The Fourteenth Goldfish

“My mom’s a high school drama teacher and my dad’s an actor. They got divorced when I was little, but they’re still friends. They’re always telling me I need to find my passion. Specifically, they’d like me to be passionate about theater. But I’m not. Sometimes I wonder if I was born into the wrong family. Being onstage makes me nervous (I’ve watched too many actors flub their lines), and I’m not a fan of working behind the scenes, either (I always end up steaming costumes).”

Some kids don’t take on after their parents. Ellie sees the world differently from her folks: They work with self-expression, while she’s into problem-solving; they’re artists, and she’s a reasoner. The arts and the sciences often use very different kinds of thinking. Also, either you have the acting bug, or you don’t.

“‘You must’ve been boy-crazy to elope,’ he says. ‘I was in love,’ she says through gritted teeth. ‘A Ph.D. lasts a lot longer than love,’ he replies.”

Grandpa Melvin berates his daughter Lissa for her flighty, romantic life choices. He sees the world in practical, logical terms: For him, a solid career is better than the heights of emotion as a foundation for a good marriage. She, though, views life through the colors of feelings. Ellie listens as they bicker and manages to appreciate both sides of the argument.

“I’m always the first one up in the morning because I like to cook breakfast. My mom hates cooking and jokes that she doesn’t know if I’m really her kid. But I feel comfortable in the kitchen. There’s an order to it, and it’s fun to experiment.”

Already, Ellie has the makings of a scientist like her grandfather. As with jigsaw puzzles, she takes the many elements of a meal and arranges them into a complete, unified, pleasing result. Great cooking indeed involves dashes of inspiration and dollops of passion, but it also requires measuring and experimenting. The basics of cooking form a foundation on which she can try new things.

“I’m starting to think that maybe I don’t know him at all. Not really. It’s like he’s been playing the part of Grandfather in a play, but underneath the makeup is something more. A real person.”

It’s the first time Ellie notices her grandpa as a person with an entire life of his own. Something about his thoughts and interests resonates in her. All those jigsaw puzzles and kitchen experiments suggest qualities they share. His world contains wonders that eclipse her own slightly staid existence.

“Middle school is like one of those highway restrooms in the middle of nowhere. It’s dirty and smelly, and it’s crowded with strange people. By the time I graduated from elementary school, I knew everyone. I had watched them grow up and they had watched me. We knew who’d wet their pants in kindergarten, and whose father always screamed too loud at the coach during T-ball games. We had no secrets, and it was comfortable. But in middle school there are so many new kids. Some seem like they’re from different planets.”

Children’s comfort zones are violated by the strange, sometimes unpleasant, newness of middle school. Like millions of young students before her, Ellie must suffer the loneliness of starting all over again in making friends, avoiding enemies, dealing with several teachers and several classes instead of just one, and finding her place in the 6th-grade social pecking order. It’s a lot to handle all at once. Ellie’s smart, and she’s up to the task.

“‘All scientists are a little bit mad, Ellie.’ For a moment, I think he’s kidding, but then I realize he’s serious. ‘Average people just give up at the obstacles we face every day. Scientists fail again and again and again. Sometimes for our whole lives. But we don’t give up, because we want to solve the puzzle.’”

Melvin explains the passion scientists feel for their work. Something in her grandfather’s words awakens Ellie’s interest: She, too, loves puzzles. She’s just beginning to learn what it takes to be a scientist; it’s a much more demanding career than she supposed.

“The most powerful tool of the scientist is observation. Galileo, the father of modern science, observed that Jupiter had moons orbiting it, proving that the Earth was not the center of everything. His observations forced people to think differently about their place in the universe.”

Melvin explains the most basic principle of science, the one that gets science projects going. Observation isn’t simple: Just seeing things isn’t much use unless the observer thinks about what she sees. Observations lead to questions, which lead to experiments and discoveries.

“My grandfather grills my mom with questions I can tell she finds annoying: Does she still have her college transcripts? Would she like to meet with a friend of his in the Stanford biology department to talk about the program? Would she like his help in applying? She answers him the first few times, but after a while she stops and just looks at her plate, the way a teenager would. I have a sudden realization: even though my mom’s a grown-up with her own life, my grandfather still treats her like a kid.”

