THAT

said. “It’ll be fine. I’ll be done soon.”
I took an exaggerated breath. “Okay, then I’ll say this. I don’t want any fish. The
four were fine. Eight may have been fine. Twelve. There are about forty in here.”
“Yeah, sixty,” she said.
I left the room. I started the coffee maker. While I was waiting, I grabbed a beer
and poured some of it into a little Smurf cup.
She called to me from the bathroom. “I know how I can fix it. What if I just
make it one big fish? You know, one giant fish that sort of is the bathroom. I can make
the door the fish’s mouth.”
“Are you being serious?” I said.
“I’ve got to do something,” she said.
“I told you what to do.” I walked into the bathroom and gave the cup to my wife.
“Drink this,” I said. While she was drinking it, I pulled off my boxers.
“What, you want me to paint that, too?” she said.
I had a car accident on the way home. It wasn’t too bad, didn’t damage the car
much more than a bent bumper. But my neck hurt. I would have to get it checked out,
thought it might be whiplash, even though I felt silly thinking that. Whiplash is the sort of
thing I thought lawyers made up, a myth that everyone believed. Like quicksand.
I knew my wife was still working on the fish before I opened the door. I felt it
creep all over me as I put the key in the doorknob. Before I opened the door all the way,
she yelled, “Don’t come in here! Don’t look. I’m almost done.”
“I have whiplash,” I said from the doorway.
“Whiplash?” She sounded concerned. “Is that a real thing?” She came into the
living room with me, her hair covered with a chili pepper bandanna, and she had on purple
bellbottoms splattered with paint.
“You’re still painting the fish,” I said.
“Just sort of finishing it up. It looks fine now. Let me feel your neck.” She
grabbed my neck and it hurt worse when she did. “I almost studied to be a chiropractor,
you know.”
“Quit it,” I said. I pulled her hand away. “I’m going to the doctor. For real. No
fake infection. Which reminds me: I was supposed to stop being horrible and lying. I
don’t want your friends at the office thinking I’m unclean.”
“You don’t have to be unclean to have an infection—or to give an infection,”
she said.
“I know that, but people think it anyway. I think it. And, besides—I don’t have
an infection. But I do have a neck injury of some sort. I was in a wreck. The guy should
be calling sometime today to handle the insurance stuff.”
“Bad, huh?”
I told her everything that happened, those boring car wreck stories no one likes
to hear. She asked me to sit in the living room with her. We watched TV. I didn’t even
want to see the bathroom, but I was curious. Then I stopped worrying about it. It was just
one room in the house. I could see the kitchen from here, and it looked fine. The living
room was fine. I’m sure our bedroom was fine. Fish.
78 THAT