The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (14 page)

P
ART OF ME
welcomes the information about my birth and part of me finds it troubling.

She revealed this to me the day before she and my father had to decide whether or not to move to Sunny View.

At the time I accepted the revelation as simply a logical extension of the topic “I Thought I Might Die,” and I felt curiously
privileged to be let in on a long-held secret of which I myself was the very crux.

Inevitably the story had the effect on me of “final words.”

It had always been Dad who spoke of the phenomenon of near-death experiences, an interest that had seemed merely eccentric,
but now I understood his reasons.

The revelation added yet another layer of fog as I continued trying to do what I thought was best for both of my parents.

Wanting to be Mom’s special one, the one who could protect her, yet not wanting it.

May the white space here represent the small distance I sought to place between her and myself. And still seek.

A layer of air around her.

As in a novel my memory skips seamlessly to the next morning, which suggests to me a night of mindless inner turmoil like
heavy sludge.

“As you breathe in, feel yourself breathing in love.”

Dad and I ate our breakfast as usual and then headed over to Sunny View, also as usual.

Down the long hill and back up again.

I was afraid Dad would dig in his heels and then I really would have to take my mother’s side.

The dry sun-drenched live oaks in Sunny View’s parking lot, their waxy prickly leaves in harsh October sunlight.

At some point I had realized that, with novelistic concision, the nursing home where I had worked in high school as a dishwasher
was none other than Sunny View itself; the facility’s many new buildings had, at first, obscured this fact.

I used to find dentures on the food trays.

An aide once told me that an old man cried when informed there were no more bananas that day.

At the moment I had no use for such memories, which had always made me think of nursing homes as “gross and depressing,” whereas
now I needed to regard them as “not so bad after all.”

Dad and I passed through the lobby with its particular smell.

I wheeled Mom out into the small garden, and the three of us were sitting in the deep blue shade.

A general atmosphere of California flowery fragrance.

I might have left my parents alone to have it out, but I didn’t think that was wise, though in choosing to preside over their
argument I was perhaps indulging my longstanding myth that I was somehow in charge of their marriage.

Once again Dad said, “I just don’t think you get much for your money at a retirement home,” and, “We have everything we need
at the house.”

“
He
has everything
he
needs,” Mom replied. “Because
I
do
everything!
”

This was quite true: she handled all the finances as well as the cooking and cleaning, and of course now the driving too.

I knit my brow: if ever there was a time to take Mom’s side, this might be it.

In couples therapy, whenever John or I tried to talk to each other through Armin, he (Armin) would say to John or me, “Tell
him, not me. He’s sitting right here.”

Thus I found myself saying to my mother now, “Tell him, not me. He’s sitting right here.”

I wish I could see the humor in this—serving as couples counselor to my own parents.

“David, I just can’t do it anymore,” my mother croaked, as annoyed at me now as she was at my father. “I’m
tired
. I
cannot
cook and clean anymore. I don’t have the strength in my legs to drive, so how would we even get to the supermarket? And I
cannot
hire someone and try to oversee them. It
just won’t work
.”

Fighting for herself from a wheelchair.

The temperature must have been about eighty; otherwise it would have been either too cold or too hot for her to be out in
the garden.

She made various other statements to which I said, “Tell Dad, not me.”

Above, the sky was that utterly cloudless California blue.

A couple of times I let her speak to me without making her repeat it to my father, such as when she listed all the services
that Sunny View would provide.

“There are meals. And housekeeping. And I’m going to need help with bathing and going to the bathroom and getting dressed
in the morning!”

“I know that, Ruth,” my father admitted.

“And who is going to put in your eye drops? I can barely put my own socks on.”

Confronted directly with my mother’s arguments, my father appeared increasingly stricken and defeated.

His almost white hair and his thin white short-sleeve polyester shirt.

He had probably sensed my real position on Sunny View, so I felt like a traitor anyway.

Nearby, cherry tomatoes glowed. The beds were raised waist high, so that residents in wheelchairs could tend them.

At last my father said, “All right, Ruth.”

No memory of his expression, but let’s say he was staring down at the cracked concrete, his hands flat on his knees.

I waited a moment. “So you’re going to take the apartment?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“All right then,” said my mother, angrily.

Fatigue had been accruing like a pair of heavy goggles around my eye sockets ever since my arrival in California, and now
I wanted to curl up in a ball right on the patio.

Thus concluded my heroic self-help project to remain neutral in my parents’ dispute and thus forge a new relationship to both
of them before it was too late.

My mother liked to call me a “caring” person (as opposed to certain other uncaring people she knew), and though I had hoped
today to redefine the very term, I now felt conflicted rather than caring.

