How High the Moon

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS
OF
SANDRA KRING

Also by Sandra Kring

Carry Me Home
The Book of Bright Ideas
Thank You for All Things

I lost my first tooth when I was six years old. Well,
lost
isn’t exactly the right word, since it’s not like it just plopped into my chicken noodle soup out of the blue, or fell out when I sneezed. In truth, it got yanked out of my head by Teddy, who didn’t know what to do with a wobbly baby tooth that hurt when you bit down, so he asked some guy at work.

It took Teddy three songs on the radio to finally get the string wrapped around my tooth, but when he slammed the door—more like a shut than a slam—the string slipped right off. After a lot of howling by me, and pleading by Teddy, he pinched the tooth between his fingers and yanked.

I screamed bloody murder and whacked his arm so hard that my tooth went pinging across the room. So while I bawled and bled into my hand, Teddy scooted around the floor on his knees, smoothing his hands over the linoleum to find it, because I was wailing that I wanted it back. When he found it, I popped it into my mouth like I was Mr. Potato Head and my tooth was a part you could take off and put back on, take off and put back on.

Teddy took me by the hand and led me to the couch, where he sat me down beside him and tucked me under his arm. “I shouldn’t have pulled it like that, Teaspoon,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should know by now that there’s some things in life that just hurt
too much when you’re forced to let go of them before you’re ready.”

“What things?” I asked Teddy as I sniffled, because I wanted to know what else somebody might try yanking from my head.

“Well, I guess a lot of things. Hope… love… childhood…”

“And teeth.” I said, careful to keep my yanked tooth tucked up against my cheek. “You forgot teeth.”

At bedtime Teddy tried to convince me to put my tooth under my pillow for the Tooth Fairy. I shook my head no, so Teddy said I didn’t have to until I was ready, but that I couldn’t keep it in my mouth while I slept because I might choke on it. So I hid it in a sock in my drawer in case the Tooth Fairy heard I’d lost it and decided to come snooping. I put it back in my mouth when I woke up, but after a few days, when the tooth started graying and feeling dry, like it wasn’t a part of me anymore, I put it under my pillow and the Tooth Fairy left me enough money to buy a Mars Bar.

For a lot of days after I lost that tooth, I couldn’t stop rubbing my tongue over the hole where it had been. I asked Teddy when I’d stop doing that because it had started getting on my nerves, and he said, “When you’re used to having it gone.”

I don’t know why the words Teddy said that day stuck in my head like gum on hair, since most things Teddy said—or anybody else, for that matter—went right in one ear and out the other, but they did. I’m thinking about them now, as I walk toward home with Teddy, the neighborhood so quiet that I can hear the clicking of my shoes on the sidewalk while we move out from under one streetlight beam and into another, my mind rubbing over the last few months like a tongue over the hole where a baby tooth should be.

I was sitting
at my desk, second seat back in the row by the window, staring outside watching jump ropes twirl and kids chase one another across the playground. The sounds of thumping red rubber balls and excited voices floating in through the rectangle screens were nothing but a big fat tease, though, because I couldn’t go out for recess.
Again
. I had to sit at my stupid desk and twiddle my thumbs while Mrs. Carlton, my fifth-grade teacher, corrected papers and ignored me, even though I was baking like a potato in the sun.

I was supposed to be working on my English assignment, but I hadn’t gotten farther than writing the date—May 13, 1955—at the top of my paper. I knew that was about all the farther I’d get, too, because I was supposed to write about Moby-Dick, and I didn’t even know who the guy was. I wasn’t really listening when Mrs. Carlton read us a chapter after recess for about a bajillion days in a row. I could see the book cover in my head, though, and it had a big fish on it, so I was thinking Moby-Dick might be that guy who got swallowed by a whale and became a rib bone in the story that Miss Tuckle, the Sunday school teacher, told us. But I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t exactly listening then, either.

“Isabella… your paper…,” Mrs. Carlton said, and I turned away from the window.

“I can’t concentrate with all that yelling and laughing going on outside,” I told her.

“Try,” she said, without looking up.

“Plus,” I added, “I’m about melting to death. These windows are working like a magnifying glass. I’m not kidding. It’s so hot on my arm that I think I might start on fire. That can happen, you know. Jack Jackson started a grass fire in his backyard using a magnifying glass, and Johnny, his big brother, had to put it out with a blanket. I have very dry skin, Mrs. Carlton.”

She looked up at me and sighed, her lips painted big and red like Lucille Ball’s, and said, “Then take a seat over there.” She pointed to the first desk on the other side of the room. The one closest to the door.

Me and my big mouth!

