The Tooth Fairy Read online

  In the Caravaggio that made me understand Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas places his finger in the wound in Christ’s side, and that wound is like a tear in the painting itself.

  John laughed as I sang for him my new favorite song:

  Papa was a rodeo

  Mama was a rock ’n’ roll band

  I could play guitar and rope a steer

  Before I learned to stand

  Home was anywhere with diesel gas

  Love was a trucker’s hand …

  Because the church’s ceiling was being replastered, Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses had been covered in bubble wrap.

  The pervasive, calming, cheerful sun.

  We realized the delicious sandwiches we had just bought were only a dollar fifty.

  “If a child will try to adjust to anything, including and especially parental failings,” I wrote, “then I, too, played guitar and roped a steer before I learned to stand.”

  “… bla bla bla Catherine Zeta-Jones bla bla bla,” said the Italian television announcer.

  The oranges we bought each day were large, sweet and just slightly bloody inside.

  Bernini’s elephant in sunshine.

  At the gay-owned shop I bought John a cunning little pepper grinder for his birthday.

  Our two bunches of ranunculuses lasted the whole nine days.

  On the way to the airport the trees streamed past the train window as if they were being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

  To sit on the aisle, I accepted a seat way in the back, but then the people next to me kept wanting to get up.

  I found the in-flight movie almost unbearable because of the many humiliations suffered by the main character.

  Journal: “The sky really does look different everywhere you go.”

  3

  IN FIFTH GRADE I wrote an essay that concluded, “As Plato said, power corrupts.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I can last in corporate America,” I muttered, but then I’d been saying that for years.

  I read that singer-songwriter Nick Drake killed himself with an overdose of amitriptyline; remembered that was the scientific name for what I’d been taking for arthritis pain; realized I had options.

  On the record albums of my youth, the various aesthetic choices seemed so inevitable that they hardly appeared to be choices at all, such as when the applause following “The Needle and the Damage Done” is suddenly cut short.

  I hoped that with the help of my blue pills I would either cease hating my public-relations job or be able to find a new one.

  On the weather map the clouds were in a slow spin across the continent.

  “The Long and Winding Road” had made me cry when I was twelve, and ever since then I had loved sad songs.

  Without understanding why, that winter I had spiraled down into punishing sadness and terror, which manifested themselves most mercilessly on weekday evenings.

  “Most jobs are nothing more than service with a smile, and then the day is over,” I wrote.

  People have often told me, “You’re the only one I’m not mad at.”

  I wrote, “I can only deal with crying every other therapy session.”

  As I sank further, I became overwhelmed by even the smallest thing, a state which reminded me of my mother on a bad day.

  I felt guilty when I snapped at customer service representatives, but I did it anyway.

  I posited a magazine called Naked GQ, which would be exactly the same as GQ, only the models would all be naked.

  Thought: The only problem with my blue pills, as with vacations, is that the same conundrums of work and love remain.

  I frequently imagined screaming arguments with my boss and with others in management.

  I was reading a book by a hunchback dwarf who died in 1942.

  At the party celebrating his twentieth anniversary with the large magazine where I worked, the editor-in-chief said, “I tell my kids that if you can find a line of work that you love, then you’re truly blessed,” and I wrote it down to put in the company newsletter.

  Ashamed of my life, including the shame itself.

  “And yet I can also see glimmerings of some sort of perspective,” I told Noelle.

  After I wired John money in Tunisia, because his bankcard didn’t work, I thought, “This is the kind of crisis I’m good at.”

  I was able to see the possible literary merit, if not the actual merit, of my predicament in life.

  Journal: “I’ve always loved best works of art that are both absurd and moving.”

  A coworker told me a top executive had complained to her that there weren’t enough blueberries in his muffin.

  Riding the subway home from work I longed to hear Joni sing of being a poor wayfaring stranger.

  At least it was spring.

  The magazine’s writers had recently published books on: baldness; civil rights; cryptography; early American music; an incident of arson in Vail, Colorado; current social and political issues (from a neocon perspective); and how to live “a happy life.”

  “Major quitting fantasies,” I wrote.

  The pale, spring-like green of my new jacket pleased me, and I was happy again.

  “Sometimes a worm will sew a stitch in a young leaf, and even though the leaf may partly unfold, and partly grow and live, it will always be a crumpled and imperfect leaf …,” writes Katharine Butler Hathaway. “Because the worm had sewed a stitch in me and made me forever crumpled, I belonged to the fantastic company of the queer, the maimed, the unfit.”

  I learned on the Today Show that actress Valerie Harper’s new book was called Today I Am a Ma’am, and it was about growing older.

  My feet were okay, but my right knee had been bothering me again, who knows why.

  I preferred having an easy job that I could do perfectly, rather than a hard job that I couldn’t, because I hated making mistakes.

  The geometric pattern in my tin ceiling suddenly looked like gritted teeth.

  “It’s more suave to have no regrets,” I wrote, “but I do have them.”

  It occurred to me that more boys should take off their shirts in the park.

  I had to squeeze through a crowd to reach Psychology, because Valerie Harper was doing a book signing.

