Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  Brave Girl

  FILLINGS WERE GOOD for groans. There was something about the contrast between the low, jumbled moans and the high-pitched whine of the drill, not quite drowning them out. Sometimes the mewling would sound almost like words, like Chewbacca in Star Wars, full of feeling but without meaning. It was impossible to form real words with the steel tang of my father’s instruments on your tongue, his rubber-gloved knuckles pressing into the corners of your mouth.

  Fillings were good. Sometimes there were even tears. But extractions were better. Extractions made kids scream.

  My father would stand back a little after the first examination and say, “Rinse now,” and then, when the patient was lying back in the chair, try to break the news gently. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he’d tell them, and they’d pale. “You don’t believe me, but you will. Promise. You want to know why?” He’d put his hand on his heart. “Because it’s the tooth.” That might even make them smile, but soon there’d be tears, and they’d just be the start. My father would say something about an injection, but even that wouldn’t do it. Kids who’d never had an extraction thought that an injection meant a shot in the arm. The real moment was when he held up the silver syringe, with its glistening tip of Novocain shining wetly in the bright halogen lights. “Just a little pinch,” my father would say. “Open wide.” That was when the yelling would start, the needle bearing down on you, vanishing from sight into your mouth.

  I was ten that summer, almost eleven, old enough to look after myself at home, but my father insisted on taking me with him to work. In the spring my mother had moved to London with her captain from the Territorial Army (he was a gynecologist in real life), and my father didn’t like me being alone in the house. He’d demanded that I finish the term at my old school and spend half the summer with him, but now it was the second Friday in July, and on Sunday I would go away to live with my mother and Captain Cunt.

  My mother had left me her white overnight case. It was round and silk-lined, and just the right size for me. It had a vanity mirror in the lid in which I loved to stare at myself. Soon I’d be packing it.

  “I could fight her for custody, sweetheart,” my father had told me. “And I’d probably lose. But I want you to know I love you, and if you want to stay, I’ll do everything in my power. No ifs and buts about it. It’s your choice; you just say the word.”

  I told him I knew he loved me. And I did. But I also knew I was the only one left for him to love, and when he said things like that it made me worry that I didn’t love him enough. I didn’t want to choose. I already felt sorry for him because my mother had left. I tried to make up for it by being good.

  …

  It wasn’t so bad at the surgery. I even had my own room, a tiny cubicle intended for gas extractions but rarely used by my father, who referred most of that work to the hospital. There was still a high bed, upholstered in blistered red vinyl, and a tall stainless steel instrument tray which I could use as a desk. Every morning, before he opened, my father would let me into the waiting room to take my pick of the new comics and magazines. I would come back with yellowed dog-eared armfuls of Mandy and Jackie and the occasional copy of boys’ comics like Battle or Warlord, the ink smelling like pee. Buried deep in the pile would be one or two slippery editions of Cosmopolitan or Elle that my father’s Australian nurse, Sylvia, subscribed to and left in the waiting room for mothers. At the start of the summer I had read my way through most of the girls’ comics and grown bored. The boys’ comics with their tales of torture and heroism had entertained me briefly (I was especially struck by a strip called Sergeant Steele, about a self-sacrificing NCO with a bullet next to his heart—“like a time bomb in his chest!”—who stayed on at the front to perform weekly feats of suicidal bravery). But lately I was onto a steady diet of slick grown-up magazines. I would close the blinds on the window and skim through the pages to see how many stories there were about sex. I tried to memorize all the tips: seven secrets of office romance; nine lives of modern women; ten telltale signs he’s interested. I couldn’t imagine my parents doing any of the things the stories described, so I pictured blond Sylvia, in her short dental nurse’s uniform and white tights, winning and keeping men, enjoying a career and multiple orgasms. Sylvia would be good at all that, I thought, and I admired her. If there were no new Cosmos or Elles, I’d settle for the duller articles in Woman’s Own about family life.

  The only thing that would tear me away from a good article about sex was moans or cries from the other room.

