The Tooth
Helaina Pisar McKibbin
I thought I heard an airplane for a second, but it was just the sound of the drill trimming my jawbone. I was at the dentist getting a wisdom tooth removed, rather unusual for a 50-year-old man.
“It’s your mid-life crisis,” the dentist joked. “Most people have it done in their teens or 20s. At any rate it’s a good thing you’re getting it done, it’s impacted, and it would have been dangerous to put it off any longer.”
Courtesy of Novocain, I only felt a little pressure when the scalpel cut through my gum. The dentist had warned me, but I still jumped. The assistant put a soothing hand on my shoulder. Her long hair was white, platinum actually, and she wore it in a braid. It matched the pale gray of her eyes. For a second, she reminded me of my grandmother, minus the wrinkles. Speaking of teeth, Grandma, or Babushka in Russian, used to bury my milk teeth in our vegetable garden back in Wisconsin. I never knew if it was a custom from the old country or just hers. “Baby teeth belong in earth, not under pillow,” she would say. “You make wish. That help second teeth grow strong in mouth. Tooth fairy not real.”
I glanced up at the dentist. His brow was furrowed in concentration. There were numerous wrinkles around his mouth and on his cheeks that looked as if they had been made with a scalpel. His hair wasn’t gray though but red like rust on an old iron gate. A bad coloring job! I’ll be damned if I ever look like that. In fact, I had postponed the wisdom tooth operation as long as possible so I could use the money for a face lift. I’m an actor, after all. The plastic surgeon had smoothed out the lines around my mouth and taken out the frown lines between my eyes. Since then, I couldn’t frown at all, though I wanted to at the dental office. The doctor had bad breath.
“Water,” he said, and the assistant sprayed me. “Suction,” he said, and there was a swish of air, like a small tempest inside my mouth.
“Just cleaning things out here;” said the assistant. “It’ll be over in a jiffy.”
Four hands flew like wings in front of my face, and then the cotton and pincers swooped down like an eagle. My jaw was aching a little because my mouth had been pried open for so long.
“Here it comes,” said the doctor. “It’s a boy.”
“Naw, that’s a girl,” said the assistant, placing the tooth in a plastic bag.
Both laughed. I didn’t. After they sewed me back up, the dentist said, “Okey dokey. We’re done. Marylin here will go over the post-surgical instructions with you. I’m prescribing an antibiotic and some extra-strength Motrin, in case you need it. Have a good one.” Then he left.
“You can have it,” Marylin said.
“What?”
“The tooth.”
“Oh, okay,” I said.
She put the tooth in a small plastic bag, which she handed to me. I got out of the dental chair and went to the sink to wash it. A tiny spot of blood on the crown wouldn’t come off so it stared up at me like a small red eye. Feeling uneasy, I rinsed the molar thoroughly and used a little hand soap. They had pulled this pearl out of my jawbone, pried it out as if from an oyster, a pretty little thing, opalescent white but beige at the roots. Maybe I should bury it under the hedges near my apartment building, for old times’ sake, for Grandma. I threw it back in the bag, and stuffed it in my pocket.
After I paid—only the first installment, of course—Marylin sent me on my way. The tooth and I went down to the parking garage and got into my yellow convertible. I pressed the button to put the top down as I drove out and got on the freeway. I was sailing by at 70 miles an hour, my long hair blowing in my eyes. Half of my face was cold, the other half was numb.
I stopped at the pharmacy to pick up the antibiotic. I was shivering from the cold, but what’s the point of living in LA if you can’t wear a short sleeve shirt in the winter? Then I went back to my studio in Culver City. I hate my tiny apartment. The landlord refuses to change the stained gold carpet, but it’s all I can afford right now with the various operations and the sports car. Hopefully my agent will call me so I can get a role as an extra in a crowd scene standing out in the cold for hours. I put the bag with the tooth on my nightstand, plopped down on the bed with my clothes on and fell asleep.