Lissa has long since found her calling, but her father doesn’t accept anything less than a full-blown career in science like his. He only accepts people who make robust contributions to the advancement of human knowledge; to him, directing plays is a waste of time. Thus, Melvin treats Lissa as if she’s still a teenager trying to find her way, and he keeps hoping she’ll see the light and follow his path. He simply doesn’t respect his daughter or her choices. As far as he’s concerned, there’s only room in Lissa’s mind for his dreams, not hers.

“I’m not a big fairy-tale fan. Mostly because I always wonder about the after part of happily-ever-after. Like in ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ What happened after the third pig cooked the wolf in the pot? Did he hold a funeral and let the wolf’s friends know? Or with ‘Cinderella.’ Sure, she got the prince, but what about the stepsisters? They were still her family. Did she have to see them at Thanksgiving dinner? Talk about awkward.”

Ellie has a creative, questioning mind. She looks at famous cultural icons and thinks about them in new, surprising ways. This is a hallmark of an inventive mind, something often found in scientists. It’s also a sign of someone who won’t settle for the official explanation.

“He’s a tidy cook; he cleans up as he goes along, just like me. He shows me how to cut the carrots. How to brown the chicken with bacon. How to combine everything and simmer with red wine. I start to see how the kitchen is kind of like a laboratory. The glass bowls. The measuring spoons. The gas flame on a stove is like a Bunsen burner. When you think about it, even cooks’ white aprons are similar to the white coats that scientists wear. But maybe there’s also a little magic in cooking, taking all the plain old ingredients and turning them into comfort and memory.”

Melvin and Ellie prepare coq au vin for dinner, and Ellie sees a distinct difference between the delicious food methodically prepared by scientist Melvin and the terrible food prepared by her artist mom. Still, she understands that, even if science is the foundation for cooking, there’s still an art to it, something that logic can’t deduce and that the heart must discover.

“Maybe this part of me—the science part—was there all along, like the seeds of an apple. I just needed someone to water it, help it grow. Someone like my grandfather.”

More and more, Ellie identifies not with her mom but with her grandfather. His orderly, scientific habits resemble her own. Where her mom lives and breathes the arts—and enjoys the dressy, night-owl lifestyle of theatre people—Ellie begins to see herself as a scientist. Already she can identify on sight pictures of a few basic bacteria. It’s been a part of her all along.

“I wonder: shouldn’t there be a ‘law of friendship,’ that if you’re friends with someone practically your whole life, you can’t just suddenly stop and change directions without the other person?”

Listening to Melvin’s description of Newton’s three laws of motion, Ellie wonders if some force—maybe volleyball—is what pushed her and Brianna apart. She’s searching for anything that might bring back her friend, and a law of nature about sticking with a buddy might do the trick. Science, though, doesn’t always have the answers to friendship problems.

“We settle down at the kitchen counter to eat and make lists of how to break into the lab. Our ideas are silly—mailing ourselves to the lab as packages or parachuting in. The strange thing is, it all feels so cozy. I wonder if this was what it was like for Oppenheimer and his team of scientists when they were working on the bomb. Did they sit around eating burritos and coming up with ideas?”

In a way, Ellie is onto something: Oppenheimer’s team got its own city, Los Alamos, complete with recreational facilities, lodgings for family members, and dance parties. (Many ideas were tossed around informally. If not burritos, maybe burgers and beer were consumed during brainstorming sessions.) Ellie’s insight is that when people are relaxed, their minds can develop surprisingly good ideas. It’s a useful rule of thumb in any creative activity, including science. Even silly ideas can lead to insights.

“I think what you wear on Halloween is important. It says something about you—who you are and what you want to be. There’s got to be a reason so many girls go around dressed as princesses and witches.”

Witches and princesses have power. Ellie elects to be a mad scientist, representing her growing love for science. Her choice says more about who she is than what she wants from others. Already she’s willing to forge a path through life untrodden by most people. It’s more important to her to be true to herself than applauded by the crowd.

“I find myself jumping and twirling next to Raj. The music pounds like a pulse through the floor, and it’s so loud, you can’t think. It feels like the undertow of the ocean, and I’m just swept along, everything reduced to senses. The sticky heat of the air. The brush of an elbow. The flash of a strobe light. I’m a jellyfish glowing in the dark sea, bright and brilliant, just waiting to be discovered.”

At the Halloween dance, Ellie finds the rhythm, not merely of the music but of her own heart and soul. She gets lost in it and in the energy it releases in her. She can feel her spirit readying to burst forth and shine its light onto the world.

