“Well,” I said, “the nine-dollar plan sounds a little better, but I just had a wisdom tooth removed and can’t really talk very well. Could you send me brochures or something? I would just like some more information on your organization before I give any more money away.”
“Certainly. Thank you very much for your pledge, Mrs. Carpenter. You’ve made two handicapped children very happy. Good night.”
She hangs up before I get to protest. First of all, I haven’t officially pledged anything, and I resent being rushed, bullied, misunderstood into it. Second of all, why would two retarded children ever want to see Hansel and Gretel, a play about the abandonment of children? What if I refused to give the Lertoma Club my money. Certainly most of it benefits the theater group and not the kids at all. Why not nine dollars for, say, beer and M&M’s? If I were retarded — hell, even if I weren’t — that’s what I would want. What if I don’t pay? Would two kids be left standing out in front in a lobby somewhere, teary-eyed, wondering why Missus Carpenter didn’t send in the money? “We don’t like Missus Carpenter! We don’t like her!” they would chant in unison. Would they be stuck there while all their friends went on in? Would this be the real Hansel and Gretel? Would this be what they should see?
“Mom, a long time ago I put a tooth under my pillow, but the tooth huvvah didn’t come and give me anything.”
Huvvah is Georgianne’s baby word for fairy. I don’t know where she got it; I think it just kind of developed on its own, like marsupials in Australia. For some reason we’ve kept it in circulation.
“Really?” I say, wondering if I should wrench her out of infancy, get rid of this tooth-and-money jazz. My mother had told us right from the start that there was no tooth fairy, sorry kids, and that Santa Claus was simply a spirit in your heart that prompted you into present-giving. The Easter Bunny, however, I knew really truly existed, though he was crucified on Friday and had to wait until the third day to rise and pass out jelly beans. What could I say to Georgianne? “Honey, there’s no such thing as the tooth huvvah”? It wasn’t compelling. It wasn’t a spirit in your heart.
“Why don’t you try again?” I suggest and cup my hand over my jaw. “The tooth huvvah owes me quite a bit of money, too. Maybe the tooth huvvah will come visit tonight.” Maybe Darrel, I thought, was the tooth huvvah.
“Nah,” says Georgianne.
“Why not?”
“Cuz in school I made a ring with it.”
“A ring?”
“Yeah. Wanna see?” And she whips out from behind her back a tiny pipe cleaner twisted and curled into a circle. Glued to it, rather precariously, is her tooth, the blood in it now brown as a body part. It looks like some horrible thing that got done in Vietnam and people never talked about until ten years later.
“My,” I say.
George slips it on. “It’s very pretty. I just have to be careful.”
“What did your teacher say?”
George shrugs. “She said I just shouldn’t wear it to church. But I tole her we didn’t go to church, we went to Donut-O-Donut, and she said, ‘Well then I guess you could wear it there.’ ”
The dentist calls, as he said he would.
“How are you?”
“It’s supposeta hurt, right?”
“Uncomfortable is the word we use.”
“I’m uncomfortable then. Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Good. Glad to hear it.”
“How are you?”
“All right, thanks.” He pauses. “After you I had five more.”
I think about this. It sounds like something I said once to my first boyfriend, in a bad coffee shop, over beers, in my imagination, in New York: After you I had five more.
But what does one say to a dentist?
“Eye-yi-yi.”
“That’s teeth for you.”
“Yes,” I say, “it certainly is.”
“Come in on Tuesday, and I’ll remove your stitches.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Yes. Well. See you then.”
“Right,” I say. This is like every divorce. You get tears in your eyes and think, “God, all that oral sex and now we’re talking to each other like bureaucrats.”
My face is puffed up like a boxer’s. I know Darrel secretly finds me irresistible this way but just isn’t letting on. When I mention this he rolls his eyes and exhales in an exhausted fashion. Then he, too, asks to see my stitches.
Benna Carpenter’s morning classes had nothing to say about poetry. They had nothing to say about sex either when she switched the subject to that. They merely wanted to be told what to know. They wanted to know what they should be writing in their notebooks. “This class is supposed to be full of lively discussion,” she said to her eight o’clock class. “I’m going to start bringing in pots of coffee.” To her ten o’clock class she said, “It’s people like you who were responsible for the Holocaust.”
The Free Verdi Company performs at Baker High School, a few miles outside of Fitchville. I arrive a little late and have to tiptoe into the auditorium, which is a large room, perhaps used in the daytime as a cafeteria, with a stage at one end and rows of folding chairs, unfolded and arranged in meticulous lines. The cast is already on stage, singing. There are no costumes, no sets, no orchestra: This is what the Free Verdi Company means by free. There is a piano, and the cast reads the music from books they hold in front of them. And Carmen: This is what they mean by Verdi.
The auditorium is only half-dark and half-full, mostly, I assume, with friends, parents, senior citizens who in the middle of Carmen’s arias squeak in their chairs, or readjust them loudly across the floor. The woman singing Carmen is a pale, wheat-haired woman named Dixie Seltzer. She tries to look seductively Spanish, but ends up steamily emoting like a Kansas housewife with the vapors. Gerard hasn’t really prepared me for the amateurishness of this production. Mediocrity alone never surprises me, but this particular example, unheralded by the usually shrewd and cynical Gerard, comes as a painful surprise, like a car accident. I’m probably being unkind. I adjust to my seat, slip off my coat, re-cross my legs. Perhaps it’s not all that bad. The rest of the audience seems to be enjoying it, smiling and applauding and glancing down at their programs to see who’s singing whom. Perhaps it’s just my unpreparedness for this that has made it seem so quickly awful, or perhaps it’s the Jewish mother in me, wanting only the best for Gerard (“My son! My son the musical genius is drowning!”). What the hell do I know about opera?
The lights go up. There will be three intermissions. The cast is allowed to meander the corridors, linger at the water fountain, chat pleasantly with relatives. An older man, strikingly white-haired and in a red turtleneck, brushes by me, in a hurry to leave. He has his car keys in his hand. “I for one am not sticking around for the rest,” he says to me meanly, stagily, because I am the nearest person at the moment. He stops and smiles at me, as if I’m supposed to agree. I look away. I look for Gerard, spot him by the stage door with his back to me, scurry up behind him and then give him a big hug. “You’re terrific,” I say, though I’ve hardly heard him sing a line yet. “Act two,” I remember him saying, “act two is where I turn into Placido Domingo.”