I had a dream in which I was about five years old. It was nighttime, and I was back in my bed in Wisconsin, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept running my tongue over the space where my two front milk teeth had been. Grandma and I had buried them in the yard that afternoon, and I decided to check on them. I crossed the garden barefoot, my little feet freezing in the wet grass. In place of the small mound we had made over the incisors was a tree and on every branch grew teeth, molars, incisors, and canines. These must be second teeth, I thought. They seem so big. The tree could have been scary, but I wasn’t afraid at all. The teeth were beautiful like pearls that shone, iridescent, in the moonlight, flickering like white flames. The branches swayed in the wind as if dancing to the high tune it whistled. I went up to the tree and touched one of the molars on the lowest branch. It was smooth as enamel should be.
Babushka, my grandmother, called me from inside the house. “You crazy. Come back to bed right now. You catch cold.”
“What are they doing on the tree?” I asked her as I made my way back to the house. “Why can’t they be in my mouth?”
“You need be patient,” she said.
As I woke from the dream, the pain came, eating the inside of my mouth. I got up to take some Motrin and lay down again. I glanced at the clock radio. Though it was one o’clock in the morning, I didn’t think I could go back to sleep, at least not until the Motrin took effect, so I turned on the light and reached for the mystery novel on my nightstand. It was then that I noticed that the tooth on the nightstand was out of the bag in which there was now a tiny hole.
I picked up the tooth. It looked even cleaner than before. The blood spot was gone, and the roots were now white like the crown. Had it cleaned itself like a cat? I must be going crazy, I thought. Is it some effect from the anesthetic? Unlikely. It was local, just Novocain. I placed the tooth back in the bag, put it in the drawer of my nightstand and tried to read.
The phone rang. My crazy agent was calling me at this ungodly hour. I let it go to message.
“Hey, I have good news. I’ve gotten you a commercial,” he said, “so the money should be pretty good. It’s for Listerine Antiseptic. You know, the blue kind.” He paused, then continued. “Why aren’t you picking up? Out picking up women, no doubt. You rascal, you. Well, good morning. Call me back.” Then he hung up.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. That floozy I’d picked up last week at the Mexican bar spoke. One night in bed, and she was hooked on me, a real drag. She sounded drunk.
“Give me a call, honey,” she said, leaving a message.
God, I missed Babushka or Baba for short. I wished she were here to take care of me during my recovery like she did when I had the measles, reading me fairy tales about Vasilisa the Beautiful, Ivan Tsarevich, the witch Baba Yaga whose cabin stood on chicken legs, and my favorite, the Snow Girl. Kind of an odd thought for a middle-aged man, but that’s how I felt. To be honest, I’d felt the same way after my face lift. My mother had died in a plane crash when I was six months old, so Grandma and Dad had raised me. The three of us lived together. Now they were both dead, and I missed them, especially Baba.
I got up to get an ice pack from the freezer. My cheek was swelling, which was normal, but I decided I’d better call the dentist later in the morning just in case. When I walked back to my bed the tooth was standing in the middle of the room. She was walking stiffly on her four roots, shifting her weight from one to the other.
What’s going on, I thought. Didn’t I put that tooth in the drawer of the nightstand? This is making me crazy. I better just throw the damn thing out. It’s too much trouble. I put on my bathrobe, picked up the molar and, leaving the apartment door open, raced down the hall to throw it down the chute. When I returned, I locked the door and went back to bed leaving the light on. Eventually, I fell asleep. At 8:00 a.m., the phone rang. It was Marylin from the dental office.
“Just wondering how those gums are doing,” she said cheerfully. “Remember to call next week to make an appointment to get the stitches removed.”
I need to pick up the phone, I thought, to tell her about the swelling, but I couldn’t move. I was so exhausted. I heard the click of the phone as she hung up. I passed my tongue over the stitches which of course I wasn’t supposed to do. A scab was forming, gelatinous, normal for a wet environment. The blood was in limbo, half clotted. Then, I suddenly noticed a large four-legged white stool by my bed. The seat was square and indented. It was the tooth that had grown to the size of a stool.