  …

  The girl in the chair on my last day at the surgery had been ice skating with friends. It was her birthday party. Most of them hadn’t known how to skate, and they’d been circling the rink hanging on to the sides and making short staggering runs back and forth across the ice. On one of these, the birthday girl had dropped behind the others. They’d reached the barrier and slumped across it, and in her hurry to catch up she’d stumbled and slid on her stomach toward them. Someone had lost their balance, and the back of a skate had slipped out and caught the fallen girl in the face. Her two front teeth went snap like a pencil lead.

  My father was pushing cotton wadding into her mouth, his fingers working quickly like a magician’s, shoving in more and more of the short white swabs until her cheeks bulged like a hamster’s. Then, just as fast, he was pulling them out one after another, limp with blood. He dropped them with his tweezers into the metal pan that Sylvia, his beautiful assistant, held out for him.

  The girl was lying almost horizontal and raised up for my father to work on without straining his back. My head, when I took my usual position in front of the chair, was at her shoe level. It took a moment for her to see me standing there, staring, and her eyes grew huge around her tiny pupils.

  I never said anything when I watched my father work. I never really showed any expression. I just wanted to let the kids know I was there. I liked to think I was helping him. Sometimes he told them how traveling dentists in olden days often drew a crowd. I was sure my presence could shame some of the kids into not going mental. It was a playground thing. What I held over them, like a knife at their throats, was my contempt.

  “Hello, darling,” my father said, but his glance at me was so fleeting his expression didn’t change. He picked up his drill and thumbed it for a second to get the girl used to the sound. “Now, this will only tickle, sweetheart,” he told her over the whir of the motor. He showed her the air-blower and the water jet and called them his toys. A little later, he held up a hypodermic and told her it would only sting a bit. He said these things so often that I thought he believed them. You couldn’t see his lips move behind his mask, but if you looked closely you could see the paper crimp at his mouth.

  My father talked to all his patients. He asked them their names and then he talked to them as though he’d known them all their lives. This girl’s name was Marie. He told Marie how good she was. What a big girl Marie was being. He told her how proud her parents would be. He called her mother mummy and her father daddy. It was odd hearing him talk like that to a stranger. It reminded me of how he had sat down one evening and answered my questions about the divorce.

  “The tooth?” he lisped, but I didn’t smile. “Mummy and Daddy fell out of love.” The way he said it made me think of falling out of treehouses, or swings, off bicycles or ponies—all the ways kids ended up in his surgery. “People change,” he said. I told him I’d never change, but he said I was being silly. “Don’t you want to grow up?” he asked me gently, and I shook my head till my temples ached and he caught me and held me.

  I glared up at the girl. She was older than me—twelve, perhaps thirteen—and she had lipstick on, a dark cherry that seemed almost black against her pale skin. She wore tight designer jeans and a white blouse freckled with blood. I could see her bra through the polyester, and I watched her small chest heaving.

  She was in too much pain and shock to scream, but she was shuddering with sobs and whinnying nasally. I wa
nted to tell her to stop having an eppy. But my father spoke to her softly as he worked, while Sylvia stroked her forehead, her bright nails in the girl’s fringe. The three of them reminded me of a funny sort of family. After a little while the girl’s moans became weaker and fuzzier, and I knew the injection was taking effect. My father reached into her mouth with his shiny pliers and pulled the broken stubs of teeth out one at a time. He had long, strong fingers, only slightly hairy, and I saw them go white, straining. He held each tooth up, streaky with blood, and studied it for a second. He looked like a doctor in the westerns he loved who’d just extracted a bullet from deep in the hero’s leg. Then he dropped the teeth into a kidney-shaped bowl, where they made a dull ping on the stainless steel.

  “All done,” he said cheerfully. “There’s a brave girl.”

  She smiled at him numbly, her cherry lips opening over the dark gap in her teeth.

  …

  For as long as I could remember, I had been the bravest kid I knew. Everyone else was afraid of the dentist—even boys. My father’s surgery was close to school, and most of my friends were his patients. I was sure they were scared of him. It made me secretly proud.

