The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  I remember when I first had the idea of making bombs. That is, I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember the feeling. I remember putting my hands out, palms curved and facing each other, about eight inches apart, as if a bomb, a hard small object, as I thought before I had seen any dynamite, could appear between them, if the force of desire alone could have that effect. Making a bomb was the most extreme thing I could think of to do, and once I had thought of it, I could not settle for anything less. All through the research, all through the dropping of hints, all through the wooing of Maury Nassiter, I was lusty and restless, the way I feel now. It is the itch to do the most unthought-of thing, the itch to destroy what is made—the firm shape of my life, whether unhappy, as it was, or happy, as it is now.

  But if I turn the imagined object and look at the other side, my motives are trivial, unimportant. My grandfather would say that what is true was what compelled me to act. He used to say, “When these bosses make you go faster until you can’t keep up and they fire you to hire a younger man for less, you think this is by mistake?” He would say, “Of course they shoot me if I throw a stone through the window. You think that a pane of glass is not worth more than I am worth? Did the pane of glass cost more than the bullet? That’s what they say to themselves.” And every time he devalued himself, I got angry. It is an explosive pressure in my chest and shoulders that pulsates, I realize now, in time to my quickened breathing. It only takes a second to feel it again, to know again what my grandfather knew. I push myself out of the couch and walk to the front door. It is locked, and I open it and step out onto the porch, still panting. Since no one ever comes here, and Michael and I always park in the back, I know that this matted grass is from the morning, from the old couple. I stand looking at the tracks. Who could they be, that couple, other than the representatives of blame? I am struck, in retrospect, by their half-defeated air, the way the man stayed behind the car door, and the woman held her handbag in front of herself like a shield. Although it is certain they have nothing to do with me, my anger passes suddenly into remorse, the way the blossom of an explosion turns from yellow to orange, even as its shape billows outward. And the blast wave, though slower, is more punishing: the conviction that I might have understood more, acted less ruthlessly.

  • • •

  “I can’t believe you ate it,” says Avie.

  “I ate it. What was wrong with it? I didn’t want it to go to waste.”

  “Mom, it was rancid. You can’t keep dressed salad in the refrigerator for a week and then eat it.”

  “Did it hurt me? Am I still standing here? Did I like it?”

  “I can’t believe you liked it.”

  “I don’t like to waste things, that’s what I don’t like. It hurts me to waste things. Look at your socks.”

  Avie looks down at his socks, perplexed.

  “Are there shoes on your feet?”

  Avie sighs. “No.”

  “I can see those socks getting threadbare as I stand here.”

  “Mom, you have to think more of yourself. You have to value your own mouth, your own taste buds.”

  “You have to think more of your socks.” She turns and walks out of the room.

  He shouts after her, “Why are you this way?” But she doesn’t bother to answer. Miriam goes over and puts her arm around his thin waist. We tease our mother, we question her, we watch her, but every time, she defeats us. There is no way in. Now she is in the other room. What is she doing? There are noises, a thump, a rustle. But when I go to look, she has gone into the bathroom and shut the door. I am filled with longing and curiosity.

  Now I open my eyes again upon the Sunday summer afternoon, and I stand up from the couch and stretch. I move around the room, straightening, and into the bedroom, where I open the drawers and take out some underwear. I go to the closet and take out a bag and begin throwing things into it. It is about three thirty. I have no plan. I will take each stage as it comes—south to I-70, north somewhere in Ohio to I-80. I will drive across the George Washington Bridge stealthily, press myself into the city as into jungle: not, as people think, to avoid capture, but rather to ambush my mother in some act, any act, to see her as she has never been seen before.

