A FAMILY VACATION by Anne Whitehouse (best novels in english txt) 📕

my sisters, I descended the ladder and crept into the downstairs half-bathroom.
I turned on the light and shut the door and locked it. I stared into the medicine cabinet mirror over the sink. I had to stand on my toes to see my whole face. I opened my mouth wide and wiggled my loose tooth with my thumb and forefinger. I wiggled it, trying to make it looser.
It would have to come out. I pictured myself running out to my parents, telling them I'd lost my tooth, and their stopping their fighting to look at it. Maybe it was a pitiful possibility; maybe they'd only stop screaming long enough to scream at me to go away, but it might work. I had to try it.
But I was afraid. The tooth wasn't ready to come out, certainly not by my standards. I rocked it back and forth, a little roughly. I jerked at it, and stopped in pain, and blood trickled down from my gum. I shrank. I couldn't go through with it. I would just have to give up.
But I couldn't give up. I had to force myself. I steeled myself, and then I weakened again, and then I steeled myself again. I wavered back and forth, in indecision; and from outside I heard a thud and my father's voice, "That does it, you bitch, you're asking for it now," and my mother's answering scream, an elongated "Fu-u-uck yo-o-ou!"
My heart was racing. I stared into my open mouth in the mirror again, and this time I was resolute. I held my tooth pressed between my two fingers, and I yanked as hard as I could, ignoring pain. And then, all of a sudden, it was out and in my hand, and the blood was streaming from my mouth. It was all over the sink.
I'd pulled the tooth out. I couldn't believe it. I stared at it in my palm, a small, white lump. Its roots were shallow. One more baby tooth gone. After all my hesitation, the extraction itself was a swift operation. Still, I had not expected there would be so much blood. Just for a second, I swayed weakly, and steadied myself at the edge of the sink, the little tooth still gripped tight in my fist. A sense of triumph washed over me; it propelled me to the front door, to confront my parents.
I didn't even look up to see them, but rushed out shouting, "Guess what! Guess what! My tooth came out! I just lost my tooth!" I heard in my voice the thrill and excitement, and none of my long indecision, my terror, or my dismay; and I had my moment: I saw my parents stop their denunciations in mid-sentence and look up at me in surprise and curiosity.
They both stared at me. My mother said, "Baby, are you all right?" It was the first note of tenderness that I had heard coming from her in quite a long time.
"I'm okay," I said. "It just came out. Do you want to see it?" and opened my rather grubby palm, like an oyster shell revealing its pearl.
"There's blood on your face," said my father. He stated the obvious and stopped at that.
"We better wash you up," said my mother. She didn't touch me, but she led the way back inside and I followed her. "Oh my," she said when she saw the bathroom. She had me rinse out my mouth with warm salt water. Her ministrations at times like these were the essence of her mothering; this was care she knew how to give, and liked giving. In my submission to it, I felt powerful. The emergency I created in pulling my tooth not only interrupted their fight; it actually stopped it.
It never occurred to either of my parents to question me as to how the tooth had come out; this was another source of satisfaction to me, for I do not know what I would have told them. They simply accepted the evidence at face value. My mother did not linger long with me. I cleaned the bathroom and myself up.
Shelley and Rachel crowded round me to see the tooth. They eyed it with awe, as if it were a magic object, a kind of talisman. Shelley had just begun to lose her teeth, Rachel not yet. They also did not know that what had happened in the bathroom was deliberate, but the relief on both their faces was evident.
I don't know which of my parents picked up the pieces afterwards--the steaks lying in the dirt, the bag of charcoal flung by my mother that had made the thud we heard and enraged my father. The rage between them was ongoing; we had been born into it and were growing up with it. While we were still children, there could be no life for us apart from it.
My parents were tense, white-faced. Tonight for certain my father would sleep in the living room. My mother was in the kitchen; my father was somewhere else. Her movements putting up the dishes were slow but trembling. We were all exhausted. With the tip of my tongue, I gingerly felt the tender spot where the tooth had been. It had begun to ache dully.
"Should I put the tooth under my pillow?" I asked my mother.
"If you want the Tooth Fairy to come," she answered in the practiced voice of the parent.
"I didn't know if the Tooth Fairy could come up to my bed," I said pointedly. "Besides I want to keep my tooth. Would the Tooth Fairy let me keep it?"
"If you keep your tooth, you won't get any money."
"All I ever get is a dime anyway. All of my friends get dollars."
"Don't get huffy with me, young lady," said my mother, leaving one role for another. "A dime is plenty of money for a tooth."
"No, it isn't. Anyway, I think I'll just keep my tooth instead."
"It's up to you. Though I don't know why you'd want to keep such a nasty thing."
"I just do."
I slept uneasily, disturbed by dreams of fairies--not of the Tooth Fairy, for she was a charade I had never believed in--but of the true fairies, the ones my grandmother had told me about. One twilight I had been walking with her around the block and had looked up at the trees and been certain I'd caught a glimpse of them in a twinkling at the treetops, dark as ink against the dim, white sky. "Look! Look!" I said to my grandmother, pointing. "I see the fairies."
"I see," my grandmother said, regarding me and not the trees. "I see you do."
In my dream I saw the fairies again in the twinkling of their wands in the treetops, and then my dream deepened; it became a dream of seeing God. This same grandmother had told me that on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, it is possible that God will reveal himself to Jews. In my dream, it was Yom Kippur, and for the first time, I was attending the adult service. The morning stint was over; it was early afternoon, and we had to go home and get Shelley and Rachel to bring them back to the children's service. In my dream, I shook the rabbi's hand and walked out of the synagogue; and, while my parents lingered on the steps to greet acquaintances, I looked up at the sky. There were great clouds blowing over. As I watched, I saw a parting at the center of the sky and the sun burst through in a brilliant shaft. It shone over me; it changed the whole world- trees and street and cars parked down it--and I felt awed and blessed, certain that I was witnessing the radiance of God.
My dream was so vivid that I was startled to wake in the sleeping loft in Camellia Gardens in the white, still pre-dawn. At first it was quiet; then I heard the crows outside screaming for the day to come.
I had proved to myself the night before that I wasn't always helpless. I had found some relief, even if I had not made myself happy. Granted a temporary cease-fire, I lay in bed and listened, my tooth still under my pillow, to the cacophonous crows heralding that our vacation was over.

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Publication Date: 11-09-2009

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