The Fisherman's Son by Michael Koepf

The Fisherman's Son by Michael Koepf

Author:Michael Koepf [Köepf, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76686-1
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2010-10-06T00:00:00+00:00


His mother was in a “secret pal” club. Each month she sent and received a present, each recipient not knowing who the sender was. After several months, the women had a party to reveal themselves to one another. Most of the women were fishermen’s wives—his mother’s friends from the cannery. They opened their gifts with glee, gifts they never received from their husbands, gone on the sea. They exchanged things that made them look and smell better, knick-knacks, cheap copies of things movie stars and rich magazine women had in their homes: plastic fruit bowls made to look like crystal; plaster-of-paris ballerinas, made in Japan, that danced on top of music boxes like expensive French porcelains. Sometimes these same women dressed up for Tupperware parties and get-togethers where salesmen who looked nothing like fishermen sold pots and pans. The women spoke of better homes they would someday get to live in, homes without stacks of crab pots in the yard. Neil knew his mother wanted more out of life than a full bin of silver fish, or a four-day nap in the wind. The sea had made his father a solitary seabird. His mother, on the land, was a social swallow, flying this way and that in pursuit of her dream. She was now a full-fledged member of the Rebecca’s Lodge, the club Father Kerrigan came to warn her about, a club that was Protestant to the point of mortal sin.

On Friday nights, she would go to the Rebecca’s meeting upstairs at the Odd Fellows Hall on Main Street in town, while he and Paul went to the movies. One night they came back from the show early, waiting in a kitchen with long tables for her meeting to finish. The entrance to the meeting room was blocked by a big door, which had a peephole in it, covered by a swinging oval of wood. The door was guarded by a huge woman in an apron, who worked in the kitchen. When the woman wasn’t looking, he and Paul stole a peek through the peephole.

What they saw was a wonder, an astonishment: On a platform in the center of the room, a line of women sat like a court of stately queens and obedient princesses. Their mother, dressed in a pink satin gown with a floral corsage pinned to her waist, paraded before the platform, along with other women wearing satin gowns and broad sashes of silk. Their mother looked like a movie star in a musical. Neil and Paul could see Bernice Bergstrom—she was one of the ladies on a throne. At the cannery, Ott’s wife was just another woman standing on the fish line, digging her fingers into cooked fish. Here, she was a queen, ruling a court of housewives, cannery workers, and fishermen’s wives. The women were like magic caterpillars changing themselves into butterflies and back again anytime they chose. They lived in a world of secret dreams. They wanted more than the cold, constant world of the fishermen.



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