  The Age of Grief

  Dana was the only woman in our freshman dental class, one of two that year in the whole dental school. The next year things changed, and a fifth of them were women, so maybe Professor Perl, who taught freshman biochemistry, didn’t persist in his habit of turning to the only woman in the class and saying, “Miss McManus, did you understand that?” assuming that if Dana got it, so had everyone else (male). In fact, Dana majored in biochemistry, and so her predictable nod of understanding was a betrayal to us all, and our class got the reputation among the faculty of being especially poor in biochemistry, a statistical anomaly, guys flunking out who would have passed any other year. Of course, Perl never blamed himself.

  Dentists’ offices are very neat, and dentists are always washing their hands, and so their hands are cool and white and right under the nose, to be smelled. People would be offended if dentists weren’t as clean as possible, but they hold it against us. On television they always make us out to be prissy and compulsive. If a murder has been committed and a dentist is in the show, he will certainly have done it, and he will probably have lived with his mother well into his thirties, to boot. Actors who play dentists blink a lot.

  Dentists on television never have people coming in like the man who came to me today. His teeth were hurting him over the weekend, and so he went out to his toolbox and found a pliers and began to pull them all out, with only some whiskey to kill the pain. Pulling teeth takes a lot of strength and a certain finesse, one of which the man had and the other of which he lacked. What drove him into my office today, after fifteen years away from the dentist, was twenty-four broken teeth, some in fragments below the gum line, some merely smashed around the crown. Teeth are important. Eskimo cultures used to abandon their old folks in the snow when their teeth went, no matter how good their health was otherwise. People in our culture have a lot of privileges. One of them is having no teeth.

  Dana was terrifically enthusiastic about dental school, or maybe the word is “defiant.” When she came into the lecture hall every day she would pause and look around the room, at all the guys, daring them to dismiss her, daring them, in fact, to have any thoughts about her at all. To me, dental school seemed more like a very large meal that I had to eat all by myself. The dishes were arrayed before me, and so I took my spoon and went at it as deliberately as possible, chewing up biochemistry and physiology, then fixed prosthodontics and operative dentistry, then periodontics and anesthesia and pain control.

  I was happy during lab, when we were let loose on the patients. They would file in and sit down in the rows of chairs; then they would lie back, and we would stretch these wire-and-rubber frameworks over their mouths. They were called rubber dams. You lodged the wires in the patient’s mouth and then pulled the affected tooth through a tight hole in the rubber sheet. Our professors said that they made the tooth easier to see and get at. Really, I think, they were meant to keep the students from dropping something, a tooth or even an instrument, down that open throat. They also kept the patients quiet. That little barrier let them know that they didn’t have to talk. Patients feel as if they ought to make conversation. Anyway, that huge hall would hush, and you would simply concentrate on that white tooth against that dark rubber, and the time would fly. That was the last time that I felt I could really meditate over my work. For a dentist, the social nature of the situation is the hardest thing.

  I did well in dental school, but it seemed to me that I deserved more drama in my life, especially after I quit the building crew I had worked on every summer since I was sixteen. I quit the crew because I was making $4 an hour and one day I nearly crushed my left hand trying to lift a bunch of loose two-by-fours. It hurt, but before I even felt the pain (your neurons, if you’re tall, take a while) I
remembered the exact cost of my first year of dental school, which was $8,792.38. A lot of hours at $4 an hour.

  I took on Dana. I felt about her the way she felt about dental school. I dared her to dismiss me, and I was determined to scare the pants off her. I took the front basket off my bike, and then I would make her sit on the handlebars at midnight while we coasted down the longest, steepest street in town. We did it over and over, eight nights in a row once. I figured the more likely outcome, death, was cheaper in the end than just wrecking my hands. Besides, it was like falling in love with Dana. I couldn’t stop doing it and I was afraid she could.

  After that, we’d go back to her place and make love until the adrenaline in our systems had broken down. Sometimes that was a long time. But we were up at six, fresh and sexy, Dana pumped up for the daily challenge of crushing the dental school between her two fists like a beer can, and me for the daily challenge of Dana. Now we have three daughters. We strap them in the car and jerk the belts to test them. One of us walks the older ones to school every day, although the distance is two blocks. The oldest, Lizzie, would be floored by the knowledge that Dana and I haven’t always crept fearfully from potential accident to potential accident the way we do now.

