F.I.S.H by Margaret Laureys:Part-1

F.I.S.H by Margaret Laureys

A lot of people came and went through our kitchen but Mom almost never left it. My father, whose own headquarters were at the bar, called Mom “The General” and the kitchen was her command center. She cooked, sewed, did laundry and helped us with our homework all in the kitchen. Every major appliance – fridge, stove, washer, and dryer – was lined against the same wall, along which she moved up and down for two decades, raising ten children and wearing a groove into the linoleum so deep the concrete showed. The phone, with a twelve-foot cord, stood at the end of the line.

Once my baby brother was enrolled in kindergarten and all ten kids were tucked nicely away for the school day, Mom branched out. She founded a church organization called F.I.S.H., which she ran almost entirely from that kitchen telephone. F.I.S.H. was an acronym for “friends in need of service and help” and a play on the fish that the early, persecuted Christians painted above their doors. The sign of the fish established fellowship without setting off the Romans. It was through FISH that I was first exposed to our contemporary pariahs – the drunks, unwed mothers and homosexuals whom even the church got in on persecuting.

Initially, the FISH clients seemed no more interesting than the garden-variety church poor – the families to whom we gave turkeys every year. Mom recruited volunteers from our parish church and when calls came in from the needy she put them in contact with her volunteers and arranged for rides to the hospital or the market. Mom walked up and down her aisle -- stove, sink, washer, dryer -- and talked on the phone, which she clamped tightly between chin and shoulder while she used her free hands to work.

As I got older and understood things better I noticed that Mom’s FISH calls involved more than logistical arrangements. Some of these callers had dramatic problems. There was the unwed teen whose family threw her out. Mom went through her list of volunteers and put appropriate people in touch. Couples came to our house and conferred with Mom. I knew a match was made the day that the girl herself showed up and left with one. The couple took the girl in until the baby came to term and could be put up for adoption. A few years later, we were the family to take in one of these teens. But in the early days, Mom just took the calls.

I knew most of these people only by voice on the phone. There was the lady who called all the time in tears. Her husband drank and she needed to find him rides for his AA meetings. I knew my own father drank, but he never crashed our car or lost his job. I eavesdropped while doing my homework at the kitchen table and knew that Mom also organized food drives for such women, women whose no good, drunken husbands were out of work and who needed more than that one turkey a year. This would never happen to us. No matter how much my father drank, Mom’s parents would never fire him from the family business, which, since it was a supermarket, also meant we’d never starve.

I’m sure Mom would’ve liked that I felt safe, but she would not have wanted me to feel superior to her FISH clients. She did her best to keep these people’s problems private. She was particularly cagey about a call if it involved a family with kids we knew. This rarely happened, but when it did, Mom was right: we noticed. We lurched and listened. And something was definitely up when that couple came with their teenage daughter who talked like a boy. I didn’t know the girl; I was only in fifth grade at the time and she was a high school kid. But my sisters Kathleen and Cecilia knew her all right.

She arrived still wearing her uniform from marching band practice. I knew marching band was for geeks, because Cecilia, the cooler of my two older sisters, told me so. I also knew that Cecilia was the cooler one because Kathleen’s friends were, in fact, in the marching band.

I was at the kitchen table doing homework and I desperately wanted to stay to hear this girl talk more. I’d never heard a girl with such a deep voice. If it weren’t for her long, stringy hair, she could’ve been a boy. It was 1976 and boys still wore their hair long, but not that long. Besides, her being a girl and not a boy seemed to be the crux of the matter. Mom sent me to the living room, which was directly beyond the kitchen and had an open doorway from which I could still hear. You couldn’t really shut things out in our house; there were too many people and too little space. My siblings were streaming in and out of the kitchen, living room and bathroom all afternoon. I gathered what I could eavesdropping from the chair closest to the kitchen.

The mother kept saying things like “we don’t know what to do” and the father kept reassuring that, “No, come now, it’s not really that bad.” They just needed to think about the other kids. There were other kids to think about. Apparently, the boyish daughter – I’ll call her Sharon -- was making life difficult for the pretty daughter and this could not be. The mother then said what I remember most distinctly, because it was the precise sort of thing that made my own mother shake her head in disgust whenever she heard it: “Sharon’s a bad influence.”

I went to a birthday party once where one classmate was conspicuously denied attendance. The birthday girl’s mother thought the classmate was a bad influence because she was caught smoking cigarettes at school.

“There’s no such thing as a bad influence,’ Mom said. If she had raised us right, she declared, we would do what’s right -- no matter the other kids were up to.

It’s a good thing my mother thought this way, because more often than not, I was the one bringing cigarettes to school. But a boyish sister? On what grounds was she a bad influence? I needed to know what this girl had done. I gleaned better information after Cecilia discovered her presence.

“What on earth is Sharon Jones doing here?” Cecilia asked.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

Cecilia seemed to know all about this Sharon Jones, how she stared at the other girls in the locker room and how she dressed like a boy and how she should just leave us alone. Cecilia didn’t seem to know anything about the pretty sister, but Kathleen did and it was on this point that Kathleen and Cecilia began to argue.

“Her sister’s a bitch,” Kathleen said. “You have no idea how mean she is to us.”

Kathleen hated the sister more than she liked Sharon and it occurred to me that a similar sister rivalry was at play between she and Cecilia.

I felt for Kathleen, as one often feels for the underdog. But I also felt it was unfair to ask Cecilia to be brave on this one. Cecilia hung out with popular girls yes, but she was only a freshman and by no means the queen bee of the crew. Her position was precarious, augmented in one way by having big brothers who were handsome and good at sports. And then, of course, there was always safety in numbers. There were enough of us to be spread throughout every grade and every clique. But in other ways our family was also the problem. Our house was crowded and every one of us slept two, sometimes three to a bed. Worse, Mom hoarded. Friends teased about the mountains of magazines, broken toys and empty cookie tins. There was a joke that our house was like the Bermuda Triangle; once something entered the realm – be it an old shoe or a dried out pen – it never left. Even the kinder kids commented on how strange our autistic brother Brian was. Brian sat on the floor all day, Indian style, rocking to music and spinning tops. He never spoke and instead made loud braying noises. He often wet his pants and always ate with his hands. Brian wandered the house at will like an untutored Helen Keller while Mom went her merry way solving the community’s problems via FISH.

Though never stated, I intuited Cecilia’s position and empathized: our family couldn’t afford to be any weirder. Still, the girl was only sitting in the kitchen. As soon as they left it became clear that she would not be coming back. Mom began making calls to place her. I didn’t hear the FISH volunteers refuse, but I assume they must have, because Mom ended up putting her in a spare room at my Uncle Joe’s house.

I needed to know what was so wrong with this girl and it had clearly come down to one, salient question: “Why,” I asked Mom, “Does that girl act like a boy?”

“It’s not her fault,” Mom replied. “Some girls are born with too many male hormones.”

I persevered, but hormones were the most Mom could make of it. To this day, I’m not sure if my mother could come up with anything more sophisticated and I’m glad of it. I’m glad she cared for the girl without understanding one damned thing about it.

 

Great read! Thank you for posting and I look forward to more of your posts.

 

Thank you very much aaronroofing