Blup

She must have figured that at 13 cents each, the risk factor wasn’t that high.

November 1962

A water cooler was really a cool thing. Well, maybe not as cool as your own drinking fountain in the backyard like Doug, the kid next door had, but still pretty cool. It was out of character for Dad to spend money on water when it was in plentiful supply right out of a garden hose or a kitchen faucet, but of course that made it all the more cool to me. Dad set the water cooler in an awkward place—wedged between some unused tables and a stack of unopened boxes, right past the washer and dryer, and just before the ivy-- which I thought was poisonous because of the Coasters song —but I delighted in becoming a contortionist for the reward of getting a glass of water, and I loved that water cooler sound, blup. Sometimes it was a double, blup, blup.
That’s where I got the name. They say goldfish make lousy pets because they are silent and they don’t do tricks. But their trick is the best of them all; they can stare straight at anyone and anything and it appears that they don’t have a thing on their minds, but in fact who knows? They could very well be the greatest poker players ever. As for the sound, well, maybe they don’t have anything to say, or maybe they are making a sound the people can’t hear, and if we could hear that sound, I always thought it would be the water cooler, blup, every time their gills moved. So that’s what I named the first one, and since there really wasn’t a better name than that, I also gave the name to the second one. They were Blup and Blup. Everyone loved the name, even without the explanation. One would find my sister walking around in the house at given time saying, “Blup!”
I got the fish at Newbury’s in Burbank on Magnolia. I loved the humming of the aquarium pumps in the back corner of the store. That MMMMMMMMMMMM was a sound that could fix something inside. It counteracted the darkness, the smell and the worn out look of the store. I patrolled the rows again and again until Mom called me out of there. I’m not sure what happened the day Mom changed her mind and yes instead of no to my endless requests for a goldfish. She was never big on pets; it was one of the things that she and Dad were on the same page about: pets were a nuisance; an annoyance to be avoided, but they relented on several occasions and most of the time the results were good. We had several cats, Whiskers, Snowball, Sam and Sam II, and they were a source of fascination for Dad. He would dangle string in front of any of them until the cat was in a mad frenzy to catch it. Mom though wanted nothing to do with them other than that they leave her alone.
“Now you listen, you, Mr. Cat. You just go somewhere else.”
“Meow.”
“No, I don’t have any food for you. I’m not feeding you and I’m not playing with you, so just go on and go somewhere else.”
”Meow.”
“Go on, shoo!”
A goldfish for a pet, though, that was different. They make no noise, they don’t scratch or chew any of your belongings, and it is impossible for them to soil the carpet, and an 8 year old could feed the fish on shake of fish food a day. She must have figured at 13 cents each the risk factor wasn’t that high. Of course there was the bowl, the net, the ceramic deep sea diver decoration, the strand of grass and the fish food to add to the bill but it still made for a not so unreasonable investment. I knew I had to prove to Mom that she had not made a mistake. I would have to be a very conscientious pet owner, and I was.
After much consideration I chose the top of the kitchen counter for the location of the fish bowl. It afforded the fish a view of everything from the kitchen to the den, although I wasn’t sure how far or well fish could see. The two fish were nearly identical so I named them both Blup, My sister loved the name; she would often be seen walking around the house saying over and over.
I was a loving care taker; I greeted Blup and Blup every morning, then again after school and I bid them goodnight before I went to bed. I once had to rescue one of them when he somehow jumped out of the bowl. Mom called out for me from our back yard to Doug’s back yard next door. She did not care about the fish enough to actually pick it up and toss it back in the bowl, but she knew I would come running. I leaped over the gate and bolted across the yard, to the front door, through the living room like a comic book hero running fast enough to blur time and space. I grabbed Blup by the tail and tossed him back in the bowl in plenty of time.
I was a very responsible pet owner as well. I read the directions on the fish food box before and after each feeding, being certain not to over or under feed them. When the bowl acquired that pungent odor, I changed the water. I had heard stories of goldfish dying but I wasn’t going to let it happen on my watch. So when we had plans to go to Fresno to see Grandma Ruth, I asked who would care for Blup and Blup.
It was probably Veronica, my brother’s girlfriend and future bride, who took up the issue of pet care. Everyone who knew Blup and Blup loved their name and knew loved how I loved them. The Chavoor clan loved irony. The fish were 19 cents each, couldn’t do tricks, couldn’t jump in your lap so it was expected that we make a huge fuss over them. It was Veronica who thought of Mr. Auperle, a quiet elderly next door neighbor, to take care of the fish while we were gone. Veronica loved animals as much as she loved people. She did not see any irony in wondering how one’s goldfish would fare for two days. That made her a good candidate for selecting a caretaker.