  That summer, though, I had started to be afraid. I knew that my father would never let me go ice skating now. The year before he’d had a girl come in who’d lost several teeth playing hockey and he’d made me take netball at school. Last spring the police had used his records to identify the body of a boy who’d drowned and I’d had to give up piano and take swimming lessons instead. It had bothered me then, but now I knew that when he banned skating I would be glad. Even if my mother let me, I decided I didn’t want to.

  I was afraid of other things too. My friends had begun to get their ears pierced and I wanted to, but I was frightened. They all had their mothers to take them and give permission for the man to place the gun to their ears. I couldn’t imagine my father there with me. Sharon Clark in my class had gone with her mother, and she said proudly it hurt like hell. That made me feel faint. I thought of buying bras. I thought of getting my period. I didn’t want to leave my father, but I knew I’d go to my mother. I loved her too, of course, but next to fear, love just didn’t seem like a useful way of choosing between your parents.

  My mother called me almost every night, and because we couldn’t talk about her and my father, we talked about the captain. I asked her what he did in the TA, and she said she wasn’t sure. “Only he can’t be a gynecologist,” I said. I’d only learned the word recently. Guy-neck-ologist. I liked to say it. “There’s not much call for gynecologists in the army. I mean, what would a gynecologist do at the front?” She laughed a little and told me she didn’t know, but I had my suspicions. He was handsome, the captain, tall and fair. He looked like the Nazi interrogators in my comics. The kind of man who made people betray their comrades. Everyone cracked under torture, sooner or later, I knew.

  Sometimes the captain would come on the line. I liked to call him sir. He thought I was very polite. He told me how much fun we’d all have together. “What do you like to do?” he asked, and I told him I liked going to work with my dad. “Could we do that, sir?” But the captain just coughed. “I mean when you’re being a soldier,” I said. “Not looking up people’s fannies.”

  During the days I read Cosmo and tried to make friends with Sylvia. I told her I liked her nail polish, and she showed me how to put it on in long tapering strokes. She was younger and prettier than my mother, just like the captain was cleverer and richer than my father. I wanted to get her alone, to make her a confidante. I would tell her how nice my father was. I thought if he had her, I wouldn’t feel so bad about leaving. Perhaps I could even stay. But I could never find the right moment. Sylvia insisted on treating me like a kid even though I knew all her sex tips.

  “My dad likes nail polish,” I said.

  “Really?” She took my hand in hers. “Let’s just see what we can do with these nails of yours, eh?”

  “Don’t you think he’s good-looking?” I asked her coyly and she whispered back, “Fair dinkum. If he was my dad, I’d be really proud of him.” I wasn’t sure who was trying to convince whom.

  In between patients, my father would slip the mask down around his neck and try to entertain me. Sometimes he would pull out a matchbox, empty the matches into a pocket, and drop a shiny globe of mercury into the little drawer. He would tip it back and forth under my nose. “See,” he’d say. “A little mouse.” And I’d go, “Oh yeah.” I preferred it when Sylvia gave me the used drill bits to collect. They were diamond tipped and came in tiny plastic cubes the size of jewel boxes. “Your first sparklers,” Sylvia whispered to me, and I told her that diamonds were a girl’s best friend.

  Once I heard my father tell her that she was good with me and that he appreciated it. “She has a bit of a crush on you,” he said, which made me furious. After that I stopped trying to time my trips to the loo to coincide with hers.

  …

  The last patient that day was a boy called Barry, so scared he refused to sit still. His mother had to come in with him. As soon as she placed him in the chair and my father began raising it, he squirmed off. “I’ll be good,” he blubbed. “Honest.” What a spaz, I thought. I would have liked to help, but when parents were in the surgery my father wanted me to keep out of the way. I satisfied myself with sitting in Sylvia’s swivel chair, studying the chart on her clipboard, sucking her Bic.

  “I promise this won’t hurt,” my father said soothingly, but the boy’s mother was losing her patience.

  “You’ll just have to learn to put up with a little pain,” she said, and I saw my father give her a sideways look. In the end he asked her to get into the chair with Barry in her lap. He tilted the chair back until mother and child were almost horizontal and then he raised the chair to work on the boy.

