The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) Read Online Free PDF Page A

she has a very nice figure,” said Dad. “But she gets very upset if things don’t go the way she thinks they should
     at church.”
    “Is it Hattie, or Pattie?” I asked.
    “Hattie,” said Dad. He came over to dry the dishes. “And her husband’s name was Bee, B-E-E. Hattie Bee.”
    “Hattie Bee,” I repeated.
    I went through the Christmas things, saving the best ornaments and the giant old lights to mail to myself, because I knew
     John would love them.
    The Christmas box was so old that its promotional message read, “Special Price: 7¢ off.”

7
    D AD SPILLED WATER on the counter and Mom whispered, “This is what I have to deal with all the time.”
    The last time I’d seen Noelle, which was before the attacks, she had explained the Oedipal Complex in a way that felt new
     and revelatory.
    I couldn’t remember now what she had said, only that it was indeed complex.
    In the local newspaper Anna Deavere Smith wrote that the fires of the World Trade Center smelled “like a dragon, yawning”—as
     if the event needed embellishment.
    Sometimes Mom said “Excuse me” after complaining about my father, because she knew I didn’t like it.
    My father kept a dozen suits in his study closet, going back to 1980, he said, and on each lapel was pinned a small slip of
     paper with the waist size (38½, now too small), which he asked me to read for him.
    “I don’t like to give anything away,” he said, sliding the closet door closed again.
    As I dragged the old eight-track stereo from under his workbench, he said, “This is going too fast for me,” something he had
     said before, but this time I understood the obvious, that he wasn’t ready to move.
    “I
ask
him and
ask
him to throw things away!” Mom whispered in the kitchen.
    “I don’t think you get much for your money in a retirement home,” said Dad in the side yard.
    “He just doesn’t
concentrate
,” said Mom in her study.
    I walked the deserted, heat-drenched streets trying to calm myself down.
    Above my old schoolyard, the dry, pink mountains of yore.
    At dinner Mom said, “When you were nine or ten you came home from Roger’s—his parents were divorced—and you said, ‘You and
     Dad aren’t getting a divorce, are you?’”

8
    “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