip of paper and focused on it. Fish. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful, fluid word. The word itself was filled with water and motion and certainly as long as there was fluid motion there could be no serious aging and certainly no dementia. That was a perfectly satisfactory thought.
The following day she remembered the fish in the refrigerator, but was surprised to find so much. Still, that could only be a good thing. There was so much fish that she saw no reason to eat anything else, and that fit perfectly with her plan to eat fish every day except Friday. No, that wasn’t right. Every day including Friday. She smiled. So every day. She would eat fish every day.
She took to carrying an open pint jar of fish around with her as she went through her normal chores, a fork protruding from the top of it. Whenever she took the notion, which was often, given her excellent memory of all the studies she’d read, she dug the fork into the jar and ate a forkful of fish. So that was quickly becoming like the fish-water, water-fish phenomenon. Her memory of those studies was excellent because she was eating fish so often, and she was eating fish so often because her memory of those studies was so good. It was a perfect symbiosis. It flowed, was fluid, like water.
The pint jars lasted her a full week. She refilled them out of the quart jars and they lasted her a second week. She preferred the pint jars and she didn’t trust the quart jars anyway because they just didn’t fit a person’s hand well.
Edna worked out a routine. She would visit the grocery every Monday and buy as much fish as she felt she could cook in a day. She would eat it as she cooked, and she would put what was left in pint jars in the refrigerator. It was a good plan.
For a few months she cooked fish on Monday, packed what she didn’t eat into pint jars and refrigerated them. For variety, she began labeling the jars. This one contained whitefish; that one tilapia; that one catfish; another one salmon; another trout and another bass. There were a few other species but those were her favorites.
By the fourth month she felt something was missing. She poured over scientific magazines and journals, looking for any new innovations that had to do with fish as a source of brain food. And one day, as she was flipping through a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal, of all things, an advertisement caught her attention.
It was an advertisement for all things pertaining to aquariums. She was fascinated, especially by the concept of fish food. She’d never given thought to what the fish eat. But they did eat, didn’t they? So why should she go to the effort of buying and cooking and canning fish when she could omit the middlefish, as it were, and go straight to the fish food?
She’d go broke purchasing the small, salt-shaker containers of sprinkle food for aquarium-bound fish, but she’d heard there were fish farms. Surely they must obtain fish food somewhere.
She drove into town to the library and, with the assistance of the nice boy at the desk, continued her research on a computer. She learned that the types of fish she had been eating to improve her mental function were indeed raised on farms. They ate a variety of things, including manufactured fish food that was delivered to those farms in twenty-pound bags. To enhance their diet, they ate smaller fish, plankton, and algae. Occasionally they also nibbled on the bases and roots of reeds, cattails and other water plants, all of which looked absolutely sumptuous to Edna.
A few days later in the middle of the afternoon, a truck pulled into Edna’s driveway. The driver slowed to a stop, leaned down and peered through the passenger-side window at the fallow field. It stretched away to a fence row almost a quarter-mile to the east. Some distance to the northeast, the fence row disappeared into old growth maple and beech trees and brush.
He turned his head back to the front and looked through the windshield to the north. He squinted, and he could barely make out the back fence of the property, also beyond a flat, fallow field. Nowhere was there a pond, nowhere were there aeration accelerators, nowhere were there pumps or skimmers or any of the other equipment typical to a fish farm. A broad stand-alone garage and, farther out, the barn interrupted his view to the northwest.
A confused look on his face, he killed the engine, put the truck in gear to keep it from rolling away, and stepped out. The air was crisp and clean, the aftermath of the small thunderstorm that had passed through earlier. As he crossed the lawn, the grass sponged water beneath his feet. To the west lay another fallow field, bordered by an overgrown fence row. There was a lot of room for fish ponds, but no fish ponds.
The porch stretched the width of the house and was six feet deep with three wide concrete steps leading up to the center. The short wall around the porch was made of red brick, and it looked all right hanging off the front of the clapboard house. Geraniums in various colors hung from the edge of the ceiling or lined the top of the wall. A rocking chair sat to the left of the door near the far edge of the porch, obviously stored, and another sat to the right side of the porch, but at an angle.
