The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (11 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
G
ABBY
arrived from Israel, where she was living that year.

In Cairo’s huge labyrinthine marketplace, John went off to explore while Gabby and I sat down in a gaudily tiled tourist café.

There I ordered the meal that would make me sick for the next year and a half.

“I saw your eyes in a portrait in the Coptic museum today,” I said to Gabby. “That’s uncanny,” she replied, “because people
keep commenting about my eyes lately!” At that moment everything seemed uncanny to me, probably due to my Egyptian cold medicine,
Flu-Calm, which despite its name made my heart race. As did the strong tea I was drinking.

Gabby and I spoke of déjà vu, past lives, destiny … The food arrived. I had ordered Egyptian Pancake with Egyptian Hotdog,
which I’d hoped was tourist-speak for a crepe with merguez, but in fact it was a flat doughy thing studded with orange chunks.

Doggedly I ate it.

The analogy might be my doggedly conducting my romantic life as I always had.

Gabby and I realized we had been talking a long time and John hadn’t yet returned. I sipped my tea and began to worry.

Café noise, fluorescent lights, sugary odor of flavored tobacco; outside, the crowded square was strung with bare lightbulbs.

I silently fumed over all the other times John had been late.

But at last he arrived, breathless and exhilarated from having been lost in the innumerable winding passageways of the Khan
al-Khalili. He sat down and told us about it. At first he was simply following his wonder, past the dozens of tourist shops
full of perfume bottles, silver, or inlaid wood, and on into the real market—piles of baby clothes, towels, surplus plumbing
fixtures, tools—until he realized everything was closing and the narrow streets were becoming more and more dark and deserted.
He didn’t know the language and didn’t know where he was. Then he felt a hand firmly grasp his arm. He looked to see a teenage
boy, who silently led him back through the maze to the brightly lit square. “Do you want to meet my friends?” John asked him,
but whether or not the boy understood, he shook his head and disappeared again down the curving alley.

John’s capacity for such adventures was something I’d always loved about him.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night I sat in the stained marble hotel bathroom shitting my brains out.

I say brains because I had entered an altered mental as well as physical state, a whirligig of alarm that had begun spewing
inside my skull all the recent doubt and confusion over John.

“Are you OK?” he called through the door. “No,” I said.

The sagging mattress no longer seemed charming.

We can assume here a visceral memory of shitting my pants as a kid, whether or not I was aware of it.

Morning tea and toast in the dark-paneled hotel dining room; John said, “From now on you have to be more careful about what
you eat.”

My mother’s stories about disagreeing with my father were likely to conclude, “I didn’t say a word.”

Possibly I was ashamed of my inner turmoil, since I mentioned none of it to John.

He and Gabby went to see the Blue Mosque and to find me some Pepto-Bismol.

I shit the tea and toast away.

I lay in my hammock-like bed staring at the cracked ceiling, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” at each new twist of my gut.

Wanting the diarrhea to pass was the same as wanting the doubt and confusion to pass.

As my thoughts escalated into a kind of falsetto, I began to debate whether to break up with John right there in Cairo.

Preemptive abandonment.

Yet I was also running away from my own roiling suppositions and imperatives.

It would have been a lot simpler to see a doctor, but in the mental maze I’d entered, a parasite must have seemed the least
of my problems.

I wondered if there was such a thing as Egyptian saltine crackers.

I felt no better the next day and desperately tried to decide whether I was too sick to travel to Aswan that night, as John
and I had planned. I couldn’t stay in Cairo alone—should I go to back to Israel with Gabby?

Lying there fervently wishing John would proclaim to me, “I’ll come with you to Israel and make sure you get well!”

John said we had already bought our tickets to Aswan and moreover he didn’t know when he would ever get back to Egypt, so
he definitely wanted to go to Aswan.

This wasn’t particularly considerate of him, but I’m concerned here with my own actions.

I thought, “My boyfriend is selfish and won’t take care of me!”

It might have been interesting to conduct this conversation out loud, but even on a good day, I couldn’t have conceived of
a happy result.

