The Fourteenth Goldfish

One morning, the house is “toasty warm.” Lissa tromps downstairs and demands to know who turned up the heat. Melvin says he did it. She says, “We’re trying to save money.” He pulls out a $20 bill and says, “Turn up the heat” (161).

Lissa and Ben go to a play. As they leave, Melvin asks when Ben will bring her home. He insists that, as the sitter, he should be informed. Ben says midnight.

Ellie watches a monster-movie marathon while Melvin works on a science paper. At midnight, he becomes irate because Ben’s late. They get home ten minutes later, and Melvin goes outside and pounds on the car window, interrupting their kissing. Back in the house, Melvin and Lissa argue: He says he’s her father; she retorts that it’s not 1950. Also, she’s the actual adult. She tells him to look in the mirror. Melvin stalks off. Lissa turns to Ellie and says, “See? […] Teenager” (163).

Ellie and Raj visit the de Young Museum, where there’s an exhibit about Egyptian mummies. She wonders why the ancients didn’t just bury or cremate the dead; Raj says they wanted to live forever, like Melvin’s doing: “He’s sort of preserving himself […]. Just like a mummy” (166).

Melvin says T. melvinus will soon have its own page in science textbooks. Ellie looks at the handprints on her bedroom wall and wonders if rejuvenation will cause people’s hands to get smaller. Curious about what happened after the Hiroshima bombing, she looks it up, sees pictures of the devastation, and calculates that the number of casualties equals 200 middle schools of dead kids.

She confronts Melvin and says maybe the jellyfish discovery isn’t good, like Salk’s polio vaccine, but bad, like Oppenheimer’s atom bomb. She says Melvin is like a mummy reanimated. The world needs to move forward. Lissa needs to dare to marry Ben. Melvin says he’s not interested in moving forward.

Ellie asks, who will be in charge if everyone becomes a child again? Melvin says she doesn’t understand because she hasn’t lived through what he has. She replies, “But I want to!” (173). She asks if growing old is so terrible.

Lissa arrives home with dinner—it’s Chinese, including Melvin’s favorite, moo goo gai pan. Melvin says he’s not hungry and walks away.

Lissa wants a full house at her production of Our Town, so she gives Ellie a pile of tickets to give away. Ellie invites Momo, who accepts and suggests they get something to eat afterward. Ellie has seen the play before, but on opening night, she understands it differently. The character Emily, who dies in childbirth, returns for one day, at age 12, and marvels at how people don’t appreciate life when they have it. Ellie notices that Melvin is transfixed.

At home, her grandfather still won’t speak to her. Ellie decides that science isn’t about agreeing but being dedicated to searching for answers. She decides to make quiche. The single block of cheese in the fridge has mold; she scrapes some off and looks at it under her microscope.

Melvin walks in. She tells him what she’s doing, and he says it makes perfect sense: “That’s what a scientist would do” (180). He tells her he finished The Catcher in the Rye and declares it good. He admits he was wrong about the book and many other things. His experiments aren’t a good thing; he’s not being a “good ancestor,” as Salk would say. He flushed his prize jellyfish down the toilet, which is now clogged.

Dissatisfied with her job at the mall, Nicole asks Lissa for her old job back as a sitter. Melvin is glad: He wants to travel. Lissa arranges for his apartment furniture to be put in storage. She gets him a phone so that he can call them.

At the bus station, Lissa worries whether he’ll be ok, but he says, “Of course, I will. I have two PhDs.” (185). Ellie gives him her collection of ponytail holders. She hugs him and says she loves him; he whispers, “I believe in you, Ellie. You’re my possible” (185). As he leaves, Ellie realizes that her grandfather taught her what she needed to know about life. He’s her 14th goldfish.

With her father’s help, Ellie repaints her bedroom a deep-sea blue. Near the top of the walls, they paint day-glow jellyfish. Lying in bed, Ellie feels like she’s deep in the ocean. Ellie joins Raj and Ananda for a tour of UC Berkeley as part of Ananda’s college search. Ellie imagines Oppenheimer walking across campus, “full of purpose” (186). She and Momo spend more time together. They both like horror movies, and Ellie finds several about science experiments gone wrong.

One evening, Lissa greets Ben at the door, steps into his arms, and says, “Yes […] I’ll marry you” (187). They get hitched at a small civil ceremony downtown, with Ellie as witness. The judge says she loves happy endings; Ellie corrects her: “It’s a happy beginning” (187).

Ellie joins the Melvin Sagarsky fan club. He sends her pairs of slippers from all over. He’ll speak at the fan club’s annual meeting in Helsinki. Ellie sends him a care package containing hair bands and another book by the author of Catcher in the Rye called Franny and Zooey.

One afternoon, while Lissa and Ben are away looking for a new house, the doorbell rings, and Ellie retrieves a package. It’s a box that contains dry ice. Attached is a note signed by a Billy from the Philippines. It reads: “Dear Dr. Sagarsky, I found a jellyfish even stranger than the last one. Thought you might want it” (190-91).