by Sue Miller
‘What? What’s wrong?’ Ryan asked.
‘My tooth’, she said, holding up a finger that told him to wait a minute, he’d see.
He started to eat again as he watched her, a steady in-shoveling that was the result of his morning’s work. He was just back from a junior year abroad in England, and he was helping on the house for the summer – mostly scraping and painting and minor repair. He was tall and blond, and he didn’t look anything like Lottie – except that right now they were both wearing paint-splotched work clothes and that the exposed flesh of their arms and faces was similarly freckled here and there with Benjamin Moore’s semigloss Birch White. They’d been painting the trim in the stairwell.
Lottie finally extracted a sizable silver nugget. She set it by her plate and stared at it gloomily. Her tongue swung over the rough socket left behind, and she felt a little jolt of pain shoot skullward. ‘God, I’m going to pay for this,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m going to be so very sorry this happened.’
Ryan made a sympathetic noise but went on eating. Others can never understand our pain, particularly dental pain. Where had she read this? It didn’t matter. She knew it to be true.
Lottie cleared her place and went upstairs to the room that had been her mother’s, the room she had been sleeping in while she worked on the house this summer. She sat for a moment on the bed, looking at her feet, encased in the paint-flecked old running shoes she wore to work in. She felt almost teary. She would gladly have lain back and fallen into forgetful sleep.
There was no reason why this – the tooth – should be so upsetting to her, she told herself.
But it was. Of course it was. Lottie was someone who believed in health. She’d had cancer seven years before. Mostly a bad scare: the doctor was sure they’d gotten it all. But now she took good care of herself. She ate carefully, she ran daily.
She had bad teeth, though, terrible teeth, and from time to time they reminded her of all she could not now control, of all the things that had been out of control in her past – dental care among them. She animated her teeth in her imagination sometimes, she thought of them as acting willfully on her. A set of bogeymen, half of them man-made at this point.
What’s more, Lottie was upset anyway. She’d barely been holding herself together since her husband’s visit the weekend before. He’d flown out from Chicago and stayed for two days, and by the end of the time it was clear that nothing had changed. They’d fought just before he left, and neither had called the other since. Lottie assumed his reason was the same as her own – that there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t lead to another argument.
And now this. Then she laughed out loud at herself: yes, first my marriage goes, and now my tooth. She reached for the telephone. She called Elizabeth’s house – Elizabeth, whom Cameron was in love with – and got Elizabeth’s elderly mother, Emily, who fussed and clucked and gave her the name of the family dentist on Mass Ave. The receptionist there said to come over, they’d fit her in. Lottie changed her clothes and washed the paint off her skin. She brushed her teeth carefully, so the dentist would believe she had good hygiene, that this was something unfortunate that had happened to her, rather than something she was in any sense responsible for. She reapplied her makeup. On her way out, she stopped in the kitchen. Ryan was doing the dishes. He’d cleared her place.
‘I’m headed for the dentist, honey,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be back sometime later. They said they’d fit me in between his other patients, so I’m not sure how long it’ll take. I have a feeling I’m going to have read a lot of People magazines before you see me again.’
‘I hope I’m able to recognize you,’ he said.
It was raining out, a slow, soft rain at this point in the day, and when Lottie unfurled and opened the umbrella on the front porch, she saw that three of the spokes now stuck nakedly out from the fluttering fabric. Last time she’d used it, only one had. She sighed and stepped down the stairs into the gentle drizzle.
The dentist was a small, grave man with sparse hair combed carefully over the top of his shining head. He was appalled by Lottie’s mouth; they always were. Most of the early work had been done at a cut rate in her impoverished childhood by dental students learning the trade at Tufts University. Lottie didn’t bother to explain this; some part of her didn’t wish to give the dentist the satisfaction of knowing what this suggested about her life. Instead she told him that she’d heard this many times before, that she’d never encountered a more competitive profession than dentistry.
When the dentist poked in the base of the tooth that had lost the filling, Lottie gasped. He said this would be a little more complicated than he’d originally thought, and sent her back to the waiting room until he had a longer gap between patients.
