The Ceramist
The damage was done at the final hole of the miniature golf course, where a large fiberglass shark burst through the hull of a ship suspended four feet above the trap door. The shark’s head mechanically thrashed from side to side; the idea was to try to hit the ball inside its moving mouth. I stood behind my cousin Louise, as she crouched down and held her putter straight in front of her to line her body up with a small, carpeted ramp, barely visible under the shadow of the hovering ship. She placed the ball in the tee box and followed an imaginary line drawn in the artificial green with her grey blue eyes. Louise stood up, turned to her side, and arranged her hands on the rubber grip of the putter in a fussy, frenetic way. She wanted power, so she threw her shoulders back, shifted her weight from foot to foot and focused on her backswing. An amateur, a real know-nothing, would have reached around their back with their club and swung. Not Louise. She had taken lessons. Louise raised the putter, aiming high above her shoulder like the private teacher had told her. I studied her swing, standing less than an arm’s length away, when she raised the iron and swung with all her strength – power drawn from a cluster of muscles in her thighs and slightly bent knees. On the follow through, over her left shoulder, Louise hit me as hard as she could in the face with the blunt metal end of the putter. The force of it nearly knocked me over, but I stayed on my feet, clutching my mouth and jaw, running my tongue along my top row of teeth to make sure that they were all intact. I felt something like a hornet’s sting in phantom places inside my mouth, and a cool numbness spread across the bottom half of my face.
“Why were you behind me?’ Louise asked, as she dropped the putter and grabbed my face in her hands. She led me stunned and stammering to the office, located in a detached wood-frame house next to the course. I sat on a wicker rocker on the front porch, and the manager brought me a cold can of soda from the vending machine to hold against my swelling jaw. Louise sat down on the wooden porch step, looking up at me.
“You’re lucky you didn’t lose any,” Louise said, as I probed my mouth with my tongue, checking for broken, chipped, and loose teeth. Everything inside my mouth was smooth and familiar, except for a pea-sized nick on the inside of my cheek, where I had bitten down on impact and one of the molars pierced the slick skin. I licked the palm of my hand to see if there was blood but there wasn’t a drop.
Louise turned away from me and searched through her oversized macramé handbag. Lovely Louise. Her tight black curls were forced into two braids that hung down below her sun- bronzed shoulders, slightly exposed in a white cotton sundress.
“You have a wicked swing,” I said in a slur, my sore jaw slack and heavy. Even from behind I could tell this made Louise smile. She found what she was looking for – a stick of gum – and held it out to me.
“No thanks” I said, so Louise unwrapped the gum, stuck it in her mouth and chewed. She turned around to watch the manager handing putters and scores cards to a group of boys our age who had just arrived. The moist heat of the night had caused a few coils of hair to escape from her braids, and even this somehow looked deliberate, and elegant, like a dark aura around her, like a crown – a crown for Queen Louise. Her two sisters had nicknamed her Queen Louise soon after she arrived on this earth, as they watched their parents attempt to atone for their sin, the sin of inhabiting an almost palpable disappointment that their healthy child, born olive and pink with a head full of black silky ringlets, was not a boy. In fact, there were no boys born in this generation throughout the extended family, and since Louise’s mother was almost forty when she became pregnant, all hope had hinged on that birth.
“She’s the most beautiful baby that I’ve ever seen,” Louise’s father had said, in front of his other two daughters, who were old enough to know that they had been displaced, and soon they would know what it was like to live like refugees in their own split-level suburban home. “I have never seen a girl this beautiful. I feel bad for all the other babies.” This was how the story started, like a whisper game, even before the blessed baby was brought home from the hospital. My mother was pregnant with me when Louise was born, and I imagined there was a tiny fear in the Louise family that I would break the curse and be the first boy born to that generation. But by the time I arrived no one cared that I was just another girl. It was no longer important to break the curse, and now there was no such thing as curse because no one ever really wanted a boy in the family anyway. “Boys aren’t beautiful,” someone in the family remarked, and they all felt blessed. They named the beautiful baby Louise, after no one they knew.
It went beyond beauty, this thing with Louise. She was also the smartest baby, and the most alert, so therefore, had the most potential. There were lessons, a childhood full of lessons – ballet, piano, pottery, tennis and golf. Her two older sisters shared a bedroom, but Louise had her own room so she could practice her clarinet. When she got an A- minus in science our families chipped in to buy her a refractor telescope so she could see the constellations at night, and Venus in the daytime sky. Louise never mastered any of the things she studied. She learned enough to be considered better than a novice, better than her sisters and me. But she would grow restless and indifferent. She fully assumed these hobbies, these identities, and then shed them like dead skin. But all the aspirations of the family – first generation aunts and uncles, shopkeepers and con-men, housewives and single women on factory-workers’ pensions, were channeled towards her. And the rest of us – Louise’s sisters and myself, were so unseen, that nothing was expected of us. Nothing we did mattered to anyone but ourselves. We were free to fail and make our own way. We could see Venus in the daytime sky with our naked eyes.