  If Dana were reminded these days that she hadn’t graduated first in our class but third, she would pretend indifference, but she was furious then. What did it matter that Phil Levine, who was first, hadn’t been out of his apartment after dark in three years and his wife seemed to have taken a vow of silence, which she broke only when she told him she was going to live with another guy? Or that Marty Crockett, number two, was a certified genius and headed for NASA as the first dentist in space? The result of her fury was an enormous loan, for office, house, equipment, everything the best, the most tasteful, the most up-to-date, for our joint office and our new joint practice. We had been intending to join two separate and established practices, etc., etc., the conservative path to prosperity. Another result of her fury was that the loan officer and his secretary were our first patients, then his wife, her five children, one of her cousins. The secretary has proved, in fact, an inexhaustible fount of new patients, since she is related to everyone in three counties and she calls them all regularly on the bank’s WATS line. I root-canaled three of her teeth last year alone.

  Anyway, we dropped without pause from the drama of Dana’s four-point grade average into the drama of a $2,500 mortgage payment in a town where we knew no one and that already had four dental clinics. Dana put our picture in the paper, “Dr. David Hurst and Dr. Dana Hurst, opening their new clinic on Front Street.” I was handsome, she was pretty, people weren’t accustomed to going to good-looking dentists, she said. They would like it. Our office was next to the fanciest restaurant in town, far from Orthodontia Row, as Dana called it. It wasn’t easy, and some of those huge mortgage checks were real victories of accounting procedure. As soon as it got easy, just a little easy, Dana got pregnant with Lizzie.

  Dana likes being pregnant, even though, or because, each of our fetuses has negotiated a successful but harrowing path through early bleeding, threatened miscarriage, threatened breech presentation, and long labor. She likes knowing, perhaps, that when Dr. Dana Hurst comes through the obstetrician’s door with the news that she is pregnant, the man had better get out his best machines and give his assistants a little extra training, because it isn’t going to be easy, and wasn’t meant to be.

  Then there was the drama of motherhood—babies in the office, nursing between appointments, baby-sitter interviews that went on for hours while Dana probed into the deepest corners of the candidate’s psyche, breasts that gushed in front of the dourest, least maternal patients. Assistants with twins. Those were the only kind she would hire for a while, just, I thought, to raise even higher the possibility that we wouldn’t make it through the morning, through the week, through our marriage. I used to meditate over my patients in the dental school, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be a dentist and have drama, too.

  Now the children are all in school, or at least off the breast, we are prosperous and established on a semi–part-time schedule, and all Dana has to do is dentistry. Little machines. Itsy-bitsy pieces of cotton. Fragments of gold you can’t pick up with your fingers. I think she thought it would get bigger, like Cinerama, and instead it gets smaller and smaller.

  If she were writing this, she would say that I was an exotically reckless graduate student, not dental at all, and that she pegged me for that the first day of classes, when I came in late, with my bike helmet under my arm, and sat down right in front of the teacher, stuck my feet into the aisle, and burped in the silence of his pause, loud enough for three rows to hear. But it was the only seat, I was too rattled to suppress my digestive grind, and I always stuck my feet into the aisle because my legs didn’t fit under the desk. It was she who wanted me, she would say, to give her life a little variety and color. When I tell her that all I’ve ever longed for is the opportunity to meditate over my work, she doesn’t believe me.

