The Gill Family

 The Gill Family

The kids on the street welcomed the Gill Family to the neighborhood.  A week after the realtor’s sign was removed from the home’s front lawn, girls chalked a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk.  In block letters, they wrote the name of our town and the word WELCOME.  Because of our meat packing plant, the High School football team is called “the Packers.”  The little girls drew stars and asterisks on the sidewalk that led to the home’s front door and, then, inscribed the town’s initials next to the phrase VICTORY PACKERS.  The old concrete paving was rough and swiftly abraded the chalk pieces down to knuckle-sized nubs and, if you looked closely, you could see the pieces discarded at the edge of the lawn – the blunt bits of chalk were blue, yellow, and red and the colors on the sidewalk had the subtle, cloudy appearance that is characteristic of writing of this kind.

The family didn’t move into the home for several weeks.  Evidently, extensive renovations were required in the house.  An elderly couple had lived there for fifty years and the kitchen and bathrooms must have been old and in disrepair.  The trucks of several tradesmen were parked along the curb in front of the house, a two-story wooden structure with small square windows next to an entry sheltered by a hoop-shaped barrel vault.  According to the writing on the trucks, dry wall was installed and the bathrooms remodeled with new showers and walk-in tubs.  Some workmen were observed hauling door-sized plates of glass into the house, big sheets of the stuff slick with reflections of the shade trees and grass constellated with dandelions.  The men passed the large panels of glass through the front door, gyrating and twisting to find an angle through which they could be tilted into the dim, marine shadows of the house.  The next-door neighbors, watching from behind their curtains, wondered about the sheets of glass.  There was a modest deck on the back side of the house and a sliding door there, but the glass didn’t seem sized to fit that opening and all the other windows were small, conventional, square panes set in wooden frames with the paint peeling a little on the sills. 

Flooring and carpeting tradesmen followed the workers lugging the big glass pieces into the structure.  A couple men dragged a rolled carpet out the front door and set the burden on the sidewalk in front of the house.  The carpet was soiled and folded up like a monstrous burrito, a big lump of grey-brown fabric on the edge of the concrete, angled over toward the curb.  Perhaps, the carpet had been rolled around a corpse and, when you walked by the bundle of rug, you sniffed instinctively, sensing a slight, foul smell coming from the dirty, wet fabric – it had rained several times since the carpet appeared outside,  Wasn’t Cleopatra smuggled to Julius Caesar rolled up in a rug?  But this thing wasn’t glamorous in any way and the sheet-rock workers seemed to have left plaster chipped off the walls adhering to the fabric and, for several weeks, the rug was prostrate on the sidewalk, limp and inert as a corpse and, then, the Gill family arrived, their moving van parked in the driveway and the carpet was suddenly gone, vanished overnight and we watched the movers carrying boxes and furniture over the sidewalk chalked with our welcoming inscriptions and that night, for the first time in a year, lights were lit again and shone in the windows of the house.  

A cheery little plaque posted beside the door read “The Gill’s”.  A big RV was parked along the curb and there was, also, a small car, a compact KIA, pulled up to the garage.  The KIA didn’t fit into the garage.  That space was blocked by some kind of pumping apparatus, plastic PVC tubes and hoses passed through the wall and an aerator with a table-sized filter attached to its side.  We glimpsed this apparatus from the sidewalk but couldn’t make any sense of it.

Rain fell for a few days, but, when it cleared, Mrs. Gill emerged from her house, carrying a folding lawn-chair.  She set up the lawn chair under a tree in the front yard.  Two small and pale boys came from the house and played with a soccer ball on the grass.  Mrs. Gill wore sunglasses and a yellow dress with tennis shoes.  Soccer?  I suppose it’s all right.  It doesn’t tell you anything about ethnic background or country of origin. Many kids play soccer these days.  It was a weekend and a few other children from the neighborhood went to greet the little boys.  After a while, Mrs. Gill went inside and, after a few minutes, emerged with a pitcher of pink lemonade and some dixie cups nested together.  A big, empty jug of distilled water sat on the front stoop of the house.  

Later, someone said that the Gill boys seemed fragile, perhaps, unwell.  Each boy had scars ribbing the sides of their necks, under their jaws but above their collar bones.  Apparently, the same condition afflicted both of them.  An older girl, one of the kids who had decorated the sidewalk to welcome the newcomers, squatted beside the pavement to draw with some fat pieces of chalk that she took from her pocket.  The boys observed her and directed her hand.  She searched in the grass for the stubs of the chalk pieces that she had earlier used to make the greetings.  The soccer ball lay under a lilac bush with big, scented clumps of purple flower.  Next to the front door, under the barrel vault, six big jugs once filled with distilled water were stacked along the wall.  