By the time Louise’s mother pulled into the parking lot of the miniature golf course, a throbbing pain radiated through my entire head. I climbed into the back seat, clutching the now lukewarm soda can against my puffy jaw, while Louise hopped in the front. Louise told her mother about the accident. Her mother told her to search the glove compartment for a bottle of aspirin. Louise handed her two white tablets, and I swallowed them with a large gulp of soda.
“You shouldn’t have stood behind Louise,” her mother said. I stared out the car window and said nothing. I knew that I’d stood on the spot that was marked for me. I’d stood where I was supposed to stand. Behind.
***
The chairs were lined up six in each row facing each other. I reclined in the vinyl seat and watched the man across from me, who was flanked by an older, gray-haired dentist and two students dressed in purple scrubs. I couldn’t see the man’s face, but because of the way his feet twitched, and from the sign of blood streaks across his paper bib, I could tell he was having a difficult time. I turned away, but every chair had a patient, and every patient was having a procedure. Heads bent backwards; mouths hung open like caves. Everything shined under the glaring silver lights, and I heard the clump of wooden clogs against the linoleum tiles, dental students darting from chair to chair. For the first time in my life, I missed Dr. Iacona, my childhood dentist, and his peach painted small-town office with big windows overlooking the tulip beds in a courtyard. But I was older, living on my own, and uninsured. The care I could afford to receive was at the dental school at the university downtown, where students in their final year perform all procedures, but a dentist reviewed their work before you left the chair. I was there for a routine appointment – x-rays, cleaning and examination. Mei was the student who had taken my x-rays. She stood at a counter behind me, viewing the slides against a lighted display.
“Wow. Check it out,” said Mei. I turned to see if she was talking to me, but she bent closer to the display, studying the film through her wire-frame glasses. She motioned to a tall, skinny bald man dressed in business casual who was laughing with a few male students at a chair that had just freed up across from me. Within seconds he appeared at my chair.
“Hi there, I’m Dr. Berger,” he said, and went right to Mei. “Huh,” I heard him say. I turned in the chair and saw them huddled around an x-ray display.
“The nerve in one of your front teeth is dead,” Dr. Berger said.
“Dead? How dead?”
“Dead. Have a look.”
I got out of the chair and joined them at the counter, where six different views of the inside of my mouth were glowing, black and white film backlit against the display. It looked so primal, the skeletal images of my teeth and gums, and something about stripping the human mouth of tissue and flesh made me think of the animal I that I could have been. Like staring at dinosaur bones.
“See?” Dr. Berger pointed at one of the top front teeth. Something was different about that tooth. All other teeth had thick, concise white lines that protruded from the gums down into each cavity, and a white haze clouded around each little line. “Nerves, “he explained. But the entire space within that front tooth was dark and opaque. The inside of the cavity looked like an empty jewel box, or an ocean at night. I asked Dr. Berger what could have killed the nerve.
“Trauma, most likely.” He asked me to remember a time when I had fallen or gotten hit in the face. I told him about Louise’s wicked swing, how ten years ago I had stood right behind her at the final hole.
“Well there you go.”
I asked him what happens to a tooth after the nerve has died.
“Discoloration. Maybe infection. Eventually it will turn black.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Eventually.”
There wasn’t anything to do that day about the dead nerve. The tooth itself was fine, and I didn’t have any money to do anything about it anyway. I paid at the front desk and then stepped out the front doors and onto lower Broadway. I decided to walk all the way up to 96th Street, to the apartment where I was staying for the summer, cat-sitting for a musician on a five-month world tour playing keyboards for an aging rock star. It wasn’t a paying gig for me, but it was a clean place to stay, at least for a while, and at that time I wasn’t really living anywhere, sleeping on sofas and futons on the floor at friends’ filthy apartments or scoring short-term subleases when I could. While I wound my way up Broadway, I thought about Louise, who I had not seen in eight years. It was two summers after the night at the miniature golf, and the final summer of the reign of Queen Louise, when we were seated at the kitchen table at their home eating tuna salad with green olives, the way that Louise liked it, and her dad walked in and told us he was leaving. Louise was sure that he’d change his mind but by dinner he had filled the back of a yellow Dodge Dart with all his clothes. The Dart belonged to Miss Stakowski, a substitute Spanish teacher at our high school who that night became her father’s live-in girlfriend. By the end of the summer Louise announced that she was not going to college to study pre-med or pre-law as planned; instead, she was heading to Virginia to pick apples with her new boyfriend, a guy that she met in line at the take-out window at Friendly’s. By Christmas she was pregnant by the apple-picker; by the next summer she had a daughter named Starr and was married to a cop in Florida. I graduated from a small liberal arts college in eastern Massachusetts, and then came to New York to study film. I was hoping to be a film editor, but to earn money I was working as a Production Assistant on industrials and a few TV commercials. Louise and I had spoken on the phone a few times over the years, but mostly I learned about her from her sisters, who seem to relish every one of Louise’s missteps.
