The dental hygienist smiled at me and squeezed my right shoulder in a maternal way. While I appreciated the gesture, it did little to make me feel at ease. What I really wanted was for someone to explain exactly what I could expect -- what type of anesthetic they would use, how long the procedure would take, or an assessment or examination of some sort. Instead, various white coats shuffled around me, mumbling to each other and placing scary tools on a tray by my head.
When I finally asked the hygienist whether I'd be getting "general anesthetic," she replied with contradictions, saying, "Yes, but we don't put you under. Only the big dogs do that. We are the small puppies," and then shrugged and left the room.
I waited for what felt like a long time, eyeing my cuticles and wishing I were back in the waiting room, reading. The theme song from the show Taxi played over the office speakers, twice, before the hygienist returned.
"Which of your teeth do you want to get taken out first?," she asked. "It's your choice! Do you have a favorite today?" Politely as possible, I asked, "Shouldn't we leave that up to the dentist?" No one had even glanced in my mouth yet.
I tried some questions on the dentist and told him everything I could think of that he might want to know about my dental history, in an effort to prevent any painful mistakes. "Slow down. One question at a time," he replied, before responding with more silence.
During the extraction, they told me I should make a sound if I feel any pain, so when they stabbed me, I made a small whimper, and they promptly gave me more anesthetic. When I tried that again, the hygienist chided me, "Now only let me know if you feel sharp pain, not just when you feel pressure. You will feel some pressure." I wanted to explain to her that the pressure itself was painful, but they had their hands stuffed in my mouth so I kept quiet.
It was over more quickly than I expected. Todd picked me up at the reception desk, bringing related literature he'd found online, Japanese ice cream, a camera, and his nice, familiar face. We rode in a cab with the windows down through an unfamiliar part of New York while I gnawed on gauze and involuntarily talked like Marlon Brando. We made jello, dyed eggs (months late), and watched movies, as I easily drifted in and out of consciousness. I pretended to need certain food for proper recovery (scorned items such as American cheese slices), and Todd tacitly agreed not to ridicule my dietary choices. Between naps we walked around the neighborhood until I started feeling the contours of my skull again, and then we'd head home and do more nothing. I liked that part.
"I can't believe you still have that," Todd said, referring to the 21-year-old Swatch on my arm. I was wearing it as a substitute for my current (but dead) Swatch, along with a pair of earrings I bought in 6th grade. I know how to keep objects for long periods of time.
Whenever I go to my parents' house, I feel compelled to rifle through my old things, to see whether my discarded clothes from junior high have come back in style, and to look through papers and pictures and old scraps from my past. I'm convinced this is why I have such a good memory of my childhood. (My parents are incredibly tolerant and have lots of closet space.)
This weekend, while in North Carolina, I only managed to look through one drawer, which contained old prom pictures (which I showed to Todd while he was sleeping), and a science report I wrote in fourth grade about color. (I'm sure I researched color not because I was interested in color itself, but because it gave me an opportunity to make a pretty book report cover. In fact, I showed so much interest in the report that I researched it using only one source, an encyclopedia from 1958 that we had lying around the house. The cover, though! It looked like the welcome sign to Rainbowtown.)
I came across something else in that drawer that impressed even me: a Ziploc bag full of discarded keys. That's right, I have a bag full of keys that open nothing, and I've kept it for decades, probably. Sadly, it didn't even occur to me to throw the bag of keys away. I just placed it back in the drawer and promptly got distracted by the elaborate headband I wore in my 3rd grade dance performance.
The sound of her voice was a surprise. She was silent in the moments when the train paused, allowing people to exchange and shift in relative quiet, but once the train lurched forward again, she resumed her tirade. She yelled at him as if he were standing at the other end of a field, rather than three feet from her in a subway car. The people new to the car looked at her in surprise; the train's veterans seemed to no longer notice and instead stared into their books and magazines.
She shouted about the reason she'd left him at the altar, and about how he'd cheated on her with another woman, already replacing her with a new girlfriend. She railed about how she'd been paying his rent, she explained a few finer points of the welfare system, and she offered heated justification about why she had good reason to go to the Bronx in that moment. Even though it was impossible not to eavesdrop, I felt guilty doing it, though I think it was more about hearing the pain in her voice than the words she was saying.
He never said a word. I'm not even sure which passenger he was.
On a different day, I might've focused on how crazy it was for her to seek revenge so publicly. Instead, the episode just made me feel incredibly sad.
Hi. I took some photos of the US Without Immigrants protest this evening. Record turnaround time! Please have a look.
