He pronounced Meer mare, but I tried not to think about it as I stood up, smoothed down the front of my dress and, in the moderate but perfectly respectable burst of applause, made my way across the rubberized stage (supposedly there’d been a bad wipeout a few years prior: Martine Filobeque, cunning pinecone, girdle). I was grateful for the applause, grateful people were generous enough to clap for a kid who wasn’t theirs, a kid who, at least academically, had outtangoed their own kid (as decent a reason as any Dad would find to crack “so this is what they call ‘outstanding.’”). I set the papers on the lectern, pulled down the microphone and made the mistake of glancing up at the two hundred heads facing me blankly like an expansive field of mature white cabbage. My heart was trying out new moves (The Robot, something called The Lightning Bolt) and for a harrowing second I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to speak. Somewhere in the crowd Jade was smoothing her gold hair back, sighing, “Oh, God, not the pigeon again,” and Milton was thinking, tuna tataki, salade niçoise — but I quarantined these thoughts as best I could. The edges of the pages seemed to panic too, trembling in the wind.
“In one of the first well-known Valedictorian Speeches,” I began; somewhat disconcertingly my voice boomeranged over everyone’s coiffed head, presumably reaching the tall man in the blue suit in the very back, a man I’d thought, for a split second, was Dad (it wasn’t, unless like a plant without light, Dad without me had withered, lost serious amounts of hair), “transcribed in 1801 at Doverfield Academy in Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Michael Finpost announced to his peers, ‘We will look back on these golden days and remember them as the best years of our lives.’ Well, for each of you sitting before me, I really hope that’s not the case.”
A blonde in the front row of the Parents Section wearing a short skirt crossed, uncrossed her legs and did a restless swinging gesture with them, a stretch of some kind, also a movement used at airports to direct planes.
“And I–I’m not going to stand here and tell you, ‘To Thine Own Self Be True.’ Because the majority of you won’t. According to the Crime Census Bureau America is experiencing a marked increase in grand larceny and fraud, not only in cities but rural vicinities as well. For that matter, too, I doubt any of us in four years of high school have managed to locate our self in order to be true to it. Maybe we’ve found what hemisphere it’s in, maybe the ocean — but not the exact coordinates. I’m also”—for a terrifying second my hobo concentration fell off the train, the moment started to speed by, but then to my relief it managed to shake itself off, sprint, hurtle on board again—“I’m also not going to tell you to wear sunscreen. Most of you won’t. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in June 2002 skin cancer in the under-thirty demographic is on the rise and in the Western World, forty-three out of every fifty people consider even plain-looking people twenty times more attractive when they’re tan.” I paused. I couldn’t believe it; I said tan and a little seismic laughter quaked through the crowd. “No. I’m going to try to assist you with something else. Something practical. Something that might help you when something happens in your life and you’re worried you might never recover. When you’ve been knocked down.”
I noticed Dee and Dum, front row, fourth from the left. They stared up at me with evenly weirded-out faces, half-smiles caught up in their teeth like skirt hems caught in pantyhose.
“I’m going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life,” I said, “not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus — though I’m sure they’re helpful — but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish.”
There was party favor laughter, little bits of it strewn here and there for fun, but I pressed on.
“People make fun of the goldfish. People don’t think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of ’42, appears in The Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don’t think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us.”
I glanced up and my gaze smacked right into Milton, first row, fourth from the left. He had tilted his chair back and was talking to someone behind him, Jade.
“If you live like a goldfish,” I continued, “you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts — the guppy, the neon tetra — go belly up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America — a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice — luckily she’d done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn’t quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years.” I cleared my throat. “They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven’t seen soap in a year. And they don’t die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they’re abandoned.”
One or two restless people were dribbling into the aisles, hoping to escape my notice, a silver-haired man needing to stretch his legs, a woman bouncing a toddler, whispering secrets into its hair.
“If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone.”
The wind taunted the edges of my papers.
“The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present — it’s a gift. They are free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. No inner demons. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn’t forty years ago when you still had all your hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it’s still going on, this very moment.” I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. “And this moment, too.” Another three seconds. “And this moment, too.” Another. “And this moment, too.”
Dad never talked about not moving people during a lecture. He never talked about the funny human need to impart something, anything, to someone, build a tiny bridge to them and help them across, or what to do when the crowd twitched ceaselessly like a horse’s back. The endless sniffing, the clearing of throats, fathers’ eyes that skateboarded one side of a row to the other side of a row, doing a 180-ollie around the hot mom, sixth from the right — he never said a word. Standing around the rim of the football field the hemlocks stood tall, watching protectively. The wind tugged the sleeves of a hundred blouses. I wondered if that kid, far end, third row, red shirt (oddly gnawing his fist and frowning at me with James-Deanian intensity), if he knew I was an impostor, that I’d secretly cut out only the beautiful part of the truth and discarded the rest. Because, in reality, goldfish were having as rough a time with life as the rest of us; they expired all the time from the shock of new temperatures and the faintest shadow of a heron prompted them to hide under rocks. And yet, maybe it didn’t matter so much what I said or didn’t say, what I kissed on the cheek or what I gave the cold shoulder. (My god, Red Shirt, hands clamped over his mouth, biting his fingernails, he was now sitting so far forward, his head was nearly a flowerpot on the sill of Sal Mineo’s shoulder. I didn’t know who he was. I’d never seen him before.) Lectures and Theories, all Tomes of Nonfiction, maybe they deserved the same gentle treatment as works of art; maybe they were human creations trying to shoulder a few terrors and joys of the world, composed at a certain place, at a certain time, to be pondered, frowned at, liked, loathed, and then one went to the gift shop and bought the postcard, put it in a shoe box high on a shelf.