Pike Mother
Granddad died in 1969 and Dad had him cryopreserved. This was virtually unheard of at the time, and Granddad was the fourth of seven clients for that institution before they went out of business. He was embalmed first, which leaves me with an inescapable vision of Dad having Granddad at the funeral parlor, and upon reading about this new cryopreservation outfit in the newspaper, crying out “Wait! I have a better idea!”
This was the family I visited as a child, and lived with for the duration of every summer, as the sole member of my generation, as my father was the sole member of his. Real bottleneck there.
There had been a cousin, Granddad’s sister’s son, who’d taken up with drugs and died in a ditch, several years older than me. I was told cautionary tales about him.
I wished I’d known him. He sounded like fun. Maybe I could have cheered him up. I missed other children. There rarely were any around, not until after I was ten and my father remarried. Gramma had lost some before they were born, and her sisters had none. I had these people all to myself.
Granddad was a retired stockbroker, and had been a talented one. He fed birds and yelled at cats (because of the birds) and grew zinnias. I can still see those zinnias, artfully adorning a curving footpath in their back yard. He told me about aphids and he gave me an Audubon bird whistle and showed me how to use it. There was a family rumor that John Paul Jones was one of his ancestors. I never met any family from Granddad’s side, and only Gramma’s sisters when they’d visit. Neither of my grandparents seemed to have any friends.
My grandmother was a writer and obsessive and should have been much, much more, and thus in some ways much less, but she bought into the cultural narrative for women at the time, which was typically solely about marriage and motherhood. She loved language and puzzles and schmaltzy music and moralizing. Before Granddad died, we played word games and solved jigsaw puzzles with her sisters, who would come out for the summer as well. And at five P.M. we’d have Happy Hour, non-alcoholic for me, and a little snack feast. They were all lovely to me. They were fun.
Gramma’s favorite song was “She Thinks I Still Care,” which she played for me relentlessly. “And he does,” she once told me, sorrowfully.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” (Marmion, Sir Walter Scott) Gramma like to tell me that. She willed me a large box of her typewritten manuscripts and a strident antique clock. These things are gone now.
My father didn’t like being photographed. He would turn his back. I don’t recall him ever offering an explanation. He owned and ran a research lab. He called it “IFR,” which stood for “Institute for Research,” and, among possibly less reported activities, ran rat studies and circa 1965-1970 engaged in research involving such as giving college students amphetamine and alcohol, which he then had published in peer reviewed journals. It was the MK Ultra era, but if he ever worked with LSD I never heard about it.
He gave me a rat from his lab once. I can’t remember ever getting to bring that rat back to L.A., any more than I could the puppy. He was why I kept rats, though.
My father turned me on to a lot of science fiction, and also Arthur Conan Doyle. I read a lot of Heinlein, and Brunner. He pointed out to me that the Population Bomb (1968, Erlich and Erlich) was an important book but that if only smart people limited our own reproduction, we’d be overrun by stupid people. He liked his pre-dinner cocktails too, and once told me with great glee that when people chastised him over his alcohol use and told him he was killing off his own brain cells with this ill-judged habit, he’d respond with “Imagine what a wonder I would have been if I’d never touched the stuff!”
About ten years after I came into the picture, and subsequently disappeared like Persephone for nine months of the year; Dad remarried and had a pond made. A house, too, but it was very much about the pond. He wanted to be a kind of fish god, to create his own ecology, his own personal piscine fiefdom to shape to his own desires.
It took a long time to dig and a long time to fill.
The pond was a wonderment. He stocked it with shiner minnows and smallmouth bass, and three kinds of trout (brown, brook and rainbow) and northern pike. Sometimes I would snorkel while he fed the trout. They would gather at the spring inlet because it was cold there, and trout like it cold, and I’d watch them surging up to scarf up the trout kibble, right in my face.
I’m not sure my father ever fully admitted to himself that I was a girl until I started doing what adolescent girls do, starting to look like women, and this created something of a rift between us. I remember hugging him and his flinching away ever so slightly.
I look a lot like my grandmother, an underrealized woman who was inordinately invested in her only child, much to his frustration and despair. And we both looked a lot like my father.
We had an awkward conversation at this junction in my life stages, about how I might address him, now that I was no longer a child. That I could call him “Dad” instead of “Daddy Mickey,” which had been to differentiate him from my other dad, who was now living in a beach house in Malibu with his new wife.
I couldn’t do anything about all that. But I knew how to fish and I knew how to snorkel and how to jog. Dad bought me a book about aerobics (”Drink if you must, smoke if you must, but whatever you do, exercise!”) and we’d run with the malamutes along the railroad track, and sometimes I’d walk for awhile while he ran ahead and then back to me. When the dogs would howl in their kennels at night, Dad would ominously proclaim to all and sundry “The wolves are out tonight!”
Mardi Gras killed at least one neighbor’s pet during the interludes when she became inspired to climb out of her kennel, or just leap up the sides, and ran off pillaging the countryside. She was a lean, yellow-eyed dog with a mask. Dad shot both her and Dawson before he left the country with his second family in 1975. Too much trouble to export ten-year-old malamutes who were starting to develop health problems, he told me.
And he had Granddad defrosted. He told me it was because Gramma refused to consent to being frozen, before she died of Alzheimer’s. He didn’t want Granddad to wake up without Gramma there, he told me.
By then the pond had been developing problems. The scum algae bloom was horrific. Dad had introduced mallard ducks to eat it, with variable success. But also the minnows were in decline, and when we’d snorkel around, we’d see trout with big bite scars in their sides.
We line fished from his canoe every year; catch and release, with all its concomitant casual sadism. I’d caught this particular fish before, it seemed. “Pike Mother!” we yelled in excitement. Dad could see the scars, it was really her! Three feet if an inch. He’d seen her while snorkeling, he knew she still lived.
And I did battle, and bested the trout-biter. And then we let her go, because we always let them go. I cannot remember ever eating a fish we caught, with my father. He would have taught me to clean it first. He was like that.
And yet, someone taught me to clean a fish once, or I wouldn’t know what that felt like. So maybe he made an exception.
We ate lamb chops, pork chops, venison. He got his deer every year. He did not mount their heads but we did eat them. Not half bad, venison.
Before he had all this built he had an old farmhouse in the area, and a black Lab named George, and that place also had a pond, albeit a smaller one and I don’t think fish were much of a thing in that pond, but I remember him explaining about dragonflies. And once he was planting conifer starts and he gave me one to plant, and called it my tree.
Recently I heard from the people who own the big pond place now, and they sent me some current photos of the pond, and much older ones of me and Dad and all that construction. They had found these older snapshots in this house they bought, after previous owners resold, and scanned them and put them in an online file and sent me the link. They love their new/old house and their new/old pond. I’m glad this land is in loving hands.
I made Dad a trout out of clay once, which we mailed to him from Los Angeles, without getting it fired first. I thought of it as a rainbow trout but it was just shaped brown clay, with a flat back. An action figure. Like you’d hang it on the wall.
It was a pretty good fish. I saw it later, lying across other things on the middle of his dresser, damaged in shipping, broken in two. We never spoke of it. I wonder what he thought when he looked at it.
I dreamt of this place for years, about running along the pond dikes and then off into the wilderness, like we did with the Malamutes along the railroad tracks, being healthy and feeling superior and slightly feral. And I think: what about Pike Mother? Did she live? Have progeny? Did she win the ultimate contest of survival?
What about the fish? Because it was always about the fish.
Beautiful story. Thank you.
thank you, that was a lovely accounting of you and your dad and who else but you could tell me this.