The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [59]
What does she do? Those were the words people used, and what they meant was What is her occupation. But after all, that was only a part of what people did all day. Nonetheless, it was the easiest way to begin an understanding of someone’s identity. A better question, he supposed, than Who is your family?—the kind of tribal placement an Italian might be interested in. So what did it mean that before Miranda asked “What does Clare do,” she asked, “Is Clare tidy?”
And he understands suddenly that he had to be asked for information about his wife; he had no impulse to speak about her. Does this mean that he feels even seeing Miranda is a kind of infidelity, something that needs to be kept separate from his married life? He knows that’s part of it. But in Clare’s case, it is both more and less than that. Saying what she does for a living would not shed light on who she is. It would cloak her in incomprehensibility. Clare’s job does not explain her.
Clare is a dentist.
How could he explain that this was something Clare liked about her job—that, as she said, it was for people either a joke, a source of boredom, or a cause for recoil. And that it is part of what he loves about her: the slant, even ironic posture she takes toward life, a determination to be sensible and yet surprising. The way she has of blinking several times before she speaks, as if she were always standing in a light a bit too bright, whose brightness no one else seems to be acknowledging.
He has known her since she was thirteen years old. She was the daughter of the head of the history department, John Sargent, an expert on Shaw’s Brigade of black soldiers who volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Clare Sargent. He couldn’t remember paying attention to her; he was drowning in his own life, his life with Beverly and Raphael. He remembered a girl small for her age, with a head of curly red hair that seemed too heavy for her body, who at the school Christmas fair sold the wooden animals she had whittled; he once bought one for Raphael. A squirrel, perhaps a chipmunk. She wasn’t one of the faculty teenagers who babysat; she didn’t sing in the chorus. Then she was off to Yale, and then to dental school. He was one of those people who stopped listening when he heard the word “dentistry.”
How did it happen, that she became his wife? It was soon after his son, Raphael, left home. Adam had broken a front tooth; he was mortified; he hadn’t been to a dentist in ten years. Who recommended her? He can’t remember now. She fixed his tooth. She mentioned that she was on her way to Rome. He gave her names of restaurants.
She brought him back a model of the Colosseum made of marzipan. He felt he hadn’t laughed in years. She said—the awkward flirtation of someone unschooled in it—You see, I’m hoping you’ll eat it and then you’ll find yourself back in my chair. She told him why she became a dentist: because she had grown up among people (her father, who taught history, her mother, the school librarian) who were never sure that what they did was important. At Yale, she thought of architecture. It was clear to her she liked building things, but had no talent to design them. And no patience with the lack of concern among her classmates for how people actually lived. She thought of medicine. She disliked the premeds so intensely that when, standing on line to sign up for organic chemistry lab, she saw a burly junior push a small woman to the ground to sign up before her, she took herself off the premed list. Also, she said, she didn’t like the thought of having someone’s life in her hands. That you could kill someone by making the wrong decision, or not paying attention at some crucial point.
One spring break she was talking to the woman who cleaned her parents’ house. She was from Guatemala. Clare noticed that whenever she smiled she covered her mouth. She dared to ask why: It’s my teeth, my teeth are rotten: no one should see me smile. Clare took her to the dentist. The dentist struck her as modest and intelligent, and compassionate in a way that she found pleasingly