As much as I hoped for her to get well and as much as I tried to be the best son I could be in the situation and as much as
I sympathized with her and as much as I gave her my sympathy and encouragement and as much as I might have even gone overboard
with a desire to serve during her time of need, still there was this one thing I wouldn’t do for her.

To her mind, my not taking sides was the same as taking my father’s side. Paradoxically, if she hadn’t always pitted me against
him, I might have been able to serve as her advocate that morning at Sunny View.

As it happened, I sort of got my father back, during those three weeks in California.

Evidently the only way for that to happen was with my mother completely out of the house. She had always managed to keep us
apart, even as she made such statements as, “You should try to spend more time with Dad.”

Recently Noelle said, “She considered you a gift, and she wanted to keep you for herself, but she didn’t realize that that
also meant keeping your father from
you
.”

The horrible dilemma that put me in, and still puts me in.

Mom versus Dad: having to choose between myself and myself.

Though John and I have gotten better at disagreeing, whenever we do, still some part of me feels hopeless and trapped.

Usually when you read about people who have had near-death experiences, they decide to make big changes in their lives, but
evidently my mother made no big changes after floating above the operating table of my birth.

Like most depressed people I’m idealistic, hence often disappointed.

Periodically I return to the exasperated question, “Why did she
do
that?” Not only the complaining about my father, but her needing to put me in the middle of it, no matter how often I protested.

She often said Dad was unrealistic, which was true, but she herself was unrealistic to think she could live that way.

I wonder if it will ever be simple for me to tell John when I’m pissed.

I wonder if I’ll ever be objective about my mother.

Then again, why would I want to be?

At some point I gleaned that her friends Hap and Mary thought I hadn’t sufficiently stuck up for her against my father.

She must have complained to them.

Periodically I argue with Hap and Mary, in my mind.

T
HE PLASTIC SHOPPING
bag was white with gold letters that advertised, in English, a shoe store in Tehran. I discovered this in my suitcase upon
returning to New York from Berlin in October 2006.

I had not, as one must assert at the airport, allowed anyone else to pack for me, nor had I left my luggage unattended.

What happens beyond your ken, as when the shells in the game are moving too quickly to see.

I didn’t even know anyone from Iran.

Smashed between the two halves of my suitcase, the shopping bag was stuffed full.

I pulled from it the following items: several children’s costumes in bright colors, with gold and silver rickrack; a red woman’s
dress with a gold scimitar pin; and several books of music for an instrument called the setar, which an illustration showed
to be some kind of lute.

I half wondered if this was someone’s idea of a joke.

As if the luggage fairy had left me a gift.

Unpacking the suitcase, I couldn’t be entirely sure if any of my own things were missing, but I didn’t think so.

My bag had been delayed on my flight home, so its return to me intact was—objectively speaking—a relief.

I was in that jetlag state of unreality anyway, where you don’t quite know where you are.

I pondered our crack anti-terrorism forces, here or in Europe, randomly inserting random items into random suitcases.

Searching, and mixing things up, with their white-gloved hands.

My mother had died early that year, my father the year before.

I had put aside my grief in order to function on my trip to Holland and Germany, but now I was alone in my apartment again.

The pervasiveness of grief, whether or not you recognize it, like the white on this page.

I began to wonder how the Iranian family must have felt when they realized these particular belongings were missing.

The weird specificity of children’s clothing and lute music made me feel as though I had invaded this family’s very home.

The costumes’ synthetic fabric was slick and refused to stay folded and stacked.

I pictured other indignities suffered by this family upon entering the United States in addition to lost property: intrusive
questions, fingerprints, photographs.

Acquaintances in Germany had complained to me about these measures.

And if the contents of the shopping bag had been less innocent, and if I had been “caught” with them?

After Ken died, I constantly misplaced things; now, in some kind of poetic reversal, I had
found
something that wasn’t mine.

A small addendum to my inheritance.

Grief, this thing you don’t want.

That isn’t
yours
.

By now I had more or less accepted my father’s death—but my mother’s was another story.

The shopping bag’s owners appeared to be a mother and her children.

There were no labels on the kids’ costumes, so I envisioned the woman sewing them herself—gathering the waists, stitching
the rickrack—just as I had seen my mother sew her own clothes and also items for my stuffed bear when I was little.

The music books also evoked my mother, since she had played the violin nearly all her life.

Scales and runs curling from behind the closed door of her study.

The switcheroo: mere memories of a person, subbed in for the person herself.

Had I dreamed about finding music, children’s clothing, and a woman’s dress in my luggage, I would have concluded that the
dream hoped to tell me something about my mother.

In my mind I opened the suitcase again and again, each time finding the white plastic sack that didn’t belong there.

