The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (13 page)

B
ACK AT THE
house Dad agreed that Sunny View was probably the best place for Mom to undergo rehab, but he didn’t see why the two of them
had to move there permanently: when she was well again, she could simply return to the house.

My mother had severe osteoporosis, and I’ve never seen anyone more bent over.

“We have everything we need right here,” my father said, with his old complacency.

Indeed as usual a cool jasmine-scented breeze was wafting through the dining room window, and the oranges were glowing out
on the tree in the backyard.

Perhaps I said Mom could no longer be expected to take care of the house, or perhaps I didn’t want to upset him.

Over ice cream he exclaimed what a good job I had done that day.

I intuited an element of flattery—perhaps to get me on his side regarding the Sunny View question—but his praise also seemed
genuine.

I had often heard him praise my mother in just this way.

That night at my old desk I jotted down the pros and cons of each nursing facility, so that I could present them to my mother
back in Modesto, the next morning.

I lay on my old bed as Eno’s accordion-like keyboard glided through Baroque-like chords.

The morning paper dutifully reported, “Teams in Iraq on Trail of Anthrax and Missiles, Chief Searcher Says.”

My father and I drove the various roads and freeways.

When we got there my mother was tired from physical therapy but her color was good.

I wanted her to feel like she had a choice, and I wanted the same for my father, so I very carefully said, “
If
you and Dad decide to move to Sunny View, then you’ll already be there.”

She shrugged and chose Sunny View.

A
T LEAST ONCE
a day my father said he wished his vision were better, and he couldn’t have done any of this without me.

I myself was surprised at how well I handled a situation that was unlike anything I’d encountered before, since I hadn’t been
directly involved in Ken’s care.

I returned the rented SUV and rode the bus back, which took two and a half hours, and began driving my mother’s car; I went
to Sunny View to wait for my mother’s ambulance from Modesto but she had already arrived and was asleep; I asked Mrs. Henderson
to ask her daughter the doctor for the name of a good orthopedist; I brought Mom’s hospital X-rays from Sunny View to the
orthopedist’s office; I went with Dad to shop for a walker for Mom; I gathered the clothes she had requested from her closet
as well as a brush for her hair; I called the hotel at Yosemite to see if her right hearing aid had perhaps been found; I
located her old right hearing aid in exactly the dresser drawer where she had told me I would find it; I went to buy warm
socks for her, because she said her feet had been cold in the hospital.

Dad and I visited Mom every day, usually once in the morning
and once in the afternoon, which I hoped the staff would notice and thus pay closer attention to her.

Regarding Dad’s reluctance to move out of the house: “He just isn’t being realistic.”

“Sure, you can hire homecare workers, but then who oversees the homecare workers?”

“And how would I even get down into the family room, with a walker?”

Always speaking to me, as if Dad weren’t there.

“I don’t think you get much for your money at Sunny View,” he replied.

His argument wasn’t new, but his hearing was excellent.

From my journal: “I’ve had to encourage them both; their apparent inability to encourage each other has baffled me.”

Panicky swims at the Y and panicky walks past my old schoolyard, around the track, out the other side, past more tract homes.

My love and my anger, in a tight, tight ball.

Confiding with John each night after dinner, the curly phone cord pulled out into the garage, wondering if Dad could still
hear me, just like I used to do in high school.

Talking to Noelle on Mom’s cell phone, sitting on the bleachers of the empty Little League diamond.

“When two people have been together as long as your parents have,” said Noelle, “they’re like one person. So when you calm
one of them down, you calm them both down.”

She was reassuring me that my efforts weren’t actually split.

The row of pastel 1960s houses backing up on the dirt and weedy edge of the baseball fields.

My mother had been a bookkeeper much of her life and often used to tell stories of searching for a missing penny when the
various columns didn’t add up.

Ironically, my father admired her perfectionism. “Mom does everything perfectly,” he liked to say.

She was annoyed that the nurse’s aides often missed doses of her glaucoma medication, but she wasn’t allowed to administer
the drops herself.

“I keep telling them, I AM DIABETIC, and they keep trying to give me APPLE SAUCE.”

Most of the nurse’s aides spoke highly accented English, and even my mother’s one good hearing aid didn’t work very well.

