The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [42]
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