As he put his left foot on the bottom step, Edna opened the screen door. “Yes?”
The man stopped on the bottom step, raised the brim of his ball cap and scratched his head, then tugged the cap back into place. He tried a smile, but it didn’t quite develop. “Lady, I don’t mean to sound foolish, but I think I must have the wrong address. I got a load of fish food here, and—”
Edna grinned and clapped her hands in front of her face. “Oh goody goody goody! Thank you! Please just put it here in the living room. I have a space cleared, and I’ve laid down a couple of Ed’s pallets.”
“But I think you don’t understand. This ain’t food for them little fish like in one’a them aquariums. It comes in twenty-pound bags. This here food is for—”
“Oh no, I understand perfectly.” The grin was still resident on her face. “Please unload the truck quickly and I’ll get your check ready.” She turned and disappeared into the house, the screen door slamming shut behind her.
The delivery man shook his head. Twenty-four bags at sixty bucks a pop, and not so much as a fish pond in sight. He hesitated, then opened the screen door slightly and stuck his head into the living room. Sure enough, there on the left were two large pallets, side by side at the base of the west wall. He’d have to stack the bags three high, twelve to a pallet, but they’d fit fine.
As he was about to withdraw his head, he realized there was nothing else in the west end of the living room. He looked again. Only those two large pallets. He quickly glanced about the rest of the room. In addition to a couch, a recliner, and an easy chair, there was a rocker, a coffee table and three small occasional tables. All had been shoved helter skelter into the east end of the room in deference to the pallets.
He shrugged. If the lady wanted the stuff in the living room, he’d put the stuff in the living room. He’d have to find something he could use to block the screen door open. As he closed the screen there was a slight tapping sound. He looked down. There was a hook at the base of the screen door. He opened the door wide, the spring groaning at being extended beyond its usual range, and soon located the eye low on the wall. He knelt, slipped the hook through the eye, and walked down off the porch to begin unloading the bags of fish food.
When he came back to the porch, Edna was outside again, this time sitting in the rocking chair to the right. She seemed delighted as he walked past her, a twenty-pound bag of fish food draped over each shoulder.
He entered and crossed the living room, then deposited the bags carefully on the left pallet. Each bag read Ultimate Organic Fish Food. He went outside for the next two. After eleven more such trips, he came out. “Well, that’s it.” He knelt to unhook the screen door, then straightened.
Edna had stood and extended her right hand toward him with the check in it. “Thank you so much.”
He glanced at the check. She’d made it for $1500 even. “Ma’am, this is too much. There wasn’t no delivery fee or anything. The total is $1440.”
Edna smiled. “Yes, but you did such a good job. The extra is your tip. Is that all right?”
“Oh sure. And thanks.” Still he couldn’t quite turn away. His own mother was getting up there in years too. “Yeah. Listen, I’d be happy to hang onto this check for a few days. You know, just in case maybe you decide later there’s been a mix-up or somethin’.”
“Thank you so much. You’re really very kind, but there’s no mix-up.” She turned away, opened the screen and stepped through, waving with one hand over her shoulder. “Tata!”
Shaking his head, the delivery man folded the check and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He stepped down off the porch, crossed the lawn, got into his truck and left.
By the time he left, Edna had already moved a chair from the kitchen table into the living room next to the pallets. She hefted one bag and set it on end in the chair, then carefully opened the top. Dipping her hand into the bag, she pinched a few pellets between her thumb and index finger and popped them into her mouth. She’d expected to have to get used to the flavor, but they were actually quite good. She slipped a handful into the pocket of her dress.
The next day she experimented, using her food processor to mix the pellets into a slurry. First she tried mixing them with milk, but that was just nasty. Then again, would fish eat cattle? Perhaps piranha would, she thought with disdain, but certainly no fish of class would stoop so low. Naturally it followed that neither would they eat byproducts of cattle. Cattle most definitely were not brain food.