When I walked my dog, I passed over the pictograph on the concrete sidewalk.  It was schematic, depicting a family.  Six figures were outlined on the pavement.  Father was tall and slender with no neck and a head that was shaped like an old-fashioned diving bell or, perhaps, an astronaut’s space suit.  Mom was shorter with a flare of skirt above her stick legs.  The two boys were approximately the same height with round heads each marked with a zigzag of blonde hair, long torsos, and short legs with feet like a chicken.  Smaller than the two boys, but aligned with them, were two torpedo-shaped forms, evidently representing fish with whale-flukes instead of feet.  The chalk colors were beautiful, foggy pastels.  

One of the Gill brothers told the girl who made the family portrait under their direction that they had two twin sisters, but that the girls were fish.  They lived indoors in a large aquarium.  Because their sisters were fish, they couldn’t attend school.  

“They are different,” one of the Gill brothers said.

At first, none of the adults in the neighborhood were invited into the Gill family home.  But kids played there and, sometimes, went inside and there were, even, sleepovers.  The kids confirmed that there were four siblings, two boys and two girls in the Gill household.  The father never seemed to be around – either he traveled for work or he and his wife were separated.  The two girls were, indeed, fish with scaly cheeks and lips and fins instead of hands and feet.  They were yellow-gold and hovered in the water near the glass sides of their aquarium, watching a big flat-screen TV set up opposite their tank. 

Some of the parents in the neighborhood thought that it was a scandal that the fish-sisters didn’t attend school.  A woman whose son was autistic said the girls should be assessed by the special education teacher and that an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) should be made for them.  The mother of the fish-girls was very protective.  She told the neighbors that she was home-schooling her twin girls and that she was afraid that, if they were taken to school in their vats of aerated water, they would be bullied.

“Kids can be so cruel to those differently-abled,” she said.  

With time, the boys flourished.  They rode bicycles around the neighborhood and the scars under their chins were no longer red and livid but pale and hard to see.  The twins had a birthday party complete with cake and candles and party favors.  The girls were larger now, with muscular torsos and the tips of their fins were translucent.  Their faces were winsome, freckled with tiny gold and silver scales.  

Officials from the school district visited several times.  Proceedings were pending at the courthouse.

A month later, a semi-truck pulled up to the curb in front of the Gill home.  The truck was equipped with a hoist on the side of the semi-trailer.  The trailer was a long, cylindrical vat equipped with filtration systems.  A neighbor said that this sort of equipment was used for transporting sharks; he had seen similar semi-rigs in a documentary shown during Shark Week.  Four men carrying a stretcher went into the house and emerged with one of the fish-sisters.  She was thrashing violently on the stretcher and her fins splashed big sprays of water up into the air.  Using the hoist, the men lifted her to the side of the shark tank and, then, dropped her into the vat.  The same process was used to remove the second girl from the home to put her in the trailer’s tank.

The Gill boys stood silently on the sidewalk, aghast with red wet eyes.  Mrs. Gill came outside and stood on the porch next to the stacks of empty distilled water jugs.

Two of her neighbors came from inside the house and put their arms around her.

Mrs. Gill was crying.  She said that she had been able to care for her girls as long as they were minnows, but, now, they were half-grown and their aquarium was too small so that it was becoming a prison.  It had become difficult to feed them and keep their water clean.   

The men climbed into the semi-cab and the truck pulled away.  I never saw the fish-sisters again.  This was years ago. Someone said that he had seen the girls grown up to be shapely mermaids in a water-show in Weeki-Wachee in Florida.  Others doubted whether it was the same girls.  The woman who glimpsed the mermaids in Florida wasn’t sure whether they had arms or not.  

Just yesterday, as I walked my dog, I passed a home in the neighborhood that had been recently sold.  Contractors were re-siding the facade of the house.  Someone had sketched a human figure on the sidewalk in front of the house.  The figure looked as if it had been made by outlining someone lying flat on their back on the concrete.  The pictograph had outstretched arms and yellow and orange rays were drawn emerging from the figure’s biceps and shoulders.  Either the yellow and orange marks signified flames burning in a halo around the shape on the sidewalk or, perhaps, the garish feathers of wings.