The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [41]
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“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
D ana 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