The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [44]
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 out 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