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

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.

12
    “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 hereturned 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.

13
    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