North of Nowhere, South of Loss. Janette Turner Hospital
arms and the frail air of entreaty, that made me think of a praying mantis. Maybe she heard my thought, or maybe the grasshopper she pinched between finger and thumb reminded her. “He said something about a praying mantis,” she said. “You asked him about it, Philippa. What was that thing?”
“The ootheca.”
“Funny word, isn’t it?” She pulled her housecoat around her and tightened the sash. “He won’t be there for lunch, will he?”
I bit my lip. “He had to take an early flight,” I said. It was and it wasn’t a lie. We both knew it. “He had to be back in Melbourne.”
She concentrated on the roses, bending her stick limbs over them, a slight geometric arrangement of supplication. “Anyway,” she said. “I don’t like going out. We never did, Ed and me.” She straightened up and turned away from me, walking toward the gate. “I hope you won’t mind, Philippa, if I don’t …” At the gate, she reached up and picked a frangipani and gave it to me. “Could you tell him,” she said, “that I’ve still got his crystal set? It’s in his room. I thought he might, you know … I thought one day he might …”
I held the creamy flower against my cheek. It’s excessive, I thought angrily, the smell of frangipani, the smell of Brisbane. I had to hold onto the gate. There was surf around my ears, I was caught in an undertow. When I could get my voice to come swimming back, I’d tell her about the safety layer that Brian kept around his mum and his dad.
They are curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door to the reception room and come in off the esplanade. Their walk is different too; loose, somehow; as though they have teflon joints. Smile propulsion, Dr Foley whispers, giving her a quick wink, and Beth presses her lips together, embarrassed, because it’s true: they do seem to float on goodwill, the way hydrofoil ferries glide out to the coral cays on cushions of air. Friendliness spills out of them and splashes you. Beth likes this, but it makes her slightly uneasy too. It is difficult to believe in such unremitting good cheer.
Of all the curious things about Americans, however, the very oddest is this: they wear their teeth the way Aussie diggers wear medals on Anzac Day. They flash them, they polish them, they will talk about them at the drop of a hat.
“Got this baby after a college football game,” Lance Harris says, pointing to a crown on the second bicuspid, upper left. Lance is here courtesy of Jetabout Adventure Tours and a dental mishap on the Outer Reef. “Got a cheekful of quarterback cleats, cracked right to the gum, I couldn’t talk for a week. It was, let me see, my junior year, Mississippi State, those rednecks. Hell of a close fight, but we beat ’em, all that matters, right? Keeps on giving me heck, but hey, worth every orthodontist’s dollar, I say.”
Beth never understands the half of it, but in any case, what can you make of people who talk about their teeth? She just smiles and nods, handing Dr Foley instruments, vacuuming spit. American spit is cleaner than Australian spit, that’s another interesting difference. Less nicotine, she thinks. No beer in their diets. But Scotch is yellowish too, wouldn’t that … ? and certainly the boats that go beyond Michaelmas Cay for marlin are as full of Johnnie Walker as of American tourists with dreams. Champagne too. She’s seen them onloading crates at the wharf. She imagines Lance’s wife, camcorder in hand, schlurping up into her videotape Lance’s blue marlin and his crisp summer cottons and the splash of yellow champagne and the dazzling teeth, whiter than bleached coral. How do they get them so white? Here I go, she thinks, rolling up her eyes for nobody’s benefit but her own. Here I go, thinking about teeth. What a subject.
She wonders, just the same, about amber spit and clear spit. Is it a national trait?
“Australians don’t floss,” Lance mumbles, clamp in mouth, through a break in the roadwork on his molars.
Beth’s hand flies to her lips. Has she done it again, blurted thought into the room? Possibly. She’s been jumpy, that’s why; ever since the dreams began again, the dreams of Giddie turning up. Or maybe she just imagined Lance spoke. Maybe she gave him the words. Her head is so cluttered with dialogue that bits of it leak out if she isn’t careful.
“It astonishes me, the lack of dental hygiene hereabouts,” Lance says. “We notice it with the hotel maids and the tourist guides, you know. As a dentist, it must break your heart.”
“Oh, we manage,” Dr Foley says. He lets the drill rise on its slick retractable cord and winks at Beth from behind his white sleeve. She lowers her eyes, expressionless, moving the vacuum hose, schlooping up the clear American words.
“You see this one?” Lance mumbles, pointing to an incisor. “Thought I’d lost this baby once, I could barely …” but the polished steel scraper gently pushes his consonants aside and only a stream of long shapeless untranslatable vowels grunt their way into the vacuum tube.
If we put all the tooth stories end to end, Beth thinks, we could have a twelve volume set. Oral history, Dr Foley calls it, laughing and laughing in his curious silent way at the end of a day, the last patient gone. Every American incisor and canine has its chronicle, lovingly kept, he maintains, laughing again. Many things amuse him. Beth can’t quite figure him out. She loves the curious things he says, the way he says them. She loves his voice. It’s the way people sound when they first come north from Brisbane or Sydney. He seems to her like someone who became a dentist by accident.
As he cranks down the chair, he murmurs: “The Annals of Dentition, we’re keeping a chapter for you, Lance.”
“I’m mightily obliged to you, Doctor, mightily obliged. Fitting me in at such short notice.” Lance shakes the dentist’s hand energetically. “And to you too, young lady.” He peers at the badge on Beth’s uniform. “Beth,” he reads. “Well, Miss Elizabeth, I’m grateful to you, ma’am. I surely am.”
“It’s not Elizabeth,” she says. “It’s short for Bethesda.”
“And a very fine city Bethesda is, yes ma’am, State of Maryland. I’ve been there once or twice. Now how did you come by a name like that?”
“The tooth fairy brought it,” Beth says.
Dr Foley’s eyebrows swoop up like exuberant gulls, then settle, solemn. Lance laughs and, a little warily, pats Beth on the shoulder.
“Well, Lance,” the dentist says in his professional voice. “Fight the good fight. Floss on. Mrs Wilkinson will handle the billing arrangements for you.” He ushers the American out, closes the door, and leans against it. “Don’t miss our thrilling first volume,” he says to Beth, madly flexing his acrobatic brows. His tone has gone plummy, mock epic, and she can hear his silent laughter pressed down underneath. “Wars of the Molars. Send just $19.95 and a small shipping and handling charge to Esplanade Dental Clinic, Cairns—”
“Ssh,” she giggles. “He’ll hear.”
“No worries. Now if Mrs Wilkinson hears me—”
“She might make you stand in the corner.”
“You’re a funny little thing,” he says, leaning against the door, watching her, as though he’s finally reached a judgment now that she’s been working a month. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she says, defensive. “It’s on my application.”
“Oh, I never pay attention.” He brushes forms aside with one hand. “I go by the eyes in the interview.” Beth feels something tight and sudden in her chest, with heat branching out from it, spreading. “You can see intelligence. And I look for a certain liveliness. ‘You haven’t been in Cairns long, I seem to remember.”
“No.”
“Just finished high school, I’ve forgotten