small infatuation
Even with the fetish art and tongue-shaped couch downstairs, I had an image in my mind of Ella as a docile little old lady, soft and matronly. I still expected her bedroom to be dense with quilts and brass fixtures like my grandma’s and was surprised by its new, genderless IKEA furniture. Just outside the room I felt the hesitation I’d suspended after walking through the front door. Lisa paused for a second a few steps ahead; I thought maybe she felt the same invisible barrier to the room but I was wrong. She looked under the bed, pulled out a red-lacquered box and said, “What’s in here…” but didn’t open it. She circled the room with Ella’s cat following behind.
From inside the closet she said, “Those posters down there are really light compared to some of the stuff she showed me last time I was here. There’s a set she’s in called Furniture Sluts and one called Sick Picnic…The best part is the hairdos though--you know those big sixties bouffants.”
I picked up a big glass marble from a bowl on the windowsill and rolled it around in my hand, nice and cold. I let it slip halfway down my fingers but before it fell back to the bowl I saw something white under the other marbles. A tooth. I pulled it out and held it in the light. It seemed raw, the surface was dull and not exactly damp, but sticky. Lisa was still busy in the closet.
I sat on Ella’s bed and watched the cat unroll herself in a square of light on the carpet. I still held the tooth but for some reason I didn’t want to tell Lisa about it. “When does she get home?” I asked a third time, but Lisa didn’t answer. “I don’t think she would bother hiding them this well,” I said toward the closet, “I don’t think she would even take your notes, you know, you probably lost them somewhere.”
“No,” Lisa set two sagging cardboard boxes on the floor and started flipping through the papers in the first one. She jerked her head at me to go for the second one but I didn’t move from my spot on the bed. “No,” she said again, “I came out from the bathroom at like five; I don’t remember seeing my notes again after that. She stuffed ‘em away somewhere.”
“Yeah, you just want an excuse to go through her stuff.” I turned the tooth over in my hand. I thought of showing it to Lisa but resisted again.
Lisa looked like she was going to say something, but the gravelly sound of the cat throwing up distracted us both.
“We should leave,” I said with my head turned toward the bed, away from the vomit. “Let’s just go, she’ll be back soon anyway.”
Lisa ignored me. “That’s really gross,” she said, “go downstairs and get me some paper towels.”
“There is no reason we should clean that up. The cat would have puked whether we were here or not; we should just go. It’s a sign. It’s almost six anyway.”
“We can’t just go. The bedroom door was closed; she probably had it closed on purpose to keep the cat out.” Lisa sat down next to me on the bed. I pressed the tooth into my palm.
Downstairs the air was cooler, I realized my face had gotten hot up in Ella’s room. I tore a handful of paper towels from the roll on the kitchen counter, they were the expensive spongy kind. I moved back toward the hall but a tendril of scent from the dying flowers on the kitchen table floated across my face and infected me with an idea.
I lifted the flowers from their vase, letting the stems drip across the table cloth. I’d guessed right; I pulled a second tooth from the rotten smelling water, brown petals and little curled leaves stuck to my fingers. I examined the rusty stain of the molar’s roots, more ominous than the first tooth. I rolled the two in my palm and tried to think how many teeth were in the human head and how much time I had left.
While Lisa sponged up the cat vomit I drifted around the other side of Ella’s room, as far away from the puke smell as possible. I couldn’t make myself slip the teeth into my pocket and continued clinking them against each other in my hand.
“Done.” Lisa held the wet ball of paper towels in her bare hand.
“Can’t believe you’re touching that.”
“You never had any pets.” She made a pretend sneer and went to throw the mess away.
As soon as she’d left the room I took the red-lacquered box from under the bed. Inside was a layer of pocket change, and a long silk bag that I ignored. I shifted the coins, concerned that they would have made the tooth dirty, but there wasn’t a third tooth there.
Lisa leaned over my shoulder, making me tense. But she didn’t seem concerned that I’d gotten into the box, and hadn’t noticed my closed left fist.
“We’ll go soon,” she said, “I just want to check her office while I’m up here, then we’ll take off.”
“Ok,” I pushed the box back to its place and stood up. “I’m going to just look around a little more.”
“See, you’re curious now.” Lisa smiled and pushed my arm. “Ella’s fascinating. Just make sure the cat stays out of here.”
I checked my phone, it was 5:38. I sifted through random sections of the house, trying to follow the instinct that had found the first teeth.
Nothing in the flower pots at the top of the stairs, or in the drawers of racy underwear, then suddenly I found two in the aspirin bottle in the crowded medicine cabinet, all chalky from the pills.
I knew somehow a whole head’s worth of teeth were in the house and I wanted to find them all. More than afraid of being caught, now I worried that if we were still here when Ella got home I would have to return the teeth, probably never to hold them again.
I stared down at them. They didn’t seem like they would have fallen out, they weren’t rotten. Probably they had been violently pulled, and Ella was a psycho. And then I would have to give the teeth over to the police. I rolled them, clicking, over and over.
It was 5:46. Lisa called something to me as I moved past Ella’s office but I pretended not to hear so I could get downstairs without pausing for her. I pulled books off the shelves in the living room, brushing behind them until I found the fifth tooth, a sharp slanting bicuspid, in the dust behind Ella’s copy of Pervy Girls. I found another at the bottom of the ashtray on the mantle, two more under the glossy red couch cushions.
I stepped into the hall, rolling the teeth, their different kinds of grime had formed a sticky layer on my skin. Before I had decided where to go next I heard quick confident steps beyond the front door. I’d been listening for a car, but Ella had come back on foot.
The key clicked and in the second before the door handle turned I envisioned every window in the house, but there weren’t any nearby to leap through. Lisa’s step creaked on the stairs behind me; we would both be right in Ella’s view when the door opened, frozen like deer. I squeezed to feel the eight blunt little points of pressure in my palm, the teeth were wet now from my sweating hand.
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