The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  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.

  7

  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.

  8

  BACK AT THE house Dad agreed that Sunny View was probably the best place for Mom to undergo rehab, but he didn’t see why the two of them had to move there permanently: when she was well again, she could simply return to the house.

  My mother had severe osteoporosis, and I’ve never seen anyone more bent over.

  “We have everything we need right here,” my father said, with his old complacency.

  Indeed as usual a cool jasmine-scented breeze was wafting through the dining room window, and the oranges were glowing out on the tree in the backyard.

  Perhaps I said Mom could no longer be expected to take care of the house, or perhaps I didn’t want to upset him.

  Over ice cream he exclaimed what a good job I had done that day.

  I intuited an element of flattery—perhaps to get me on his side regarding the Sunny View question—but his praise also seemed genuine.

  I had often heard him praise my mother in just this way.

  That night at my old desk I jotted down the pros and cons
of each nursing facility, so that I could present them to my mother back in Modesto, the next morning.

  I lay on my old bed as Eno’s accordion-like keyboard glided through Baroque-like chords.

  The morning paper dutifully reported, “Teams in Iraq on Trail of Anthrax and Missiles, Chief Searcher Says.”

  My father and I drove the various roads and freeways.

  When we got there my mother was tired from physical therapy but her color was good.

  I wanted her to feel like she had a choice, and I wanted the same for my father, so I very carefully said, “If you and Dad decide to move to Sunny View, then you’ll already be there.”

  She shrugged and chose Sunny View.

  9

  AT LEAST ONCE a day my father said he wished his vision were better, and he couldn’t have done any of this without me.

  I myself was surprised at how well I handled a situation that was unlike anything I’d encountered before, since I hadn’t been directly involved in Ken’s care.

  I returned the rented SUV and rode the bus back, which took two and a half hours, and began driving my mother’s car; I went to Sunny View to wait for my mother’s ambulance from Modesto but she had already arrived and was asleep; I asked Mrs. Henderson to ask her daughter the doctor for the name of a good orthopedist; I brought Mom’s hospital X-rays from Sunny View to the orthopedist’s office; I went with Dad to shop for a walker for Mom; I gathered the clothes she had requested from her closet as well as a brush for her hair; I called the hotel at Yosemite to see if her right hearing aid had perhaps been found; I located her old right hearing aid in exactly the dresser drawer where she had told me I would find it; I went to buy warm socks for her, because she said her feet had been cold in the hospital.

  Dad and I visited Mom every day, usually once in the morning and once in the afternoon, which I hoped the staff would notice and thus pay closer attention to her.

  Regarding Dad’s reluctance to move out of the house: “He just isn’t being realistic.”

  “Sure, you can hire homecare workers, but then who oversees the homecare workers?”

  “And how would I even get down into the family room, with a walker?”

  Always speaking to me, as if Dad weren’t there.

  “I don’t think you get much for your money at Sunny View,” he replied.

  His argument wasn’t new, but his hearing was excellent.

  From my journal: “I’ve had to encourage them both; their apparent inability to encourage each other has baffled me.”

  Panicky swims at the Y and panicky walks past my old schoolyard, around the track, out the other side, past more tract homes.

  My love and my anger, in a tight, tight ball.

  Confiding with John each night after dinner, the curly phone cord pulled out into the garage, wondering if Dad could still hear me, just like I used to do in high school.

  Talking to Noelle on Mom’s cell phone, sitting on the bleachers of the empty Little League diamond.

  “When two people have been together as long as your parents have,” said Noelle, “they’re like one person. So when you calm one of them down, you calm them both down.”

  She was reassuring me that my efforts weren’t actually split.

  The row of pastel 1960s houses backing up on the dirt and weedy edge of the baseball fields.

  My mother had been a bookkeeper much of her life and often used to tell stories of searching for a missing penny when the various columns didn’t add up.

  Ironically, my father admired her perfectionism. “Mom does everything perfectly,” he liked to say.

  She was annoyed that the nurse’s aides often missed doses of her glaucoma medication, but she wasn’t allowed to administer the drops herself.

  “I keep telling them, I AM DIABETIC, and they keep trying to give me APPLE SAUCE.”

  Most of the nurse’s aides spoke highly accented English, and even my mother’s one good hearing aid didn’t work very well.

  One night the aide made my mother wait for more than an hour in a wet diaper. “You know, you’re not the only patient here,” the aide told her.

  I complained, but a few days later it happened again.

  Journal: “I don’t know if I should be taking better care of her, but I also know she’s rather particular … she gets mad that the nurse’s aide opens the wrong side of the little milk carton.”

  I bought a mindfulness meditation tape and began listening to it twice a day.