Lottie sat watching the gray rain fall on the shining cars, on the people moving from shop to shop along Mass Ave. She listened to the soft rock flowing gently from a speaker in the ceiling and thought of the dental clinic. God, where had it been? She couldn’t even remember. Many subway stops, changing lines in the grimy, old-fashioned stations, the narrow escalators with slotted, sloping wooden steps. And then, once there, you waited and waited under the flickering lights with all the other mendicants, hoping you’d get someone who had some minimal competence, who didn’t actually seem to like to inflict pain.
Mendicants. Lottie had used the very word in telling the tale more than once, making an amusing, exaggerated story of her life. Today it seemed grimly pathetic. It seemed true. She felt sorry for that girl-Lottie, that Charlotte, who traveled across the city alone to have her terrible mouth fixed in a way that dentists for years to come would shake their heads over.
Late in the afternoon, she stepped out into the rain again and began a slow walk back to her mother’s house. Her mouth was benumbed and it tasted of peppermint, yet it still ached. Exactly the way she felt about Jack, she mused. Numbed, yet still in pain. She was glad for the numbness for the time being, though she wondered when it would hit her – the full sense that it was over, that there didn’t seem to be a way for them to stay together. And then she pushed that thought, all these thoughts, aside.
Lottie subscribed to denial, the best defense, she said. She often claimed it was how she’d survived her childhood. And there was a way in which she was proud of rolling so smoothly through the days since Jack had been here, proud of how little anyone might have guessed of the pain she was pushing under. But she had also pushed under, with far less consciousness of feeling it, the sense of having had a close call with this marriage, the tentative pulse of relief that it might now be over. She’d pushed under the odd excitement about the blank slate that waited once she’d taken the last, final steps of extricating herself. Now, too, she had a glimmer of this; but she quickly thought instead of Ryan, of how much he might or might not have understood of what was going on. Not a lot, she suspected. And she was determined to hold it all together until he went back to college, so that he wouldn’t have to witness the terrible details: the packing, the silence. Or, worse, the chilly politeness.
And what then? Whatever. Whatever came next.
Lottie started down the hilly street she’d grown up on, past the bigger, fancier houses where her childhood friends had lived. It was deserted today, in the steady rain. In the distance, though, she could hear children somewhere yelling – soaked, no doubt, and wilder and noisier on that account. Her eyes swept the houses. How many streets in Cambridge were like this, she thought. Streets where at one end lived the children of Harvard faculty, or lawyers or doctors; and at the other end – where the houses had peeling paint and wobbly wrought-iron railings on their porches, where ornamentation had fallen off, leaving black holes like so many missing teeth – you had the children of janitors, or state employees; or, like her father, criminals.
Abruptly Lottie remembered that counting game, ‘Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief …’ The way, when the kids chanted it in her presence, there’d be a peculiar pause before they got t
o ‘thief,’ then a hard emphasis when they arrived; and she’d feel them watching her for a response. Early, she’d learned to keep her face perfectly blank; somehow the image in her own mind at the time was of Little Orphan Annie with her empty white saucer eyes.
My father, the thief. The criminal, she thought as she passed Elizabeth’s big Victorian house and looked over at it. She said the word aloud, and it came out ‘cwiminaw,’ along with a little drool. She wiped her lip, swung her tongue over the smooth new filling. The dentist had said it was a tooth that would ‘bear watching.’ Lottie had told him that she’d have her dentist at home check it when she saw him. Home, she thought. Wherever that was.
She heard the downstairs shower singing when she came inside. The shower singing and Ryan singing too, chanting some bit of rap in which ‘world control’ rhymed with ‘soul.’
She flapped the umbrella and left it puddling in the front hall. She went upstairs to her bathroom, the bathroom she shared with the one remaining roomer in the house, Richard Lester. She shook her damp hair out and looked at her face. The skin at the corners of her mouth was red, raw, stretched-looking. What big hands you have, she’d wanted to say to the dentist. Her numbed lips drooped on one side.
