The tooth fairy visits my house. The
madness must stop.
This all started when I lost my first
tooth. I was at first crazy with the blood and the drama of having the thing
pulled then I could not lose them fast enough. When I was in grade school I went
through a streak of losing teeth and grew quite concerned. English class was
always disrupted by my sucking sounds on those awful brown paper towels--the Big
Chief writing paper kind, with the visible wood chunks still in them—to keep
from bleeding all over the desk. Good thing those were molars because there
almost nothing left for a while and I got scared; but oh, how my piggy bank
grew!
T
hen I stopped losing teeth. I was going
to have to find another source of income but could think of no other kind of
fairy that would pay for offerings such as hair trimmings from the barber shop
or nail clippings or boogers. “What good is a Boogy man if he won’t pay for
boogers?” I wondered. The money stopped and I was left to find contentment once
again with birthday cards you have to read out loud in front of everyone and
Christmas bonuses that somehow find their way into the toe of the stocking. And
chores.
One
night, not long after I was able to sleep without scratching due to stray hairs
wandering around my bed (do you know how difficult it is to get hair trimmings
out of your sheets?) I woke up one morning to the sound of a quarter falling to
the floor. I know it was a quarter than fell because it was still spinning when
I looked over the edge of my bed. My awakening hand brushed it from under the
pillow and pushed the coin out, landing on the hardwood floor. Ok, so I had a
stray. I would not have worried so much about it until the very next week, I
found another quarter under my pillow. And the next week.
I started to worry. I inventoried my
incoming teeth and they were all present. The boogers were still stuck right
were I’d wiped them. I doubted it was the nail clippings or the hair trimmings.
I worried so much I got sick and my mother took me to the doctor who looked me
over, poked and prodded, took my temperature and the works. You should have seen
the look on his face when I asked if he saw were any new suspicious marks
looking like surgery scars. My mom started to laugh then froze with a look on
her face as if she’d just remembered she left the iron on or the car door open.
Quarters
continued to show up week after week and I didn’t say a thing. Dad kept smoking
his pipe behind his newspaper after supper and dropped no hints that he was up
to something. One Saturday I heard the radio from the garage indicating Dad was
working on the car. One often hears a mechanic talking to the car or to parts or
to tools or to all of the above because of all of the above, but this Saturday
the sound of the radio was the only sound for nearly an hour and nothing else.
Dad came through the door, his coveralls as clean as when he just put them on
carrying his tool box.
“Jamie, c’mere,” he motioned me over to
the table.
I came to the
table.
He opened his gray tool box. “Where are
my tools?”
I looked inside. It was empty. Not only
was it empty, it was clean. The brand-spanking-new kind of clean, complete with
the brand-spanking-new kind of smell and a shimmer of factory oil to prevent
rust. I looked at the outside of the box: same scratches and dings, same dirt.
Same STP racing sticker. Inside, nothing.
“At first,” he said, scratching his
head, “I thought I was being forgetful, laying a tool down some place and
forgetting. I’ve not been able to pliers or hammer. Then socket wrenches
disappeared. I thought I’d loaned them to Mr. Sanchez across the street, but
then the box wrenches . . . and now this. Would you have an explanation?”
I was sent
to my room to think about what I’d done, knowing I did nothing. Dad passed
sentence knowing there was no other explanation, but felt he had to do
something. I was sad my father was disappointed but what came to my mind and
could not say made sense . . . sort of.
Going to my desk, I found a piece of paper. Drawing something may help me
feel better. I found my cigar box of crayons.
I loved my cigar box and could not wait
for the start of the school year when we took our supplies in them to tuck under
our desks. That scuff right there across the gold border on the corner happened
when I dropped the box on the bus after Suzy bumped my leg as I passed by. I ran
my finger across the black scar thinking of her pig tails and smile. She gave me
one of her hair ribbons and I keep it inside the box along with other keepsakes,
like my pen and pencil set my father used when he was in high school a hundred
years ago. I opened the box . . .
