Fisheye by Jade Lacy

The last time we stayed at Popo’s house, I was five years old, still in the cradle of memory when truth and story become mixed up in an inseparable mosaic. It’s hard to say what I remember and what has been spun to me as a family tale, more real than my own hazy recollection. Maybe if I had been older I would have more to tell. Or maybe it would be all the more clear how much of Popo’s life had slipped through the cracks of my young, distracted mind.

My sister Lara and I went to Popo’s house almost every weekend. Our mom would drop us off at the low cracked stoop. Before leaving, she stopped inside for a cup of tea and tried to avoid the Tupperware with steamed fish and rice that Popo always had prepared for her, always worrying as she did about getting fat.

The drawers were full of clothing scraps turned rags and spare red envelopes. Old produce boxes from their restaurant days were stacked along the walls, each one containing trash that Popo found valuable. Mom said that Popo once had to leave everything she owned to come to America. No matter how hard Mom tried, Popo would give up nothing more.

After a day of foraging around the house, Lara and I would bring Popo our most unique finds. Scraps of bent and rusted metal, cracked broaches, bubble-wrapped figurines. We held them out to Popo and asked her what they were called. She would respond in Chinese and we would repeat the word at home, challenging our mom to remember her vocabulary.

Sometimes Popo wouldn’t know what we were holding in front of her. She would screw up her face, pulling her loose skin into tense wrinkles. It was a game to me, a trick she liked to play. I would keep asking her the name, where she got it, what it was doing here in her house after so long. She would shake her head and deepen her frown, pulling it lower and lower until I relented. I told her I brought it from home to trick her. Then her face returned to its normal kindness, and she pinched my cheek. I would slip away at some point in the day and return the rejected item where I found it.

On special days when she was feeling very energetic, Popo would load us onto the bus with empty plastic bags and take us to the Chinese supermarket. My family was among the first wave of immigrants in the area, living canaries in the mineshaft. She used to sit in the passenger seat as my grandfather drove all the way to Chinatown, three hours round trip, for their produce. But now, decades later, the city was full of migrants creating little pockets of homeland in the American suburbs.

The store was huge and bustling. I held my breath for as long as I could when I entered, trying to stave off the stench of raw fish that floated through every aisle. Popo never noticed. She charged ahead. We trailed behind her as she examined the fruits and bargained with the men behind the counter. If we were lucky, she would let us choose a chocolate to take home with us.

Lara was in charge of holding the list, since it was her idea. She had gotten tired of being sent back to retrieve items Popo had forgotten, so she demanded that Popo keep a list for the first time in her life. Her stubbornness had outlasted Popo’s, and at last she received her prize: a little scrap of paper written in neat Chinese script. She would always squint at the letters when Popo asked her what was next, then hold the list to Popo’s face and complain about her bad handwriting. Popo chided her rudeness and said nothing more, grateful for the fantasy of a shared language between them. 

On the last day I was watching the seafood tank. I liked to watch the doomed fish struggle through the murky waters while Popo haggled with the butcher man. Lara had left to the cookie aisle, knowing it was much easier to convince Popo to buy us something we already had in our hands.

Among his plump and expressionless brothers, one fish floated tummy up at the top of the tank. He began to move towards me, the fins of the other fish swirling the water around him. The fish danced across the top of the water, wavering from side to side like a rubber duck in the bathtub, but never falling over. He looked at me with his tiny white eye. The most precious meat. We stared at each other.
            Lara grabbed my shoulder.

“Where’s Popo?!” she demanded. I glanced around the supermarket. I saw nothing.

“Why weren’t you watching her?”

I shook my head. I darted my eyes in every direction, hoping to see Popo jumping out from behind a stand of frozen meats. It was just a trick. And yet my cheeks were growing hot and my breath came in hiccupping gulps.

Lara wanted to berate me more for losing our grandma, but crying was always the way to her heart. Instead of yelling, she dragged me across the store, peering down every aisle to find the missing woman.

“Where is she?” she moaned.

Around each corner was a comforting silhouette, giving us a moment of hope before they turned around and showed us a stranger’s face. We walked the length of the store twice, frozen food to produce and back, until Lara was forced to stop.

“She disappeared.” The break in her voice and iron grip on my wrist told me something was very wrong. Like I always did when she was upset, I began to cry.

Lara wiped my tears away frantically, but they ran fast. They poured down my cheeks and onto her hands until the frustration of my unstoppable well drove her over the edge and she started crying too. We sat like that for a long time before anyone approached us: two children crying in front of the bags of bulk rice, calling out for their grandmother.

We were safe in the manager’s office when my mother came to get us three hours later. Popo was at home, happily cooking her fish. When we returned to her house for our things, she said nothing of the supermarket, nothing of our mother’s anger. Instead, she just ladled us out a plate of fish and rice, plus a Tupperware for the road.

I never saw Popo in that house again. My mother moved her into a new home, with nurses who knew how to stop Popo from wandering away, and sold the old place. My mother was strong enough to sort through the accumulated trash of her childhood, picking and choosing the memories she would keep, but she could not watch her mother do the same. 

Sometimes Lara and I were allowed to help. We went through the familiar boxes and pulled out our favorite treasures. I would present my pile of saved goods to Lara one by one. She nodded or shook her head, and I would return the rejected item to its resting place.

Popo lasted another year. I remember her funeral. I know I walked up to the casket, where her fragile face was laid open for us to gaze upon it for the last time.

I thought about the fish. It’s not something Lara could have told me about later; I know it’s mine. I wondered how long the fish sat in that tank, its cold body being jostled about by the others. Did the other fish know? Maybe it seemed like nothing more than a joke to them, a prank.

I wondered how to tell if a fish was crying. I could look them dead in the eye and not know if the water flowing around them was salty or clean. I wouldn’t know until they were laid out in front of me, already dead and cooked, their eye on the tip of my tongue.

I looked into Popo’s resting face and remembered that round, precious eye, staring at me through foggy waters. 

Jade Lacy

Image: A wet fish market stall from Pixabay.com