The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [43]
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,