The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) by Clifford Chase Read Free Book Online

they asked her
     questions as if she were a child.
    I know that jockeying for position is simply human nature, a pack animal thing, but it has always revolted me.
    We kept hearing the phrase “back to normal,” and John said, “What if you didn’t like normal?”
    Down the platform, a low clarinet trilled.
    The editors told me to submit the torture column for an award.
    So I didn’t know what Ken was on his way to before he died: so what?
    Though the fire continued burning, the city seemed to have gotten used to the hole in the ground, and people in the news began
     arguing about how to rebuild, and what sort of memorial there should be.
    I used the coupon Mom gave me to buy my own Swiffer.
    It also occurred to me that Christine’s father’s death, coming so close to Ken’s, must have completely overshadowed the latter
     event, preventing her from examining her feelings about my brother, and this might be why her perceptions of him seemed trapped
     in amber.
    “I
can
be intimate,” I told Noelle, getting back down to business, “I know how to do that, but then I seem to need to withdraw—why
     is that?”
    “One bright thing in my life right now,” wrote my mother, “is a hummingbird that has been coming to drink the nectar from
     the Bouganvilla (spelling?) that has been blooming profusely since I started watering it when I do the watering of the roses.
     This morning, it was there when a squirrel came running along on top of the fence and the bird flew up and hovered around
     as though it were saying, ‘Squirrel, get out of here. I want my snack.’ Then as soon as the squirrel left, down to a blossom
     came the bird. It is so wonderful to watch.”
    Over time Ken’s image in my mind no longer seemed upsettingly changeable, as I gradually grew accustomed to the new information
     gleaned from Christine.
    To a female passerby, a homeless man said, “You love me, I love you. It’s very simple. Very simple indeed.”
    After a good cry my face looked rosy and healthy in the mirror.
    “And now I’d like to watch
Star Trek
in peace,” I muttered.
    In the morning the editor-in-chief was happy to announce that the magazine didn’t have anthrax after all, and soon enough
     the box from San Jose arrived in my office.
    Mom was very worried they wouldn’t get their $4,000 back from the trip insurance. “Dad never wanted to go on that trip in
     the first place.”
    I decided to try BuSpar, for anxiety, but it, too, made the tinnitus worse, so I had to stop.
    Near the end of the dream, after witnessing a male rape, I received my map and instructions from my mother.
    Outline for the previous few months: my usual problems; the suicide hijackings; my parents’ mortality; my brother’s life and
     death; my usual problems.
    What a sight I must have been in the park, a man in a suit and tie stooping to collect fallen yellow leaves.
    Ken was alive to me again for those few weeks following my conversation with Christine, in that he was still able to surprise
     me; just as I knew he would be alive to me again when I decided to read his diary.
    John loved all the ornaments I’d sent from home.
    “This film is a record of a journey,” said
The New Yorker
, “and it leaves us with the dreadful possibility that all highways are lost.”
    I told Noelle, “I want a new fucking map, and new instructions.”
    Outside it was already dark. I walked up Lexington Avenue.

1
    U PPER QUAD WAS a clearing in the redwoods, lower quad a knoll overlooking the ocean; I lived in lower quad, in Dorm 8.
    January 1980, my senior year: a prehistoric time, crucial but shrouded.
    In this foray into the past, I consider previous quests for maps and instructions.
    With some pride I put on my surplus khakis and the white button-down shirt I had discovered in a box at my parents’ house
     over Christmas break—my new look.
    That fall I had cut my hair for the first time since high school, and grown my first beard.
    Between the two quads lay a