With that lesson learned, she eschewed all other animal products and byproducts, which of course left water. And that made perfect sense. She could mix the pellets with water or, since she herself was mostly water, she could nibble on them dry. The latter seemed the more sensible solution.
Her last trip to the grocery was for several boxes of quart plastic storage bags, the kind with the little plastic zipper pull across the top to seal them more easily. Back in her house, she began filling the quart bags with Ultimate Organic Fish Food. She emptied the refrigerator and cabinets, filling those spaces with the quart bags.
She carried a bag of Ultimate Organic with her as she went about her chores in and out of the house. She glanced across the field often, and she never once saw Ed in his coveralls and that filthy off-white long john top or on his tractor. She was pleased, too, that she could recall all the scientific and medical articles she’d read about brain food and fish and water. In fact, she was absolutely certain she could recite them practically word for word, should she be called upon to do so.
She snacked on the pellets from the ever-present bag of Ultimate Organic all day every day. Soon she also began to notice a certain clarity that she’d never experienced before. Things around her were wavering, much as the single word on her grocery list had wavered several months earlier. Inside, the walls, floor, furniture and fixtures were wavering. Outside, the field, the tree line of the woods, the fence rows, the telephone poles—all of it was wavering. But with her newfound brain power she realized the wavering was a boon, not a hindrance. She was overjoyed. The wavering provided a lovely, moving kind of clarity with no distortion at all.
That’s when she realized to get the most benefit, she would have to adjust her own herky-jerky, clumsy physical motion to match the fluid vibrations in her highly developed brain. Her human form was no match for the beautifully wavering visions.
Soon Edna took to visiting ponds near her home, those within walking distance. She practiced moving fluidly with the wavering road as she walked along it, practiced slipping effortlessly through the wavering grasses. At the ponds she experienced a kind of peace she had never known. But still something was missing. She was standing on the threshold of nirvana, but she sensed that it was larger, much larger, than the local farm ponds.
That’s when I first became aware of this whole affair.
She called me on the telephone and asked whether I’d like to visit a nearby lake. I always thought she was a sweet old lady, so I agreed to pick her up on Saturday morning.
“Which time is Saturday?” she asked.
That was a bit alarming. Somehow I adjusted. “The long dark passes, then the long light, and then another long dark. The next time the long light begins, that is called Saturday.”
She giggled. “Simply perfect!” she said, then hung up.
Two days later, on Saturday, I picked her up. She was dressed only in her pink house robe and her black-cloth house slippers. I’m not sure why, but I was certain she knew what she was doing, so I said nothing other than, “Good morning. Ready to go?”
She smiled and nodded in a very soft, fluid way, her lips pouting in the middle and her cheeks sunken as if she was holding them in.
Over the next two hours as we drove I coaxed her story out, and I have to say I agreed with her completely. Her mind having reached that stage of development, there was only one place for her to be. I pulled the car to the side of the road for a moment, put the gearshift lever in park, and turned to her.
“Mrs. Lovejoy, I think it’s time for you to be released back into the wild, don’t you?”
She nodded, fluidly, with that odd pucker in the center of her mouth.
“Let’s just do that then, shall we?” I extended a clipboard across the seat to her with a pen attached. “Could you just sign there at the bottom to verify that you’re ready to be released?”
She signed, her scrawl running all over the bottom of the page.
I pulled the clipboard back and slipped it into a pocket on my door, then pulled the gearshift lever into drive. I smiled at her. “Here we go. Ready?”
She slapped together her hands as if they were flippers, as if she’d just completed a trick and was awaiting her prize.
I pulled the car back onto the road. “Almost home, Mrs. Lovejoy. Close your eyes and just relax. You’re almost home.”
I drove her to a release point on the river. We both got out of the car and walked down to a boat ramp. She slipped off her black-cloth house slippers, then dropped her robe and slipped head first into the water.
A moment later, she surfaced much farther out. I thought she was smiling but it was hard to tell with that odd pucker more firmly in place. Then she turned, flipped her tail and gaily swam away.
Despite her brain being in excellent shape, she doesn’t know to this day where she leaves off and fish begins.
Or me when I come to visit in her room.
* * * * * * *