A woman in white smock, lavender pants, and white shoes adjusts the paper covering across my chest—it’s a bib, I guess—before securing it with an alligator clip at my shoulder. I settle into the chair as she leaves. A small, framed picture near the door reveals a mountain in delicate brushstrokes, with some sort of Asian lettering down the side. I take a deep breath, release, and try it again. The scent is linoleum and fluoride toothpaste. I lean forward, twiddling thumbs beneath my bib.
At least, I think, Tim is waiting. When I sought to lessen tension earlier by giving him an opening to tease—“I suppose I’ll come home a swollen-headed blob”—Tim merely nodded, his gaze all sincere and not really helpful.
He brought me to the dentist’s office in the Falcon and is now prepared to spend hours of his free day on a waiting room chair on my account, when otherwise he’d get to be on base in the auto hobby shop setting weird pieces on parts like heads and gaskets in the process of renewing my Mustang’s damaged engine.
As I shift my bottom and wonder when the dentist will appear, a musical strain rises above machine-driven air sounds. The building PA system plays local radio station pop tunes. This one is unfamiliar, but lovely. I can rarely resist a man’s high voice crooning.
Sailing, the new voice sings, takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be…My shoulders lower into the cushioned chair.
“All set?” the dentist says, breezing in.
I jump. “Uh, sure.”
“All right.” He nods to the hygienist as she returns. “Let’s get those wisdom teeth out of your way.”
“I don’t suppose you’d let me keep one or two, so I don’t become foolish?”
He chuckles, shaking his head. “This’ll be easy. Now, you chose to have the gas?”
“Yeah, I think…”
His hygienist clamps a small device over my nose.
“Breathe deep,” the dentist says. “It’ll start working instantly.” He pulls a tray of instruments near.
He’s right. I feel…a bit disconnected from my eyes. Easier, now, to exist in this place that reminds me of a dark blue sailor dress (why is everything nautical today?), my shiny black shoes on much smaller feet rising above my head as a bushy-browed, stern-faced man leans me back, continually commanding, “Open wider.” Finally, he’s thoroughly disgusted when I miss the ceramic bowl and instead spew rinse water down my little-girl front. “Ah, see? You’ve messed up your pretty outfit.”
My mommy, anyway, didn’t scold me on our way home. She gave me glances of sympathy, kind of like Tim’s on our way here today…
I drift to scenes of Tim telling puns to my mom. It’s our second month dating, and he’s helping us take down our Christmas tree. I hear his deep voice, “Bet this really needles you.” To Mom’s laughter I take in this muscular guy, who the night before whispered, “You make me feel so good, Deanna.” He’s not exactly the one I’d have guessed I’d call my man. He’s four years older. In the Navy and likely to be reassigned across the country soon (I won’t think about that; about making it to the end of my senior year alone). He’s not what you’d call an excessive romantic. I didn’t expect to find someone with whom “our” song would be from an Alan Parson’s Project album.
But the more I appraise him, the more everything he is fits me. Can I hope he’ll want to make our relationship permanent? Not unless I’m opting for stupidity, like girls in my classes who pined long after their boyfriends broke things off—some, I’ve heard on the outside of whispering circles, got rides to their doctors. At least abortion’s legal now.
I won’t end up pregnant by Tim. Sure, he and I get pretty intense. I mean, chaperoning died out eons ago, and now it’s do your own thing, and our things get pretty heated, though never in Tim’s Falcon—I mean, bucket seats, really, and you’d have to jump in the back, as singers croon about sometimes, but neither of us is smooth enough for that, so we go to his travel trailer, parked between Tim’s shore-duty base in Seattle and my house in Tacoma.
But Tim’s dad is a minister. My father is, too. Other guys stopped with me at hickeys and such, likely paused by vestiges of a fear that you violate a preacher’s daughter and a special room in hell is being spiffed up for your enjoyment, but Tim never has worried that way, knowing we aren’t special. He just believes getting me preggers would be wrong. And what a mess. For all his greasy work on car engines, Tim doesn’t like messes…
“All right, that’ll do it,” the dentist is saying. My chair’s back is lifting, and they’re removing instruments from my mouth and nose.
My eyebrows rise. I gesture to the back of my mouth, saying, “Aagh?” and holding up four fingers.
The dentist smiles. “We got all four. Popped right out. You can go see your husband now.”
“Yes, scoot on out there,” the hygienist says, undoing my bib. “That man looks worried about you.”