“What do you want from me?” I heard myself saying. What am I doing talking to a tooth? I turned around and faced the wall so I wouldn’t have to see the tooth and tried to sleep. I couldn’t help wondering how it had crawled back up the garbage shoot. It didn’t, I said to myself. I’m just going a little crazy. It’s fatigue. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I started counting the bumps on the cottage cheese ceiling to distract myself, but my mind kept returning to the tooth. I thought it might be better to turn around and look at it again to see if I still saw it, in my imagination, of course, but I was afraid to. I turned on my back. I could see something white in my peripheral vision. Oh, what the heck, I thought, just look at it. So I turned my head in the direction of the tooth-stool. It was still there. I heard myself gasp but didn’t let myself look away.
Then I felt myself rise from the bed, slowly. I couldn’t fight it. I walked up to the white stool and, as if pulled by gravity, sat on it—or rather, fell on it. It began to rock, back and forth, shifting its weight from one leg, root to root. The seat or crown was hard, indented in the middle. I felt myself falling through the center, the canal swallowing me as I tried to make my way through the capillaries. The pulp was viscous in there, like quicksand. I was terrified for a moment and choking on the blood, but then I could suddenly breathe again.
The stool was still rocking, but it wasn’t a stool anymore. It was a rocking chair painted white with a green cushion. I was sitting in someone’s lap. I looked up and saw Baba, her gray-white braids coming down her shoulders, a red kerchief on her head. My father had never managed to convince her to style her hair. She was singing the Cossack lullaby she used to sing, her voice cracking with age. I recognized the tune though I couldn’t understand the words. I’d never asked exactly what they meant, but I knew it was something about growing up and becoming a soldier, big and strong. I felt my face. It was smooth and hairless. Looking down, my hands were tiny, and my legs dangled on Baba’s lap. With my tongue, I felt the spaces where my lower incisors had been before I’d begun losing my milk teeth and then, I ran my tongue over the back molars. All was smooth, no stitches. I looked out the window. It was snowing outside, the earth only a shade whiter than the sky. We must’ve been back in Wisconsin.
“When spring come,” Baba said, “we plant white lilies in the garden. They grow tall and white like the teeth in your mouth. You make wish and grow up big and strong like your teeth. When spring come,” she repeated.
“It’s your mid-life crisis,” the dentist joked. “Most people have it done in their teens or 20s. At any rate it’s a good thing you’re getting it done, it’s impacted, and it would have been dangerous to put it off any longer.”
Courtesy of Novocain, I only felt a little pressure when the scalpel cut through my gum. The dentist had warned me, but I still jumped. The assistant put a soothing hand on my shoulder. Her long hair was white, platinum actually, and she wore it in a braid. It matched the pale gray of her eyes. For a second, she reminded me of my grandmother, minus the wrinkles. Speaking of teeth, Grandma, or Babushka in Russian, used to bury my milk teeth in our vegetable garden back in Wisconsin. I never knew if it was a custom from the old country or just hers. “Baby teeth belong in earth, not under pillow,” she would say. “You make wish. That help second teeth grow strong in mouth. Tooth fairy not real.”
I glanced up at the dentist. His brow was furrowed in concentration. There were numerous wrinkles around his mouth and on his cheeks that looked as if they had been made with a scalpel. His hair wasn’t gray though but red like rust on an old iron gate. A bad coloring job! I’ll be damned if I ever look like that. In fact, I had postponed the wisdom tooth operation as long as possible so I could use the money for a face lift. I’m an actor, after all. The plastic surgeon had smoothed out the lines around my mouth and taken out the frown lines between my eyes. Since then, I couldn’t frown at all, though I wanted to at the dental office. The doctor had bad breath.
“Water,” he said, and the assistant sprayed me. “Suction,” he said, and there was a swish of air, like a small tempest inside my mouth.
“Just cleaning things out here;” said the assistant. “It’ll be over in a jiffy.”
Four hands flew like wings in front of my face, and then the cotton and pincers swooped down like an eagle. My jaw was aching a little because my mouth had been pried open for so long.
“Here it comes,” said the doctor. “It’s a boy.”
“Naw, that’s a girl,” said the assistant, placing the tooth in a plastic bag.
Both laughed. I didn’t. After they sewed me back up, the dentist said, “Okey dokey. We’re done. Marylin here will go over the post-surgical instructions with you. I’m prescribing an antibiotic and some extra-strength Motrin, in case you need it. Have a good one.” Then he left.
