The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  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.

  4

  THE 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.

  5

  IN CUPERTINO HARDWARE 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.

  6

  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.”

  7

  DAD 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?’”

  8

  “HERE ARE KEN’S papers,” said Mom, meaning the diary my brother Ken had kept during the last five years of his life. “I tried reading it, but it was too painful. I didn’t know he was in so much pain, that he was so depressed.”

  She handed me the sealed manila envelope.

  Often I wasn’t able to respond meaningfully when my parents told me emotionally charged things, such as the above.

  I had long known of the existence of the diary Ken had kept before he died of AIDS, and I was glad that it existed, but even then, twelve years after his death, I was afraid to read it.

  Above my old bed were the copper-colored brackets and redwood-stained shelves I had put up as a teenager, as well as my quaint nature photographs—columbine in shady forest; orchard in springtime.

  I had once hid a cummy sheet under my bed, and when I looked again it was covered with tiny black ants.

  I thanked God that tomorrow I was going away for a couple of days, to visit friends.

  “… and thank you for Cliff’s help,” said Mom during grace.

  While Dad dozed in his chair, she and I watched a documentary about New York City, whose aerial shots of the twin towers made my eyes well up.

  “I know, it’s freaky, it’s just really freaky,” I said to my sister Carol, who had called from France.

  “I observed certain things that indicated that the house was slipping forward,” said the e-mail from my other sister, Helen, regarding a dream that combined her own townhouse, my parent’s house, and the World Trade Center. “Then you-all pulled up in the car, sort of down the hill from the house (which was on a hill), and I yelled down for you to stay away and get away fast, as the house was slipping; I ran down the hill, and then the house suddenly slipped very fast, but instead of sliding forward it slid backwards and sort of collapsed as it disappeared over the hill.”

  I regret that my continuing anger at my mother, over her complaining about my father, often kept me from her.

  I noted the fragrance of the lemon tree overhanging the fence, and Dad said, “Delightful.”

  Mom pulled back the drape to point out to me the full moon.

  When she said, “I’m not going to be here forever,” I saw how she truly believed it—that is, that she would continue to exist, just not here—and for a brief moment this seemed not simply a matter of loss for me but an objective fact for each of us.

  Again and again those shots of smoldering piles of steel and rubble, and rescue workers still holding out hope for survivors.

  “I’m glad we were able to do it,” said Mom of caring for Ken during his two major illnesses.

  “Our poor little Ken,” said Dad.

  9

  ALWAYS INTERESTING TO take the train in California, because no one does.

  At the station coffee shop, a mom said to her six-year-old, “You’re always going to be my son, no matter what.”

  “To disseminate anthrax germs with a crop duster,” the Times cheerfully explained, “terrorists would have to master dozens of complex steps.”

  This particular train passed through many beautiful, swampy places.

  Red and green succulents along the levees, and the gray bay stretching away flatly below the even gray sky.

  Tender, burned-seeming buttocks of a grass-shaved hill.

  Sometimes I did actually pray when Mom said grace, as tainted as organized religion is for me.

  John doesn’t believe in the afterlife, but I do.

  There was a very smart girl I knew from church, probably a dyke, who left home and got her own apartment at sixteen (was she abused?); for a time she and I worked in the same nursing home, as dishwashers; a few years later I heard she had become addicted to glue.

  Memories don’t have to be relevant to be meaningful.

  A bird with a very long beak flew down from a telephone wire.

  10

  OVER DINNER WITH Cathy I discussed my father’s failing vision, my mother’s diminishing hearing, my father’s patchy memory, my mother’s osteoporosis, asthma, allergies, as well as their feelings about each of these things, and my feelings, my denial.

  11

  “BOTH MY PARENTS are gentle, lovely people,” I told my friend Gabby, “despite their many problems.”

  Whenever I stayed with Gabby I got to sleep in the cabin in her backyard, which was almost like camping.

  When I was five my father worked in another state for about six months, and I recall not quite recognizing him as he made popcorn in the kitchen one evening—a painful memory I’ve never been able to understand in any useful way.

  I thought, “Who is that nice man making popcorn?”

  That was in Illinois; hollyhocks grew in the side yard.

  At the end of the block, a park with tall trees—some fallen with the roots exposed.

  Mom forbade me to dress up in her old clothes again, and then she asked why I only played with my friend Liz and not the other little boys on the block—a question I had never even considered and therefore couldn’t begin to answer.

  I hope that simple, factual sentences about my childhood will make the past seem almost comprehensible—not “normal” exactly, but closer to it—that is, an objective story I can view without shame.

  Superman was a turn-on.

  The basement used to flood regularly.

  The pipes froze.

  Though the reasons for my father’s absence in 1963 were always explained as purely practical—we had to remain in Wheaton until the house was sold, and the house was difficult to sell—I gather that, for various reasons including the house itself, my parents were very much at odds during this period.

  Family story: My older brother Ken said, “If you don�
��t like it, you can lump it,” and I said, “Lump lump lump—I lumped it!”

  Liz showed me how to pick wild strawberries in the empty lot next door.

  I liked the retired couple in the house on the other side of ours but Mom told me not to bother them.

  Before he got the job in New Orleans, my father had been unemployed off and on for nearly a year, and my mother had been very worried about money.

  She had to go to work as a Kelly Girl to pay my sisters’ college tuition.

  She herself had attended only junior college. The day before she was supposed to leave for Grinnell, her father’s salary was cut in half and she couldn’t go. She cried all night.

  Jack LaLanne: also a turn-on.

  “Little Cliff, little Cliff, little Cliff-Cliff-Cliff,” my father used to say.

  At nursery school I was sent to naptime early because I called Liz a “nincompoop.”

  Liz got off by maintaining she had only called me a “nincom.”

  The vibration of Mom’s voice as she held me in her arms.

  I had hidden behind the big beige chair in the living room, and when Ken found me, he kept saying, “Where are you? Where are you? You’re invisible!” until I screamed for him to make me appear again.

  There was no bathroom in Gabby’s cabin, and entering the house would wake her, so usually I just peed somewhere in the yard.

  Quite pleasurable as well to imagine I was Superman.

  12

  “I WON’T ARGUE with you,” said Mom to a cement truck merging in front of her on the freeway.

  “He might pour concrete on you,” said my father, who could no longer drive.

  “Maybe he’ll follow us home to our cracked driveway.”

  Using a sharp knife my father cut his chocolate cream into thin slices.

  “I called them and told them that that magazine was for my great-granddaughter, not for my husband,” my mother said. “I told them, ‘My husband is eighty-eight and I’m eighty-six. What would we want with a teen magazine?’”