“Fish” begins with news that a man, sixty-four years old, has just found out that he is dying. The cause—whether cancer or something else—is never given. Family and friends gather to comfort the man, including a woman who nursed him back from pneumonia when he was two years old. She saved him then but cannot save him now. His younger daughter narrates this story, and she recalls her father’s childhood despair that he might die as did his stillborn brother. He has two older brothers and two older sisters, but his “partner” died. This sense of loss initiated a depression that haunted him for much of his life. The narrator’s eleven-year-old nephew sits with his dying grandfather and tells him all the stories the grandfather made up for him when he was very young. All of his grandchildren are there, and their affection for him is plain to see. The youngest grandchild is the narrator’s baby son. Her father asks her to hold him up high so he can see the baby: “I want to see his whole body,” her father says. The narrator recalls her father’s fear of water and how, nonetheless, he would wade into the pool up to his chest (the edge within reach) to watch his younger daughter dive and to cheer for her. They also went fishing together, standing in water up to their hips, and he would warn her about all the dangers of ocean fishing. Once she caught a toadfish which swallowed her hook, and her father cut the line to free it. “But just think of the fishtales he’ll have for his children and grandchildren. He will always be the one that got away.” He made light of it, but his daughter saw sadness in him. Back in the present, the narrator, along with her mother and sister, Jeannie, sing her father’s favorite songs for him. They are well-known love songs from the 1930s.
The narrator remembers that, before she left for college, her father gave her advice on how to be safe, and he assured her that she’s never too old to come home. True to his word, when she calls him years later and asks him to come get her because she is leaving her marriage, he overcomes his fear of flying to go to her, pack up her things, and drive her home. Now, at forty years of age, the narrator is the prepared one, ready for any possibility, taking safety precautions as if second nature. It will be her turn now to pass her father’s advice on to her children.
She recounts a memory of her childhood, a time she thinks her father does not remember. Their family used to take vacations to Ocean Drive in South Carolina where they rented the bottom floor of a beachside cottage and had an obnoxious upstairs neighbor who greased his body and whistled “Red Red Robin” constantly. She and her sister, Jeannie, five and nine years old respectively, buried a note on that beach in 1963 for their future selves to return to and dig up. They remembered that day, a day that was not more outstanding than any other except that it was summer vacation and their dreams were of mansions and Cadillacs and fluffy pets. Her most vivid memory of that summer is of having to clean up Play-Doh that she pressed into the rug of the rental cottage. It was difficult to pick out all the pieces, and she knew as she was sitting there cleaning it that she would remember this experience.
Casting farther into the past, the narrator remembers her paternal grandfather. Despite hardships while growing up, such as his father’s alcoholism and their repossessed belongings, her father only said nice things about his father to his children, and they grew up loving him unconditionally. As a schoolboy, the narrator’s father used to play hooky to go downtown and shoot pool in a dark hall. “Your eyes were always drawn to the light.” The narrator describes in frank terms her father’s struggle with depression: The narrator was astonished and dismayed to learn how little understanding people had of depression and how they disrespected her father, a result of their ignorance. She and Jeannie stayed by their father’s side when he was laid up in his bedroom with depression one summer in their childhood. They were afraid to leave him, afraid for him to leave them. When he was later hospitalized, his girls were too young to be allowed inside the hospital, so he came out to hug his daughters and apologize for being there. They rode home looking at a card their father gave them “about love and joy and the birth of spring.” The card, the narrator recalls, “made us sad. The only resurrection I cared about was yours.” Life was renewed for their little family when their father came home from the hospital once and for all. “You were young and had many years ahead of you.” Her father said the same thing to her when she left her marriage. Less than a year later, her grandfather had a stroke and was afflicted with throat cancer. The narrator went to the hospital to see her grandfather but had to wait outside. She asked her father to read her “The Little Match Girl,” her favorite story at that time because it made her cry, and she liked to cry.
As her father dies, both the narrator and her sister are aware of death’s imminence, as if from a sixth sense. They gather their mother and their uncle and watch this beloved man quietly pass away with one last blink of his eyes.
Source:
Ira Mark Milne – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 24, Jill McCorkle, Published by Gale Group, 2006