George the Fish has the Worst Day Ever

by Deborah Markus, one of four articles from the special "Talking to Our Children About Death" section of Secular Homeschooling, Issue #5, Winter 2008

Although I'm still learning the language myself, I teach a little French class to my son and a couple of his homeschooling friends once a week. It's really more of an introduction rather than a full language course, but it's teaching them to think about what a language really is. It isn't a code, it isn't just a collection of verbs and nouns. In terms of communicating, accent is as important as vocabulary. What is idiom, and how much do we take our own for granted — and is it really any sillier to say "I have the cockroach" than it is to say "I have the blues"?

Fortunately for me, there is a series of children's books put out by Barron's Educational Series called "I can read French." The simple, picture-book style stories are written in French with English translations on the same page. The writers assume that the reader has a smidgen of knowledge of how French should sound — there's a pronunciation guide in the back, but you can only do so much in trying to describe how a language sounds. But I get by, and when all of us are tired of lessony lessons, a story is a nice break.

"Good news, guys," I said one morning, after we'd drilled some vocabulary. "I found a new story." I held up the latest title in the series: George the Goldfish, or, in French, Georges le Poisson Rouge.

"Does the goldfish die?" my son and his friend Olivia asked more or less simultaneously.

It was fortunate for me that they were my only two students that day, because it was right then that I made an absolutely inexcusable mistake. I have made it a point of pride — have been positively obsessive about it — that you don't assert something as a fact in a positive statement unless you're jolly well sure it's true. It infuriates me when I see or hear adults blithely pronouncing unfacts to their children because said adults either don't know the truth themselves or are too lazy to check. If you don't know, say you don't know. If you aren't 100% positive, say you think this is so, or don't think it is — whichever is appropriate.

I have gone on about this ad infinitum, ad nauseam. I have written whole entire articles on the subject. And yet when the children asked their anxious question that day, I didn't even think about the fact that, frankly, what else does a goldfish do when you have one around for longer than five minutes? I didn't do a quick flip through a book that was maybe twenty pages long, max, with no more than two or three sentences of text on each page.

Instead, I thought, "Good grief, kids can be so morbid!" And aloud, in a tone to match, I said, "Of course the fish doesn't die!"

I mean, they named the whole book after him, for heaven's sake. You can't have the title character dying on you. Unless you're Shakespeare, and as much as I appreciate these books, I wasn't quite prepared to put George the goldfish up there with King Lear.

"Now, settle down and quit worrying," I added, pulling my chair up to where they sat expectantly. "Isn't it interesting that in English, we call it a gold fish, but in French, it's red?"

We all agreed that this was very interesting, and I started in on the story, covering up the English translation on each page as I read. "Harry a un poisson rouge," I read. Harry has a goldfish. "Il s'appelle Georges."

"His name is George!" my son shrieked triumphantly.

On the next page, we saw and read about how George(s) liked to swim around in his bowl, while Harry watched adoringly.

Then we got to page three.

"Mais un jour," I read aloud. (But one day.) As always when I'm reading to children, my eyes slipped ahead of the text I was pronouncing. I caught the word "meurt" and, appalled, checked the translation.

"Oh, my God!" I said.

"What?" the children asked eagerly.

"The fish dies!"

The children looked at one another, and then at me. Oh, this was great. Humiliation galore, plus I'd probably traumatized them for life.

Salvage time.

"Can you believe this?" I demanded indignantly, as if the only issues at stake here were literary standards. "They killed the main character on page three!"

"Rude," my son said, evenly enough, and I took heart.

"Kids," I said, "I am so sorry. I am so dumb. It just never even occurred to me that they could do that. I should have checked when you asked. I should have read the book before I brought it in for you guys."

My son seemed calm, if a little startled. Olivia looked rather taken aback by the whole thing, but she's a fairly sturdy sort. Still... "Let's read something else," I said, starting to shut the book.

"NO!" they exclaimed in stereo.

"Read it!" my son said.

"We want to know what happens!" Olivia said.

"But guys, the fish died," I said. Not much room for character development there.

"There has to be more than that," my son pointed out reasonably enough. "There's the whole rest of the book left."

"Maybe they have a funeral," Olivia said.

"Maybe the funeral's in the toilet," my son suggested.

Olivia gave him the cat-like stare that is a specialty of hers. She comes from a long line of warm-hearted, cool-eyed women. "They do flush fish," my son protested. "I've read about it."

"I'm pretty sure they don't do that in this book," I said, having learned my lesson about making sweeping pronouncements.

"Read it!"

I gave in, conditionally. "Okay, but if it freaks you out, I'm getting something else."

"We're fine!" my son said.

"We like it!" Olivia said.