  Dana would say that she loves routine. That is how she got through a biochemistry major and through dental school, after all, with an ironclad routine that included hours of studying, but also nourishing meals, lots of sex, and irresponsible activities with me. Her vision of routine is a lot broader than most people’s is. You might say that she has a genius for knowing what has to be included. She has a joke lately, though. At night, standing in the bathroom brushing her teeth, she will say, “There it goes!” or she may get up on Saturday morning and exclaim, “Zap! another one vanished!” What she is referring to is the passage of the days and weeks. A year is nothing any more. Last fall it happened that we got Lizzie the wrong snow boots, fat rather than thin, and not acceptable to Lizzie’s very decided tastes. Without even a pause, Dana countered Lizzie’s complaints with the promise that she could have some new ones next year, in no time at all, she seemed to be saying.

  It used not to be like this. Time used to stretch and bunch up. Minutes would inflate like balloons, and the two months of our beginning acquaintance seem in retrospect as long as all the time from then until now. A day was like a cloth sack. You could always fit something else in, it would just bulge a little more. Routine is the culprit, isn’t it? Something is the culprit. The other thing about routine is that it frees you for a more independent mental life, one that is partly detached from the business at hand. Even when I was pulling out all of that guy’s teeth today, I wasn’t paying much attention. His drama was interesting as an anecdote, but it was his. To me it was just twenty-four teeth in a row, in a row of hundreds of teeth stretching back years. I have a friend named Henry who is an oral surgeon at the University Hospital. He is still excited when he finds someone’s wisdom tooth up under the eyeball, where they sometimes migrate. He can talk about his patients for hours. They come from all over the state, with facial disfigurations of all types, no two alike, Henry says. But does his enthusiasm have its source in him or in them? In ten years, is he going to move to New York City because he’s tired of car wrecks and wondering about gunshot wounds? Should Dana have gone into oral surgery? I don’t know any women who do that.

  I sound as if we never forget that we are dentists, as if when someone smiles we automatically class their teeth as “gray range” or “yellow range.” Of course we are also parents. These are my three daughters, Lizzie, Stephanie, and Leah. They are seven, five, and two. The most important thing in the world to Lizzie and Stephanie is the social world of the grammar school playground. The most important thing to Leah is me. Apart from the fact that Lizzie and Stephanie are my daughters, I am very fond of them.

  Lizzie is naturally graceful and cool, with a high, domed forehead and a good deal of disdain for things that don’t suit her taste, for instance, turtleneck shirts and pajamas with feet in them. She prefers blouses and nightgowns. Propriety is important to her and wars with her extremely ready sense of humor. She knows I exploit her sense of humor to get my way, and I would like to get o
ut of the habit of tricking her into doing things she doesn’t want to do, but it is hard. The tricks always work.

  Stephanie is our boy. She is tall, and strong, and not interested in rearranging the family’s feelings. She would rather be out. Sometimes she seems not to recognize us in public. She feels about kindergarten the way people used to feel about going away to college: at last she is out of the house, out of her parents’ control, on her own in the great world. I think she has an irrational faith that she won’t always be two years younger than Lizzie.

  There is a lot of chitchat in the media about how things have changed since the fifties and sixties, but I think that is because nothing has really changed at all, except the details. Lizzie and Stephanie live in a neighborhood of older houses, as I did, and walk home from the same sort of brick schoolhouse. When they get home, they watch Superman cartoons and eat Hershey bars, as I did. They swing on their swing set and play with Barbie and talk about “murdering” the boys.

  They have a lot of confidence, and even power, when it comes to the boys. To hear them tell it, the boys walk the playground in fear. Dana says, “Don’t talk about the boys so much. When you grow up, you’re going to resent them for it.” It is tempting, from their school tales, to think of the boys as hapless dopes—always in the lowest reading group, never earning behavior stars for the week, picking their noses, exposing the elastic of their underpants. It is tempting to avoid mentioning that I was a boy once myself.

  It’s not as if they ever ask. The unknown age they wish to know all about is their own—what were their peculiarities as babies, and toddlers, in the misty pasts of five years ago, three years ago, last year, even. When Dana pulls out a jacket for Leah that was originally Lizzie’s, Lizzie greets it with amazed delight—how can it possibly still exist, when the three-year-old who wore it has vanished without a trace?