I vaguely remember Grandpop and Grandma watching from the side of the dock. There was laughter and chatter, and Ethan Chapman must have been curious because he came over from next door.
“Keen,” he said, kneeling in the sand above the platform where Julie and my mother were doing their dirty work. “That is the most gigantic eel I’ve ever seen.” Ethan was very skinny, his knees the widest part of his legs. He was entirely covered with freckles, and his hair looked brown one minute and red the next, depending on how the sun hit it. His glasses were thick.
“Why don’t you come over tonight and have some?” my mother said. Then she tossed her head back with laughter at the face Ethan made. She knew the eel she cooked was safe from anyone besides my grandmother and herself.
“I don’t want to eat that thing,” Ethan said. “Could I have the skin, though?”
Julie had been about to throw the skin into the water, but she looked up at him, the whites of her eyes in sharp contrast to her nut-brown summer tan.
“What for?” she asked.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, pointing. “Look how shiny it is on the inside. Look at all the colors.”
We stared down at the inside-out eel skin. I could see what he meant. The skin had a shimmery mother-of-pearl look to it.
“It’s yours,” Julie said, tossing the skin up to him.
Ethan reached out with one of his toothpick arms and managed to catch the slithery mess. “And can I have the guts when you clean him?” he asked.
I could see Julie wrinkle her nose. “You’re gross,” she said.
“Julie,” my mother reprimanded her quietly. Then she looked up at Ethan. “Sure you can have them, Ethan,” she said. “What will you do with them?”
“Study them,” Ethan said, and I understood why Julie was no longer friends with him that summer.
Later, when my mother threw the skinned, gutted and beheaded eel into the frying pan, it still wriggled. I had nightmares about that for several nights in a row. I’d been an extraordinarily fearful child back then. After Isabel died that August, my fears gradually began to slip away. It was illogical; I should have become more fearful once my world had been shattered. But it was as though the worst had happened and I’d survived, and I knew I would be okay no matter what happened after that.
Mom finally came over to my table in the corner and sat down across from me.
“Whew!” She smiled. “Busy place today.”
“All the summer-school kids,” I said.
Mom was not really with me. Her eyes darted around the small restaurant, looking for customers she knew and tables in need of cleaning. She’d worked there for five years and it was her home away from home.
“That girl,” she said, nodding toward the young woman she’d introduced me to earlier, “is pregnant again. Can you believe it? She’s going to have three little ones under the age of four.” She clucked her tongue. “The choices people make,” she said.
“It’s her choice, though,” I said.
“Well, I’m certain her husband had something to do with it,” my mother said. She pulled a napkin from her pocket and wiped at a spot on the table. “I wish you’d go to church with me Sunday,” she said. “It’s a special occasion.”
“What’s special about it?” I tried to remember when the holy days were, but drew a blank.
“It’s Father Terrell’s birthday.”
“Ah,” I said. That wasn’t special enough to get me inside a Catholic church. I’d explored just about every religion possible over the course of my adult life and was probably best described as a Buddhist Quaker. I wanted peace, both inside and outside. But I watched my mother carefully fold up the napkin and put it back in her pocket. She was so cute. So devoted to her job. How could I resist her?
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Lucy!” she said.
I got along fine with my mother, despite my lifestyle choices. I’d never been married, but had lived with three different men, eight years apiece. Eight years seemed to be my limit, for some reason.
Julie’s relationship with Mom had always been a little strained, though, in spite of the fact that my sister tried to do everything right. She’d stayed Catholic, gotten married, produced a beautiful grandchild and had an enormously successful career. She was conservative and reliable, the levelheaded daughter who took Mom to her doctor’s appointments and helped her with all her paperwork. Still, there was an undeniable awkwardness between my mother and Julie that I doubted would ever go away. Julie thought she still blamed her for Isabel’s death. I didn’t believe that for a minute, but it was impossible to know if that might be the case, because my mother wasn’t the type to talk about her feelings. The topic of Isabel was always off-limits, anyway. Even I would have been uncomfortable bringing it up with her. Feelings kept under wraps, though, could be far more destructive than those brought out in the open. I knew that, and I was a brave woman, but I would never have been able to form the right words to speak to my mother about Isabel.
“Listen,” my mother said, “I was thinking we need to have a big party before Shannon goes off to college. She’ll be away for her birthday on September tenth, so it could be a combination birthday and going-away party.”
“That’s not for a couple of months, Mom,” I said.
“But you know how time slips by,” she said. “If we don’t start planning it now, it might never happen.”
“All right.” Sometimes it was better to let my mother run with an idea than to try to stop her. “What are your thoughts?”
“We could have it here.”
“At McDonald’s?” I tried not to sound too horrified. “Shannon’s nearly eighteen. I don’t think she’d want to have a party here.”
“All right, all right.” My mother brushed away my comment as though she’d known it was coming. “How about at home, then?” She meant her house, the house Julie and I had grown up in.
“Good idea,” I said.
She started talking about her plans for the party—who we should invite, a theme for the decorations, what sort of food we’d have—and my mind slipped back to the eel.
“Do you remember that huge eel Julie caught?” I asked suddenly.
My mother looked confused, my question so completely out of context. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “What eel? When?”
I realized I’d made a mistake starting the conversation, because I was certain the year of the eel had been 1962.
“Just…when we were kids,” I answered. “She caught it in the canal. When you put it in the frying pan, it still moved.”
“Oh, they always did,” my mother said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Some autonomic nerve thing,” she said. “They were dead as doornails. What on earth made you think of that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I lied. “It just popped into my head.”
My mother looked dreamily into space. “What I wouldn’t give for some eel right now,” she said.
I leaned back and sipped my soda, feeling pleased all out of proportion to the conversation: I’d said something about the bungalow and survived.