ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERESA TUMMINELLO BRADER is a mother, writer, and lifelong resident of New Orleans. Her short fiction has appeared in Rumble and The Flask Review.
Bikes
By Teresa Tumminello Brader
Marc balanced the fishing pole between his handlebars, as he and Anne biked from their home to Scotty’s. The three children cycled a few more blocks to the levee that held back Lake Pontchartrain. Anne, happy that Marc didn’t mind her tagging along, had a crush on Scotty though he was in third grade and she was in fifth.
The front wheel of Anne’s pink bike slithered on the oyster-shell road. She struggled to keep up with the boys. She’d only learned to ride recently, finally accepting her dad’s offer to teach her, finally forcing herself to stick with it the weekend before a Girl Scout bike hike. If she hadn’t gone on that outing, she figured the other girls would’ve guessed why.
Yesterday Scotty had organized a ping-pong tournament in Anne and Marc’s family’s garage, outlining the rules and preparing the brackets. He talked Mama into playing; she even abandoned the laundry before she was done for the day. When Scotty noticed the old fishing rod on the garage wall, he suggested to Marc that they go fishing after school. Swatting the ping-pong ball to her, Scotty told Anne she should come too. Anne couldn’t tell Scotty no.
The boys pedaled up the grass-covered levee, forced to a slower pace by its slope. Anne tried to catch up but worried about falling. She got off her bike and pushed it to the top. She imitated the boys’ dropping their bikes in the grass halfway down the other side of the levee and ran to the rotting pier, which appeared to be only a large piece of wood wedged between some jutting rocks.
His tongue poking out between his clenched teeth, Marc cast the line the way Daddy had taught him. While they waited the boys recited the different bodies of water that existed: bayous, gulfs, swamps, marshes. “This lake isn’t really a lake. It’s an estuary,” Scotty said. Anne hadn’t heard that word before but contributed fjord to their list (she’d recently read The Cabin on the Fjord), not knowing if she’d pronounced it correctly. She presumed the boys wouldn’t know either.
The boys had become friends almost as soon as Scotty had moved into the neighborhood. That was at the beginning of the school year, now almost over. Summer weather and attitudes started to engulf these last weeks of school. The students were restless and impatient, and the teachers were bored, overseeing the children scrubbing their desks with abrasive cleanser and rags they brought from home. Biking and fishing in the afternoon May sunshine presaged days full of outdoor activity.
Scotty lived with his mother on the same street as the siblings but on the poorer side of the canal. Their house was one of the nicer ones, though, still bearing the marks of new construction. Anne hadn’t passed beyond the entryway but still smelled sawdust, the scent reminding her of a family excursion to the lumber company to buy wood for the shelves Daddy had made for their bedrooms.
Mama had whispered to Daddy about Scotty’s mom’s divorce. His mother was the only single parent Anne knew, though she’d encountered the possibility of such people existing from reading Mama’s copies of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Anne read the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column faithfully and furtively in the garage. She anticipated a marriage not being saved, but they always were.
Scotty had given Mama a wallet-sized school photo of himself. She was sewing a button on Daddy’s work shirt and she put her mending aside. “Why, that’s so sweet of you to think of me,” she exclaimed. From her recliner in the den, she reached out and hugged Scotty. All evening Mama talked of how adorable Scotty was; Anne wondered if Mama had a crush on him too.
Mama left the photograph in her sewing basket. Anne peeked inside the basket on its shelf in the laundry room, wishing she were brave enough to steal the photo and keep it for herself. With his green eyes and reddish blonde hair, Scotty resembled no one in her family. The freckles sprinkled across his nose and cheeks were like cinnamon on buttered toast.
Easily the strongest of the three children, Marc pulled the line in by himself when he felt the tug. He bit on his tongue as he concentrated on reeling it in and hauling it up. “A catfish!” Scotty yelled. It was big, and ugly.
“Mama can cook it,” Anne said. Marc nodded. Every Friday’s supper consisted of fish and other kinds of seafood. Mama bought the seafood from the local markets, shops across the road and around the corner from this part of the levee. The store Mama frequented mostly was the size of a hut. Its glass-fronted counter displayed whatever was in season. Anne watched the scruffy-faced man in knee-high white boots dump the slimy, slippery shrimp into a large tub while Mama placed her order: four pieces of trout, six crabs, ten pounds of crawfish, a pint of raw oysters, and a stuffed artichoke that only Mama would eat.
The fish Mama bought were already cleaned though, Anne suddenly remembered, already skinned with certainly no head attached. Mama warned them about bones as they ate, and occasionally Anne removed from her cooked fish a bone the size of a clipped baby fingernail.
The bikes glided down the levee, gravity doing most of the work. Anne’s heart flew into her throat and her stomach tumbled. She was going too fast; she envisioned bleeding limbs and a car skidding to a stop as she lay on the rough gravel. As the road loomed she swerved away, remaining upright alongside the grass until she could cross the street. She tried to calm the beating in her chest, not making a sound, not calling out to the boys who were far ahead.
On the far end of the avenue that led to their homes, Anne drew near to the boys who had unexpectedly halted. The catfish had slipped from the hook onto the pavement, and Marc’s back wheel had rolled over it. The fish looked okay; it wasn’t squashed, at least, and Marc deposited it in the white basket in front of Anne’s handlebars.
The siblings left Scotty at the front of his house, promising to call him when the fish was cooked. They pedaled across the busy road and then over the canal. Anne breathed easier on the other side of the canal where the sidewalks were smoother. She pondered the canal in Hans Brinker. An iceboat couldn’t sail on the canals here even if the water did freeze, which it wouldn’t.
Anne found Mama in the laundry room, and she raised her voice to be heard over the tumbling of the dryer. “Marc caught a catfish. Can you cook it?”
“Imagine that. Good for y’all. Put it in the kitchen sink with some water and I’ll come see about cleaning it after I throw these towels in the wash.”
Anne wedged the stopper in the bottom of the basin, and Marc dumped the fish in. She ran water from the tap over it, and they left the kitchen to watch “Gilligan’s Island” in the den with their younger brothers.
Published July 2007