The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (3 page)

“C
OME ON, COME
on, hurry up!” I muttered to my penis, as it tried to pee.

How much of each day feels like blind thrashing.

A slot had opened up at the retirement home, so my parents were planning to move November 1, and I would have to go out to
California in October to help them.

Of the four remaining siblings, I had the most flexible schedule, due to the magazine’s generous vacation policy.

“I was so engrossed in MY stuff I didn’t ask you where you went for the weekend and if you had a good time!! So tell me. Love,
Mom.”

I almost never dream about sex, and when I do it’s almost always illicit sex.

I lay my head against his forbidden, muscled, Islamic belly, then kissed it, my boldness surprising me, because kissing it
was even more forbidden.

My parents couldn’t sleep because they were so worried about moving.

Despite the Nortriptyline I continued to tumble into very black moods from time to time, or more accurately, gray humors,
vomit-green tantrums, and shit-brown funks, which left me hopeless, annoyed, and ashamed, respectively.

I joked to myself that if someone at work asked, “How are you?” I’d answer, “My daughter died.”

John and I rolled over and went to sleep, but the next morning sex clicked in a way it hadn’t in a while, and then we went
bicycling.

Way out in the Rockaways, ugly red-brick housing projects, the A train a series of concrete archways like an aqueduct, and
huge empty lots, whole tracts of land that you never see in New York anymore, then the old wooden boardwalk and the sea in
little verdigris waves calmly rippling in.

Jean Rhys: “Yes, that night was the last frenzied effort of my guardian angel, poor creature.”

A
SHRIEK FROM
my coworker who had a TV in her office.

And to think that only two days before, John and I had remarked how we could see the World Trade Center from the Rockaways.
Van Gogh: “We live in such a disturbed time that there can be no way of having opinions fixed enough to form any judgment
of things … I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky … When you have looked at these two studies
for some time, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and Bermard and I sometimes
used to talk about.”

Again and again, from various angles, the plane slicing into the tower.

With unusual kindness people moved aside to let me off the crowded subway car.

Noelle also saw clients in an office down near Wall Street, so I was terrified something might have happened to her, but fortunately
she was fine.

The woman in the office next to mine shut her door because her cousin, a fireman, had been killed.

A mass e-mail from a new person in Marketing, asking for help in locating her brother.

Erin’s three-week-old nephew suffocated in his crib in Maryland.

Each day Erin had to clean up the thin layer of ash that blew from Lower Manhattan into her windows in Brooklyn Heights.

“And now,” said the cassette Noelle had given me, “begin relaxing, or maintain and enhance your relaxation, by focusing on
breathing deeply, and slowly.”

Erin asked me to read what she’d written to say at her nephew’s funeral. In it, she affirmed the evolution of the soul.

Later, as we turned to leave the bar, I saw sitting next to me a middle-aged man with his eyes closed, perhaps in fatigue
or meditation, which anyone right now was entitled to, I thought, but then I recognized him as an editor from the magazine
where I worked, evidently pretending not to see me.

My parents decided not to move November 1 but to take the next opening at the retirement home, which could be several months
away.

“Dad refuses to throw anything out.”

I looked down and noticed someone had dropped a paper clip in the urinal.

John and I got into an argument over whether or not the suicide hijackers were “evil.”

Rain falling on the disaster site made the whole city smell like burnt plastic, and downtown on the street corners and alongside
the buildings, candles burned below photos of the missing.

I cried in front of the television because the President said absolutely nothing but they all stood and applauded anyway.

Rhys: “The country stretched flatly into an infinite and melancholy distance, but it looked to me sunlit and full of promise,
like the setting of a fairy tale.”

I delayed but did not cancel my trip to San Jose, because my parents still needed help cleaning out the house, even if they
weren’t moving immediately.

John and I watched
Creature from the Black Lagoon
.

At the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, near the greenhouses, a four-year-old prancing sideways: “Mom, is this walking?”

