Toothy

<p style=”clear: both”>Ungently, I woke up at 2 am, not sure whether it was a throbbing in my jaw that caused this, or the anxiety attending the realization I am going to have to take action. The fears are taller than me, like the boisterous, intimidating eighth graders at Rainer’s school and the gauntlet they present when you have to walk down the hall where their lockers are, how they sometimes knock each other down or just stand in oblivious little knots of adolescent solipsism. Only. I have an eighth grader of my own at home, so I know the trick where you squint and see that they’re really kids after all and you can squint them back down to size and they just want attention and respect and the expression of all that exuberance.

I line the fears all up to face them down: I’m scared of causing anyone any inconvenience, scared that I will be unavailable to drop the kids off at school or pick them up after, I am scared of the dentist being irritated somehow that popping out this filling I’ve undone some work of his, nervous about missing the high school redesign meeting at the school district main office, nervous about having no excuses and having to go to it (new building, I’m unrehearsed on where I park and how I get there and mean secretaries who could stare me down in unfamiliar corridors). I’m anxious about discomfort in the chair. Anxious that the I’ll have to live with the discomfort until after the holidays. I’m worried I’ll be yelled at for not calling the dentist yesterday. Worried about losing the tooth, about how that has to be another stupid intimation of mortality, as if I needed another. I’m worried about how much it will cost. It’s hard to go back to sleep.

I wake up again at six, my stomach still tight with all of the anxiety though I practice the breathing I did with Dana at yoga yesterday, inhale broadening exhale deepening and it is not so bad. And awake, I might as well write. But the moment the iPhone struck seven (if it rings, then surely it strikes?) I call the dentist’s office, tentative, “I think I lost a filling?” “Can you come in right now?” “Oh, yes!” Raven doesn’t hesitate about taking Rainer to school, so I throw on clothes, make Rainer’s lunch for him, race out.

And when I get home I finish writing. My lips are rubbery and it’s startling to look in the mirror and lok — normal, my jaw not distended or bloated. And my head is full of my “excruciating sensitivity” that the dentist walked into the room where I was waiting with all his bluster and impatience, and I had this feeling I get where I think I could be a human sponge and absorb all of the stress in the room to be carried out and safely wrung out elsewhere and why do I do that?

I was everyone in the room: my Hermione self, wanting the dentist’s pat on my head “what a good patient you are!” and the hygienist/assistant (you never find out what some people’s job titles are and I worry about accidentally using a wrong/insulting one, calling a flight attendant a stewardess or something — but her role! I know her role!) who has three kids with three different father and quietly takes the dentist’s impatience, the sharpness in his voice when he asks for something a second time, only I imagine how one day she won’t, and she won’t even know why. And so during the periods of waiting for my mouth to get numb and for the new filling to set or whatever while the dentist is off doing something else I joke with her and sympathize with her in that mother-to-mother way, emphasizing how we are alike, trying to relax her.

Back on my back, eyes clamped shut against the three sets of hands coming in and out of my mouth, trying to soften in the places where I want to strain and resist and tighten, I was also the trainee, more fearful, I think, she still hasn’t worked out how to seamlessly stay out of the way while having the mindreading ability to have exactly the tool he needs at the ready before he asks. And I’m even him, I resonate with the impatience, the stress, maybe, of being a small business owner, the economy perhaps, one pressure, and changing technology — he’s said things that make me think he finds computers irritating. It’s really important to him that people think he’s smart and he’s given monologues on anthropology while his hands were in my mouth that I honestly enjoyed. I imagine he is surrounded by women who sort of cater to him, the hygienists and dental assistants, receptionists, his wife of thirty-five years, their daughters, but that catering carries a reciprocal sort of responsibility for them all. Of anybody I’ve met in the last fifteen years, he seems to embody patriarchy, and I’m shocked that this summons only sympathy. And, that, yes, I trust him as a dentist.

I absorb it all and I come home and spill it out. My tongue tries to get reoriented to the changed contours of my mouth and there’s still a dull ache, I’m sharp with my kids. But I should sleep better tonight.