Sardines

This short story dramatizes a young girl's first encounter with mortality. It was first published in Spindrift in 2003 and was reprinted in 2025 in the Maryland Medicine Journal.

During the time my grandmother lived with us, she smelled of sardines. I don’t know if the odor came from her body, her breath, her clothing, or if it was simply the essence of old age. I was ten and had known my grandmother all my life, and never had she smelled like anything other than a normal person. Then she got sick, moved in with us, and the odor appeared. Because the fishy aroma stayed in a room long after she left it, our entire apartment reeked. There was no escape. I was not permitted to open the windows. It might give Grandmother a chill.

My parents either didn’t notice the smell or chose not to mention it. They were religious and making fun of a parent, especially one who was sick and had come to her child’s home to die, was a sin proscribed in the Ten Commandments.

I didn’t know she was dying, at least not at first. It was one of those puzzles children need to figure out on their own, from clues. My mother quit her job, and my parents whispered a lot, especially after Grandmother went to sleep. So, I knew there was something going on that no one other than my parents was supposed to know about.

Then there were the pills and the elaborate schedule for taking the pills. When my mother shook out the tablets and capsules into her hand, I tried to get a whiff, to find out if they smelled like sardines, but the pills were odorless.

After that, there was the operation. Grandmother was taken to the hospital and came back home with the little finger of her left hand removed. I pictured the pinky, like a flesh-colored sardine, rolling off the chopping block onto the floor, to be swept away by a janitor with a huge broom, like the kind they used for cleaning the gymnasium at school. I asked my parents about the surgery, but they said that the finger was infected and had to go. I went to the bathroom and dabbed Mercurochrome on every one of my knee cuts. I worried all night about losing my legs.

Then there were the treatments. My mother told me she had to take Grandmother back to the hospital once a week for what she called cobalt treatments. “Why?” I asked. “To make her better,” she said. I was afraid to go further. I envisioned my grandmother sitting on a stool in the center of a sealed room with blue light beams zapping her from all directions. I imagined a pungent fish odor, a high-pitched buzzing sound, and my grandmother falling off the stool in a swoon.

Finally, there was the pain and the nights where both my parents took turns sitting with Grandmother, rubbing her arms and giving her something that made her sleep. It was then I knew that this was how you died, in a progression of steps, one worse than the other. But at that point, I had no idea how bad it would become before the end.

I stopped eating sardines. Up until then, I loved those little silvery brown bundles, especially the skinless and boneless kind, snuggled together in thick olive oil, in a flat can, like a pack of playing cards, but with a special key. I would pile the sardines onto a slice of pumpernickel bread and fold it over, relishing the first bite from the crustless center of the bulging sandwich.

I began to sniff at my clothing, my arms, and my long hair. I thought that I might be dying, too, if I could detect a sardine odor on me. I felt shooting pains in my leg bones. My parents told me they were growing pains.

During the day, when my mother said it was all right, I tiptoed into Grandmother’s room and asked if she wanted me to read to her. She would smile at me and call me, shayna maydl, the Yiddish words for pretty girl. She would ask about school and about my friends and would laugh when I would mimic my teachers, but I could tell that her laugh was tired and pained. I wondered if she was thinking back to when she was my age, when she was full of life, when she was in the old country and smelled like a person.

“Grandmother, do you want me to get you some perfume?” I asked.

“What kind you got?”

“Tabu.” I was thinking of the bottles standing on my mother’s dresser.

“Too serious.”

“What about Arpege?”

“Okay. Just a little spritz.”

I sneaked into my parents’ bedroom and came back with the atomizer.

“Ah, a mechaya!” Grandmother said. “You’ve made my day.” Then she said, “Don’t look so sad, mamela.” And then, “I love you.”

I began to cry. I wished I had brought her the cologne to make her feel better.

Two weeks later, Grandmother died. The sardine smell lingered hauntingly until one day I searched for it, and it was gone. After a long period of mourning, our household got back to normal in every way, except that once in a while, when my parents weren’t paying attention, I’d sneak into the pantry and open a can of sardines. Not to eat. Just to sniff.