“The whole restaurant sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. I lean in and blow out my candles. One refuses to go out and it takes three times before it’s finally out. That night, I fall asleep dreaming of candles. Hundreds of candles. They burn on and on, bright and defiant. Never going out.”

As she begins understanding what she wants from life, Ellie feels her power enlarging. The candle that refuses to go out symbolizes her newfound desire to explore and resolve the world's mysteries through science. Hers will be a brightly shining persistence that will light her way forward.

“We wind our way through the exhibition. In one room, they’ve re-created the inside of a tomb. The sarcophagus is surrounded by the dead man’s belongings: furniture, food, and a pair of leather slippers. It’s like his life has been frozen in time, and I can’t help but think of my grandfather’s apartment.”

Visiting a museum’s mummy exhibit, Ellie notices that the ancient Egyptians tried to retain their everyday lives in death. It’s as if, somehow, they couldn’t move on but had to persist with the existence they had before they died. Melvin’s apartment bedroom, with everything just as it was when his wife was alive, is a kind of museum that captures a moment in time. It stands still while life leaves it behind. His effort to rejuvenate fails to account for a missing element: With a new body should also come a new beginning.

“I don’t remember my grandmother’s funeral, but I know she was cremated and her ashes were scattered in San Francisco Bay. There’s something I’ve always liked about that. Whenever I see the bay, I feel like I can hear her in the rolling waves and the shouting seagulls.”

Ellie wonders at how societies deal with death. The mummy, its skin like suede, an eerie tuft of hair still clinging to its scalp, gives her chills. She prefers the clean simplicity of cremation. Hovering over these thoughts is the idea of her grandfather, his body young again, but his mind still stuck in the past.

“I look around my room with new eyes, and what I observe makes me question everything. The handprints on the wall: as people grow older, will hands get smaller instead of bigger because of T. melvinus? The pink bow on my dresser, from the birthday present Raj gave me: will people have fewer candles on their cake every year because they’re getting younger? I feel like Galileo, my vision of the universe suddenly upended.”

Melvin’s discovery may change the world, but perhaps not entirely for the good. Ellie realizes that science causes side effects and that solving problems can cause new problems. There’s more to successful research than the simple joy of winning a prize.

“I suddenly understand what Starlily was trying to teach us with the goldfish. Endings are sad. Like goldfish dying and Grandma’s slippers and Brianna and me. But beginnings are exciting. Like discovering something I might be good at and making new friends. Raj. ‘It’s the cycle of life,’ I say, remembering Starlily’s words. ‘Things need to move forward, not backward.’”

Melvin’s work messes with the timing of life. It brings back old things in new forms and perhaps crowds out the new people and ideas the world needs. Melvin doesn’t buy this idea; he wants the world to return to how it was when he was young. His newly youthful body belies the aging mind inside, a mind that wants to turn back the clock, not just physically but in all respects.

. “[…] life is precious and we don’t realize that at the time. But maybe life’s also precious because it doesn’t last forever. Like an amusement park ride. The roller coaster is exciting the first time. But would it be as fun if you did it again and again and again?”

A scene in the play Our Town catches Ellie with its wistful regrets about how people fail to appreciate life during the short time they have. She also sees that, if life went on forever, people would similarly fail to appreciate it because it would become tedious. Maybe Melvin’s fountain of youth isn’t such a good idea.

“Part of me wants to smooth everything over, tell him I was wrong. But deep down, I know I’m right. The world isn’t ready for T. melvinus. I wonder if this is what it’s like to be a scientist. To believe in something so strongly that you’re willing to go against everything, even someone you love. Maybe I am a little bit mad after all.”

Ellie is in the ironic position of admiring her grandfather’s scientific dedication and achievements while disagreeing with his search for a rejuvenation drug. Melvin’s impressive discovery isn’t as important to her as the realization that science is her calling. It’s the exploring, experimenting, and discovering that matters, not any one finding, no matter how amazing or whether she agrees with it.

“I will never look at a bowl of fruit or cheese, or anything ever, in the same way again. It turned out that what I needed to teach me about life was my grandfather. He was the fourteenth goldfish.”

Melvin’s inquisitive mind, intense focus, drive to know the answer, and dedication to science appeal to Ellie so much that she now knows the direction for her own life. It’ll be a scientific journey, but her quests will be her own, different from Melvin’s or other scientists but worthwhile simply because they answer the call to discovery. She learns from him that, rejuvenation or not, life has a time limit, and it’s important to engage with it to the fullest while it’s here.