by Marcia Williams
I sat in a comfortable chair facing a wall in a room with a vaulted ceiling and tawny mesh screening the bank of windows. Late afternoon light filtered in while riffling leaves on the trees outside cast meditative shadows on the far wall.
“What kind of music would you like?” the nurse asked.
“Whatever the doctor wants.” I glanced at the speaker on the soft-green wall before me. For this last appointment late on a June Monday, it was more important that he, rather than I, be relaxed. The speaker remained silent.
I inspected an enormous x-ray image of my tooth, number twenty-six, displayed on a screen—the only other item on the green wall. A monitor behind me beeped a stressful hammering every time my heart beat. The beep wasn’t necessary for me to know when my heart pumped. I could feel every throb in old number twenty-six. Soon the nurse threaded an oxygen cannula under my nose. That added a slight hiss to the monitor’s percussion.
Children speak of losing a tooth, even when it is neither swallowed nor lost. Number twenty-six was not to be lost; extracted was the dentist’s term. I preferred removed as it seemed less savage. My mother saved my baby teeth in a decorative milk glass jar. A couple of inches high, the container had horizontal ridges and three little feet that boosted it above whatever surface it stood on. Its copper lid, decorated with white swirls, sat loosely on top. In addition to my teeth, it held errant buttons waiting to be sewn back on or put in the official button box, bobby pins despite the fact that my mother wore her hair short and had no need for them, a few odd Canadian coins, and likely a lone collar stay from one of my father’s shirts. In her role as the tooth fairy, my mother paid the going rate. There would be no dollar for tooth number twenty-six—indeed the price for its removal had a few more digits.
When I was growing up, my mother smoked Raleigh cigarettes, saving the coupons which came with each pack and carton to trade in on merchandise. They offered the same sorts of things that the Green stamp catalog did, general household or sporting items, the sort a bank might give away as a promotion for opening a savings account. My mother would let me look through the Raleigh catalog to help decide what to trade her chits in for. You could get a set of stainless steel cooking bowls or a blanket. You could not exchange your Raleigh coupons for a casket.
I had my wisdom teeth removed when I was in my late teens. My parents and I lived in Florida in a ranch house with terrazzo floors. I recall going into my bathroom after the extraction of those teeth. I locked the bathroom door, hollow-core with a cheap knob, the sort with a button in the middle. The locking would not have been known had I not then fainted onto the unyielding floor. My mother must have heard me go down. Was it a thump or a slump, perhaps muffled by the small bathmat in front of the sink? She rushed to help, only to find the door locked. It could have been opened by sliding a credit card up against the crummy little latch, but she just shouted and screamed and raised enough noise that either it brought me back to consciousness or, when I returned to consciousness on whatever schedule my body had determined to follow, I crawled to the door and let her in.
“Don’t ever lock the door like that!”
I’m sure I agreed in my drugged, recently passed-out stupor, but it was an easy enough promise to honor: never again lock myself in a bathroom after I’d had four teeth cut out of my head.
That day of the wisdom teeth wasn’t the only time I’d locked myself away from her. The first time I was about three, and we lived in New York. That winter day, in robe and slippers, my mother was in the basement doing laundry. I was home and fascinated by clicking, turning locks and latches. First, I locked the deadbolt in the kitchen door to the basement. Then, I decided to play in the dirty clothes hamper built into the back of the bathroom closet. The hamper was designed to be opened and closed only from the outside. However, once inside, I cleverly pulled its door closed by pinching the back of the spring latch between my fingers and pulling. CLICK. It latched shut, irreversibly shut so far as I was concerned, trapped in the fusty dark scary inside. This time it was I who screamed.
My mother, hearing my cries, ran upstairs, only to find the kitchen door bolted shut. My screams continued. She didn’t know what was wrong. She ran out through the garage, up the driveway, through the snow, around to the front steps, in the front door, toward the sound of my cries. Opening the hamper door, she pulled me out, grabbed my small upper arm in one fist, and shook me roundly while screaming at me for scaring her.
***
My mother smoked until well after I left home. As a child I had frequent respiratory infections for which she would dutifully take me to the pediatrician, for yet another course of antibiotics. After that, we’d go to Merry Go Round toy store where I could choose a new outfit for my Barbie. My dolls had vast wardrobes.
In junior high school my mother snapped at me, “Don’t you brush your teeth? They’re all yellow.”
The color had been baked into the enamel by the tetracycline prescribed for my infections. The ones caused by her smoking. Taking her criticism to heart, I started using extra-hard toothbrushes and brushed longer and more often. That aggressive brushing wore away my gums and the enamel on tooth number twenty-six and others. The gum line in front of that throbbing tooth was low, not enough to hold it in place. Nothing could be done to replace the lost gums to increase the amount of the teeth they covered. But by harvesting tissue from the roof of my mouth, it could be applied at the gum line to thicken the depth of the gums. Those italicized euphemisms mask the cutting, sewing, and healing involved. I had that procedure done several times.
By the time of its removal, number twenty-six was a sad little tooth, crowded in front of teeth twenty-five and twenty-seven. A root canal years before had failed, leading to an infection which darkened the tooth. Its front had been bonded—like a filling stuck to the front—several times due to erosion from that heavy brushing. The bonding, being artificial, did not darken, leaving the visible portion a mixture of original yellow, black from the infection, and replaced whitish bonding. If the tooth fairy had still been alive, she’d have reduced payment for this damaged merchandise.
After I emerged from the sedation, shadows of leaves still flickered on the wall opposite the windows. Along with instructions for the following days, they gave me the tooth, such as it was. The surgeon said that he hadn’t needed to cut to extract it, that some light taps with what I imagined to be a petite mallet had loosened it sufficiently that it crumbled in what he further described as about fifty pieces. What they dropped into my palm was rough, sharp, and stained with blood. I could tell which end was up, as that part was a little less bloody, but still cannot tell which side faced out.
Marcia Williams is a writer based in Missoula, Montanta.