The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,12
every single fish before it was put down to bed in the fish hold, or so the story goes.
Uncle Gorky didn’t fish then, just me and my parents. I’ve been told that if my father tried to speed up the process and throw a couple down without me seeing, I would scream my head off until he climbed down and got them again so I could kiss them good night. One of a million stories, as it happens, that I hear from both my parents over and over again.
We used to live on the boat all year round until I was five. That’s when Mom took us to the interior part of the state, where there’s no sea—just mountains and tundra and long ribbons of rivers. I know she misses being near the ocean. Just the other day when we were at the airport waiting for my flight, she was dabbing her eyes and sniffling as she handed me my float coat.
“I just miss it,” she said.
It, not him.
“Don’t forget you have to pull the cord to inflate your coat,” she told me as if I was still two.
“Mom, I know that. Duh.”
My dance friends, Sally and Izzy, had come to the airport to say good-bye, and it was embarrassing that they had to hear Mom talk to me like that.
“Let’s go get some gum in the gift shop,” Izzy whispered.
“I just don’t understand how she can still get so emotional after this many years,” I told them.
But when I glanced back at her sitting at the gate holding my dry bag and rubber boots, I felt a twinge of guilt. She and Dad just couldn’t make it work, so she gave up a life she loved and came here, where she had more “emotional support,” as she says.
Sally and Izzy have never been out of Fairbanks, but they’re both hoping to get college scholarships and go Outside to major in dance. The thing is, you have to audition the summer before senior year—this summer—because schools are looking way down the road. It’s too late once you’ve graduated. We were supposed to be the Swan Lake version of the Three Musketeers, always together, even in college.
They’re trying not to show it, but I can tell I’m letting them down by going fishing. I can’t imagine either of them working on a boat, touching a slimy salmon, or even having to set a dainty foot on a blood-soaked deck.
“Did you ask if you could come back in a couple weeks, just for the audition?” Izzy asked, holding up a sweatshirt showing a cartoon moose batting its eyes and wearing bright-red lipstick. It said, “I’ll moose you when you leave Alaska.” Tourists will buy anything.
“It’s too expensive to fly back and forth. Besides, my dad needs me for the whole summer; it’s a lot of work.”
“Too bad your mom can’t fill in for you,” Sally said, looking over at Mom holding on to my float coat as if somehow she needed it to keep her head above water, even in the middle of a landlocked airport.
But Mom’s never going fishing again and there’s no way I can tell Dad that I don’t want to go, either. Worse than not getting the audition would be getting accepted, which would mean attending preprofessional classes next summer before the official college courses start. I would never be able to skip a whole summer of fishing; it’s the only time I see my dad.
Sally and Izzy mean well, but they have simple parents who are married and like to volunteer to sweep snow backstage at The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is my winter life, where I get minor roles because everyone else has danced all summer and is in way better shape. My mom comes to it—she usually volunteers to sell tickets—but my dad has never seen me dance. Dad’s life, and mine with him, is on the boat.
If I didn’t fish, who would bag the salmon eggs and make sure the bloodlines along the coho backbones are totally clean? Those have been my jobs since forever. Dad says not even Uncle Gorky can cut the heads off as cleanly as I do, right through the neck bone. I don’t explain that to Sally and Izzy. It’s another world, another language.
When my flight was announced, we shuffled back to the gate where Mom had to make one last attempt to show my friends how smart she was about all things fish-related.