The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [62]
Leah sat up at five months and reached for the toys that were in front of her. It took her another five months to crawl. Yes, she was big and fat, but more than that, she was satisfied. Her hands were huge, and she could hold two blocks in each of them when she was six months old. Hand to mouth. You couldn’t keep anything out of her mouth. Now it seems as though she doesn’t recognize anything without touching it. She runs her hands over my face. She holds on tight. She snuggles. Standing in front of a table of toys, she is as satisfied as a human can be, and she has stretches of concentration that Lizzie and Stephanie don’t begin to match, although they are five and three years older than she is. If you distract her, she looks drugged for a moment. Drugged by touch.
And so I have three separate regrets. What does Lizzie see? What does Stephanie hear? What unsatisfied, yearning tension does Leah feel in my flesh when she snuggles against me and puts her hands on my shoulders? There is no hiding from them, is there? And there is no talking to them. They don’t understand what they understand. I am afraid. I should call the pediatrician, but I don’t. I think, as people do, that everything will be all right. But even so, I can’t stop being afraid. They are so beautiful, my daughters, so fragile and attentive to family life.
I wish they were boys and completely oblivious, as I was. I could not have said, before I met Dana, whether my parents’ marriage was happy or not. I didn’t know. She told me. She said, “Your parents are so dissimilar, aren’t they? I mean, your father is sociable and trusting and all business, and your mother just doesn’t know what to make of things, does she? They are a truly weird combination.” We were twenty-two. She had spent her first half hour with them, and this was what she came out with, and that is what I have known about them ever since.
The next day a new patient came in, a heavyset, pugnacious man about my age. I poked around in his mouth and said, “Besides your present cavities, you have some very poorly filled teeth here.” He sat up and looked at me and said, “You know, I’ve never been to a dentist who thought much of what was done to your teeth before him. And I’ll say this, you’d better be cheap, because five years from now, some guy’s going to tell me he’s got to redo all your work, too.” He sat back and looked out the window for a second, but he must have thought that the ice was broken, because he started right in again. “Doctors never say boo about what they see. I mean, some guy could cut off your healthy leg and leave the bad one, and you wouldn’t get another doctor to admit the guy had made a mistake.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Things are more fucked every day.”
“Open, please,” I said.
“I mean, I don’t know why I’m sitting here having my teeth fixed. It’s going to cost me a lot of money that I could spend having the other stuff fixed. By the way, don’t touch the front teeth. I play the trumpet, and if you touch the front teeth, then I’ll have to change my embouchure.”
I said, “Open, please.”
“Well, I’m not sure I want to open. I mean, if you don’t do anything, then I can spend my money on therapy or something that might really improve my life.”
“We do ask patients to pay for appointments they don’t keep. If you’re uneasy about the discomfort, we have a lot of ways to make sure—”
“Hell, I don’t care if it pinches, like you guys all say. I don’t care if it hurts like shit. I just want to feel I’m not wasting my time.”
“Proper dental care is never a—”
“My wife made this appointment for me. Now I’ve lost my job, and she’s kicked me out. But she sent me this little card, telling me to go here, and I came. I mean, I can’t—”
“Mr. Slater, please open your mouth so that we can get on with it.”
“I can’t believe she kicked me out, but I really can’t believe she cares whether or not I go to the dentist.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Slater.