More than once, Jack had said he loved her mouth. He’d told her he could sit across from her forever and watch her lips shape the words as she spoke. Forever. Fowevewr. She remembered how he’d looked when she’d driven away to come here to her mother’s house, standing in the dappled sun of the driveway with his old dog.
Ryan turned off the shower downstairs, and the pipes through the house thudded implosively. The dinner bell, Lottie thought. Make yourself useful. She put lipstick on her thickened and awkward mouth. She went downstairs, through the dining room, where her books and papers lay strewn across the table. Lottie was a writer. She had brought her work with her to her mother’s house; but she hadn’t gotten much done. The messy dining room nagged at her each time she passed through it.
In the kitchen, she pulled several different kinds of lettuce out of the refrigerator and began to fix a huge salad, using some cold leftover chicken, some pecans, some sliced pear. She was starving, she realized as she tore off pieces of the frilly green. She’d only managed a bite or two at lunch before her tooth crumbled apart.
Ryan came into the kitchen looking scrubbed and fresh, two bloody bits of toilet paper stuck on his face where he’d nicked himself shaving. He started to set the table while they talked together in the mild and aimless way they’d grown accustomed to this summer. Lottie put the salad on the table, and they sat down. But as soon as she started to chew, she bit her tongue and the inside of her cheek. Shocked tears rose in her eyes; abruptly she felt precariously near the real thing.
She got up, went to the refrigerator, and uncorked the wine. ‘Would you like some?’ she asked Ryan, waving the bottle. ‘It appears I have to drink my dinner, since I can’t chew.’
‘I don’t want wine, but I’ll take a beer, if you’ve got it,’ he said.
She opened the refrigerator again and lifted out a brown bottle. She brought one of her mother’s larger glasses to the table for him, one that had a picture of Fred Flintstone on it. He carefully poured the beer out, explaining his technique for minimizing foam, learned in England. When he’d emptied the bottle, she held her glass up and they clinked their glasses together.
‘To dental health,’ he said.
‘To fluowidation,’ she answered, exaggerating the Elmer Fudd stuff.
She had two glasses of wine while he ate almost all of the salad she’d intended for both of them. Between bites he told her that he’d called his father that afternoon and put him and his wife on alert that he’d be coming for his summer visit within a couple of weeks.
‘That sounds fine,’ Lottie said. ‘Whatever you guys work out.’
Then, because it always made him a little uncomfortable to talk about his father with Lottie, he moved quickly on to a movie he’d seen the night before, and began to tell her the entire plot. At every pause, Lottie said pointedly, ‘I’d like to see it.’
‘You should,’ he’d say, and then, oblivious to nuance, he’d begin to describe the next episode. While this irritated her in one way, she also took such a simple, almost physical, pleasure in his enthusiasm, in his too loud voice, his laughter, that she didn’t want him to stop. She felt the wine hit her midway through the second glass, but finished it anyway. The hell with it.
After Ryan left, she poured herself the definitive third glass. She dumped out the remaining salad. She turned on the jazz program and started to sing while she washed the dishes. When she was done she sat down at the kitchen table. In spite of the rain, or perhaps because of it, she opened the window wider. A mist strained through the screen on to her face and bare arms. She looked around the room. It was small and old-fashioned, a dingy riot, if there could be such a thing, of fluorescence and plastic and linoleum. They weren’t going to do anything to it, as they hadn’t to the bathrooms: Cameron’s theory was that people always wanted to redo the kitchen and bathrooms anyway. With the painting of the stairwell done, she realized, they were finished inside. And when Ryan had finished the windows outside, it would be over – the job, the peculiar summer here. Nearly as soon as this thought crossed her mind, though, she began to think of the things – the odd, leftover chores – she still had to do. It was almost a kind of consolation, going over this list. Lottie sat at the table and reviewed it several times. A song ended; another one began. ‘Miss Brown to You’: the moment the clarinet started, she recognized it. She decided, abruptly, that she would begin tonight. Yes, she would clear out the kitchen cupboards.
