Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

I don’t eat sweets.

I could still give you half my yo-yo. It isn’t a sweet or sour, comes apart easily and I’m sure in the short time it’s been in my mouth, hasn’t been changed in any physical or chemical way.

It would depend what flavor it is.

Wood.

I prefer plastic.

I think sucking a plastic yo-yo would make you sick.

But wood could give me splinters while plastic wouldn’t.

If I can’t give you a wooden yo-yo half, instead I can demonstrate my little yo-yo trick with the whole yo-yo in my mouth and its string end looped around my back tooth.

You only have one back tooth?

I’ve several. But the right lower’s the one I choose for the loop to be around, as it’s the biggest and I believe my strongest tooth. And because it’s a bottom tooth, the string has less chance of slipping off than it would around an upper tooth which, if my lips or front teeth couldn’t grab the departing string in time or my tongue couldn’t pin it to my teeth or gums, the yo-yo would fall to the floor. And if the floor happened to be this sidewalk, the trick couldn’t be tried again till the yo-yo was washed and the string, except for its loop end, had thoroughly dried.

I was only asking. Now I’m watching,

Well, as the yo-yo fully unwinds out of my mouth, I lean over a ways like this and do the walk-the-dog trick on the sidewalk and then jerk my head up so the yo-yo can rewind into my mouth. Then I close my mouth and stand straight and bring my feet and the inner condyles of my femora together again, or stand straight and bring the feet and condyles together and then close my mouth, and the trick’s done.

That’s quite a finish.

You’re not in too much of a rush to watch it? If you are I could save the trick for another night when there might be a bigger moon and no clouds or perhaps during one of the hemisphere’s rare auroras, or at least under or near a streetlamp.

I’ve time and there’s plenty of light.

Or even one weekend or holiday afternoon when you’re cycling down the street toward me and I happen to have a yo-yo in my mouth with its string end looped around that back tooth.

What I think is that you’re dawdling on doing the trick because you don’t have a yo-yo in your mouth.

Want me to open my mouth so you can see it?

Almost every time you opened your mouth to speak I saw you had no yo-yo inside. That is, once you said you had a yo-yo inside your mouth and I began making an effort to look for it.

Then I must have swallowed it.

Isn’t that a risky thing to do with a yo-yo?

Why? My digestive track’s like an alligator’s.

Is an alligator’s especially fit or equipped to digest yo-yos?

An alligator’s or crocodile’s or any of the large loricates who can digest an iron wrench without a problem.

That would be fine, if your yo-yo was made of iron and not wood.

The iron yo-yo I had was too prone to rust, didn’t taste as good as the wood, and either chipped or dented a ceramic or linoleum floor tile if I landed it too hard, or my front teeth if I jerked it back into my mouth too fast and without perfect control.

What about the string? Should I put my mind at ease because the string’s also made of wood?

The string’s made of string.

Then it must be a vegetable fiber, which shouldn’t do your digestive system any harm if the wood doesn’t.

I’m allergic to all fruits and vegetables, so I’m sure it wasn’t either of those.

Maybe it was made of dried meat or fish.

Allergic to all animal flesh too — dried, fried or fresh. And anything grown in the ground except trees, shrub stems or the harder vines makes me unwell. But I think we better check whether the string’s still in my mouth before we get upset. It could have come undone from the peg that joins the two yo-yo disks.

Doesn’t seem to be inside.

Did you look way back to the right lower molars?

I envy you. From what I can make out, you haven’t a filling in your mouth.

Forget about that. Is the string there or not?

Seriously, though, how can you have no fillings? You must be a few years older than I and so have had even more time to get cavities and impactions and lose a tooth or two. But you’ve all your teeth and apparently no cavity that large where the tooth had to be drilled and filled.

You didn’t check the upper set.

I’d need a dentist’s mouth mirror and penlight for that.

I could stand on my head on the sidewalk so you could see it.

I’d have to get on my knees to look, which would dirty my skirt.

What if I stood upside down on this car hood and opened my mouth extra wide?

You’d get dirty and probably slide off the hood and break some of your beautiful teeth.

Then I’ll just have to take out the top set and show it to you in one piece.

You saying you’ve had less success with the upper set than your lower?

I’m saying I’ve two sets of uppers. One for taking out and showing people who are interested in upper sets or really any kind of sets, teeth, twins, etcetera. And a second set underneath the first for the prehension and chewing of food and as half of a defense and offense weapon and for clasping and carrying things.

You’ve got a pretty full mouth.

I’d even have more in it if I hadn’t swallowed the yo-yo.

You forgot the string.

I didn’t forget the string, just which side I put it in. For I occasionally loop its end around the lower left molar to give the right molar a rest if I’m doing the trick several times in a row. And the last time I looped the string around the tooth was a while ago.

Just waiting for someone to bike along to do the trick for?

All the bikers on the block but you have seen it, which was why it was in my mouth so long.

No new uni-, tri-or hydrocyclists move into the neighborhood in the last few days?

One, but he didn’t stop pedaling long enough to be shown the trick to.

I’m sure there’s a good reason why, but I better go.

You have to?

The babysitter leaves to babysit for her own child when my husband comes home at five. And after an hour of babysitting alone with his son, my husband can go wild.

Paints his face, dons a malamute’s garb, does a snarling yipping dance — wild like that?

Just a few booming curses at my maiden and pet names. It isn’t easy taking care of a sleepy-hungry two-year-old between five and six.

I bet it was even harder before he turned five.

You know, sometimes it can be difficult talking to you.

That’s because I only have you for a few minutes. But at four I expect he got so out of hand now and then that you and your husband had to shout “four” and then duck, or just flee the house or crack.

No. We both had to shout “duck” and then fall on all fours in the house and quack.

You have more than one two-year-old who was four?

One’s enough for the time being.

One might be enough, but there’s nothing you can do about it once his second birthday comes.

It already has: three times. Which is the favor I want to ask of you, which I don’t think I’ve alluded to yet. You see, tonight’s Tim’s second birthnight again and neither my husband nor I—

Bill.

Phil. And we don’t want be around as we weren’t for Tim’s last three anniversaries, as we feel if we’re not there when his birthnight comes, he’ll always remain one.

One what? And how do you elude your son during the same day of his birthnight?

He was born at night, so we always assumed that’s when his anniversary is. Though whenever we travel around the world and Tim’s second anniversary comes, I always check my terrestrial calendar as to what hour and day it is where I am when it’s nine at night in New York on November tenth.