I figured I don't--
I don't actually need my distance glasses
since I can't see anything.
This is what I call an essay.
It's called "A Little Tooth."
"The lady in the white mask hits a lever,
and the blue plastic lounger swings back.
I'm no longer talking about how nice the weather has
been lately.
Now, I'm an animal halfway across the interstate.
I cross my ankles and fold my hands across my lap,
trying to appear relaxed.
Christ, it's only a teeth cleaning.
I eye the contraptions-- the bowl where you spit the bloody
remains of your mouth, the gleaming set of silver pokey
things--
how many ways can you poke and scrape?
Here are all the tubes for sucking out your insides.
I'm feeling a little exposed.
I like my spit.
My spit is who I am.
I'm made with spit and clay.
That's the sum of me, and don't fuck with it.
Everything else is hooey-- all the little successes,
and failures, and things on paper.
Love, huh?
Back in the old days, they cleaned your teeth nicely--
sweet toothpaste and a gentle brush,
that whirred kindly, and ineffectively.
A bad day would include fluoride.
That's it-- three months smiling in a wax
mold filled with axle grease, but other than that,
piece of cake.
Here at Family Dentistry, everything is changed, spiffy.
In the waiting room, I was staring melancholicly
at the pamphlets, suggestions of illness, suggestions of remedy,
when the TV came on.
Oh good, I thought, the Today Show-- a chance
to be with the bright and happy.
But no, it was a dental video.
I didn't know such things existed.
An animated paintbrush whisked an ugly mouth
into something pretty.
Now, in the examination room, with the calm apricot
wallpaper, and the sign that says,
ominously, "Painless Dentist."
the hygienist is about to clean my teeth
with her newfangled invisible pain machine.
It's a sonic X-ray chainsaw diamond cutter laceration
needle.
I've got my mouth open as wide as I can,
and my hands are holding the sides of the chair now,
sweaty and tense.
And the suction tube is pulling at the bottom of my mouth,
like a small thirsty animal.
And the hygienist descends with the sonic needle,
and the screech of cleanliness fills my head--
back and forth and weedle, weedle,
weedle into the small and unlikely places,
surprised out of their dark perfectly natural hiding.
And all of a sudden, 'sensitive there?', she asks casually,
and writes something down on my chart, goes back to it.
I flashed back to high school, to the entreaties
of the football captain.
Just jump on.
Look it.
It's almost morning already.
He was promising something-- joie de vivre?
Not exactly, but a kind of membership to a club where
people did things--
action.
This was something encouraging and appealing.
15 years later, a new football captain came calling,
or actually not calling.
He hadn't called all day--
the day he was supposed to visit me.
I spent eight hours painting a watercolor
of a beautiful sleeping dunce, hovering over a quiet village.
When he finally did call from his friend's apartment nearby,
he had no apology, but he did invite me to a party.
I took a brave step by saying, you come over here.
We've got to talk about this.
No, he said.
I fell into a trance.
I got off the phone, put on a mini skirt,
and went to the party.
There, since it was his birthday,
I gave him another painting I had made especially for him--
this one of a beautiful empty room.
I talked boldly, but not exactly wittily to all his friends.
They had nicknames like Ace and Bandage,
and their girlfriends, who didn't have names at all.
I should know the glory of science and industry.
I want to trust, but my body is trembling.
The hygienist has pulled out something new.
It's a little camera the size of a pen.
With it, she rummages around my mouth cinematically.
The images play on the TV screen suspended from the ceiling.
Has this ever happened to you?
Is your mouth shaped like a heart, too?
Is it your private mouth, the one where you store your teeth,
and all the words you didn't say,
and some of the words you finally did say, could say,
and it was a good thing that you had?
Is your mouth the place where you've made love known?
And where you've said bitter, horrible things to those
you love the most?
Is your mouth where you store grief
about your mother and father?
And where your first poem-- and where the first poem you ever
wrote resides--
Quiet red and blue little cells?
And is your mouth a reservoir of each nightmare
and each sweet dream?
And will your mouth die brutally with you when you go?
Is your mouth, as they say, the final frontier
where you keep the big stack of stuff that is you, and you
dole it out to husband, lover, child, friend--
not all of it, just some of it here and there?
On the screen, one of my molars appears,
side turned and out of focus.
I never knew it looked like that--
a big white bone and a silver blanket,
surrounded by pinkness, wet and obscene.
Once I was admitted into the realm of cleanliness and order
for about two months, and then one day, evicted.
The tall old man in tennis whites, a white mustache,
and a pith helmet held his hands behind his back
and said that, alas, due to the rain this season,
he was going to have to let me go early.
Gone from my job as locker girl at the lawn tennis club,
the place where I wore kelly green,
back into the world of random violence-- cavities.
Order is beauty, even when you are 17 and action oriented.
Order and men in white, and you want to be part of that
if you can because you, your dark heart,
shaped like a mouth, always feel like an impostor
at times like this.
If you could only really become your clothes--
the right shirt, what do you wear to an abortion?
What do you wear to tell your boyfriend of this gentle virus?
I looked at the man in tennis whites
and his drippy blue eyes, distant and unknown to me,
and hoped, for a second, that I could still
fit in like a puzzle piece, a cup in a bigger cup,
and that if I wore the outfit, if I above all lied about it,
the man in the white jacket would let me stay on.
'But sir, it's sunny all the time', I ventured.
The suspiciously innocuous person
at the dentist's has finished taking the video of my teeth.
She's made stills of some of them,
and those stills are displayed on the screen, four
separate images, my teeth as game show contestants,
and there's a second channel with two more teeth.
Are these particularly good teeth?
I'm worried maybe that's not the case.
I'm getting a funny feeling.
When the dentist himself arrives,
I am somewhere beyond cowardly.
I'm staring at my massive teeth on TV,
and my hair is scribbled and scrambled by the headrest.
Pamphlets on expensive dental procedures
are in my purse, which is on the floor along with my jacket.
This little pile of my things shames me."