I sighed and opened the book again. We read about how Harry was sad and cried, and they were delighted because they knew the words for "sad" and "cries." Then Harry's mother came in and gave Harry a hug. "George made you happy," she said.

"Not for long," my son said sourly.

His mother said they should bury George in the garden — "Aw, man, no toilet," my son said — and he would "make the garden happy."

The children expressed vast skepticism. "Okay, maybe happy is too strong a word," I editorialized. "Seriously, are you guys okay with this?"

"Keep reading!"

"Harry peint une petite boite," I read. They could tell from the picture that Harry was decorating a little makeshift coffin. And then he put George(s) on some leaves in the box.

"George looks like a fish salad now," my son, the vegetarian, said.

"That is disgusting," I said. Then I looked at the picture and, hang me for a sheep thief, he was right. The leaves didn't look like foliage from a tree; they looked like something Harry might have foraged from the fridge.

"I'm not saying he should be a salad," my son said. "He just looks like one."

True enough. I read on. In an exciting twist, the mother and son bury not only George(s), but also three flower bulbs. (Not in the same coffin, but they do share the same plot, as it were.) "Now George will help the garden to grow," the mother announces cheerily.

"Eww," the children said.

The seasons passed swiftly in the story, leading the children to ask some difficult questions along the lines of just how the heck long does it take for a few flowers to grow, anyway. And then, finally, three beautiful yellow flowers sprouted from George(s)' grave. And Harry smiled.

"Do they at least get a new fish?" Olivia asked.

"Why? It would just die on them, anyway," my son answered for me.

The French lesson was pretty much destroyed at this point, much as I'd tried to emphasize throughout the story the words they already knew or could figure out from context. We broke for lunch early, and I confessed my sins to Olivia's mother, who'd spent the lesson making us a lovely déjeuner. Fortunately, she's very forgiving, and has a good sense of humor. As Olivia didn't seem exactly wracked with grief, we agreed to hope that no harm had been done.

Naturally, this incident couldn't pass without some serious discussion on the home front. Daddy had to hear everything, especially the parts about Mommy being stupid enough not to read in advance a book she was going to read to young, impressionable children.

"Look, none of the other books in the series are like that!" I said in my own defense. "There's one about a giraffe and a hippo, and one about a farm where all the animals get along, and —"

"It's true. Nobody had died up to this point," my son said thoughtfully.

"And I'm sorry, but there is something seriously wrong with killing off the title character on the third page."

"He didn't even get a chance to do anything," my son agreed.

My husband was listening patiently. "Was this book written by a French person?" he asked. "I mean, dying on page three is pretty dramatic. Maybe it's a French thing."

"It's a kids' book!"

For reasons that made sense at the time, we brought Georges with us a few days later on a drive to a doctor's appointment I really didn't want to go to. My husband knows better than to leave that kind of errand to me, since he knows I'll just skip out on it; anyway, someone had to stay with our son, since it was that kind of appointment. George(s) jumped in with all the other school-in-the-car books, and floated to the surface when my son grabbed something to do.

"Read this," he said to me, since I'd been suckered into sitting in the back seat.

"Oh, geez Louise. Aren't you ever going to let me forget this?"

"I like it," my son protested.

"Why don't you have it be a French lesson?" my husband offered as a compromise. "Mommy can read it in French, and you can tell me what it says in English."

My son looked less than thrilled, but agreed. The first page was some of the least inspired translating I've ever heard. "Come on, honey," I said. "Dad wants to hear you tell him the story."

My son sighed. "Georges fait le tour de son aquarium," I read sternly.

"'Look out — he dies on the next page!'" my son "translated."

My husband, who wasn't doing anything important or anything, just driving, started laughing so hard that vision became an issue. I gave up on French for the rest of the day.

The next week, the kids met for French lesson again. This time Lilli, our third student, was also present.

"Did you bring George?" Olivia asked me the second I stepped inside.

"Um," I said. George is not my son's name. For a second I had no idea who she was talking about.

"Lilli didn't get to see it last time," Olivia explained. "She was sick. But she's here today, so you have to read it again."

I couldn't believe this. I'd been worried sick about emotionally scarring these ten-year-olds, and had instead introduced them to their new favorite story.

Fortunately, all my French books had been tossed into the same bag, so George had indeed come along for the ride that day. Olivia and my son took great delight in embellishing the story for Lilli's benefit. ("Seriously, he dies in like two pages!" "Doesn't he look like a salad in this picture?")

When we got to the end, my son announced, "I'm going to write a sequel to this."

"Harry buys another fish?" Lilli asked.

"George comes back as a zombie?" Olivia suggested.

My son shook his head. "It's going to be called, George the Fish meets Toto the Toilet."

More about Issue #5