  “You will merely make a mental note of whatever enters your awareness, at the moment you become aware of it … If next you thought about your mother, you would say, ‘Now I am thinking about my mother.’”

  The usual daily naps and masturbation.

  I listened to each of her complaints, making sympathetic nods, trying to decide which ones were worth passing along to the RN and which were not.

  Fake violins plucking: “My brain is a chemical factory, capable of producing any necessary chemical to ensure my being a stress-free person.”

  Some of Sunny View’s wheelchairs were more comfortable than others, with various kinds of seats, and only some of them had footrests, which the physical therapist said my mother needed, and just when we had found her a good one, the staff would take all the wheelchairs outside to be washed, and the same one never seemed to come back to her.

  The additional cushions my mother required would also be washed, and she would often end up with an unsuitable one.

  I complained but was told the wheelchair-washing procedure could not be altered.

  Possibly I should have been more forceful with Sunny View about such things.

  My abhorrence of conflict makes me a sympathetic friend and interviewer, but leaves a lot of unsolved problems lying around.

  Such as with John.

  Whenever I’m forced to confront someone, my face heats up immediately and my head floods with an indescribable prickly sensation akin to a fever dream I once had in which my sheets were immense boulders.

  My parents’ longtime doctor was semi-retired and would not visit Mom at Sunny View—nor would the orthopedist, of course—and getting her out of the wheelchair, into the car, out of the car, into the wheelchair, and into the doctor’s office was an ordeal through which she repeatedly winced and groaned in both annoyance and pain.

  Journal: “It’s all so emotional and so logistical at the same time.”

  In Nursing she was surrounded by patients who were completely senile, and sometimes the staff treated her like a child.

  She imitated the saccharine voice of a volunteer: “‘Would you like to come sing a song with us, dear?’” Then she wheeled me in there, and I had to sit while they all sang ‘Yes, Jesus Loves Me.’”

  She had to do various exercises in bed, such as lift herself up with the help of a bar that hung from the ceiling, and one time as she completed this movement she called out to the physical therapist, “Blast off!”

  Quips such as this as well as her determination endeared my mother to this therapist, a young heavy-set woman, possibly a dyke, one of the few at Sunny View who actually seemed to know what she was doing.

  Dad and I came in one day to see Mom walking very slowly in the hallway, with great concentration, her veiny hands tightly gripping the walker as its rubber wheels slowly turned on the pale institutional tile.

  I said, “You’re walking!” and she replied simply, “Yes,” still concentrating very hard on placing each sneaker a few inches ahead at a time.

  I doubted my father would have had the will to come back from such an injury.

  Her death just two and a half years later makes palpable the mystery of that effort: it wasn’t exactly futile, but what exactly was it?

  Tiny and bent over and moving her feet under the awful fluorescent lighting.

  10

  “OPEN UP EVERY cell of your body to light and love.”

  The warm feeling of cooking for my dad, of choosing foods I knew he was accustomed to, such as slice
d ham from the supermarket, reheated in the microwave.

  Difficult to see him objectively, since to consider his faults is to enter into my mother’s system again.

  The familiar loud sluicing of the dishwasher.

  The lumpy ceramic tiles of the entry hall, across which the hard plastic wheels of Mom’s laundry cart used to clack.

  I put drops in Dad’s small blue eyes each night, because he couldn’t manage it himself.

  “You are a remarkably competent person,” he said. “Thanks, Dad,” I replied, half-realizing that up till now he had thought of me as a loser.

  “Why don’t you write a bestseller?” he used to ask me.

  In contrast, my mother had always been proud of my writing, even when I published unflattering accounts of her and my father. She went to see me read from my first book, The Hurry-Up Song, which is no more upbeat about my family than is this memoir; my father, however, stayed home.

  Regarding my longstanding job at the magazine, he said now, “They must like you,” because my boss had told me to take as much time off as I needed to care for my parents.

  We went to buy his cherry Life Savers in bulk.

  My father had always asked lots of questions, which I had found aggressive—“the third degree,” my mother called it—and maybe we were right, but presumably he was also curious.

  “Don’t you get lonely, living by yourself?” he asked now, sounding very concerned. We were on the way back from Smart & Final. I replied that I saw John on weekends and often went out with friends on weeknights.

  While my mother had been forthcoming in her acceptance of my being gay, until now my father had never said anything about it at all.

  Another day, over lunch, I was recalling a camping vacation John and I had taken to Joshua Tree and Death Valley, how we ended the trip on a beach down near San Luis Obispo, pitching our tent in view of the ocean, which we could hear all night.

  Suddenly Dad said, ‘So John is like your wife?”