He pulls away. “Why?”
“Because Michael is an orthodontist. And I think you need braces.”
Michael smiles and manages to get a glimpse of Teddy’s mouth, and then mine. He hands me his card. “He does. And so do you.”
Adult Braces
Your bite is off,” Michael says, a week later in his office, his gloved fingers in my mouth, my chair tilted all the way back and the bright examination light blinding me. His mini metal dental pick taps lightly on my offending lower teeth, then hovers above my lower lip. He offers me a little hand mirror so I can participate in the conversation about the possibility of a second round of orthodontia, instead of being a passive victim like I was the first time. “You see that?”
Actually, I don’t. I’m too busy admiring my hair, which I blow-dried for once, and the perfectly thin and straight coat of eyeliner that I somehow managed to apply with a steady hand despite wearing the dog—all in preparation for my date with my orthodontist.
“I’m kidding. He’s not officially my orthodontist,” I tell Glenn when I call her from the parking lot with Teddy trailing far behind me. “I’m just going to ask him before Teddy’s appointment what he meant by his remark that I need braces, too.” As usual, I’m all over the place.
“I thought you said he was married.”
“I did, but now, in retrospect, I think I also got a divorced vibe.”
“Based on what?” Glenn always wants me to provide specifics, to show my work. In the manuscripts of the books of mine she edited, that need for substantiation appeared in the form of notes in the margin—queries on Post-it notes—Why would she say this? Or, How does she know this is what her mother is thinking? Or, Do we know if the bird on her head has thoughts and, if so, what they are? If I couldn’t answer to her satisfaction, she would make suggestions on how I could rework something to make it deeper, richer, or clearer. I can tell she doesn’t quite trust my divorced-vibes—if this were a story I’d written, her marginalia would include, Was he wearing a ring? If he told you he hadn’t married Janie, why didn’t he tell you who he did marry? Even though he didn’t tell you who he did marry who wasn’t Janie, why wouldn’t that give you married-someone-else-instead vibes? At the very least, she didn’t understand what I was basing my cues on. And indeed I couldn’t articulate them—now or then, when Teddy and I were driving home from Costco and I’d replayed our encounter in my head. It had been years—decades even—since I’d done that level of conversational parsing and analysis, holding every word up to the light and shaking it to see if it had meant something more than what it seemed: a chance encounter with a childhood acquaintance who I used to have a giant crush on. At the time, it hadn’t, but in the days since, my mind, so desperate to avoid reality, swelled with possibility. The possibility that maybe Michael, not the dog, is my true vine.
The light poking and tapping of the tiny dental tool bring me back to the present.
“Your teeth are starting to crowd. Which means you need braces.”
“But I already had braces. Isn’t once enough?” I look in the mirror again, this time biting and rebiting, baring my teeth like an angry baboon, trying to grasp the fact that there’s a seismic shift—mesial drift—going on inside my mouth, especially in my lower teeth.
“The older you get, the more your teeth move to the front of your mouth,” he explains. “It’s called ‘relapse,’ and if you don’t stop it, it just gets worse.”
“Maybe they don’t want to be alone. Like that final scene in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, remember?” I describe how, after their final broadcast, everyone in the newsroom comes together in a group hug, and then stays in that formation as they scuttle across the floor to answer a ringing telephone. He laughs, and when he does I look at his teeth. “How come yours aren’t relapsing? How come your teeth still look perfect? We’re the same age. I don’t understand why I need braces right now and you don’t. It’s not fair.”
“It’s just luck.” He pokes my lip with the metal pick and I open, and close, one last time.
Passing quickly through anger and denial, I now enter the bargaining phase. “If I decide to do this, can I get the invisible kind of braces, like Tom Cruise?”
He scoots a few inches away on his seat with wheels, snaps off his gloves, and tells me that invisible braces aren’t as good, which means you end up wearing them for twice as long as the regular kind. And, they’re more expensive. “Nothing beats good old-fashioned metal hardware.”
“How long would I have to wear them?”
He tells me that we could probably correct what’s wrong in eighteen months, then scoots back. “It’s not so bad.”
“Easy for you to say. As I recall, you never even had braces once. Unlike the rest of us, you were born with perfect teeth.”
“I could have used some minor correction, probably just a few bands on the front tops and bottoms, but there was a lot going on at home at the time. As you know.”
I watch him move around the office, putting tools away for later cleaning, his back to me. I want to ask him about that time, what it was like, those dark teenage years, but I can tell he’d rather not talk about it, so I don’t. “How much would it cost?”
“Why don’t you set up an actual consultation on your way out today so we can have more time to go over your options and I can answer all your questions.”
“I know. I ask a lot of questions.”
“You should.”
My eyes dart toward the waiting room, where Teddy stares into space at a muted cartoon on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. His teeth are the priority here, not mine.
“Actually, I think I’ll pass.” I sigh, restraining myself from explaining that money is tight and that this is the first time in five years that someone hasn’t been diagnosed with something awful or dying in hospice. Look at me, keeping my mouth, with its relapsed bite and its crowded lowers, shut.
He shrugs, then takes the crinkly paper bib off my chest, flips the light away from my head and angles my chair back up. “Okay, but don’t blame me in a few years when your teeth start falling out.”
* * *
I sit in on Teddy’s consultation, then sign the proposed but nonbinding treatment and payment plan for his braces—a minimum of two years with the probability of an extra year, depending on the growth of his chin and subsequent exacerbation of his pronounced under-bite. We schedule his appointment—the big day—for the second Wednesday in November, after Inhabitancy ends—and then, since the idea of my teeth falling out is still haunting me, we schedule an official consultation: there has been a cancellation for tomorrow, the receptionist tells me. Do I want it? I reluctantly accept. Why not have all the information before probably saying no?
Back in the car Teddy is quiet. I can’t tell if he’s glad to be getting braces like everyone else did two years ago, or if he’s horrified to be joining the adolescent masses so late. I know I could ask him—shouldn’t I just ask him?—but sometimes I think it’s easier for both of us if I just leave him alone with his feelings, instead of making him share them with me. Because maybe he doesn’t want to share them with me: maybe he’d rather process things himself, silently, without parental intrusion, the way I did.