F.I.S.H.

by Maggi Laureys (August 2017)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mom recruited other housewives from the Parish and created a network so that, when calls came in from the needy, she put them in contact with one of her volunteers who would drive them to wherever they needed to go, which was usually to a doctor, hospital, market, laundromat, AA meeting, welfare office or job. The elderly could not drive, the poor could not afford cars nor insurance and in some cases, they needed a ride somewhere because a spouse or child used the only car in the family to get to work. Addicts and alcoholics, of course, lost licenses to DUIs and needed a ride to AA meetings.

 

 

 

Was that quiet, older boy in the eighth grade’s mother really a schizophrenic? Was that trampy girl in my little brother’s class really so poor they needed donations for food? And something was definitely up when a couple came with their teenage daughter whom my sisters Kathleen and Cecilia knew from high school. I knew her as the girl who looked and talked like a boy. I didn’t know anything else about the girl; I was only in fifth grade at the time and high school kids were a world apart. But Kathleen and Cecilia knew this girl all right. They knew all about her. I recognized her only from my brother’s football games when I saw her cheeks inflated to play the trombone for the marching band. The girl arrived to our house that afternoon still wearing her uniform from marching band practice. I knew that the marching band was for geeks because Cecilia, the younger and cooler of my two older sisters, told me so. I also knew that Cecilia was the cooler one because Kathleen’s friends were, in fact, in the band.

 

 

 

 

 

Kathleen hated the sister more than she liked Sharon and it occurred to me that a similar sister rivalry was at play between her and Cecilia.

 

 

 

 

I noted the changes in my sisters as they became adults and how the paradigms of acceptable behavior changed with age and geography. Everything changes—government, society, culture, political ideologies and media tropes on tolerance. Only the compassion that animates such things is constant, because it’s only the compassion that matters—that makes any of those other things useful to humanity to begin with. My mother built her charity on this principal. Aside from voting Republican every year, she was not political and her charity was not ideologically driven, nor even defined by Catholic stricture, devotedly Catholic as she was. FISH was animated by her’s and her volunteers’ compassion. And FISH clients felt this, never treating FISH’s services with entitlement or ingratitude. Compassion creates a circle, such that it was the client’s constant as well. Volunteer housewives from our Catholic parish made no distinction between Catholic or non-Catholic clients. They did not judge addicts and alcoholics to be any less worthy of help or culpable for their plight than the sick or elderly. They did not deem help for poor black people to be any more noble than help for poor white people. Indeed, FISH had few black clients since in 1977 our county was largely working class and low income whites.

 

 

 

white trash.

 

 

 

Starsky and Hutch “the most stupidest show” she’d ever seen. Evidently, the poor thing wanted to watch something smarter, like Laverne and Shirley. The uncle told her to shut her ugly, whore mouth or to go home and watch her own fucking TV. Then he took a swig from a whisky bottle.

 

 

I could escape! Ginny seemed to think that if she could just feed me, I would stay. She made her mother look harder for some money. Mrs. Shaw went upstairs and then, on the way down, fell plop on her ass. She slid down the stairs drunkenly laughing.

 

 

 

mother is drunk. She just fell down the stairs. Her mother!”

 

 

 

 

Grandma would interrogate the kid to see if any of her relations worked for ShopRite. She liked that. If someone in her family were sick, graduating or celebrating a sacrament, Grandma made a note to have the store send a fruit basket. She was almost as intent as Mom to elude a reputation for snootiness. Unlike Mom, however, she knew nothing of the Shaw family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right to Life to Planned Parenthood. There was PETA and the NRA. There was The Southern Law Poverty Review and The American Family Association—all addressed to Mom. We all got a kick out of teasing her and asking, “You do know that the NRA and the SLPR are mutually exclusive don’t you?” Better, we got a deep sense of assurance knowing what the reason was that each of us, however opposing our views, could assume Mom would pledge allegiance to our own respective cause. It was because we believed that if something were deeply, truly right, then our mother would naturally be on its side. It was because what we really trusted was that which was deeply, truly right in her.  

 

 

 

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Maggi Laureys studied English, earning degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University. She has taught English at Seton Hall University and more recently at the College of Saint Elizabeth. Maggi currently resides in New Jersey, where she has just completed a novel based on her family and is now at work on a new novel.

 

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