I didn’t have a thing to do but hum and think about how hungry I was. After recess we still had to have math and reading class before it was lunchtime.

I thought about the ice cream we were going to have for dessert, and the next thing I knew, my mind was scooting off to the drugstore to remember the best strawberry sundae I ever had.

I guess you could say that I got that sundae because of Ma. All because one night while I was still in kindergarten, she came and sat on my bed, the stink of smoke and booze from The Dusty Rose still clinging to her auburn curls, and she said, “I gotta go, kid. I’ve got dreams to chase.” Then she walked out. Just like that. Leaving nothing behind but me, a sinkful of dirty dishes, a pair of elbow-length gloves still in their box, and Teddy, her boyfriend of a year, bawling on the arms of his ratty work shirt.

After Ma left, Teddy tried to help me stop missing her so badly. He was sweet as sugar at first, hugging me when I cried and playing with me when I was lonely. But when a few days went by and I still wasn’t eating more than a sick mouse, he got downright bossy.

“Teaspoon, I know you miss your Ma. I do, too,” Teddy said. “But you’ve got to start eating again, even if you don’t have an appetite.”
He put a plate of scrambled eggs and a cup of milk in front of me and told me I
had
to get them down. “If you don’t, you’re going to make yourself sick.”

I didn’t know people could
make
themselves sick by not eating, but I sure was glad to hear it! When we were living above the bar in Peoria, Ma left me with a lady down the hall, and on the third day I got so sick that I puked on her quilt
and
her cat. She somehow got ahold of Ma and told her to come get me. So when Teddy told me I would get sick if I didn’t eat, I decided that it was a good plan. I slid my plate away and crossed my arms, and said I wasn’t going to eat for nothing. Teddy swayed on his feet a bit, then he planted his boots on the floor and cleared his throat and said, “Isabella Marlene, if you don’t eat, I’m going to have to punish you.”

Maybe it was Teddy’s scrambled-egg-soft voice, or the way he couldn’t set his chin when he gave an order because he didn’t really have one to set in the first place, but whatever it was, his warning didn’t scare me. It only grated on my nerves like a skeeto bite itch. So I crossed my arms and I said, “I hope I do get sick, because then you’ll have to call my ma and she’ll come and get me.”

Teddy’s squished-back chin quivered a little, and he put his hand on the top of my head. “Teaspoon, your Ma wouldn’t even know it if you got good and sick, because I don’t know where she is to tell her.” He looked down at me, and there was water in his eyes. “It’s just you and me now,” he said. “Teaspoon and Teddy. And I’m not going to let you get sick.”

My arm came up to hide my eyes when he said that, because I started crying and I didn’t want Teddy to see. He hugged me to his leg and stroked my dark curls. And when my tears turned to hiccups, he took me to the drugstore and bought us both a strawberry sundae for supper. While we were there, somebody popped a quarter into the jukebox and played Teresa Brewer’s “Music! Music! Music!” and just like that my toes got light enough to tap (even if all they could tap was air, since my legs were dangling off the bar stool), and I started singing along with that snappy tune:
All I want is having you, and music, music, music!
Teddy didn’t even tell me to stop singing because I was in public and had a mouthful. He just put another coin in the jukebox and asked me what else I wanted to hear. Course, I knew that that would be the last time Teddy’d ever let me sing at the table or with food in my mouth without harping, and so far, I was right.

“Isabella. Stop daydreaming and get to your paper,” Mrs. Carlton said, not in a very friendly tone, either, and the memory of that sundae melted right off my tongue.

I picked up my pencil and poked the lead between my two front teeth as I tried to think about what to write, wishing I hadn’t thought about strawberry sundaes because it made me start thinking about how sad I was when Ma left. I didn’t like thinking about that, so instead I tried to think about how pretty she was. How good she could sing. How nice she smelled. I didn’t have much luck, though, because the truth of the matter was, by the time I was eight years old most of the pictures of her I had in my head had dried like spilled milk nobody sopped up, and they flaked away. I had six stupid miniature plastic baby dolls to thank for that.

I got those dumb things and that little pink crib to put them in at Ben Franklin, and all I did in the days right before Ma left was sit on the floor and play with those dolls. I should have been looking at Ma instead, because after she was gone for about a year or so, when I tried to see her all I saw were those dolls—naked and pink like newborn hamsters, two blue dots for eyes painted crooked on their faces, seams running along their sides.

Sure, sometimes I tried to talk to her when her bath was done and she was sitting under that helmet drying her rollers and paging through movie magazines, but she couldn’t hear me with that hair dryer whizzing in her ears, so I just went back to playing, bouncing those dolls in the plops of water Ma dropped on the
floor when she stepped out of the tub because those were their mud puddles.