The fish coasters wanted a poem, but they’re getting an essay.
They wanted — I wanted — the tactile imagery of period plastics: vinyl upholstery, Melmac plates, Formica counters, and artificial houseplants with dusty folds and seams. I wanted to nap in the hush of carpeted rooms, to swim in the wishful Kodachrome hues of visits to my paternal grandparents’ house, before anyone in my notion of the family circle had died.
The fish coasters stacked up. They nestled on themselves, into a little tower about as tall as the phone book we used for a booster seat at boisterous meals. (The phone book of Greater Los Angeles had considerable heft, a dry scent, and mystifying fluidity: the thick, unified wave of tissue-thin pages flopped and rolled from a glossy, creased spine.)
The fish themselves were probably carp, arched in a rigid, gilded, black lacework, and joined at the tips of their lips to a tiny axle. Their tails rode an outer circle that sat within the flared rim of a once-white dish. There was a scant fraction of an inch between this dish and the circle of fish. You could spin the whole fishy flower with your finger. And we did. It was the kind of pacifying, fidget-fixing, simple pleasure that attracted all ages, children and grown-ups alike, but only the children seemed mesmerized. My siblings, cousins, and I sometimes fought over who got to play with them. I can’t say if I ever saw anyone use them as coasters.
My grandparents lived modestly, without china or copious trinkets. When I was older, I asked my grandmother, and later my aunt, if I could have the coasters, which, as heirlooms and tchotchkes go, held little monetary value but great sentimental weight. I was told they disappeared after the flurry of downsizing when my grandfather died and the family house was sold. Maybe they fell away as my grandmother moved to a series of ever-smaller apartments, then on to my aunt’s house; those last few belongings landing in a storage unit long since emptied.
My aunt ran a small antique shop at the time. She curated dolls, doilies, tea sets, furniture, and more — nothing as mid-century in profile as the fish coasters, and few things as brittle with age as those early consumer plastics. Most everything had been lost by one family, found by another, saved by a curio-hunter with a generous eye.
As keepsakes, the coasters will keep here, whether or not musical language ever arrives to hold them as poetry. I’ll keep hoping to stumble upon them in some provincial thrift store, but in all likelihood they’re deep within landfill, or crumbling in our unlucky oceans, among living fish, at one with the persistent debris that speaks so frankly for our age.