The
Times
printed my friend Cathy’s letter asking “What is victory?” and subsequently she received hate mail.

Erin wasn’t allowed to share her beliefs about reincarnation at her nephew’s memorial service.

When the bus rumbled past, the angry pothole spewed water and black-tar pebbles across the entire sidewalk, but fortunately
it missed me.

Useless fact: the discount store where I yelled at the manager was right across the street from the World Trade Center.

John’s strategy was to read the
Times
thoroughly, while I found I could barely read it at all.

The magazine where I worked printed George W. Bush’s inanities in huge letters below full-page photos of the disaster.

ABC said the Miss America Pageant would proceed tonight as planned and couldn’t be stopped by terrorism.

Sad, tiny boy on the subway shaking off what his mom had just said to him.

T
HE THREE SECURITY
men coming down the airplane’s aisle said something about a passenger name matching one on their list of terrorists—but the
passenger turned out to be a baby.

I
N
C
UPERTINO
H
ARDWARE
I smelled alcohol on the breath of the man who mixed our paint.

Carried on the fragrant air, the screams of recess at my old grade school.

High up on the ladder I painted under the eaves, while my father watched.

A certain kind of moaning guitar solo reminds me more than anything else could of the hormone-soaked panic of my early teen
years—the darkened rec rooms, the couples making out, the dope I was afraid to try.

My father didn’t want to move to a retirement home, but my mother did.

His vision might not have declined so rapidly if his doctor had caught the problem sooner.

“What color do you call your hair?” he asked me. “Light brown?”

All over the yard my father had stockpiled dozens of plastic bleach containers filled with water, in case of an earthquake.

“John saw both towers collapse, from Fifth Avenue,” I said over lunch.

I napped with a kind of exhaustion that might be called traumatized.

Since my parents weren’t especially good at sympathy, I didn’t expect anything special from them regarding 9/11, whose effect
on me I couldn’t quite grasp anyway.

Up on the ladder again, my gaze sometimes drifted from the creamy off-white eaves to the extraordinarily blue sky.

Mom’s eyes had looked very red and irritated at lunch and I wondered if I should have been more forceful in suggesting she
call the glaucoma doctor again.

By now it had dawned on me that not just this one part, but the entire house, badly needed painting.

Mom’s hearing had gotten so bad that she couldn’t play the violin anymore.

The tomatoes in the salad had to be peeled and cut into very little pieces, or my father couldn’t chew them.

I supposed it was possible to feel traumatized by something that didn’t affect you directly.

“You are a first-class idiot,” I imagined telling my parents’ doctor.

The lettuce, too, had to be torn into very little pieces.

Though it was only a part of the city that was destroyed, and not even my favorite part, still it’s my city, and in this sense
I did feel directly affected.

For years now the three of us had all kept our political views to ourselves, though this left fewer things to talk about.

“Mom knows how to cook anything,” said Dad, as she poked at the just microwaved fish.

“Sit down and loaf, that’s an order,” he said to her after dinner.

On the cop show it eventually came out that the evil (fat) psychotherapist had implanted false memories of sexual abuse in
the vulnerable mind of a young female patient.

“Okay, good night,” I said, but they were both asleep in their chairs.

Either the Nortriptyline or the Neurontin made me see weird patterns if I woke up in the middle of the night—geometric bursts,
flickering line segments, wiggly blobs.

A
LARGE RED
rubber band held the package of fake breakfast sausage closed.

Mom seemed much older than she had, say, a year before—more stooped, more frail—and Dad’s vision was much worse.
“Do you think you’ll want these at Sunny View?” I asked, and the two of them stood blinking at the folding lawn chairs, which
were hanging on nails beside the Thunderbird, but they couldn’t decide.

Huge softball fist of white-yellow magnolia between the huge waxy leaves of the tree across the street.

“See all that dirt?” Mom said, proudly holding up the bottom of the Swiffer for me to see.

Sometimes I’d get mixed up as to who could hear and who could see, particularly because my mother pretended to hear what she
didn’t, and my father pretended to see better than he did.