She went upstairs to change back into work clothes. But once she was stripped down to underpants, standing in front of the tidy stacks of folded clothes along the freshly painted wall of her mother’s room – she’d sold the Depression-era bedroom set, the bed and bureau and night tables, the first week here – her eye fell on the gleaming strip of gray satin halfway down one pile, the nightgown Jack had given her those few months ago.
‘Oh, wallow in it,’ she said aloud. She bent over and slid the nightgown out. She pulled it on, let it shimmer down wetly over her breasts and hips. Then she went back to the bathroom to see what she could of how she looked in the mirror there. But Lottie was short, and the mirror was high on the wall; she saw her face, encircled by the wildly curling hair, her regular features, the large dark eyes. She saw her narrow shoulders, the sheen of fabric over her breasts, the glowing dot of each nipple. That was all.
She went downstairs, and while Billie sang, she pulled everything out of the lower cabinets on to the floor, settled herself amid the junk, and started.
And so it’s a little before ten when she hears the siren, its frantic cry choked off abruptly. Much too close, she thinks. She gets up and pads barefoot through the dining room, the hall, into the dark, almost bare living room. The furniture they’ve saved for the Salvation Army – so little of what was jammed into the house – is shoved against the windowless side wall of the room. She stands in the emptied bay of front windows and sees that the ambulance is stopped in the long driveway to Elizabeth’s house. Her hand rises to her mouth. There are people milling in and out of its headlights, there are sharp voices. Lottie’s quick thought is of Elizabeth’s mother, Emily, in her early seventies and overweight. Through the sound of the rain, she can hear a child crying hysterically. She hunches against the sticky, cold glass. She sees that Cameron’s car is hulked in the driveway, ahead of the ambulance.
For a moment Lottie considers getting her clothes on, going over. But while she is standing there, drunkenly weighing it, a police car drives up and squeals to a stop by the curb at the foot of Elizabeth’s driveway. The men get out and move quickly up the lawn. The blue light slices rhythmically through the driving rain. Somehow this gives everything a dimension that frightens Lottie, excludes her. She looks up and down the street. She can see a few neighbors at their windows, lik
e her, and one little cluster of three or four people on a porch halfway up the block. All keeping their distance. Then she hears the sudden explosive whumps! of the ambulance’s doors slamming. She looks back quickly and sees it coming down the driveway and then turning sharply, driving away up the hill. Its wail starts again as it rounds the corner, and fades almost immediately behind the noise of the rain.
There’s still a knot of people standing under the porte cochere, but now they begin to move slowly into Elizabeth’s house. One of the men looks like Cameron, but Lottie isn’t sure of that. She feels a sense of her own helplessness, her uselessness. She thinks of Emily again, and shivers.
She goes upstairs to get a sweater. When she looks out the bedroom windows through the quivering black leaves, it seems that everyone is gone. She comes down again, crosses the hall, and steps out on to the wet front porch in her bare feet and nightgown. Someone has turned off the swirling light on top of the police car. Cameron’s car still sits two thirds of the way up the drive. It looks abandoned; the door on the driver’s side hangs open, and the interior light is on. Lottie feels peculiar knowing that disaster has struck so close by, but not having any sense of what form it has taken or of how her brother may be involved.
And then suddenly she feels called back again, as she has on and off the whole time she’s been in Cambridge, to herself as a girl. Herself – she feels almost dizzy with the sense of recollection – standing here in her nightgown, looking across the wide empty street at another mysterious drama unfolding at Elizabeth’s house. There comes the image of all the surfaces plumped and whitened under a sheen of snow, the memory of the way her feet felt then, bare and burning on the icy porch as she uselessly whispered to Cameron to come home – Cameron, who stood calling outside Elizabeth’s front door. He had sat down, finally, and huddled on Elizabeth’s stoop, an almost invisible dark lump, and Lottie went back inside her house and stood, frantically watching him with numbed fingers and feet, from the dark of the living room windows. He stayed there for so long that in the end Elizabeth’s father came outside with a topcoat on over his pajamas, and unfastened, jingling galoshes on his feet, and gently escorted him back down the street to Lottie.
