The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (12 page)

O
NE
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
when I was eleven, there was nothing good on TV and we came upon a black and white movie that Mom said must have been an
old serial—one cliffhanger after another, including the heroine literally hanging off a cliff—and Mom could barely contain
her laughter.

She loved unintended humor.

Another time when there was nothing good on, my oldest brother, Paul, suggested we turn down the sound and put on a record;
just as someone died on a submarine, the Beatles sang, “Your mother should know.”

My own mother laughed and laughed.

She was remarkably open to such experiments, which I gather Paul and his college friends had conducted while stoned.

I mention these stray happy memories to counterbalance what follows.

In the hospital my mother said, “Dad didn’t want to call you kids, but I said we had to. He can’t drive. He can’t go look
at nursing homes for me. He can’t see well enough now even to cook for himself a can of soup.”

He must have been standing right beside me, but he had always blithely ignored my mother’s criticisms.

I don’t recall his reaction when I had first arrived at his motel room; possibly he put on a brave face; possibly he was simply
numb; I don’t remember him seeming nearly as addled as the Hendersons had described, but of course I was now on hand to provide
the necessary hints.

My mother explained that only part of her hip had been replaced, which meant an easier rehab than for a full hip replacement.

The thin colorless hospital gown didn’t cover her well; her chest looked exposed and pale with its dark moles and purplish
spots; and her hair was a lopsided clump of gray.

I had never seen her look so terrible and I feared for her life.

At the other end of the ward, the hospital social worker offered me her list of three nursing homes in San Jose that had room
for my mother.

Rehabilitation would take several weeks. Medicare would pay for nursing care and for physical therapy but not for the ambulance
to San Jose, nor for any sort of care beyond the prescribed period of rehab, though my mother would probably still require
assistance when she returned home.

I tried to take in these simple facts but as I sat in the social worker’s small office, staring at her stacks of colored forms,
it all seemed immensely confusing and complex, as if I had just arrived in a foreign land.

I asked whether my mother might go to the retirement community near San Jose where my parents were already on the waiting
list, and the social worker said she could arrange that if Sunny View had a bed available in their nursing facility. The next
step, she said, was for me to go look at Sunny View and the other homes on the list in order to make a selection. I didn’t
think to ask what my criteria should be.

Back in my mother’s room: the IV taped to her thin, blue wrist, and my father saying, “I know, dear …”

T
HE
V
AGABOND
’
S SLICK
polyester bedspreads, rust, gold, and green in a “patchwork” pattern, and the cheap white quilting when the spread was turned
back.

On my Walkman, Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan, in his Scottish brogue: “I’m tired of crying on the stairs!”

Vague memory of my father and me having dinner together in a Denny’s-like restaurant and, in the morning, eating free doughnuts
in the motel lobby before going to the hospital again.

Fortunately it seemed like a good hospital.

My mother didn’t want us to stay long; she was anxious for me to get down to San Jose and get cracking.

Objective statement: She couldn’t seem to hold in her head both her good and bad feelings toward my father, so she had
to vent the bad ones onto some third party, such as her friends or her children.

“If we were already at Sunny View, then all this would be taken care of,” she said now, meaning that if my father had not
resisted moving to the retirement community when an apartment the right size had become available two years earlier, we would
not have to find a nursing facility now, nor would I have to look after my father while she was recovering.

The deterioration of her hearing in recent years seemed to have bolstered her fiction that my father could not hear her complaints
about him, even if he was two feet away.

At some point, either in the hospital or later, she complained of his bungling the call to the front desk at the Ahwahnee
Hotel in Yosemite, to alert them of her fall.

He hadn’t been able to see the numbers on the phone in the room.

“I said, ‘Just dial zero! The bottom key!’ But he’s never been good in a crisis.”

My brain rushed first to save her from him, then him from her.

Noelle, my therapist, later referred to this as “sequential mistrust.”

The old sensation of being ripped in two, but I’m thick cardboard and hard to rip, so I’m mostly being twisted this way and
that.

I’m like my mother that way—weirdly strong.

A
PHORISM
: H
AVING TO
choose between your parents as a kid leads to crippling inner turmoil as an adult.

Panicky belief that I had to take drastic action to protect myself from anything I didn’t like about John, hence I continued
the practice of leaving him in my mind, though not with the same intensity as in Egypt.

