The Crystal Fishes

by

JANSEN ESTRUP

Copper was surely in demand during The War, and pennies must have been hard to come by, but somehow we had plenty.

Years later I learned that pennies were not made of copper after 1942, but we had lots of both kinds. There was a big pink pig full of them in our little house. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration. The pig seemed very heavy, but I was only four, then five and eventually, six.

Mom and Pop had been putting spare change in the pig as long as I could remember, maybe even before I was born, during the Depression.

So, this first Christmas after The War we had two rooms of a new house completed, a kitchen and a long room which might have resembled an old Norse great room, where we all lived. Outside was a large barn full of materials for future rooms, and a small outhouse. It was decided that we children would shop for our own presents.

The money would come from the big fat ceramic piggy bank.

I don't recall breaking the bank but I do know that the coins were hard to get out of the slot and I do have a picture in my mind of a hammer, broken shards of pink and a pile of vary-colored coins.

There were some large ones but not many; silver dollars and half-dollars, quarters and dimes, and nickels.

But only the pennies were ours. We separated them excitedly, as if they were themselves presents. We all knew how to count, after a fashion. I was already in the first grade. But we lost track after a while because all of us were counting out loud. There must have been way more than a hundred for each of us.

Carefully, we loaded our treasure into my father's old socks, one for each of us, which Mom had carefully darned up to make sure the coins would not fall out.  

And so off we went one December Saturday morning, along with what seemed like the whole world. We were the only three children running free amid a forest of moving legs and we had no idea of where we were going or what we were looking for.

We lugged our sock-sacks through Monty Ward, a shoe store, the pharmacy which sat on the corner under the tall professional building where I had gone up an elevator to have my tonsils taken out earlier in the year, but nothing interested us.

And then we came to a store with large glass windows. Behind the glass, among the sparkling rings and watches and necklaces stood two of the most amazing things I had ever seen.

Like solid water, though somehow in motion, were two fabulous fishes. I knew little of ice, except that it must be very cold, but ice could never be that clear or still, yet alive with movement. They went together, suspended on fins, and even a child could see that they were a pair.

At once I saw that we were all looking at the same thing. It might have been the last time we ever agreed on anything. Without speaking I knew that this was what we were looking for.

We had to wait for someone to come out because the door was too heavy for us, but that was a minor problem.

"We want those,” I told the surprised lady behind the other displays. I pointed at the fish. “For Mama.”

She made the kind of face I'd seen my teacher do sometimes, consulted the tiny tag, then said, “They are seven dollars.”

 "Okay,” I said, putting my sock atop the glass counter. It made a muffled metallic sound and a few of the pennies slid out. Pete and Suzi did the same, but he had to help her reach that high.

The clerk made the face again and disappeared into a back room. I could hear her talking, then a man appeared and looked at us for a moment. He pulled a curtain and I heard them both murmuring.

A moment later she returned and smiled. For a long time she helped us count equal amounts from three separate socks and finally she was done. Pushing all of it into a heavy canvas bag, she said, “Exactly right!”

 She produced two cardboard boxes the right size, wrapped the fish and carefully fitted them inside. She handed one to Pete, the other to me. It was heavy as the sock of coins.

 She said, “Thank you, come again,” the way business people always did back then, and added, “Merry Christmas.”

I don't remember if we even said Thank You, just that we we so excited about our gift for Mama.

I think she really liked it. She said so and let us kiss her on the cheek. Later on, when Pop finished the indoor bathroom, she painted similar fishes around the shower stall and tub. They had fluttery fins and scales and were shaped much the same as the ones we bought.  

In my memory this had always been a story about my distant mother. Only now, these seven decades later, do I wonder how, even if there had been two hundred pennies in each of our socks, had we come up with the seven hundred it would have taken to come out, 'exactly right.”