One night the aide made my mother wait for more than an hour in a wet diaper. “You know, you’re not the only patient here,”
the aide told her.

I complained, but a few days later it happened again.

Journal: “I don’t know if I should be taking better care of her,
but I also know she’s rather particular … she gets mad that the nurse’s aide opens the wrong side of the little milk carton.”

I bought a mindfulness meditation tape and began listening to it twice a day.

“You will merely make a mental note of whatever enters your awareness, at the moment you become aware of it … If next you
thought about your mother, you would say, ‘Now I am thinking about my mother.’”

The usual daily naps and masturbation.

I listened to each of her complaints, making sympathetic nods, trying to decide which ones were worth passing along to the
RN and which were not.

Fake violins plucking: “My brain is a chemical factory, capable of producing any necessary chemical to ensure my being a stress-free
person.”

Some of Sunny View’s wheelchairs were more comfortable than others, with various kinds of seats, and only some of them had
footrests, which the physical therapist said my mother needed, and just when we had found her a good one, the staff would
take all the wheelchairs outside to be washed, and the same one never seemed to come back to her.

The additional cushions my mother required would also be washed, and she would often end up with an unsuitable one.

I complained but was told the wheelchair-washing procedure could not be altered.

Possibly I should have been more forceful with Sunny View about such things.

My abhorrence of conflict makes me a sympathetic friend and interviewer, but leaves a lot of unsolved problems lying around.

Such as with John.

Whenever I’m forced to confront someone, my face heats up immediately and my head floods with an indescribable prickly sensation
akin to a fever dream I once had in which my sheets were immense boulders.

My parents’ longtime doctor was semi-retired and would not visit Mom at Sunny View—nor would the orthopedist, of course—and
getting her out of the wheelchair, into the car, out of the car, into the wheelchair, and into the doctor’s office was an
ordeal through which she repeatedly winced and groaned in both annoyance and pain.

Journal: “It’s all so emotional and so
logistical
at the same time.”

In Nursing she was surrounded by patients who were completely senile, and sometimes the staff treated her like a child.

She imitated the saccharine voice of a volunteer: “‘Would you like to come sing a song with us, dear?’” Then she wheeled me
in
there
, and I had to
sit
while they all sang ‘Yes, Jesus Loves Me.’”

She had to do various exercises in bed, such as lift herself up with the help of a bar that hung from the ceiling, and one
time as she completed this movement she called out to the physical therapist, “Blast off!”

Quips such as this as well as her determination endeared my mother to this therapist, a young heavy-set woman, possibly a
dyke, one of the few at Sunny View who actually seemed to know what she was doing.

Dad and I came in one day to see Mom walking very slowly in the hallway, with great concentration, her veiny hands tightly
gripping the walker as its rubber wheels slowly turned on the pale institutional tile.

I said, “You’re walking!” and she replied simply, “Yes,” still concentrating very hard on placing each sneaker a few inches
ahead at a time.

I doubted my father would have had the will to come back from such an injury.

Her death just two and a half years later makes palpable the mystery of that effort: it wasn’t exactly futile, but what exactly
was it?

Tiny and bent over and moving her feet under the awful fluorescent lighting.

“O
PEN UP EVERY
cell of your body to light and love.”

The warm feeling of cooking for my dad, of choosing foods I knew he was accustomed to, such as sliced ham from the supermarket,
reheated in the microwave.

Difficult to see him objectively, since to consider his faults is to enter into my mother’s system again.

The familiar loud sluicing of the dishwasher.

The lumpy ceramic tiles of the entry hall, across which the hard plastic wheels of Mom’s laundry cart used to clack.

I put drops in Dad’s small blue eyes each night, because he couldn’t manage it himself.

“You are a remarkably competent person,” he said. “Thanks, Dad,” I replied, half-realizing that up till now he had thought
of me as a loser.

“Why don’t you write a bestseller?” he used to ask me.

In contrast, my mother had always been proud of my writing, even when I published unflattering accounts of her and my father.
She went to see me read from my first book,
The Hurry-Up Song
, which is no more upbeat about my family than is this memoir; my father, however, stayed home.

Regarding my longstanding job at the magazine, he said now, “They must like you,” because my boss had told me to take as much
time off as I needed to care for my parents.

