The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  I was about to take my usual umbrage with him but then decided he was simply speaking his own language.

  “Yes,” I said, “I suppose John is like my wife.”

  I don’t mean to idealize my father here, who in order to keep peace with my mother had allowed her to gripe about him to her kids all those years.

  Her complaining and his complacency: add love, for there was indeed love between them, and you have my original definition of marriage.

  Later in the week Dad re-expressed his concern that I wasn’t married, as if we had never had that conversation about John-as-wife.

  He may have forgotten it completely, or maybe he remembered later, forgot again, remembered again …

  Sunny View’s deadline to accept the apartment in Assisted Living was approaching.

  My mother’s friends Hap and Mary had each expressed to me their opinion that, for my mother’s sake, my parents had to sell their house and move into the apartment.

  Hap herself already lived at Sunny View, because her husband could no longer walk.

  Dad playing solitaire on his old green blotter, under the bright, bright fluorescent desk lamp.

  I must have been reading some book, but I have no memory of what.

  The fake wood wainscoting, installed because our old dog Sam had clawed the wallpaper.

  Familiar shapes in the rough stucco walls of my old room, such as a pig with a long snout.

  Mary had also tried to persuade me to go to church with her. I declined. She looked crestfallen.

  Though I agreed with my mother about Sunny View, in fairness to my father I set up a meeting at the house with a guy from a homecare company. He was very blow-dried, very sales-y, and he gave us an attractive brochure. The high cost didn’t seem to deter my father.

  I set up a second meeting, at Sunny View, with my mother. “As I’ve said many times, I don’t want homecare,” she said. Out in the hallway, the salesman said, “I don’t recommend homecare for Mrs. Chase.”

  On the phone my sister Carol agreed it was wisest for me to stay out of the argument as much as possible, but I refrained from taking sides in a fog—just as I would have taken sides in a fog.

  11

  ONE AFTERNOON MOM began talking about death. It wasn’t that there were no secrets between us now but there were fewer secrets because I had seen her “this way” every day for more than two weeks—her thin hospital gown, her matted hair, her irritability, and her determination to recover. I don’t recall where Dad was during this particular visit. Possibly home napping. I don’t think I had gone there to talk to Mom about Sunny View without him, since that would have felt conspiratorial and I was trying so hard not to conspire. She told me that back in the hospital in Modesto she had thought she might die, because that’s how it used to be: a broken hip meant the end. But she hadn’t been afraid of dying, she said. And just as she would do in a dream I had after she died, she told me she knew there really was no such thing as death; rather, she would simply go “someplace else.” And I replied, just as I would in the dream, that “basically I believe that too.” The dream version of the conversation concluded there, but the real conversation continued. It was then that she told me, for the first time in my life, that she had nearly died when I was born. “I never knew that,” I murmured. I had known only that the labor was long, and in the end I was born Caesarean. Now she told me that during the operation she had floated up above the table and looked down at the doctors and nurses working on her. “The next thing I remember,” she said, “I was waking up in the recovery room. In a little while the doctor came in. I didn’t mention what had happened, but he said to me, ‘You must live right.’ That’s all he said. So I knew I hadn’t just dreamt it or something. And since then, I haven’t been afraid of dying.” Given all the things she had revealed to me in my life that she shouldn’t have, it seems a miracle of willpower that she had never revealed this until now. Presumably she felt the information might make me feel unwanted, or set apart from the other kids, or extra beholden to her, all of which was indeed how I felt now—like there was a mystical bond between us, and I was responsible for her.

  12

  PART 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 mus
t 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.

  THE CONDITION OF LEFTOVER BAGGAGE

  1

  THE 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 ag
ain, 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.