I didn’t know much about Clarence. He was almost always silent, with the exception of a deep, raspy smoker’s cough. Clara, his wife, spoke often but was frequently annoyed about something and exactly what was annoying her was hard to determine because she had a scratchy “Oakie” accent. She was thin, as thin as her husband was overweight. I was embarrassed about it but whenever I saw them together I would begin reciting the schoolyard poem, “Fatty and Skinny Went to Bed,” although Clara was far from dead, in fact she was surprisingly strong. She grabbed my arm once and twisted it until I stopped, “jemping ‘round.” She was very strong, with a streak of mean in her. Her sister, “Aunt May” was her polar opposite. May was sweet and kind. I would sit in her lap and she would read Bible stories to me. Johnny, the son of Clara and Clarence may not have seen “Rebel without a Cause;” he was living it though. He kept his Camels rolled in the sleeve of his t-shirt. His skinny arms bore tattoos with images and words I was too young to understand. He once gave me a toy car that had a vague resemblance to the car James Dean’s character drove in the chickee-run scene.
“Here ya go,” he said his cigarette bouncing up and down as he spoke, “you’re not too old for toys are you?” He spoke from behind his Ray- bans, holding the car over the cyclone fence that divided us. I was too old for toy cars, but I lied.
“No. Thanks. I like it.” I waved the car up and down as if it were covering some rough terrain.
He nodded, took a long drag on his cigarette, and flicked it across his dad’s perfectly kept front lawn. He ambled over to his hot rod, revved the engine, burned rubber and zoomed off. It was the only conversation we ever had.
Strong odors often wafted from the Auperle house. I went over there once to sell tickets to the Scout Fair and the smell made my eyes water and my stomach do a back flip. I asked Mom about the smells.
“He likes liver and onions,” she answered.
“And gin,” my brother muttered. Mom made a look that suggested that she was in the practice of pretending she didn’t know anything about it and that my brother should do likewise.
The gin might explain his red face, laconic speech, and impossibly slow motor skills. When I knocked on the door to deliver the fish that Friday afternoon, I stood on the front porch clutching the bowl until the muscles in my arms were trembling. He opened the door about a quarter of an inch, then, when he saw who it was, he trusted me up to a full two inches more. All the phone calls had already been made. He was supposed to know what was going on. I held the bowl up to him. He finally relented and opened the door, took the bowl and stood staring. I picked up the paper bag that held the fish food.
“On the back of the box it says how much to feed them.” He looked at me as if I had somehow hypnotized him.
“Uh.” I waited to see if he would make any further response.
“Um, you just shake it once, once a day. That’s all.” He stood for nearly a minute before he spoke.
“Ok.” He took the bag and closed the door.
My brother’s favorite joke that year was about the oversensitive Marine recruit whose cat died.
The drill sergeant calls him front and center.
“Jones!” He barks out, “I have news from home: Your cat is dead!” Jones breaks down and cries.
“You could have been a little more thoughtful,” Jones says between sobs, “You should have said that the cat fell off the roof and broke his leg, that they took him to the vet and he performed surgery for 14 hours and that the cat battled courageously but finally passed on.”
Two weeks later the sergeant calls Jones front and center once again.
“Jones! Your mother fell off the roof!”
I was sitting in the kitchen with a glass of milk and some of Mom’s oatmeal raisin cookies. He was sitting in the kitchen with me trying to assemble the words that would not trouble his oversensitive brother too much. His girlfriend stood behind us near the sink. He cleared his throat.
“Uh, your fish are dead.” He didn’t look at me.
“That fat pig overfed them,” I bawled.
“Uh, well, maybe,” he murmured. He shifted his position where he sat. He put his head down and folded his hands like he was praying. But Veronica was having none of it. She strode over to where I was seated, and then bent down so we were face to face.
“Your fish are dead, so?”
“He killed them.”
“What else?”
“He’s a fat pig. He eats too much so he fed them too much.” I was aware that she was using some kind of strategy on me which bothered me but what bothered me even more was that it was working. I was losing momentum.
“Yes, and?” I had stopped crying but she was still face to face with me.
“Nothing.”
“What else?”
Instead of grieving for the fish or pouring out invective against Mr. Auperle, I had now become preoccupied with the skinny woman with the beehive hairdo and the pointy glasses who was still bearing down on me. I clutched my glass of milk, and considered dumping its contents on her, picturing her shocked look with her mouth agape and the dribbling milk making a mess of her hyped up self-assurance. That image made it possible to leave the table without a word. I laughed to myself thinking that she that she was giving herself credit for the wrong reason. I knew I was too old react this way and I did not blame her for putting an end to my response. I wasn’t mad at her; I wasn’t mad at anything. I felt relieved. By the next day the issue was as dead as the two fish.
Eventually, Dad canceled the water cooler service. The patio became filled with discarded or broken things. The washer and dryer broke. The poison ivy was torn out. I threw Johnny’s car away a week after he gave it to me. The Chavoor family called all fish blups for the next 10 years. Johnny Auperle cleaned up, sobered up, put his leather jacket away, sold his hot rod, got a job with PG&E, found Jesus, got married, and had children and grandchildren. Clarence and Clara died. Someone else moved into their house. The cyclone fence was replaced with a cinder block wall. Then this morning I woke up with the lyric, “Everything changes,” but I couldn’t remember the song, the melody or the artist.