The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [54]
I am so used to Laura by now that I don’t know what to say about her. She has a raucous, smoke-coarsened, ironic voice, which she uses to good effect in lecturing the patients about dental hygiene. “What is this, you don’t floss? You want your gums to turn to cotton candy? Believe me, if you sat in this chair and watched what comes through the door every day, you wouldn’t be so optimistic. Take this. I’m going to show you.” We have never talked about anything but business. Of Delilah I don’t know much. She and Dana talk a lot, it seems to me, and for a long time this whispery murmur from the next office has been a kind of comforting white noise at the end of my workday. During the week, after the opera, it falls silent. Dana doesn’t have much to say, or rather, what she has to say cannot be said, so she says nothing. I look blankly out the window between patients. I am sure that behind the wall Dana is doing the same thing.
What did I think I was doing on that first day of dental school? Why did I choose to pour the formless me into this particular mold? I hadn’t known any dentists except the ones who worked on my own teeth. They didn’t strike me as romantic figures. I was, and still am, rather struck by the mystery of teeth, of their evolution and function, of the precisely refined support system in the gums and jaws that enables a person, every person just about, simply to chew. Senseless, mindless objects, teeth, two little rows of stones in the landscape of the flesh, but as sensitive, in their way, as fingertips or lips.
I also felt the mystery of building houses back then—the way lengths of wood, hammered together with lengths of steel, created a space that people either wanted or didn’t want to be inside of. I thought of architecture, but architecture was making pictures, not making buildings. Most of my fellow biology majors went to medical school or botany school or zoology school. When I considered doctoring, I used to imagine a giant body laid open on the operating table like a cadaver, but alive, and myself on a little diving board above it, about to somersault in. Not attractive. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting with some university administration about the age of my lab equipment.
This is what I saw myself doing: sitting here, my back hunched, the office cool and clean, the patient half asleep. I am tinkering. Making something little. But perhaps making little things belittles the self. I’ve noticed at conventions that dentists argue about details a lot. I wish my wife loved me. I wish her constant blue eyes would focus on me with desire instead of regret. I wonder if I haven’t always been a little out of the center of her gaze, a necessary part of the life she wants to lead, but a part, only a part.
That was a Friday. The last day of a long, trying week. I suspect that Dana and I measured our time differently that week. For her, maybe, the time fell into blocks of unequal length, pivoting about the minutes she spent wherever, wherever it was that she managed to see him. My week, of course, was more orderly, and it was primarily defined by those trips with Lizzie to school each morning and lying in bed with Dana each night, wide awake and pretending to be asleep so that she wouldn’t speak to me. She was, I should add, restless all week. Once, she got up at three and did something downstairs until five ten, then she came back to bed and went back to sleep. My mother used to look at us severely if we complained of not sleeping and say, “So what have you got a guilty conscience about?”
On Friday the children fell into bed at eight o’clock, practically asleep already. Dana sat knitting in front of the TV. There was an HBO showing of Tootsie. I went in and out, longing to sit down, unable to. Every time I went into the living room, I peered at Dana. She