I still also preferred imaginary arguments to actual ones.

A year earlier we had begun seeing a couples therapist, Armin, in order to address just such problems.

We had nearly broken up.

Mainly we were trying to learn how to have an honest disagreement, a simple enough concept in theory.

I, for one, had not yet weaned myself from needing a referee, Armin, in order to speak my mind.

And then there was my nasty tendency to blame John for things we both had done or decided.

Sample entry from my journal that fall: “Yesterday Noelle and I reached the same point again—my ambivalence won’t protect
me; being half-committed to John won’t keep me safe—I need to fully commit and see what happens.”

Part of me would like to tell you more about couples therapy, and part of me knows it has to remain between John and me.

I
N THE CAR
, on the same hazy Interstate going west back through the grassy hillsides, just as we crested a very long grade, my father
broke down crying.

“I don’t want Mom to die,” he said.

He was ninety and I was forty-six and I had never seen him this way.

I thought:

1. This is the last thing I need right now.

2. He’s no good in a crisis.

3. I need to take care of my mother!

The pink hills dotted by black live oaks, the dirty too-bright sky, and the raised lane markers ticking past the SUV’s shiny
white fenders.

A concept in couples therapy that I was still trying to grasp was what Armin called “Detach With Love.” It had something to
do with seeing myself as distinct from John, with my own opinion, yet still connected to him.

Now, in some minor miracle of therapeutic training, an unafraid yet receptive state of mind unaccountably took hold of me,
allowing me to glance over at my father and simply see him there, crying in the seat next to me.

Here the reader might expect a physical description of him, but the only picture that comes to mind is that of his limp hands
in his lap and the blank haze outside his window. In fact, I may not even have glanced over at him, since I was driving, or
because I was afraid to look too closely, and anyway what I saw at that moment wasn’t physical.

I thought:

1. Does his crying stop me from what I need to do today?

2. What if I simply let my father cry?

3. In fact, I
want
a father who can cry.

And in this way, I was able to say to him, simply, “I know, Dad,” and to reach out and pat his shoulder.

The process took perhaps ten seconds, from his outburst to my freaking out to my comforting him, and I had kept one hand on
the steering wheel the whole time.

I hadn’t even changed lanes.

Already my father’s sobs were subsiding and I understood that he had required from me a surprisingly small amount of kindness.

I
WANT THOSE
ten seconds to last forever so my life could always be that calm and revelatory, but now I must describe the rest of my stay
in California.

I imagine my father began to cry because at the crest of that
hill he fully realized we were returning to San Jose without my mother, which is exactly what he feared might happen in a
bigger way.

There may have been a previous outburst at the motel or the hospital, and I ignored it, or maybe he had tried to be strong
until now.

My father and I were silent for several minutes as I continued driving down the gray pebbly freeway, which was now descending
through the arid hills into the Bay Area.

In a show of mental competence, he told me exactly where to turn off the Interstate in San Jose, then off the expressway,
off the avenue, and onto our own street, Del Cambre Drive.

The old familiar house, now motherless, where I fixed lunch in the old familiar kitchen.

The reassuring metal click as each cabinet door clutched the magnet.

In an older part of town we found the first facility on our list, clearly the cheapest, and though I expected soul-stealing
dreariness, a small white dog barked as we walked in, making the hospital-green walls seem almost cheerful.

I had no idea what questions to ask but tried things like, “How often does the doctor visit?” and “Is there always an RN on
duty?”

Spanish wafting from a room nearby signaled the home’s working-class status, and I doubted my mother would like it here.

At the next home, in a swankier part of the valley, the rotund male administrator implored me to send my mom here for rehab,
because this facility, unlike some, was tirelessly dedicated to getting patients back on their feet, and this was exactly
what she needed, not a conventional nursing home where people tend to languish.

There must be a specific area of the limbic system that lights up during such emergencies—PARENT IN TROUBLE—and this area
had been blinking in my line of vision for two solid days now, hence for the moment I allowed myself the luxury of feeling
taken under this nice man’s wing.

Back in the car I decided he had come on too strong, though in retrospect I think he may have been right, who knows.

Between nursing homes, the usual freeways of San Jose, the familiar trees in brownish sunlight, and the expected pale mountains
on the horizon, blue to the west, pink to the east.

