Experiment in the Essay #3: "All the Better to Eat You With, My Dear": #52Essays2017

Adult braces don't gain you a lot of sexy points.  In fact, they suck. All the things that suck about them in childhood are multiplied by your age and amplified by your tight concept of dignity.  

They point you out as in need of correction.  A problem-in-process. And once you have them, you notice everyone else who has them.

There are a lot of us.  We're all subtly trying to keep our lips tight to our teeth when we smile. 

I don't have mine anymore; it's been over a decade since those oral shackles were removed.  But I still feel a flash of recognition when I see wires peeking out of adult mouths.  

For years they were recommended, the way a friend might recommend a favorite movie frequently, forgetting the recommendation had already been made. It seemed like a good idea, but no pressure, right?.  And then I faced the fact that there was no more "waiting and seeing" if I didn't want my mouth to cave in. I did not want my mouth to cave in; adjustments had to be made.  

When faced with no choice, choose choicelessness, right? When my toddler has no choice, I still give him options (You have to get your shit changed, no? Can't just leave it there? "Do you want to bring me the diaper, or do you want me to get it myself?") It's a false choice, but it's still something.  

So I picked "clear" rather than "metal mouth" from the menu of two-- but the braces in actuality were not perfectly clear, and there was still metal. The final and third option, "Invisible" braces, which I highly doubt were invisible, were obviously the most attractive choice.  But like any most attractive choices, they were miles out of my price range. 

My braces were "clear" for the first few minutes after they were cleaned and capped, but that was only until you chewed food. Then, those clear braces were whatever color your food was.  By default, they were yellow, like the sunrise.  You were told to be careful what you ate.  But truth was, barring turmeric curry or beets, whatever was on your plate created low-grade stains, and you need special little picks to get the food bits out. 

In my case, these braces were just a necessary first step to operating on my jaw-- inserting implants and crowns, to create a proper set. 

My orthodontist was dripping with white male privilege. His teeth were Establishment.  His hair was snowstorm white, as if he had dyed it to match his medical coat.  His skin was bronzed, shimmery in the cheeks; whenever he wasn't stooped over someone's mouth charging thousands in fees, he was (or so I assumed) sunning himself in a tanning salon, reclining in a coffin's UV surrogate. His skin didn't fit with the NYC climate, and he was going to make sure your teeth didn't fit with your face. He was going to turn your bite into a Rube Goldberg machine. 

Dr. F asked me patronizing questions while his tools were jammed into my gaping mouth.  "How's the Latin, doll?"  

And me: "GWJIjwifakjhr."

Fuck you, I think.

I taught Latin in downtown Brooklyn, and the day I was to go to my 22 year-old's dating grave and get the braces installed, I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge from work into the city.  That walk has always made me feel more free; maybe it's because the sky suddenly feels so accessible, like it belongs to us.  

Under me, the water sparkled, like my teeth never had.  Little boats trolled.  Everything was well ordered, except my teeth. I was lonely, and I felt lonelier imagining how lame it would be to kiss someone whose teeth were essentially strapped in.

____

These wouldn't be my first wires. In elementary school, I'd had a retainer. My pediatric dentist was a snidely confident black woman, who made you feel like she was the only real dentist to have ever existed. 

I remember her almond skin (you spend a lot of time looking at your dentist's face) as beautiful and flawless, her hair cropped close; she could have easily been a dermatologist by example.  Patients would be compliant just from wanting their face to look like hers. 

As a medical practitioner, she was a cooing magician, patronizing--matronizing?-- in her own way, notorious for pulling teeth without Novocain. Her office smelled of sanitary practices.  

She made a mold of my mouth I can still taste, a weirdly pleasant rubber, and then customized a retainer which she swore would keep me aligned enough to never in my life need braces, which were a waste of money (according to her. She charged for the free toothbrushes and probably per toilet paper square). Add this claim to the list of inaccurate medical assurances one receives over a lifetime.

I wore my retainer regularly enough to make a difference. I can still feel its particular plastic sealing against my upper palate, the dome of my mouth capped and speech subtly compromised.  When I ate, I was to take it out for obvious reasons.  But I was not alone then in having such contraptions; many kids were dealing with astray teeth. 

One day, after eating my lunch in the school cafeteria, I accidentally dumped the retainer, which I would wrap in a napkin on the side of my tray, into the huge industrial garbage bin.  By the time I realized what I'd done, feeling that special "something is missing" feeling ballooning like an allergy in my mouth, many other lunchers had thrown their various nasty fare in on top of it.  I froze. 

