Congratulations to Margie Jacobson for her Second Place award in our CT Voices contest collaboration with WSHU Radio.
Teeth
by Margie Jacobson
It was the least creepy of attics. Open, airy, fully finished, sun-dappled even on the cloudiest
days. The stairs opened onto a playroom which, when I left more than eleven years ago, held an
old white sleeper sofa and a Georgia O’Keeffe poster from my first apartment, a child-sized table
and chairs and a desk loaded with crayons, stickers, sparkle glue and construction paper. Bins of
girl toys lined the walls – American Girls, Barbies, Polly Pockets – and buckets of their tiny
accessories.
Behind the playroom was a door leading to the storage room which was, true to form, the nicest
of storage rooms. It was there I left my ketubah, our contract of marriage – a beautifully framed
piece of handmade art designed just for us – and my ski clothes. The ski clothes I forgot in the
rush to leave by the date set in our separation agreement. The ketubah stayed because I couldn’t
bear to look at it.
Nearby stood the plastic shelving unit with drawers I carefully labeled with the names and grades
of my three daughters – each filled with drawings, popsicle stick projects, report cards. Then
there were the boxes. Some contained photos and the detritus of our nearly 20-year marriage; the
rest came from my ex-husband’s family home.
It was in one of those boxes that we found them.
Years earlier, when we were still a family, one of the girls opened a random box. Hearing her
scream, I ran upstairs and confirmed, yes, there were teeth inside. Not baby teeth, not animal
teeth. Decidedly human, loose, yellowed with age, scattered roots and all like the Polly Pocket
accessories no longer connected to the person they’d come from. We laughed uncomfortably and reasoned that the ancestor who lost them to poor early twentieth-century dental hygiene
decided to keep them – loose in a big carton of other assorted stuff. Rational enough – but
handfuls of human teeth at the bottom of a cardboard box are rattling in unexpected ways.
After that, nobody entered the storage room at night.
More than a decade has passed. My only view of that attic since leaving came in the form of a
TikTok video posted by my youngest daughter’s high school band about four years ago. The toy
bins and art supplies had vanished, replaced by a drum kit and disco ball. I watched that viral
video along with seven million other people. Fourteen million eyeballs on a room that once held
my toddlers’ toys and my first apartment’s furniture. Some spaces were never meant to hold that
many body parts.
I’m preparing to leave the house I moved to after that one. The settlement gave me twelve years
here. Exactly twelve. The girls are mostly grown now. My ex and his girlfriend are still in the
other house with the photos and the school projects and the ketubah and the teeth.
For years that old house haunted me – the dinners I cooked there, the Girl Scout campout I
hosted on the lawn, the rooms I decorated. But now when I think of it, the memories feel murky.
There are no fresh ones because I was never invited back in. If it contains parts of me, they are
parts I no longer own. The laughter I hear comes from this house, the one with perpetually sandy
floors from beach walks and picnics, my daughters’ black Hokas and our geriatric dog.
I thought having to leave yet another house would haunt me too, another reminder of the
things ripped away from a person, leaving behind bloody roots and aching, empty sockets. But there are fewer empty spaces now, nothing anyone can take away. And I know where I’m going.
To a place without ghosts, without strings. Where my name is on the deed.
And nothing upstairs I’m afraid to open at night.
About Margie Jacobson: Margie is a recovering lawyer who teaches law to undergrads and works in nonprofit civil rights advocacy. A mother of writers and keeper of too many half-finished notebooks, she took her first Westport Writers’ Workshop in the founder’s living room and, many stories later, has finally let one of them out of the house.
Congratulations to Henry Liu for his First Place award in our CT Voices contest collaboration with WSHU Radio. From Connecticut By: Henry Liu Father: For forty years, you have rested beneath the mountains of northern China. But you never reallyleft me. I still ask: If you were alive, would you
Congratulations to Laura Brennan on her Third Place award in our CT Voices contest collaboration with WSHU Radio. Inside My Head By Laura Brennan We know that life can change in an instant. Those instants are rare though, and they’resurrounded by ordinary moments. They start in places we’ve been before
