The Goldfish in the Pond at the Community Garden
In the years I lived in that neighborhood, when I was twenty-seven and later twenty-eight, I visited the goldfish daily.
I didn’t want people to know—it was my secret thing. I had this friend in the neighborhood. He asked me once at a party if I had ever seen the fish, and I lied beautifully. I said, I didn’t even know there was a community garden. What intersection?
After that, I always brought a book to the garden in case I encountered my friend. If I saw him, I imagined, I would turn the pages like I hadn’t even noticed the fish, a flawless performance. I had a lie ready: This is my first time here. I felt there might be something between me and this man, but I was unwilling to lose the privacy of my daily ritual—even for him.
One day my friend called about a museum exhibit. He described dozens of perfect miniature staircases, spiraling up and up. I said I wanted to see the exhibit. My friend said, Where are you now? In fact I had been on the brink of entering the garden.
I’m nowhere, I told him. I mean, I’m at home.
I said I would meet him, but I allowed myself a few minutes with the fish. Their scaly forms glinted. Their pinwheel fins twirled against the water.
I was descending into the subway when I heard my phone again. The museum was closing, my friend told me, but he had extracted a promise from admissions that we could go tomorrow. This struck me as no great feat—tomorrow was Saturday, the museum was always open. Let’s go up the Empire State Building, I heard myself saying. I’ll meet you there, he told me. Some part of me wanted to go alone, I realized, but now I had invited him.
Was it an accident I rode the subway too far? I ended up in Queens. I got off the subway and stood on the open-air platform. I imagined myself on the correct strand of the multiverse, arriving on top of the Empire State Building winded and happy, the sky soft and red, the city’s architecture shining in every direction, my friend raising his hand to wave.
Instead I called him from the platform. I’m so sorry, I told him. He said, Stay where you are. I know that neighborhood. I could take you to this place with amazing fish tacos.
I thought of my goldfish turning in their pond. Okay, I said, tentatively.
I waited. I prowled through this neighborhood where I had never been. I enjoyed the sensation of being pursued from one borough into another entirely. When I happened upon a community garden, I slipped inside. It was lush and dark. No pond. An abstract sculpture hulked in one corner, and I put my hand against one of its planes, a sensation like placing my hand on someone’s waist. I imagined running into someone I knew: This is my first time here, I would say, and it would be true. What brings me to the neighborhood? I’m meeting someone for tacos.
It grew darker, and the moment passed when he should have been calling to say he was close. I reached into my pocket to text him, and I found nothing. I put my hands into my other pockets. I rooted in my bag. I was surprised by the needle of dread I experienced, the sense that something grave was transpiring. I stopped a stranger on the sidewalk, through the garden’s chain-link fence. I asked her to call my number, but: nothing.
Sorry, honey, said the stranger as she continued on. My fingers clung to the lattice.
I retraced my steps—one block, another. My eyes scanned the pavement. I had the sense an essential window was closing, my fate slipping from me. Is it possible I was relieved? The lowering sun cast one side of the street in shadow, the other in honeyed light. The wind blew an empty paper cup across my path. Then I came around the corner and walked straight into my friend. He smelled like some familiar kind of flower, like sweat, and the subway. I held onto his arm. I felt like I could kiss him, or was it that he wanted to kiss me? I lost my phone, I said. I would never have found you.
He reached into his pocket, and the phone was in his hand. He’d stepped off the train, he said, it was on the platform—his own name lighting up the screen. So we went to eat our tacos, holding onto each other, certain we were the objects of some divine act. Across the table, we looked at each other with giddy alarm. It was uncanny. We kept laughing. For years afterward, this was our favorite anecdote to tell about ourselves to other people. It made everything foretold and essential that would come to pass between us: connection, love, marriage. The apartment we shared, the trip we took to Ireland, our walks we took on weekends through New York, the restaurant that was our favorite where they had this perfect chocolate cake. I liked the sense of gravity that came over people when we told this story. I liked his hand holding onto mine with the force of fate as we spoke.
It made it seem impossible we had made a mistake.
Then one day we were alone and he said: Imagine if we had made it to that exhibit at MoMA that day. No Queens, no tacos, no lost phone. Instead: Picasso, Calder, Starry Night. Dalí’s clocks melting like candle wax. The angularity of all the glass. We’d have sat in the sculpture garden as day became night, and it would have been a different story entirely.
We were sitting by the pond, watching the coppery fish twist and preen in the light. I closed my book and held it up to block the sun so I could look at him directly. Something in his facial expression unsettled me: his certainty. I said, I always remember the exhibit being at the Cooper Hewitt. I really could have sworn.
He frowned and said it wasn’t the Cooper Hewitt.
I’m certain that it was, I said.
He said I was certainly wrong. He said, I think you’re misremembering.
This is why I never wanted to come here with you, I was on the verge of saying, but instead I told him: I would never misremember. I am excellent with details. It felt like the garden might wither around us as we looked at each other, our stories diverging. For a moment I felt alone, but then the fish were rising to the surface. They pierced the water in a clear shining mass and opened their small mouths. It was the Cooper Hewitt, they said to me. It was. It was. It was.
Kate Doyle (@Sometimes_k8) is the author of the forthcoming story collection I Meant It Once (Algonquin, 2023). She has received support for her work from Virginia Center for Creative Arts, A Public Space, Hawthornden, the Adirondack Center for Writing, the NYU Creative Writing Program, and the Global Research Institute at NYU Paris. Originally from New England, she has lived in Brooklyn and in Ithaca, New York; she currently lives in Amsterdam.