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

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.

9
    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.

10
    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.

11
    “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, andthen 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