  See The Emotional Brain, by Joseph LeDoux, page 12.

  At the top of the subway steps, the blossoming trees were palest green against a pale, green-gray sky.

  “I let my socks not matching go too far,” said John as he cleaned his apartment, “and now I can’t make heads or tails of them.”

  Ringing in my ears, probably from the Wellbutrin.

  My friend David sent me a linocut he made of the Loch Ness Monster.

  I began reading a book on the history of Latin America, in vignettes.

  My arthritis doctor said, “If you think rheumatology is hit or miss, psychopharmacology is like when I was a little girl and I’d shut my eyes and point to which stuffed animal I wanted to sleep with that night.”

  In the dream I was listening to a Fifth Dimension sort of song that went:

  Shagga dagga diddly—

  Shagga dagga diddly—

  Doo!

  I dreamed Martha Stewart guest-starred on Love Boat.

  The plot was simple: Martha turned out not to be so uptight after all.

  At the end of the show, Martha jumped in the pool with all her clothes on.

  Down my street the horizon was bright yellow, and the blanket of clouds was soft, yellow and mauve, like a golden cloth with a purple sheen, and soon the pink part began.

  It took all morning, but I didn’t have to pay a fine for trespassing.

  On the phone my friend Erin said, “I just got a bill from AT&T for forty-six cents, and they’re not even my long distance carrier.”

  “He walks slowly, listening alertly because lost souls weep or sometimes whistle like the breeze,” writes Eduardo Galeano. “When he finds the missing soul, the wizard-priest lifts it with the tip of a fe
ather, wraps it in a tiny ball of cotton, and carries it in a little hollow reed back to its owner, who will not die.”

  I dreamed I was cutting up the American flag into confetti, and even now I can feel the cool scissors in my hand, the sensation of the thick cloth giving way, and the pleasure of it.

  Journal: “Weird how rough a winter I had.”

  Journal: “When I lost a baby tooth, Mom had me drop it into a glass of water. I watched the hard little white thing float down to the bottom, and then we placed the glass on the shelf beside my bed. In the morning my tooth was gone, and a dime was in its place. It wasn’t exactly a miracle but it was straightforward and predictable, and it helped mark my progress forward on the earth. This memory, though brief, gives me a warm, happy feeling.”

  I dreamed I was eating ferns.

  HUMMINGBIRD

  1

  THE CRYING CHILD raised her two hands to her mother, asking to be lifted from the stroller, and to my surprise the mother in her wine-red sari did unbuckle her daughter and hoisted her up into her arms, the child’s dress wine-red too, and when the mother turned away from me I could see the child’s little face against her shoulder, utterly calmed and relieved.

  On the lawns of Central Park the old trees presided over huge patches of deep shade.

  In the gray street an old speckled gray dog, so fat as to be nearly spherical, had just produced four nearly spherical gray turds.

  The difficulty of being honest or objective about your own life for more than a second.

  The neurologist, Dr. Neophytides, shocked me with electrodes and stuck me with pins. Lying on my stomach I said, “It’s too bad you can’t do acupuncture at the same time.” “Ha-ha!” he barked, ready to stick me again. “I give you as many as you want!”

  Wellbutrin made my ears ring, so I switched to an older drug called nortriptyline, and the ringing seemed to grow slightly more faint but didn’t entirely cease.

  At the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Vanderbilt, a pleasant, ocean-y smell.

  It was July 2001 and I was reading D. H. Lawrence.

  I had no neuropathy and only mild carpal tunnel syndrome, and Dr. Neophytides added with smiling, Old World confidence that the Neurontin he prescribed would certainly help my arthritis pain.

  I climbed on top of John and he came, but then I couldn’t come, which left me guilty and confused.

  Back in California, my mother fell and cracked two ribs.

  Obscuring the sunset was a huge blobby gray cloud, framed by dull-orange below and brilliant white-gold above, as if the cloud itself were the source of light.

  I told John I had fantasized about the hot Hispanic guy we’d seen in the video store, and John said, “Olé!”

  I asked if he, too, ever thought about someone else. “Sometimes,” he said, diplomatically.

  The large white poodle that refused to be pulled forward looked like Carol Channing.

  On the E train, the sight of perfection in a tight T-shirt also left me guilty and confused.

  The Neurontin worked every bit as well as Dr. N. said it would, and the first day I took it I also got in one of those moods where suddenly anything seems possible, so as I bicycled along the East River in Queens, I observed how the late afternoon sun poured straight down each avenue at this particular time of year, and I made plans to live and work in France.

  I lost my temper and swore at the manager of the discount clothing store.

  That spring I had received a small writing grant that enabled me to pay off all my debts, but now I was more than ready for something else nice to happen.

  Nortriptyline was the last antidepressant invented before Prozac, and I like to think it could have been a hit if Prozac hadn’t overshadowed it.

  My job at the magazine is best described as putting on a tiger suit and jumping up and down in front of the bleachers all day.

  Journal: “Lawrence’s urge to coin hyphenated words, e.g. ‘woman-presence,’ is noble-misguided.”

