Life with Sudden Death. Michael Downing
a college education, but my mother was something of a Zen master when it came to imparting such moral lessons. She didn’t criticize the bums, and she wouldn’t tolerate any bad remarks about them. Instead, after we’d been tape-measured for a new uniform of polyester blue slacks and short-sleeved white shirts at Besse-Clarke, she’d point to The Bridge and say, They started out just like you.
I was of no interest to the malingerers, but something about my gums really caught Dr. F.’s fancy that day. I was pleased. I’d tried to impress him with my two-teeth-in-one-lunch story when I climbed into the chair, but he just harrumphed and said I should know better. He was a big man with wiry steel-gray hair on his head and arms, and whenever I didn’t open wide enough, he’d just insert his thumb and forefinger into my mouth and crack open my jaw another few inches. He’d taught me to raise my hand whenever he did something that hurt, but the first and only time I’d used the distress signal he had very politely asked me to try to keep my hand out of his face while he was working.
He took a lot of X-rays that day, and he reminded his assistant they were not cheap, which I understood as a reprimand about her rolling her eyes whenever he handed her another slide from my mouth, as if she had better things to do. Then he announced he was going to drill a cavity even though it was in a baby tooth.
I’d heard a lot about the drill, and it was often screaming in my brother Joe’s mouth while I read the women’s magazines in the waiting room, but I honestly believed Dr. F. would never turn it on me. He’d already packed me with cotton and hung a hose from my lower lip, so he probably didn’t hear my offer to just swallow the infected tooth. He said I had a molar growing under my jawbone. He was a man of few words, so I was not expecting anything else by way of explanation. Then he said, Sideways, and he sounded disgusted. You’re going to need an operation someday, he said. He also made it clear he wanted no part of the surgery. He intended to patch up the temporary molar and leave the whole mess to someone else.
If you can’t move your lips or your tongue, you really can’t pronounce the letters n and v, so I said, “hohocay” about twenty times until he nodded and said, Novocain? I’d never had it, and neither had Joe, but we knew kids who got it from their second-rate dentists when they had a loose tooth. I also had to pee, but nothing bugged Dr. F. more than pee breaks, so I figured I’d settle for the Novocain pill.
He took a step away from me and said, Do you really want your mother to have to pay an extra seven dollars for Novocain? For a baby tooth? He also produced a huge, chrome hypodermic needle with pistol grips, implying that the Novocain was a bitter pill.
I took a pee break, and he wasn’t pleased.
Initially, I was humiliated. No one had ever come so close to accusing me of being unable to afford something in the normal range of things a kid might need. Then I was a little indignant. After all the good press he’d gotten around my house, how could he possibly make me pay for something he already had in stock? Then it got worse. I realized that either Dr. F. was lying about charging my mother for the shot, or my mother was prone to exaggerating about his generosity. Were we so poor that we couldn’t afford Novocain and bought-new corduroys? Or had we actually paid for that Oriental carpet in our living room? Just how popular had my father been?
Dr. F. repacked my mouth. He decided I didn’t want the Novocain. He was right. I was ashamed I’d asked for it. While he drilled, I held on to the arms of the chair and practiced my multiplication tables. Thirteen baby teeth times twenty-five cents plus the two disputed swallowed teeth times twenty-five cents made three dollars and seventy-five cents. My total take from the tooth fairy wasn’t enough for one shot of Novocain, and that was before the Missions got their cut.
By the time I was eighteen, I had graduated from basic dentistry to the care of an orthodontist, but instead of tackling the sideways molar, he’d diagnosed an alignment problem and tried to sell me braces at regular retail rates. My mother bargained him down to a retainer, and after a few visits it was obvious that he was not equal to the task of correcting my underbite. My mother was not surprised, as I’d inherited that from her side of the family. I was sent back to Dr. F., who threw up his hands and sent me to an oral surgeon, a friend of his who had full charge-account privileges with the insurance companies. He knocked me out with anesthesia and extracted my sideways molar. While he was in there, he did some shopping for his friend and plucked an incisor that had always bugged Dr. F.
When I graduated from high school, I was missing a couple of teeth and I had an acceptance letter from Harvard—the same ticket out of town my brother Joe had cashed in two years earlier, despite my mother’s profound objections to his choice of a secular college, and lectures from our brothers and sisters about the academic superiority of the Catholic colleges they’d attended. Near the end of that summer, my mother asked me to go for a ride with her. She was the least offhand person I knew at the time, so I figured she had something on her mind that would be easier to say if we weren’t looking at each other directly.
We drove in silence from our house to Park Square and right past Dr. F.’s office, and then my mother pulled a U-turn in the new station wagon and parked in front of Besse-Clarke. And still neither of us said anything. We were almost equals by then in our ability not to express a normal human response to things like sudden U-turns or scalding hot water in the dishpan or an imminent leave-taking. I was not unimpressed by my mother’s correct estimation of the turning radius of the Oldsmobile, but I kept my tongue against the back of my teeth instead of smiling. She turned her face away from mine and stared at The Bridge. I figured I knew what she was going to say.
She didn’t say anything. My mother surprised me by leading me into a pet store. We’d had one dog, and he’d died not long after my father. We’d never replaced either of them. I pitied people who kept pets, as I pitied people who planted showy, ornamental flower gardens. They were squandering time and money doing exactly what we weren’t doing: They were trying to patch up the holes in their hearts. Joe, on the other hand, tried for years to get permission to keep just about every kind of rodent that wouldn’t kill you if it got loose, but he never prevailed.
My mother said hello to the bald, mustachioed man behind the counter. He was wearing a green smock, as if maybe he also worked part-time as Dr. F.’s dental hygienist. My mother tapped on a few of the cages and smiled sadly when the tiny cats and dogs scurried through the wood shavings to lick her finger. There were a lot of birds that didn’t belong in the Berkshires complaining in cages in the back of the store. I pretended I might buy a painted ceramic dog-food bowl. None of us said anything until my mother said, “Thank you very much,” and led me back to the car.
There were two guys seated on the sidewalk across the street, their backs against the wall of The Bridge, rolling joints. My mother said I could drive, which always pleased me and her, I think, though you couldn’t have proved it. Just before The Bridge dropped out of my rear-view mirror, my mother said, That man I said hello to in the pet store? He graduated from Harvard.
4. Negative Capability
When my brother Joe was in sixth grade, he started wearing ankle weights. He said they were designed to improve your basketball skills. We were both on the St. Teresa’s team in the Catholic Youth Center’s parish league. I sat on the bench and Joe played, and our team usually lost. I was in fourth grade. This was the year St. Mary’s parish started using their second string by the middle of the first half in games against us. Kids my age were able to hold a lead against kids Joe’s age. Our coach, Mr. C., said it was bad sportsmanship. Joe said St. Mary’s was just breaking our spirits, and he admired them for it.
Joe didn’t think Mr. C. had the right killer instincts and blamed him for a lot of our losses. He also blamed a couple on the coach’s son David, who was Joe’s age and just as skinny but had the liability of often losing his glasses and seeing a blur at important moments, like when shooting and passing. David was Joe’s friend and our best scorer, but sport bands didn’t work on his head, for some reason. Joe said if he had a head with a problem like that, he’d use Red Cross adhesive tape, which held firm to eyeglasses but could be removed without ripping your hair out. I’m sure he suggested this to Coach C. Joe was known for making helpful suggestions