I started crying and someone called the Assistant Principal, who patiently stood over me while I fished it out from the orange scraps, milk cartons, and unidentifiable food stuff they only dare to pass off as edible in school cafeterias.  She patiently stood over me again in the girls bathroom, while I ran it under the lukewarm tap, feeling like I'd never possibly wash off all that grossness. 

Even though I could see there was nothing left to rinse, I kept the retainer under the tap stream.  The sink basin was spotted with ABC gum of various colors, purples and pinks and blues. No matter that a trash can was right beside the sink: the sink or the wall-- the wall!-- or under a chair was always where the gum wound up.  

You could not chew gum with a retainer.  

The AP nudged me, gently; when I finally fit the contraption back into my mouth, I felt queasy, sure I could taste the half-eaten school lunch patties of unknown meaty origins. 

Shortly after that my allotted years were up. My teeth were free for the next decade and a half or so, but then had to face the family history they had inherited, that incontrovertible bone truth.

____

My father and mother have disaster teeth. My dad's teeth plaque easily. My mother's have been falling out and being put back for as long as  I can remember.  She jokes that she's single-handedly funded her dentist's second and third home.  The joke is more accurate than it is funny. 

Luckily, we can afford dental care; even more luckily, my parents mostly subsidized mine, which would have sent me into early bankruptcy, and done who knows what to my darling credit history.  They rationalized this gift as "an inheritance that was their fault"-- mostly my mom's (because isn't everything, as studies tell us?), but my dad was always generous about covering whatever costs we buckled under.  The good fortune of this situation is not lost on me; had their situation been otherwise, I'd be whispering this story through naked gums, gums I loved when my newborn had them, but that are startlingly sad in an adult. 

My paternal grandpa had an entire set of fake teeth.  No one ever explained to me why you'd have to lose every single tooth in your head. Overnight, he stored his fake teeth in a little porcelain container on the bathroom vanity, soaking in water and maybe baking soda.  When he took out his teeth, his cheeks collapsed into his gums, and he lisped, a person without teeth is a different person.  Every morning, he became himself again.

He had a notably wonderful smile and warm eyes to match.  But when his teeth came out, he looked small. 

We used to dare each other to go poke his teeth, floating in the brine.

My teeth were problems from the start. Four baby teeth had no adult teeth under them, waiting to emerge. The night the tooth fairy came for those was not a good one, you know? 

Lots of medical pictures were taken of the inside of my head to confirm, to view the gaps in what should be. My vocabulary absorbed precocious words like "maxillary."  My mother had eight baby teeth in this condition, as did her mother; and it led her to dental disarray, structural problems like a cathedral faces without buttresses. My mother has spent a lot of time going to dentist appointments, waiting, getting little adjustments, new crowns.  The words "bridge" and "crown" were tossed around a lot; not the kind that lets you walk on water; not the kind that marks your royalty.  

___

I've had dreams, many, where my teeth crumble out of my head.

Folklore says this means there is a destructive force in my life I am not dealing with or facing squarely. 

When I spent a year in my mid-twenties living in Thailand as a traveler, healing from some intense events back home, these dreams were frequent. 

In the fall (using American seasons-Thailand doesn't really do Fall) I lived briefly with a middle-aged Thai couple who owned a restaurant.  I don't remember now how I'd stumbled into their rental room. The couple also took in for short-term stay orphaned Thai children. The children helped out in the restaurant and it kept them out of worse trouble and aggressive pecking order at the orphanage. The woman, Noi, was plump and very nervous generally. She was very worried that I kept dreaming about crumbling teeth, a fact I at first shared casually.  To her it was a bad omen that meant ...I don't remember, that my mother would die?  That my uterus would rot?  

She would look at me out of the corner of her eye while she puttered around the restaurant in the morning, getting ready to open, folding napkins and sorting forks, her fresh t-shirt already a little sweaty down the back, the food she would serve not very good or bad. 

The couple had been financially scammed years before and were still recovering, maybe never would completely, dragging their health struggles with them. Her English was halting, like my teeth, but every time she passed me she asked me how my teeth were.  What I had dreamed, as if the story would change if she just questioned enough. 

I was helping her lay out spoons on the few tables. I smiled with extra just-fine teeth showing, but it didn't seem to calm her down. It didn't really calm me down either, once she planted the worry seed. 

They say smiling tricks your brain into thinking you are happy, but smiling is a nervous reflex, meant to create social cohesion and the mirage of friendliness when once senses a threat. I wondered if, actually, all your teeth could fall out in a single unfortunate rumble. I wondered if bad things would happen, if I should listen to my dreams or let them go like some TV commercial I wasn't interested in. In the restaurant, I got good at tuning out sounds. The TV, suspended from the ceiling, was always on and often played videos of The Eagles music; Noi gave my teeth a wide berth.  "What you dream? Say again?"