Up in the foothills the most expensive home displayed everywhere its Hyatt Regency level furniture and wallpaper.

Near a pastel sitting area I beheld a row of ten or twelve very old people slumped in their wheelchairs, completely out of
it, one or two of them softly moaning, and no nurse in sight.

I crossed this home off the list.

The road to Sunny View went straight down a long steep hill and back up another equally long steep hill; the facility stood
at the top of that second incline, though in fact it had no view.

The middle-aged saleslady with her dyed reddish hair and small beauty-contestant nose struck me as a perfect cross between
a funeral director and real estate agent, and the décor of her windowless office achieved the same curious balance, with its
dark green walls and heavy traditional furniture also in dark hues.

She made sure to look at my father as she spoke: Yes, Sunny View could offer Ruth a room in its nursing wing, and as it happened,
a very nice, large apartment was opening up soon in Assisted Living, where both of them could live after Ruth had recovered.

She led us down several long white corridors to Nursing, where the RN gave the usual assurances.

There were a couple of moaners somewhere down a hallway, out of sight, but there was a patio and a small garden; overall the
mood wasn’t as grim as the expensive home we had just seen, nor as cheerful as the facility with the barking dog; similarly,
the sales pitch fell somewhere in the middle in terms of helpful information versus playing on our emotions; hence, in some
kind of Goldilocks logic, and because I had no other logic to go by, Sunny View felt about right.

I
ADMIT THAT
my various acts of elder care included an unspoken message: “This is what I wanted from you—empathy, time, assistance—that
I didn’t always get, either as a child or as an adult.”

Kindness as grievance.

After Katrina, my mother said, “Those people should help
themselves
.” That was later, after my father’s stroke, but she had always held such views, and my father would have agreed.

The sneaky myth that by being magnanimous to my parents in their old age I could somehow change them, or even that I could
change the past—as if adult actions could have a domino effect on childhood.

Trying to transcend my own upbringing, at the scene of the crime.

When I was a kid we lived in Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, and two cities in California, all before I was nine.

My siblings and I were more or less banned from mentioning any unhappiness about moving.

I have two memories of Connecticut, which we left when I was a toddler: 1) fear of the upright vacuum cleaner’s headlight
in the dark living room; 2) learning to pee standing up, from my father.

The move to Illinois proved disastrous—my father lost his new job after just two months.

Evidently my mother hadn’t wanted to move there in the first place. The family had lived in Connecticut more than ten years,
and my mother was good friends with the next door neighbor, Mrs. Thompson. My mother’s amateur symphony in Norwalk, for which
she played the violin, had once had Isaac Stern as a soloist.

The oft-repeated tale of basement floods and burst pipes in the new house.

It was in Illinois that my mother’s displeasure with my father appears to have become most crippling, a period when I was
age three to five.

“
My
yearbooks were ruined, and of course
his
were on a higher shelf.”

It’s possible I date this as a key period in my parents’ marriage only because it was a key period of my own life, but I don’t
think so.

My father was then in his late forties; he had bought a white Oldsmobile convertible with red interior, which he soon wrecked.

“He lost that job because he talked back to his boss.”

There were five children—the oldest two in college, and me not yet in kindergarten. Coming six years after my closest brother,
surely I was unplanned, possibly unwanted.

Carol and Helen had to withdraw from their private colleges and attend the University of Illinois instead. I went to nursery
school, so my mother could temp in Chicago.

My father found a temporary position with a hairspray manufacturer in another city in Illinois, and when he finally landed
a permanent job, with a banana importer in New Orleans, my mother was unable to sell the house; thus for more than a year
my parents lived mainly apart.

And so came the moment in the kitchen when I asked myself, “Who is that nice man making popcorn?”

Looking up at him not unkindly, but in genuine confusion.

This would suggest intense loyalty to my mom, and/or intense bereavement for my dad.

As soon as the house was sold, she doggedly packed us up and moved us to a suburb of New Orleans.

I wonder how many more times I’ll need to go over this story in my mind.

I looked down from my bedroom window in Louisiana at the mosquito truck going by, kids running after it, possibly on a dare,
shouting in the poison fog.

For some reason I remember the uncrating of the dishwasher. It was a portable dishwasher that had to be connected by hoses
to the sink.

There in Louisiana, reunited with my father, I forgot I was toilet trained and began shitting my pants.