Shark Teeth

Losing someone you care about messes with time. You see that you may not—most certainly don’t—have the time you thought had. In other ways, time opens up. Doors closed for decades swing wide. You live simultaneously in the past, present, and future.

My brother left a box with my name on it. He left one for my sister and mother, too. For eight weeks I left the contents spread out on the ping-pong table. I didn’t know what else to do. There were four small paintings, one on plywood, the rest on canvas. He had packed several collections of small things, crystals and polished rocks, a bag of buttons. His first wallet, a faux leather deal that zippered all the way round, a pony embossed on the front. There was a handful of what looked like drawer pulls, with ceramic fronts. What did this mean? Was it a joke he was playing on me, leaving me pocket lint and desk drawer detritus? I resisted the urge to ask my sister and mother what they got.

Recently we had kids over and I thought I ought to clean it all up. In the two years we’ve had the table, no one has played ping-pong, but you never know. I found space for the stuff, even the buttons. I came across something I hadn’t seen before. In a tiny stapled pouch was a collection of ten to twenty black shark teeth. I stood a second holding the pouch, shocked by the clarity of a memory. We were in a gift shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was wearing his Hawaiian print shirt and baggy shorts, and he was begging Dad to buy them. I could see his knock knees and sweaty, eager face. I felt my discomfort with Dad’s discomfort. Dad was not a souvenir buyer. I can’t believe he let us inside the shop. The teeth were probably fake. Why wouldn’t Jim quit asking! Oh, I wanted him to stop. Would he win? Would Dad cave?

Dad caved.

Shark teeth are right up there with toy dinosaurs, elephant hair, turtle shells and insect collecting traps. They are little brother things, like weird noises and making faces in the mirror. Jim didn’t care if the teeth were fake. He liked imagining them in the mouth of a shark, probably a great white, with multiple rows of teeth. He had a big imagination. At night he could scare himself shitless looking at an open closet door, an eerie light out the window, the faint crack in his ceiling. Standing in my basement holding the teeth, the loss landed in my body, that gut drop of dismay, a hard-edged, nobody’s-getting-out-of-this pain. Honestly, what can I do with such a memory? With the past? I put the treasures on my sewing shelf, marveling that he’d  kept the teeth for at least thirty-four years. He moved them to Tennessee from our hometown in Illinois. He may have taken them to every rental address he had in Knoxville. The teeth probably moved to Colorado with him, living next to his socks. Then they must have gone to New York, to Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Finally, they traveled cross country in the U-haul when he and Rich moved to Portland. And now they were in Montana.

As a parent, I know the stealthy  business of mining bedrooms while kids are at school, chucking stuffed animals, matchbox cars, dried-out markers, pebbles, sticks, bottle caps and used-up notebooks. I’ve guiltily hurled that stuff in the trash bin. I’ve been busted, too. Where’s my stuffed octopus, the one with the blue eyes? How I quivered in shame.

I’ve stopped doing that evil work. Let mice nest in there. Bring on the mites and the bed bugs. Someday my kids will move out and I’ll miss them. They’ll visit their old rooms and get fed up with the mess. Finally, they will throw this stuff away.

But what do I know? Maybe they won’t.