  My father only worked on children. He preferred it that way. So when Barry pleaded, “Mummy first,” and she said, “Oh, why not?” he paused for a moment. She had already closed her eyes and laid her head back in a pantomime of calm resignation. “Open wide?” Sylvia suggested, and my father began the examination. He was silent, though, as he probed the mother’s teeth. He hadn’t worked on adults for years, and he didn’t know how to talk to them. When he bent over I could see that his bald spot, not much bigger than a ten-pence coin, was flushed. I hoped Sylvia wouldn’t notice.

  …

  At five o’clock my father hung his white coat on the back of the door and looked suddenly smaller and older in his shirt and creased tie. “What a day,” he said, dropping into the chair opposite Sylvia’s desk. I was spinning around on an adjustable stool, holding my arms out and then bringing them in to my body and speeding up like a figure skater.

  “You were a trouper with that Marie,” Sylvia said, looking up from the chart she was completing.

  “Thanks for your help with Barry and his mother,” he replied, and she looked down as she passed the chart across to him. “Really,” he said.

  She got up and began collecting instruments from the trays.

  “I’m lucky to have you, Sylvia,” he said. I let my feet scuff the floor until my spinning came slowly to a rest. “You’re the best nurse I’ve ever worked with.”

  “Well.” She dropped the instruments into the sterilizer with a clank. “Cheers.”

  Her mask was lying on her desk where she had left it when she took it off to answer the phone. It was still bowed from her face, and leaning over, I could see in the center a smudge of lipstick. I slipped it over my mouth and smelled her perfume. I wondered if the lipstick would rub off on me. There was no makeup at home since my mother left.

  “We make a good team, I think,” my father went on. “The two of us.”

  He’s paying her a compliment, I thought. It was a sign.

  But Sylvia just shrugged her coat on. “Oh yeah.” She laughed. “Torville and Dean. That’s us, all right.” She didn’t look back at him, but at the door she stopped to blow me a kiss. “Be good
, you. Ciao.”

  “See ya,” I called through the mask, but my father just went back to his paperwork, pressing his signature firmly through the carbon paper.

  …

  Before he closed up, I made my father examine me. I could tell he was unhappy. After all the cowardly kids, the crybabies, I thought I could cheer him up by being the perfect patient.

  “That Marie,” I said scornfully, climbing into the chair. “They were her baby teeth, right?”

  He shook his head. It seemed like a crime to lose your permanent teeth, and I was suddenly angry at the girl, although I also understood a little better why she had cried so much. My father had stickers that he gave out to his best patients: a bright, shining cartoon smile with the words “Teeth are for life.”

  I lay back while he pumped the pedal and felt myself floating up toward him. It was like being held in his arms, even better than the magic-carpet feeling of wafting down to earth later. He smiled at me over his mask—I could tell from the way his eyes went—and asked me to open wide, “wide as you can,” and told me what a good girl I was, how brave I was. Just like he talked to any of the other kids. For once, I liked that. It was good to know he would love me even if I were a stranger.

  He’d actually cried when they’d identified the body of the boy, his missing patient. I remembered it because it was the last time I’d seen my parents touch. We watched the announcement on the local news, and when I looked at my father the tears were dripping from his chin. He told us that the boy’s father had called him that morning, wanting to know if there could be a mistake. “He asked me how I could be so sure when he couldn’t even recognize his own son.” My mother reached across and stroked the tears from his cheeks.

  On that last afternoon at the surgery, I’d already made up my mind that if he found no work to do, I’d suggest he take an impression of my teeth. He’d fill two horseshoe-shaped troughs with pink goo, slip them into my mouth one at a time, and make me bite down hard. I liked leaving a perfect ring of toothmarks. The worst thing about it was that you felt as though your mouth were being stretched, as if you’d smiled too long, like Miss World. Afterward, he’d ask me if it was yummy—it was supposed to be strawberry flavored—but I’d tell him it tasted like a plastic spoon left in a bowl of fruit salad and make him laugh.