I’ve since learned that John responds well to direct requests, but I had little inkling of this then.

On the other hand I was also sure I would be better soon, as I always had been whenever I had caught a stomach bug up until
now.

In the end I agreed to go with John up the Nile, but even at the train station I considered turning back.

I climbed onto the top bunk of our compartment and began to shiver uncontrollably—a fresh symptom.

The carriage shuddered and began to roll.

John asked the steward for an extra blanket, but its warmth had no effect.

The guidebook warned of fundamentalist rebels shooting at these trains; I imagined the black window strafed by bullets.

Click-clack, click-clack.

Weak and sweating through my clothes, almost beyond thought now—except for the conviction that getting on this train with
John had been the biggest mistake of my life.

J
OHN SAID
, “L
OOK
,” and I sat up to behold in the window of our compartment the hazy gardens of the Nile, plots of the purest green and rows
of spindly trees, filing slowly past in the ancient early morning light. “Wow,” I said. My fever had
broken. In the next field a slender figure in a white turban and pale blue robe, his back to us, glided calmly between the
calmly glowing furrows. Now and then we caught a glimpse of the river and the sandy banks on the other side. It was as if
the train had traveled backward in time while I slept, and even now was crawling still further into previous eras, slowed
by the effort. The landscape before us had nothing to do with the train or anything else invented in the past five thousand
years. John and I were invisible, gazing out like spirits on an untouched world.

T
HE HOTEL IN
A
SWAN
was a rundown sixties high-rise of chipped pink stucco, with cracked balconies overlooking debris-strewn lots.

We were on the far edge of town on the far edge of Egypt.

It was hard to find anything I could eat.

Locating a decent doctor here seemed even more out of the question than in Cairo.

We had prepaid for the room, and it felt too extravagant to move to a better hotel where, say, toast and tea might be served.

John went out to explore the city, returning at lunchtime to tell of dark-skinned men offering him “Nubian banana” on the
corniche
.

“It’s definitely more like Africa here,” John said, entranced.

Indeed he had been entranced ever since we stepped off the plane, as if Egypt were his ideal hallucinogen.

I spent the afternoon alone in the hot room—sleeping, sweating, writing in my journal, going to the balcony now and then.

Distant palm trees, the sliver of a sailboat on the shimmering water—the very felucca John was on?

“Like a wheel of fortune,” sang my Walkman, “I heard my fate turn, turn, turn.”

Memory of overhearing my mother say to my father, “Why can’t you do something nice for me, like taking me out to dinner, without
my having to ask you?” I was six or seven. The fact that I remember the exchange is evidence of how rarely she stuck up for
herself like that.

Here the desert went right up to the Nile’s banks.

Memory of her blood in the toilet bowl.

“I want to run away,” I wrote, “not only from here but from all of my life.”

Memory of helping G. pick out a new bed and, after we had brought it to his apartment, his declaring it was presumptuous for
me to assume we’d spend the night together. “I feel invaded,” he said.

“A warm knife in my belly,” I wrote, “another in my head.”

Tourists were advised to take a taxi convoy to the temple of Edfu, because a single car was subject to rebel attack, but in
any case I doubted I would be well enough to go.

I stared longingly at the guidebook’s photo of Edfu.

I began debating again whether to break up with John.

I was hoping for some kind of self-help rule, a clear line marking when you should or shouldn’t leave someone.

Living under full sway of my illusions will forever be one sense of the word “Egypt” for me.

Perhaps America could say the same thing of “Islam.”

“I seem destined to see little more than this crappy hotel room.”

If, say, during lunch I had stopped to observe even for one moment John’s wide face and green brown eyes, I might have brought
myself to my senses, at least a little.

For a minute I thought maybe I was feeling a little better.

It was very hot and I could muster walking for less than fifteen minutes before stopping to rest on a bench overlooking the
Nile.

I had never seen a sunset like this: lacy rags in clumps, connected by ropes of cumulus, sometimes the ropes crossing at right
angles, all of this in a single plane high above the Nile, above sand hills, like an orchestra of ragged clouds, rows of gray,
dark gold, bright gold, all arranged around the conductor of the sun—

A man in a long blue kaftan stood in front of me—“Smoke, smoke. I take care of you.”