We went to buy his cherry Life Savers in bulk.

My father had always asked lots of questions, which I had found aggressive—“the third degree,” my mother called it—and maybe
we were right, but presumably he was also curious.

“Don’t you get lonely, living by yourself?” he asked now, sounding very concerned. We were on the way back from Smart & Final.
I replied that I saw John on weekends and often went out with friends on weeknights.

While my mother had been forthcoming in her acceptance of my being gay, until now my father had never said anything about
it at all.

Another day, over lunch, I was recalling a camping vacation John and I had taken to Joshua Tree and Death Valley, how we ended
the trip on a beach down near San Luis Obispo, pitching our tent in view of the ocean, which we could hear all night.

Suddenly Dad said, ‘So John is like your wife?”

I was about to take my usual umbrage with him but then decided he was simply speaking his own language.

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose John
is
like my wife.”

I don’t mean to idealize my father here, who in order to keep peace with my mother had allowed her to gripe about him to her
kids all those years.

Her complaining and his complacency: add love, for there was indeed love between them, and you have my original definition
of marriage.

Later in the week Dad re-expressed his concern that I wasn’t married, as if we had never had that conversation about John-as-wife.

He may have forgotten it completely, or maybe he remembered later, forgot again, remembered again …

Sunny View’s deadline to accept the apartment in Assisted Living was approaching.

My mother’s friends Hap and Mary had each expressed to me their opinion that, for my mother’s sake, my parents had to sell
their house and move into the apartment.

Hap herself already lived at Sunny View, because her husband could no longer walk.

Dad playing solitaire on his old green blotter, under the bright, bright fluorescent desk lamp.

I must have been reading some book, but I have no memory of what.

The fake wood wainscoting, installed because our old dog Sam had clawed the wallpaper.

Familiar shapes in the rough stucco walls of my old room, such as a pig with a long snout.

Mary had also tried to persuade me to go to church with her. I declined. She looked crestfallen.

Though I agreed with my mother about Sunny View, in fairness to my father I set up a meeting at the house with a guy from
a homecare company. He was very blow-dried, very sales-y, and he gave us an attractive brochure. The high cost didn’t seem
to deter my father.

I set up a second meeting, at Sunny View, with my mother. “As I’ve said
many times
, I don’t
want
homecare,” she said.
Out in the hallway, the salesman said, “I don’t recommend homecare for Mrs. Chase.”

On the phone my sister Carol agreed it was wisest for me to stay out of the argument as much as possible, but I refrained
from taking sides in a fog—just as I would have
taken
sides in a fog.

O
NE AFTERNOON
M
OM
began talking about death. It wasn’t that there were no secrets between us now but there were fewer secrets because I had
seen her “this way” every day for more than two weeks—her thin hospital gown, her matted hair, her irritability, and her determination
to recover. I don’t recall where Dad was during this particular visit. Possibly home napping. I don’t think I had gone there
to talk to Mom about Sunny View without him, since that would have felt conspiratorial and I was trying so hard not to conspire.
She told me that back in the hospital in Modesto she had thought she might die, because that’s how it used to be: a broken
hip meant the end. But she hadn’t been afraid of dying, she said. And just as she would do in a dream I had after she died,
she told me she knew there really was no such thing as death; rather, she would simply go “someplace else.” And I replied,
just as I would in the dream, that “basically I believe that too.” The dream version of the conversation concluded there,
but the real conversation continued. It was then that she told me, for the first time in my life, that she had nearly died
when I was born. “I never knew that,” I murmured. I had known only that the labor was long, and in the end I was born Caesarean.
Now she told me that during the operation she had floated up above the table and looked down at the
doctors and nurses working on her. “The next thing I remember,” she said, “I was waking up in the recovery room. In a little
while the doctor came in. I didn’t mention what had happened, but he said to me, ‘You must live right.’ That’s all he said.
So I knew I hadn’t just dreamt it or something. And since then, I haven’t been afraid of dying.” Given all the things she
had revealed to me in my life that she shouldn’t have, it seems a miracle of willpower that she had never revealed this until
now. Presumably she felt the information might make me feel unwanted, or set apart from the other kids, or extra beholden
to her, all of which was indeed how I felt now—like there was a mystical bond between us, and I was responsible for her.