The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [48]
The third element was that Dana fell in love with one of her fellow singers, or maybe it was the musical director. She doesn’t know that I know that this was an element.
Not too long ago, the single performance of the opera Nabucco came and went. Leah stayed home, screaming, with the baby-sitter. Lizzie and Stephanie went along. I paid attention to the music most of the time, and the part that Dana sang about sitting down beside the waters of Babylon was very pretty, to say the least. I closed my eyes, and there were certain notes that should not have ended, that should be eternal sounds in the universe. Lizzie sat in the front seat and fell asleep on the way home. Stephanie leaned against Dana in the backseat, and also fell asleep.
In the midst of all this breathing, still dressed in her Old Testament costume and with her hair pinned up, Dana said, “I’ll never be happy again.” I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. She was looking out the window, and she meant it. I don’t know if she even realized that she had spoken aloud. I drove into the light of the headlights, and I didn’t make a sound. It seemed to me that I didn’t have a sound to make.
When we got home, Leah was still awake. She was thrilled to see me, and while Dana put the others to bed and changed her clothing, I sat next to Leah’s crib and held her hand while she talked to me. She talked about the moon, and her books, and her Jemima Puddleduck doll, and something else unintelligible. She perused my face for signs of pleasure. Sometimes she made gestures of ironical acceptance, shrugs of her little baby shoulders. Sometimes she sighed, as if she didn’t quite understand how things work but was willing to talk about it. Are these imitations of our gestures? Or does the language itself carry this burden of mystery, so that any speaker must express it?
My eyes began to close, but Leah wasn’t finished for the night, and when I slid down the wall to a reclining position, she insisted that I sit up again. It was nearly one by this time. Saturday night. I had root-canaled two, and drilled and filled two, and cleaned two more a very long time before. One of them had insisted upon talking about her sister, who had cancer of the jaw. I had been arduously sympathetic, because, of course, you must. The room was dark and filled with toys. The baby was talking. The moon shone in the window. That was the last real peace I had.
Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth. Undiluted apple juice in a baby bottle, sourballs, the pH balance of drinking water, tetracycline, sand in your bread if you were in the Roman army, biting seal-gut thread if you are an Eskimo woman, playing the trumpet, pulling your own teeth with a pliers. In their hearts, most dentists are certain that their patients can’t be trusted with their teeth, but you can’t grieve for every tooth, every mouth. You can’t even grieve for the worst of them; you can only send the patient home with as many of the teeth he came in with as possible.
After a while, Leah’s eyes began to take on that stare that is preliminary to sleep, and her remarks became more desultory. She continued to hold my hand. I thought about the Hebrews sitting down beside the waters of Babylon, and I began to weep, too, although as quietly as possible. I didn’t see how I was going to support the total love of one woman, Leah, while simultaneously relinquishing that of another, Dana. I wasn’t curious. I said my prayer, which was, “Lord, don’t let her tell me about it,” and shortly after that