We never spoke of these details, even amongst ourselves. We were the children of a widow, and the Church and its Missions received more than their share of our mites. We knew the parable. But to admit we saw any parallel to our own lives would have been false pride. Instead, we behaved like aristocrats who knew better than to squander their fortunes on new bikes with banana seats or restaurant food. We accepted the hand-me-down clothes and free Oriental carpets and tickets to Tanglewood and part-time jobs with flexible hours in the spirit in which they were given. As tribute to the temple of my dead father. This was the same spirit in which we swallowed the peculiar hash that was served up for dinner in the homes of friends and in prosaic homilies by the parish priests. We recognized that it was the very best other people could do.
Joe had advised me to wrap my first lost tooth in toilet paper and try selling it to one of our older sisters. Much of what Joe did and almost all of what he said puzzled me, but I respected his advice because I was in kindergarten and he was in second grade. Plus, he had managed to accumulate a vast, secret collection of smelly chestnuts, which were sprouting roots in all three drawers of an oak desk we allegedly shared in our twin-bedded bedroom.
I took the tooth to my sister Marie, who was always allowed to have friends over because she was sandwiched in the family between Joe and me on one side and Gerard on the other, and she claimed half her secrets could be shared only with girls. Marie never liked to be interrupted, but she did like to be asked for her opinion. Mom has to pay you a quarter for every single tooth, she said after chasing me out of her bedroom, where she was putting makeup on a girl named Rose, who was wearing a white dress decorated with a big pink picture of a rose. Marie was wearing a red-and-white muumuu purchased by one of our older sisters, which was supposed to be an outdoor dress but was worn only as a housecoat by a Downing. We’d had a couple of informative dinner table discussions about muumuus. The upshot was, muumuus were Hawaiian and we weren’t.
I knew we weren’t allowed to stick old teeth under pillows and pretend not to know how they got there, so I knocked to get Marie’s attention again. She spoke to me through a two-inch opening in her bedroom door. She often did this. For years, I imagined this was how members of the Supreme Court handed down their decisions. Give me your tooth, and I’ll give it to Mom, she said, sticking her hand out into the hall.
She must have seen the toilet paper I’d packed around it, because her hand disappeared and she hissed, Sterilize it. I knew this would require bleach, but my mother kept the Clorox in the laundry room, and she was constantly running in and out of there all day with baskets of clothes, which made it very hard when you wanted to do something private with bleach or ammonia.
I tracked down Joe in the garage, where he often spent time alone after he’d been forced out of the house to play with kids in the neighborhood. I asked him a general question about sterilizing procedures people used before bleach was invented. He suggested a bonfire. Since he’d joined the Boy Scouts, Joe was constantly angling to get me to start a forest fire he could put out. But I knew if I hung around long enough, he’d come up with something else just to get me to leave him alone. He finally told me Gerard’s cologne would work. He was right. A long soak in half a bottle of Excalibur decanted into the bathroom glass did the trick. And I also discovered that hydrogen peroxide got rid of the smell of cologne in a drinking glass. This was after I’d figured out how to dribble the hydrogen peroxide I’d snagged from my sister Mary Ann’s private stash of hair-care products into the inconveniently tiny hole at the top of the Excalibur bottle to replenish Gerard’s supply.
Marie accepted the tooth without comment. She was often a lot of things I didn’t appreciate, but she wasn’t a thief. The payment turned up under my pillow the next morning.
Over the next two years, I got refunds on at least a dozen baby teeth. Then, during the spring of 1967, I swallowed two teeth while eating a bologna-and-cheese sandwich at my desk in the third-grade classroom of Notre Dame grammar school. We hadn’t had a lunchroom for a couple of months because of a flood, but we’d been allowed to turn around and face our neighbors while we ate. I motioned to my best friend, Joey T., whose desk was four rows away, but he couldn’t understand what had happened, so I had to pass him a note.
On the way home, we stopped just one block from school on a rise in First Street, which was actually a bridge over a stretch of railroad track. We hung our heads over the concrete railing to see if there were any bad kids playing down there who might get their arms chopped off by a passing train. We’d heard it had happened. We couldn’t prove it, but we knew for sure that in second grade one bad kid had told Sister Jeanne Arthur he’d by mistake dropped his penmanship homework off the bridge. She didn’t believe him, and neither did I. Whenever I brought it up, though, Joey T. always said he could believe it. This particular day, when I brought it up I added some of the worst stuff from the bad kid’s résumé—his parents were divorced, his mother yelled; plus, I’d once watched him set some of his own hair on fire—but Joey still said he could believe a homework paper could just fly away.
Standing on the bridge, looking for potential amputees, I asked Joey if you got paid for teeth you swallowed. He’d know. He’d swallowed a metal bottle cap, a nickel, and a lot of our marbles.
Joey said, You mean, prove it?
I nodded.
Joey had a sister exactly the same age as my sister Marie, and they both said prove it every time either one of us said just about anything. He told me if I had any problems proving I’d swallowed two teeth, I could always check to see when it came out in my B.M. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He was pleased to know something I didn’t know, and after he explained the abbreviation, he asked me what I called my bowel movements. I was embarrassed and a little scared that we were talking about them at all. I was going to tell him how in my family you never even touched toilet paper if somebody else had touched it, but I didn’t want to insult his family’s bad hygiene. I just let him know that my family never discussed anything that happened in bathrooms. At first, he didn’t believe me, but after a while, Joey said, You better find out what you call it before it’s too late. He went on to explain how much work had gone into his recovery of the nickel he’d swallowed. It had taken a couple of days. It was worth it, he said, because it was a buffalo head.
This somehow reminded him that he had swiped a bunch of Sweet Tarts from his sister’s bedroom for us to eat, so he dropped his green book bag and fished around in it, and then he dumped everything on the sidewalk. He had some old spelling tests and a lot of pencils and his dog Cindy’s leash in his bag, but he didn’t have any candy, and I noticed he didn’t have his geography book, which meant he was not going to live up to his potential again on the test. He did find the note I’d written him. He read it to himself and smiled. He didn’t make a big deal out of proving his point or anything. He just placed my note on the concrete railing and flicked it like a carom until it slid off and floated down to the gravel between the tracks. About halfway home, he remembered he’d eaten the Sweet Tarts secretly during art period.
It was not until I was eating dinner that I remembered eating my two teeth during lunch. Our kitchen table was always crowded, but even I eventually got a chance to speak. My mother often had to make a special plea for people to listen to me, which sometimes added to the pressure, but I appreciated it anyway. I made my announcement, and immediately one of my sisters said, I swallowed three teeth today, and then another one said she’d swallowed four teeth, and my brother Gerard asked my mother how much he’d get for swallowing one of his ears, and then they were told to change the subject. Even Joe wouldn’t look at me, even after I drank from his milk, which almost always got his attention.
It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t swallowed two teeth. I didn’t know what “prone to” meant, but I knew I was prone to exaggerating. I was first prone to it when I tried to wiggle out of wearing some donated woolen clothes because they gave me a rash, and I was prone to it again when I explained to my mother why I had been kept after