“You can have it,” Marylin said.
“What?”
“The tooth.”
“Oh, okay,” I said.
She put the tooth in a small plastic bag, which she handed to me. I got out of the dental chair and went to the sink to wash it. A tiny spot of blood on the crown wouldn’t come off so it stared up at me like a small red eye. Feeling uneasy, I rinsed the molar thoroughly and used a little hand soap. They had pulled this pearl out of my jawbone, pried it out as if from an oyster, a pretty little thing, opalescent white but beige at the roots. Maybe I should bury it under the hedges near my apartment building, for old times’ sake, for Grandma. I threw it back in the bag, and stuffed it in my pocket.
After I paid—only the first installment, of course—Marylin sent me on my way. The tooth and I went down to the parking garage and got into my yellow convertible. I pressed the button to put the top down as I drove out and got on the freeway. I was sailing by at 70 miles an hour, my long hair blowing in my eyes. Half of my face was cold, the other half was numb.
I stopped at the pharmacy to pick up the antibiotic. I was shivering from the cold, but what’s the point of living in LA if you can’t wear a short sleeve shirt in the winter? Then I went back to my studio in Culver City. I hate my tiny apartment. The landlord refuses to change the stained gold carpet, but it’s all I can afford right now with the various operations and the sports car. Hopefully my agent will call me so I can get a role as an extra in a crowd scene standing out in the cold for hours. I put the bag with the tooth on my nightstand, plopped down on the bed with my clothes on and fell asleep.
I had a dream in which I was about five years old. It was nighttime, and I was back in my bed in Wisconsin, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept running my tongue over the space where my two front milk teeth had been. Grandma and I had buried them in the yard that afternoon, and I decided to check on them. I crossed the garden barefoot, my little feet freezing in the wet grass. In place of the small mound we had made over the incisors was a tree and on every branch grew teeth, molars, incisors, and canines. These must be second teeth, I thought. They seem so big. The tree could have been scary, but I wasn’t afraid at all. The teeth were beautiful like pearls that shone, iridescent, in the moonlight, flickering like white flames. The branches swayed in the wind as if dancing to the high tune it whistled. I went up to the tree and touched one of the molars on the lowest branch. It was smooth as enamel should be.
Babushka, my grandmother, called me from inside the house. “You crazy. Come back to bed right now. You catch cold.”
“What are they doing on the tree?” I asked her as I made my way back to the house. “Why can’t they be in my mouth?”
“You need be patient,” she said.
As I woke from the dream, the pain came, eating the inside of my mouth. I got up to take some Motrin and lay down again. I glanced at the clock radio. Though it was one o’clock in the morning, I didn’t think I could go back to sleep, at least not until the Motrin took effect, so I turned on the light and reached for the mystery novel on my nightstand. It was then that I noticed that the tooth on the nightstand was out of the bag in which there was now a tiny hole.
I picked up the tooth. It looked even cleaner than before. The blood spot was gone, and the roots were now white like the crown. Had it cleaned itself like a cat? I must be going crazy, I thought. Is it some effect from the anesthetic? Unlikely. It was local, just Novocain. I placed the tooth back in the bag, put it in the drawer of my nightstand and tried to read.
The phone rang. My crazy agent was calling me at this ungodly hour. I let it go to message.
“Hey, I have good news. I’ve gotten you a commercial,” he said, “so the money should be pretty good. It’s for Listerine Antiseptic. You know, the blue kind.” He paused, then continued. “Why aren’t you picking up? Out picking up women, no doubt. You rascal, you. Well, good morning. Call me back.” Then he hung up.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. That floozy I’d picked up last week at the Mexican bar spoke. One night in bed, and she was hooked on me, a real drag. She sounded drunk.
“Give me a call, honey,” she said, leaving a message.
