Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach Page A

the ordinary household things to ready our home for the winter. I sweep leaves and bag them into fat plastic sacks, I store the lawn chairs and drain the hose. I wonder what to do about the pair of black goldfish who live, against all lack of care and expectations, in the small pond in the garden.
    I note the temperature. They must be brought into the house before the frost expected this evening. I scoop them up into a wide enamel basin (all I have on hand), fill it with water, and leave them on the deck while I go uptown to buy (at a place called Think Tank) a bowl for their winter housing.
    When I go to transfer them to their new abode, one is not there. I cannot believe it. Where can he be? The mystery of this absence overwhelms me. And then, looking down, I see his bloody body on the deck. He has committed suicide, I decide, leaping out of the basin onto the destructive wooden floor. Stuck into the wound on his head is a dead wasp. I put the survivor, whom I now name Lazarus, into the new tank, take the body of the suicide into the garden, and bury it, placing a cross made of matchsticks over the grave.
    And then I cry. For half an hour without being able to stop. For the dead, nameless fish, for Lazarus now left alone and lonely, I believe, for my carelessness which allowed the nameless one to die, dashing against the slanted side of a merciless washbasin to his solitary death.
    I am amazed at my free-flowing tears (I do not cry easily, perhaps five or six times in my adult life, which now stretches to half a century), at the depth of my grief, at my obliviousness to the true cause of my sorrow. Now I know: I am crying for my dead friend, not alone for the newly dead fish. At last I am able to flood his memory with my hot, resentful, furious, contrite tears. I realize I am trying to wash away my guilt at having, at this late age, survived his youth, my remorse at my health in the light (darkness?) of his undeserved disease. I place crossed matchsticks over the memory of my love for him, my vision of his bright face and endearing young smile. I surrender to the inevitability of all death and the injustice of his early one. I mourn my late arrival at his door, my unspoken words of farewell and love.
    I mourn the fish. The moribund Florida lions. The odium of growing old, the perversity of not growing old: the whole inexplicable condition of life and the illogic of its termination.
    I read over this record of what I felt. At the time I thought putting it down on paper would assuage my suffering. Now I know nothing will do that. I used to believe confession (in the dark upright box with the sound of the priest breathing on the other side of curtain) would take away my sins and guilt. No. Nothing will, except time, age, forgetfulness. Even then …
    We drink champagne with Peggy, and Ted and Bob, our Washington friends who now live most of the year in East Blue Hill, Maine. Someone says something about seventy being young these days. I smile and say nothing, thinking of three-year-old Emily Galvin’s birthday party in Iowa City. Her mother, poet Jorie Graham, read to her after the feasting. When Jorie went to answer the telephone, I asked Emily if she wanted me to finish reading the book to her. ‘Oh no,’ she said, withdrawing in horror: ‘You’re too old!’
    Sybil and I have a quiet dinner together at a restaurant in Blue Hill overlooking a small stream and waterfall. We talk about everything but this day. I am grateful for her tact. I don’t know how much more celebration I can bear. We have wine, but no toasts. I think how wise she is not to propose one.
    All day I have been doing what we do each end-of-year period in the bookstore: I ‘take stock,’ a curious phrase. For books it means counting what we have on the shelves. For me, today, it meant looking at what I had and have and was and am and did and do, what I no longer wish to be and do and keep and acquire. I try to find some