  The rain poured from the dirty-chartreuse sky.

  At the memorial gathering the editor-in-chief spoke fondly of the late chairman’s ability to secure preferential treatment for top employees, such as “that hospital room that wasn’t available” or help from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in obtaining citizenship.

  It wasn’t that I expected life to be fair, or rich people not to call in favors, but I was a little surprised that, far from questioning power, journalists would so brazenly seek to benefit from it.

  Blanching, hazy light down Sixth Avenue, dark, edgeless clouds above, and flickers of lightning at the end of 34th Street, over the river.

  I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid there might be a mistake in my newsletter tribute to the late chairman.

  The way the mind alights on one thing, and then another.

  I let my hair grow and took to flipping it out of my eyes the way I had when I was, say, thirteen.

  I was trying to cut down how often I went on the Internet to peer at photos of naked, muscular men.

  The huge trees in full leaf began to look tired of their own magnificence, and it was August.

  Since starting on antidepressants, I found that my various problems no longer seemed overwhelming but neither had they yielded solutions.

  In the store full of nineteen-year-olds my friend Robert said, “I have a new saying: ‘Babyhood is lost on the babies.’”

  Later, as it continued raining, the sky was gray-orange with metal-green lightning cracks.

  My problems continued to be whether and how John and I would ever live together, and whether and how I could find a better way to support myself.

  I looked up Nortriptyline on the Internet to see if it, too, might be making my ears ring, though the more likely culprits were my various arthritis medicines, which I couldn’t give up.

  I lay there listening to Joni Mitchell and imagining I had been unjustly fired.

  My friend Erin and I recalled the indignities of high school, and I said, “People are always talking about the problem of runaway teens. But the real question is, why aren’t there more?”

  2

  “COME ON, COME on, hurry up!” I muttered to my penis, as it tried to pee.

  How much of each day feels like blind thrashing.

  A slot had opened up at the retirement home, so my parents were planning to move November 1, and I would have to go out to California in October to help them.

  Of the four remaining siblings, I had the most flexible schedule, due to the magazine’s generous vacation policy.

  “I was so engrossed in MY stuff I didn’t ask you where you went for the weekend and if you had a good time!! So tell me. Love, Mom.”

  I almost never dream about sex, and when I do it’s almost always illicit sex.

  I lay my head against his forbidden, muscled, Islamic belly, then kissed it, my boldness surprising me, because kissing it was even more forbidden.

  My parents couldn’t sleep because they were so worried about moving.

  Despite the Nortriptyline I continued to tumble into very black moods from time to time, or more accurately, gray humors, vomit-green tantrums, and shit-brown funks, which left me hopeless, annoyed, and ashamed, respectively.

  I joked to myself that if someone at work asked, “How are you?” I’d answer, “My daughter died.”

  John and I rolled over and went to sleep, but the next morning sex clicked in a way it hadn’t in a while, and then we went bicycling.

  Way out in the Rockaways, ugly red-brick housing projects, the A train a series of concrete archways like an aqueduct, and huge empty lots, whole tracts of land that you never see in New York anymore, then the old wooden boardwalk and the sea in little verdigris waves calmly rippling in.

  Jean Rhys: “Yes, that night was the last frenzied effort of my guardian angel, poor creature.”

  3

  A SHRIEK FROM my coworker who had a TV in her office.

  And to think that only two days before, J
ohn and I had remarked how we could see the World Trade Center from the Rockaways. Van Gogh: “We live in such a disturbed time that there can be no way of having opinions fixed enough to form any judgment of things … I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky … When you have looked at these two studies for some time, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and Bermard and I sometimes used to talk about.”

  Again and again, from various angles, the plane slicing into the tower.

  With unusual kindness people moved aside to let me off the crowded subway car.

  Noelle also saw clients in an office down near Wall Street, so I was terrified something might have happened to her, but fortunately she was fine.

  The woman in the office next to mine shut her door because her cousin, a fireman, had been killed.

  A mass e-mail from a new person in Marketing, asking for help in locating her brother.

  Erin’s three-week-old nephew suffocated in his crib in Maryland.

  Each day Erin had to clean up the thin layer of ash that blew from Lower Manhattan into her windows in Brooklyn Heights.

  “And now,” said the cassette Noelle had given me, “begin relaxing, or maintain and enhance your relaxation, by focusing on breathing deeply, and slowly.”

  Erin asked me to read what she’d written to say at her nephew’s funeral. In it, she affirmed the evolution of the soul.

  Later, as we turned to leave the bar, I saw sitting next to me a middle-aged man with his eyes closed, perhaps in fatigue or meditation, which anyone right now was entitled to, I thought, but then I recognized him as an editor from the magazine where I worked, evidently pretending not to see me.

  My parents decided not to move November 1 but to take the next opening at the retirement home, which could be several months away.

  “Dad refuses to throw anything out.”

  I looked down and noticed someone had dropped a paper clip in the urinal.

  John and I got into an argument over whether or not the suicide hijackers were “evil.”