God, I missed Babushka or Baba for short. I wished she were here to take care of me during my recovery like she did when I had the measles, reading me fairy tales about Vasilisa the Beautiful, Ivan Tsarevich, the witch Baba Yaga whose cabin stood on chicken legs, and my favorite, the Snow Girl. Kind of an odd thought for a middle-aged man, but that’s how I felt. To be honest, I’d felt the same way after my face lift. My mother had died in a plane crash when I was six months old, so Grandma and Dad had raised me. The three of us lived together. Now they were both dead, and I missed them, especially Baba.
I got up to get an ice pack from the freezer. My cheek was swelling, which was normal, but I decided I’d better call the dentist later in the morning just in case. When I walked back to my bed the tooth was standing in the middle of the room. She was walking stiffly on her four roots, shifting her weight from one to the other.
What’s going on, I thought. Didn’t I put that tooth in the drawer of the nightstand? This is making me crazy. I better just throw the damn thing out. It’s too much trouble. I put on my bathrobe, picked up the molar and, leaving the apartment door open, raced down the hall to throw it down the chute. When I returned, I locked the door and went back to bed leaving the light on. Eventually, I fell asleep. At 8:00 a.m., the phone rang. It was Marylin from the dental office.
“Just wondering how those gums are doing,” she said cheerfully. “Remember to call next week to make an appointment to get the stitches removed.”
I need to pick up the phone, I thought, to tell her about the swelling, but I couldn’t move. I was so exhausted. I heard the click of the phone as she hung up. I passed my tongue over the stitches which of course I wasn’t supposed to do. A scab was forming, gelatinous, normal for a wet environment. The blood was in limbo, half clotted. Then, I suddenly noticed a large four-legged white stool by my bed. The seat was square and indented. It was the tooth that had grown to the size of a stool.
“What do you want from me?” I heard myself saying. What am I doing talking to a tooth? I turned around and faced the wall so I wouldn’t have to see the tooth and tried to sleep. I couldn’t help wondering how it had crawled back up the garbage shoot. It didn’t, I said to myself. I’m just going a little crazy. It’s fatigue. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I started counting the bumps on the cottage cheese ceiling to distract myself, but my mind kept returning to the tooth. I thought it might be better to turn around and look at it again to see if I still saw it, in my imagination, of course, but I was afraid to. I turned on my back. I could see something white in my peripheral vision. Oh, what the heck, I thought, just look at it. So I turned my head in the direction of the tooth-stool. It was still there. I heard myself gasp but didn’t let myself look away.
Then I felt myself rise from the bed, slowly. I couldn’t fight it. I walked up to the white stool and, as if pulled by gravity, sat on it—or rather, fell on it. It began to rock, back and forth, shifting its weight from one leg, root to root. The seat or crown was hard, indented in the middle. I felt myself falling through the center, the canal swallowing me as I tried to make my way through the capillaries. The pulp was viscous in there, like quicksand. I was terrified for a moment and choking on the blood, but then I could suddenly breathe again.
The stool was still rocking, but it wasn’t a stool anymore. It was a rocking chair painted white with a green cushion. I was sitting in someone’s lap. I looked up and saw Baba, her gray-white braids coming down her shoulders, a red kerchief on her head. My father had never managed to convince her to style her hair. She was singing the Cossack lullaby she used to sing, her voice cracking with age. I recognized the tune though I couldn’t understand the words. I’d never asked exactly what they meant, but I knew it was something about growing up and becoming a soldier, big and strong. I felt my face. It was smooth and hairless. Looking down, my hands were tiny, and my legs dangled on Baba’s lap. With my tongue, I felt the spaces where my lower incisors had been before I’d begun losing my milk teeth and then, I ran my tongue over the back molars. All was smooth, no stitches. I looked out the window. It was snowing outside, the earth only a shade whiter than the sky. We must’ve been back in Wisconsin.
“When spring come,” Baba said, “we plant white lilies in the garden. They grow tall and white like the teeth in your mouth. You make wish and grow up big and strong like your teeth. When spring come,” she repeated.
Helaina Pisar McKibbin lives with her husband in Los Angeles where she worked as an ESL and French teacher for many years. She is now focusing more on her writing which includes short stories and poems. Some of these have appeared in the following journals: The Storyteller, Rattle, The San Gabriel Quarterly, and Onthebus. She has also published some translations from French to English and vice a versa.