A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche Page B

also says to take a shower or a bath, as though I need to be purified. From the family room, my father shouts out the results and orders a cup of tea. He’s the one who stinks of fish. He loves having physical contact with any animal he kills. Most people, when they take a hook out of a fish’s mouth, hold the fish in one hand, close to the head, or if it’s still wriggling or struggling to get loose, as the eels were, they immobilize them on the bottom of the boat with one foot. Not my father. Even if the fish is already half-dead, he lays it out on his leg or holds it tightly against his chest, as though saying to it: I didn’t just catch you, I own you, I totally control you, you are going to die in my arms. Why is it that some men are so fascinated by violence? Does it prove their own power, or the weakness of the other? What pleasure does a child get from pulling the legs off a frog or torturing a cat? Is it a way of taking one’s place in a world in which one knows nothing about frogs, or cats? Or women, or children?
    “DO YOU remember the eels, Mother?”
    “Oh yes, your father loved them.”
    “And you?”
    “Oh, yes. But I didn’t like cleaning them.”
    “But you did it.”
    “It made your father happy. Luckily he showed me how to do it. He made it look so easy. And the eels were so good.”
    One of the Medicals looks over when I mention eels, which is how conversations develop with us. A word floats between the stacks of plates, cuts through three other conversations and falls into the ear of someone looking for something to talk about.
    “No, he can’t have eels. Too much fat on them. They’re like salmon. Dad cannot eat eels. Sole, maybe, or mullet, but only if they’re grilled or fried in cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil. And not oil from Greece, either, because you never know where it comes from. I was in Greece one time…”
    Yes, one time, in Greece, when she was so paranoid about being ripped off that she grilled some poor old codger about olive oil for a couple of hours.
    My mother’s no longer listening. She replaces covers on dishes, moves her plate around, nods yes a few times. I try to interrupt the monologue on Greek cuisine, but we’re deep in Santorini, where there are no eels but the blues are divine and the houses are as white in reality as they are on the postcards, and the fried squid, which Dad of course can’t eat, is tender and crisp, like french-fried seafood. When this woman talks about food, you’d never guess she is also a wise, dependable banker. She becomes a frustrated old bat. If she’d been robbed blind in Greece none of us would have minded. A child gives a shout of joy. The adults burst out laughing.
    Our teenage Santa is mooning about the room like a lost soul. The younger children have gone back to their games and the adults to their conversations. He feels peckish and circles the table. There’s no dessert left, he doesn’t like cheese, the salad is wilted. There’s a glass of beer on the table. He isn’t allowed to drink beer but has been drinking it for the past three months with a kind of perplexed pleasure. He takes a mouthful and the bitterness makes him look around for potato chips, which make the absorption of this initiatory liquid less disagreeable.
    “Grandma, do you have any potato chips?”
    My mother pretends not to hear him, but the Banker instantly looks up. She was in the middle of a paean to feta, not just any feta but a certain feta from Thessaloniki that has just the proper sponginess, still milky and at its best after being marinated for hours in extra-virgin olive oil from Kalamata. Perfect with lightly grilled whole-grain pita. Greek bread is too floury. You can’t get real feta in this country, but if you ever do, Mother, hide it from Dad. It’s much too fatty for him.
    “You children,” she says to Sam, “you never think before you speak. Potato chips! Potato chips are not allowed in this house. They’re dangerous for