Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Dead Fish
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
“Recently Demised Fish of the Day” and “Other Dead Things” are menu categories at the Dead Fish. The restaurant is about an hour’s drive out of San Francisco from where my mother raised me. It overlooks the Carquinez Strait, a tidal estuary connecting the Sacramento River with San Francisco Bay.
From my window table, I am watching an oil tanker ferrying climate-killing air pollution. It’s about to navigate under the Carquinez Bridge. Death is on my mind. So is my mother.
I wish she’d choke on a fishbone. We’ve been estranged for over a decade. She’s already as dead to me as a Dungeness crab at Fisherman’s Wharf.
My mother gutted me with two life lessons: to loathe her; to loathe myself. Like the wood deck of a fishing trawler, I am worn raw.
My mother loved the son she wanted, not the son she had. If it can be called love at all, she loved me in the way someone loves a favorite travel souvenir. A thing to show off when company visits.
Other times, she treated me like an invisible stranger, so an invisible stranger I became. At an early age, deep in my hidden heart of hearts I had to kill her off.
In a long-running stage play called My Son’s Life, my mother plays the martyred leading lady. The self-styled matriarch whose children, husband and family continually disappoint her. In the script she wrote for herself, I was an extra without agency and without lines. A walk-on part.
One thing good I can say about my mother. She is uncontaminated by subtlety. To anyone who would listen—her friends, even my friends when she thought I wasn’t eavesdropping—she openly proclaimed me the underachieving son who chose a lowly teaching career instead of practicing law or medicine, or entering business or contracting work building skyscrapers. In her measured assessment, since I was neither rich nor famous nor important, I was a nobody.
My mother’s favorite recipe calls for filleting self-worth. I can’t imagine a time in her life when the people around her measured up to expectations. I haven’t a clue what that would look or feel like.
Like a suffocating fish caught in her net, I was always gasping for air. As soon as I was old enough to save myself, I got away from her gaffing judgments. Hanging out at the mall. Going far away to college. Traveling to exotic places.
In marriage, some men mate with a version of their mothers. I did the opposite, finding a life partner who takes joy in holding me close. A lover, not a hater.
In life, the searing memories snuff out the soothing ones. When friends share heart-warming stories about their mothers, I’m as silent as a shark on patrol. The slightest counsel about maternal sacrifice, how “she surely meant well” or a son’s duty to his mother sticks in my gills.
My mom’s health is sinking. Her brittle body drowning from old age. Her heart torn apart in the riptides of loneliness.
When she succumbs (not soon enough), I won’t mourn her. A fish released back into the water doesn’t miss the fisherwoman who hooked it.
At the Dead Fish, I order the poached salmon with yogurt-dill dressing, served cold. Dead cold.