I laughed when Dad joked that maybe the ugly mustard-yellow house on the next street over was occupied by terrorists, though
I doubted he intended a broader point about right wing paranoia.

On the perfect, balmy breeze, a marching band playing “Louie Louie.”

As Dad followed behind, I gathered up all the plastic bleach containers lying by the fence and alongside the house, poured
out the water in each, and placed them in the yellow recycling bins. “There,” I said.

In the old television cabinet, from which the picture tube had been removed, were a dozen or so old Tide boxes.

As I carried the leaky garden hoses to the trashcan, Dad said, “That’s enough for today.”

At lunch we discussed the recycling laws, which were complex, and the cracked driveway, which the house inspector had said
would have to be repoured at a cost of $5,000.

Defiantly my father said he wouldn’t do it, nor would he have the hot water heater raised eighteen inches off the garage floor.

“Her name sounds Italian but actually it’s Indian,” said Mom of the real estate agent. I looked again at the little picture
on the pad of paper and saw that her features were indeed East Indian.

After lunch I napped the nap of the righteous.

We had moved to this house when I was ten, and on the wastebasket in my old room, Charlie Brown still said, “Good grief!”

In one of the
Britannica
Books of the Year—1968, I think—there was a picture of a Soviet gymnast that I used to copy in pencil, and that was how I
taught myself to draw.

Bad arthritis in my hand from all that painting.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do when I’m not around anymore,” Mom said playfully.

“I’ll be sunk,” Dad answered.

“I won’t be here forever,” she said, sounding almost relieved.

“I’ll be sunk,” Dad repeated.

I continued clearing the dinner table.

“I guess you’ll have to marry Hattie B.,” Mom said to him.

He chuckled. “Yes, I’ll have to marry Hattie B.”

“Who’s Hattie B.?” I asked, from the sink.

“Just someone from church,” Mom said. “She’s a very nice person,
but
.”

I laughed. “You mean she’s unattractive?”

“No, actually she has a very nice figure,” said Dad. “But she gets very upset if things don’t go the way she thinks they should
at church.”

“Is it Hattie, or Pattie?” I asked.

“Hattie,” said Dad. He came over to dry the dishes. “And her husband’s name was Bee, B-E-E. Hattie Bee.”

“Hattie Bee,” I repeated.

I went through the Christmas things, saving the best ornaments and the giant old lights to mail to myself, because I knew
John would love them.

The Christmas box was so old that its promotional message read, “Special Price: 7¢ off.”

D
AD SPILLED WATER
on the counter and Mom whispered, “This is what I have to deal with all the time.”

The last time I’d seen Noelle, which was before the attacks, she had explained the Oedipal Complex in a way that felt new
and revelatory.

I couldn’t remember now what she had said, only that it was indeed complex.

In the local newspaper Anna Deavere Smith wrote that the fires of the World Trade Center smelled “like a dragon, yawning”—as
if the event needed embellishment.

Sometimes Mom said “Excuse me” after complaining about my father, because she knew I didn’t like it.

My father kept a dozen suits in his study closet, going back to 1980, he said, and on each lapel was pinned a small slip of
paper with the waist size (38½, now too small), which he asked me to read for him.

“I don’t like to give anything away,” he said, sliding the closet door closed again.

As I dragged the old eight-track stereo from under his workbench, he said, “This is going too fast for me,” something he had
said before, but this time I understood the obvious, that he wasn’t ready to move.

“I
ask
him and
ask
him to throw things away!” Mom whispered in the kitchen.

“I don’t think you get much for your money in a retirement home,” said Dad in the side yard.

“He just doesn’t
concentrate
,” said Mom in her study.

I walked the deserted, heat-drenched streets trying to calm myself down.

Above my old schoolyard, the dry, pink mountains of yore.

At dinner Mom said, “When you were nine or ten you came home from Roger’s—his parents were divorced—and you said, ‘You and
Dad aren’t getting a divorce, are you?’”