*

For all of the above reasons, articulated and unarticulated, I felt compelled to reunite the shopping bag with its rightful
owners. I began by calling the airline’s number for lost baggage. “Is there a name?” the gruff man asked. “No, I’m sorry,
I don’t see—” “What are the items?” I began to describe them but of course could not convey their significance to me, which
I scarcely understood myself. He interrupted again. “That will be virtually impossible for me to track, sir. A lot of people
come through from Iran.” I didn’t see why these items in particular should be difficult to track. In fact, they could hardly
have been more unique. I also doubted that more than a few dozen passengers from Iran arrived in New York on any given day.
I had seen a sign for Emirates at the lost-baggage counter when I arrived, so I asked the man if he also handled complaints
for that carrier. “Yes, we have an agent dedicated to Emirates,” he answered, making no
offer to contact this employee. I was becoming exasperated. “Well, do you think the Emirates person might know more?” I asked.
There was only the briefest pause, a slight rustling sound. I heard no voices exchanging information. “Nobody has called in
reference to any sheet music or children’s clothes,” he said. “You can either send it back or throw it out.”

*

You could say the Iranian shopping bag had good reason to appear in my particular suitcase.

I had been in Europe promoting my novel,
Winkie
, which tells the story of my teddy bear on trial for terrorism.

The idea of Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” was still relatively recent, and my novel sought to parody such thinking.

I had brought along the bear himself, so that he could appear with me on television.

Surreal to actually see him on TV, the evening following my interview. All in German, of course.

Winkie was then eighty-one years old and very worn out, with a deranged expression resembling Charles Manson.

As in the novel, he had been my mother’s teddy bear before he was mine.

With her death, Winkie had become even more precious to me, even more charged than before.

Though I had kept him in my carry-on, somehow he had magnetized my checked baggage for objects as strange and loaded as himself.

While I was writing the book I used to joke to friends that what Winkie most wanted for Christmas was a pink tutu, and indeed
the costumes in the shopping bag included a pink satin skirt, short and ruffled.

Winkie’s wish had come true.

The novel contains pictures of him in various tiny getups, culminating with a shot of him standing before a backdrop of the
pyramids, wearing a blue embroidered tunic and red fez (which I had made out of some felt and a paper cup).

Winkie and the mystery Iranian children—in their bright, gold-trimmed costumes—could almost have been members of the same
troupe of performers, a sort of Islamic von Trapp family.

The cover of one of the setar books shows a wooden instrument with a very long, thin neck and bulbous body—a guitar the Cat
in the Hat might strum.

I discovered a surprisingly large selection of setar music on iTunes. The tracks I chose sounded vaguely Greek, vaguely Middle
Eastern, and at times jangly to my unschooled ears.

My inability to place or enjoy this musical tradition made the tunes seem that much more distant and sad.

The Persian setar is not to be confused with the Indian sitar,
says Wikipedia, while an Iranian site describes classical Persian music as “grave and mournful,” adding, “The basic character
of the Persian is, like his music, melancholy.”

*

A few days later I got up the courage to telephone U.S. Customs, realizing I could make my inquiry sound less crazy by calling
from my office at the magazine.

Press Officer Jane Rappaport naturally doubted Customs had been responsible for the mix-up but asked me to put my information
in an e-mail, including a description of the items I had found.

She called me back the next day. “All I wanted to mention,” she said, “is that—let me get my notes—okay.” I was heartened
that she cared enough both to take notes and to refer to them. She spoke in a raspy Long Island accent that I found disarmingly
genuine. She said there were six “leftover” bags from my flight, and if mine was one of them (though she was careful not to
confirm this), it would have been inspected by U.S. Customs before it was delivered to me. “We search all luggage that comes
in late. There are various threat levels, but you asked if this is because of London”—the bombings that had taken place there
two months earlier. “No. We’ve always had the condition of leftover baggage.”

As for the inserted items, she continued, “That could have happened overseas. We have no idea. It wouldn’t necessarily have
happened here … Who knows at what point that piece of luggage was searched, how many clearances it goes through.”

Uncertainties seemed to be multiplying.

“You asked also—” she began. “It would be the airline who would help you determine whose stuff that is. We could not identify
that for you.”

I inquired if my bag might have been searched right alongside other leftover bags that night, causing the mix-up. “Probably
not,” she said, “because they log in every bag they look at. And if it’s cleared, it probably wouldn’t be six bags looked
at, at the same time.”

I didn’t find this particularly convincing, but I liked Jane Rappaport herself: she had the appealing oddness of a character
actor in a television crime show. Since my e-mail had mentioned the reason for my trip to Europe, I said now, “You know, my
novel is about terrorism and childhood, so this is just a really weird coincidence.” “Yes!” she exclaimed, and she began singing
something, a weird non-tune. It took me a moment to realize it was the theme to
The Twilight Zone
.