The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (4 page)

“H
ERE ARE
K
EN’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.

A
LWAYS 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.

O
VER 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.

“B
OTH 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.

“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?’”

“I’ve sunken into myself,” she said, later. “I don’t have a waist anymore.”

A sore throat told me I’d caught Gabby’s cold.

“We didn’t know where our next dollar was coming from,” Mom said, referring to the period in Illinois when Dad was out of
work.

Not feeling well, I napped the rest of the afternoon.

During
Antiques Roadshow
Mom reminded me that my great-grandfather on her side had been orphaned by an Indian attack in Kansas.

“Do you want to see our antiques?” my father asked, and he
returned with a wooden dough-mixing trough, two magnifying glasses, a handsome pair of cast-iron tailor’s shears, and a small
wooden device that he thought had something to do with spinning.

He reminded me that tomorrow I had to help him inspect the roof repairs made that week, since he couldn’t see well enough
to judge.

Mom made a face when Dad forgot to turn up the sound after a commercial.

I realized I didn’t care how Detective Olivia would solve the crime, so I went to my room to jack off and go to sleep.

D
AD PORED OVER
the TV guide with one of the antique magnifying glasses.

“Do you want slossage?” Mom asked, using her playful word for sausage.

Each day the local newspaper breathlessly reported utterly useless information on terrorism leaked by “senior government officials.”

My father and I on the roof.

I didn’t think it had been fixed properly, but Dad said, “It looks much better,” so I let it go.

(Nap.)

At the other end of the house Mom was crossly pointing out something that Dad had misunderstood, and he said, “I guess I’m
just a dumb jerk then.”

Dad was such an asshole when I was a teenager that I forgot I loved him and only began to remember after Ken died.

His virulent racism. His rants against taxes and foreign aid. His intolerance of any other view.

If I left a wrinkle in the bathroom rug, he would call to me, in a mock-mincing voice, “Oh,
Clifford
, come in here and tidy the rug.”

He went now to the kitchen for a spoon with which to eat the chocolate chip cookie crumbs left in the canister.

Soon enough it was time to pick up my sister Helen at the airport.

My mother and father each hugged her, and then I got to hug her too.

To Helen Dad repeated his favorite stories: the division he worked for was shut down a year or two after he retired, because
no one could do his job as well as he did; they had said he was too young to retire, and they had asked him to stay, but he
had retired anyway; later they asked him to come back, but he refused, because he was enjoying retirement too much.

Later I overheard Dad tell Helen he could see well enough to drive if he wanted to, which wasn’t true.

In the garage I stood looking up at the many empty boxes, trying to pick one that would be about the right size.

Dad gave me Ken’s Mexican leather jewelry box, whose contents included four fortune cookie slips:

“An affectionate message, good tidings will come shortly.”

“You will be asked to a wedding soon.”

“You will overcome obstacles to achieve success.”

“Success in everything.”

Joan Didion once complained that a particular detail regarding a murder made for too obvious an irony, but she noted it anyway.

To my surprise, my brother Ken’s old girlfriend, from before he was gay, e-mailed me. I hadn’t spoken to her since the memorial
service, in 1989.

While Dad and Helen napped, I tried to listen as Mom talked about their HMO, because health care was important, but afterwards
I felt complicit with the accompanying complaints about my father.

A new cosmos: in the rafters of my parents’ garage was an infinite number of cardboard boxes, left over from an infinite number
of Christmases, birthdays, and anniversaries, and within each was an infinite number of boxes, and so on.

Helen and I knelt in Mom’s study wrapping Christmas ornaments in tissue paper for mailing.

At the top of the box we placed the thick envelope that said “FOR CLIFF/RE: KEN.”

We didn’t learn of the air strikes on Afghanistan until my oldest brother, Paul, called from Boston to say hello.

Christine’s e-mail told of how she had fallen out of touch with Ken and hadn’t even known he was sick when she received the
call inviting her to his memorial service.

Every story is simultaneously being written from someone else’s point of view.

After I replied to Christine’s e-mail she was anxious to speak to me, and though I had told her I was in San Jose that week,
she tried to call me in Brooklyn and then e-mailed me that she hadn’t been able to reach me.

“My vision is really bad,” my father lamented.

“Is it like you’re wearing sunglasses all the time?” I asked.

“No, it’s like there’s a cloudy film over my eyes.”

Helen and I selected expensive peaches in the fancy supermarket. I didn’t mention to her that Christine had contacted me,
nor did I tell my parents, because it just seemed too complicated a subject for my last day in San Jose.

Sublime and stately, the huge old magnolia in the calmly dying light.

Mom’s stories: the uncooked broccoli on the cruise ship; the uncooked potato, the rude waiter, and the inedible rice pudding
on a different cruise ship; Mom locked out of the house by Dad; Mom locked out of the house by my sister Carol when she was
two; the riverboat that had to go to Cincinnati because the river was too high to go to St. Paul; the pretentious woman in
the tour group who mistakenly cracked her
soft-boiled egg into her tiny egg cup; the first time Paul saw a “colored person,” whom he called a “dirty man”; Dad spilling
his water in a dark restaurant and not noticing, which made Ken and Mom laugh; Mom and my late aunt laughing at the dinner
table, when they were kids, because they could see the sun shining through their Uncle Al’s huge ears.

At breakfast Helen said she disagreed with the bombing, that it would only make things worse, and with some of the old ferocity
my father said we had to strike back or they’d just do it again.

As I packed, Mom and Dad argued in the kitchen over whether Dad could see well enough to drive me to the airport. Fortunately
Mom won.

Mom patted my shoulder and smiled as I sat down to breakfast.

In the car Dad said, “We will miss you.”

At the airport gate a stewardess walked by and sat with the other stewardesses but said nothing to them, not even hello, and
I thought, “What if you’re a stewardess and the other stewardesses don’t like you?”