I didn't want to say it again; but sometimes when you are staying with people, it's easier to crease yourself to fit into the envelopes of their beliefs.  Noi was going to get to the karmic root of my problems, maybe out of worry that they were contagious, and was it a good idea for me to be renting their room. 

She went to visit a Buddhist priest on my behalf.  She needed to know my exact birth day of the week and time of birth.  There was some confusion if it mattered that I was born extremely premature.  She eventually decided it did not.  

When she returned, she had a little gold necklace with the image of a seated buddhist monk on an oval pendant.  She gave it to me and told me to offer certain incense and say Thai words in a certain order.  She wrote them transliterated on a piece of paper-- all I needed to know what that they were auspicious.  Cheaper than the dentist, which I also visited in Thailand.

She was pushy, bringing me incense, showing me where in the house I could offer the blessings.  

My mother did not die; my uterus did not rot; my teeth did not fall out.

_______

In college I bit a fork. I felt the tooth chip, a tectonic plate breaking loose; a microscopic event that left a macroscopic impression. It seemed I would find something the size of a dinosaur femur when I fished the damage out of my mouth, not the speck of tooth I later located in the masticated carrot.

Once a tooth chips it is more likely to chip again. Thus a tooth slowly erodes, until it is half the size of its match without any defining incident splitting it.  You can remember the first chip, and the other ones with lesser intensity.  But suddenly you are not your full self. 

____

Not long after I got my braces, fearing the end of an already stale love life, I fell in love hard. The buddha would have advised against it and the suffering that would ensue. People forget pleasure also leads to suffering, or is often its precursor. This is why you should always floss and never have too good of a time.

An affair began with my best friend, my colleague at school. I hardly noticed the braces when I smiled at him or just thinking about him, even as the wiring pulled at my flushed cheeks, even as the awareness of his wife and children pulled at my conscience. In fact, my guilt caught in the wires of my need, like flies being zapped against an electric fly-swatter.  My seventh grader students took pity on me, seeing me wince as I taught, assuming it was the mechanics of the braces to blame, and lent me their wax.  Embarrassing, no? You accept gifts that are given.

The wires made frequent tiny tears inside my cheeks and lips, like hundreds of paper-cuts on your fingers at once.   I wedged wax in my cheek, making my speech awkward. Being loved so intensely made me not care; I was defective and someone had chosen me anyway. 

Kissing whenever we could sneak it sent a current coursing through my internal wiring. And in the braces, seasame seeds, spinach, apple skin. My students did not know what was really piercing me, and I did not tell them. 

____

My son, 20 months old, still finds counting magical. He counts his teeth, regularly, like this:2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5. When you gain teeth your whole face changes. They come in one by one, at first creepily like a chipmunk's, the two front ones bulging against the thinning gums, like icons of ghosts.

I don't want to ask a priest if he's been born lucky; but just as much I want to ask. We cannot afford extensive dental work, should he need it, so perhaps he'll be back in his original state sooner than later. Imagine consulting a priest only to find out there would be braces in your future, an unglamorous but likely accurate prophecy. Start saving, the priest might wink: but also, start letting go.

There are people you expect not to have braces: the president, Ms America, your orthodontist, whose gleaming teeth should incite envy and aspiration. You child is always a toss up. 

No matter--Our support systems identify us as vulnerable, our crutches, our glasses, our props, our various exoskeletons. Each of us defective in our own way; each of us with the canine teeth that mark us as part dog, our animal nature.

The day my braces were taken off, my mouth felt full of freedom. But the freedom is illusory. What is forcefully corrected only stays straight for so long before caving in again to its natural tendency. 

Thus, sexy or not, my teeth creep up on each other, the implant materials corrode, my bite shifts.

On the train to my dentist, an old guy who plays jazz and public radio and can't really see your teeth anymore--for a routine cleaning, I see the mother with adult braces seated across from me. Her (what I assume to be) husband is sound asleep, mouth hanging open, his hand protectively on her thigh, her baby mesmerized by the train lights. My husband falls asleep like that too, comfortable wherever, and the trust his relaxed jaw implies makes my pelvis pulse. 

I can see a certain bashfulness when the mother smiles at the baby, though babies don't judge us aesthetically, and thank god. Her self-consciousness in presence of other riders, which makes her look even more adolescent. I want to shout, I had them too, you look good, but my teeth are heading south, and the gesture of solidarity might cost her her hope in this process.

It's like this, I think, each of us hoping for right connection without coercion, without crowding, a certain kind of uprightness, a stay against loss of order. But we must settle for what we get: our unfortunate brittle bones, and our sense of being, which no metal however tightened can truly restrain.