I moved to another bench.

I’m not usually one to see pictures in the sky.

Four cassocks seemed to be dancing wildly off to one side, their hands linked, and soon they were spun apart by their own
dancing.

As it turned out, I was much better the following day, in both mind and body, and in Luxor John and I went out to see the
gigantic pillars of Karnak; a cramped tomb painted above with grape vines; the vast temple of Queen Hatshepsut cut into the
hillside, where fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians would be knifed or gunned down by rebels only a month later …

John and I did go back into couples therapy, but not until five years later.

For now, I continued sitting by the Nile, gazing into the sunset, re-asking myself all the riddles of the day.

And then there it was, a parting in the clouds in the shape of a question mark, blurry but unmistakable, with even a small
blue chink below for the dot.

I stared at it in thwarted wonder, until new shapes appeared—a plus, a circle.

I stumbled back to the hotel to wait for my boyfriend.

A
LONG THE DRY
pinkish hills I drove west on the Interstate toward the white brown hazy flatness below, where my eighty-eight-year-old mother
lay in a hospital bed.

She had broken her hip just outside my parents’ hotel room in Yosemite and had been taken by ambulance first to the closest
hospital and then to a larger hospital in Modesto for surgery.

My siblings were all on their way to Santiago, for my nephew’s wedding.

I’m not describing a dream: the wedding really was in Santiago.

My mother’s illness had jolted me out of my usual joys and problems, just as it now jolts this narrative out of the past.

I wasn’t speeding but had with all good speed bought a one way airline ticket, booked the car reservation, mapped my route
from the airport, woken early, climbed into the radio cab to JFK, boarded the plane, exited the plane, rented the SUV, and
gotten on the road, all in less than twenty-four
hours, hoping that each step would bring me closer to everything turning out okay.

Until now (October 2003) my parents had never been seriously ill.

Though I could see nothing of the vast smoggy valley below, I liked sitting up so high in the SUV.

If there was news of Iraq on the radio, I wasn’t listening.

My parents hadn’t told us about the accident until after my mother’s surgery, two days later.

“Hang on for Mom,” said Dad, and her weak, clogged voice came on the line.

Notes on the back of my journal:

surgery “successful”—plates and screws—yesterday—started physical therapy today—stay in a facility in San Jose 3 weeks—“skilled
nursing facility”

To Do List: Save Mom.

Down in the Central Valley I merged onto an older highway and after twenty minutes or so looped around onto one of those glary
California boulevards of dingy stucco apartment complexes, telephone wires, huge fast food signs, and empty treeless sidewalks.

The haziness of San Jose was nothing compared to the haziness of Modesto.

The Vagabond Motel, where my father was staying, consisted of several two-story wooden structures lined with identical blue
doors and floor-length aluminum windows.

Outside the lobby I ran into the Hendersons, the couple from my parents’ church who that morning had generously driven up
from San Jose, but almost before I could thank them Mrs. Henderson exclaimed, “When we got here we found David [my father]
just
wandering
around the motel—he couldn’t find his
room
, and we had to
take
him there.”

I stammered, as if in my father’s defense, “He’s probably very upset.”

To say that I myself was upset just then would place too neat a label on an amorphous array of emotions regarding an already
scary state of affairs whose complexities had now apparently multiplied to include the total failure of my father’s memory.

Mrs. Henderson reiterated that my father didn’t know where he was and that I would need to watch him carefully—meaning, I
assumed, that I had fallen down on the job so far.

Indeed, my siblings and I had been ignoring his increasing senility for years.

I might have expected the Hendersons to accompany me to the hospital or at least to my father’s motel room, but they made
it clear they weren’t staying a moment longer in Modesto, now that I—the Family Member—had arrived.

Possibly I’m being unfair. I’ve found that life and death situations heighten my sense of both gratitude and indignation.

I asked the desk clerk for a room next to my father’s.

Outside the lobby, three separate palms in a bed of lava rocks.