When I got to 34th Street, I decided to go into Macy’s. I was thinking about the dead tooth. In time it would turn black. I walked past the rows of makeup counters and realized that I had no idea if I was pretty. Growing up around Louise, her sisters and I learned that it didn’t matter if we were pretty – all that mattered was that we were not Louise. I stepped up to a lipstick display and found the matte brick-colored shade that everyone wore that year. In a business card-sized mirror on a counter display I watched as I dragged the matte brick color back and forth across my dry lips. I smiled, revealing the dead front tooth. It was like all the other teeth – white, luminous. I put the lipstick back in the display and walked out of the store, back out onto Broadway.
Later that night we would shoot one of the final scenes for a short industrial film on which I had been working, a phony black and white film noir spoof about insurance fraud. It was a hotel scene that we shot at an SRO in midtown, and my job was to keep the tenants, mostly prostitutes, from yelling in the hallways when the cameras were rolling. Before the first take I stood with the actor playing the detective, trying to remove an orangey stain from his dress shirt. I rubbed at the stain with my shirttail soaked in seltzer. “My girlfriend made ziti,” he said, which was always disarming to hear, since the detective and I had been having nightly sex since the first day of shooting. After tugging at his shirt for several minutes straight I managed to get to stain completely out.
“Do you think I’m pretty,” I asked the detective as he moved to the dresser mirror.
“Of course I do,” he said, examining the clean wet spot on his shirt. He placed his detective hat on his head in that way that actors imitating Bogart always did. I left the room and returned to my hookers in the hallway, and I never brought him back to the keyboard player’s place again.
I found the women seated on the stairs, rather than their usual place gathered around the pay phone. They were quiet and relaxed; some took their heels off and dozed, some smoked. The cameras rolled film in one of the rooms but I had nothing to do, so I went up to the pay phone. I held the battered receiver in my hands, and started pushing sticky buttons, pretending to make a call. I didn’t notice that one of the women had come up behind me.
“Nice,” she said, because she had caught me, staring at my reflection in the shiny coin return. I noticed the remnants of lush brick color on my lips, traced the top two front teeth with my tongue and smiled, wondering how long it would last.
***
Eventually…
– I was too tired to stand in the rain, under the Manhattan Bridge, holding an umbrella for a D-list star shooting a scene for an awful made-for-TV movie. It wasn’t like one day it was okay to wait on the corner of a busy midtown Manhattan street for a man wearing a safari hat to hand me a padded envelope filed with pot and pills for the director of the margarine commercial that was three days behind schedule, and the next day it wasn’t. The next night I could be at an outdoor location shoot down by the desolate waterfront in Williamsburg, my pockets filled with rocks to fend off packs of wild dogs.
– The thing itself changed. The ghosts were gone. They had haunted me during late night editing sessions, the positive images of faces staring from cut up strips of film hung above my head. When I did get the opportunity to edit films, on untitled projects for my indie director friends, or Super 8mm shorts that I shot walking through the funk of Times Square, I would hold pieces of the workprint in my hands, then use a cement splicer to join the fragments of film that I had cut with a razor tool. I’d work on a flatbed machine, which gave the ghosts flesh and human forms. Then one day, there was no more workprint, only media files, and the flatbed was replaced by a more formidable machine with an uninterrupted flow of sight and sound, of pixels and digits. I learned digital editing but never learned to love it. I missed the feel of celluloid in my fingers, to be able to hold the thing in my hand that I made.
– I moved on, enrolling in a teaching fellow program, and I spent the following summer training in a public school in The Bronx. I would never have to work in the summer ever again. I was placed in a high school in Brooklyn where I taught General Science to freshman, who seemed to have a reasonable interest in learning about earth’s history and our expanding universe. The workday was compact and manageable, and I took very long trips every summer, bike tours to hilly coastal towns in Europe and South America. And there were comprehensive benefits – medical, retirement, and even dental.
– The tooth turned. I noticed it in pictures of me from an Italian trip. There seemed to be a shadowy speck on my left front tooth in every shot. When I looked in the mirror the tooth appeared mostly normal, except for a hint of light lemon yellow around the crown. Over the period of a decade, the light lemon-yellow spread and deepened to straw, to gold, to goldenrod, to khaki. People told me that it was hardly noticeable. I stopped smiling in photos.
-I saw Louise again. I found out from her sisters that she had divorced the cop and moved north with her then twenty-five-year-old daughter Starr to a mobile home in New Jersey pinelands. Her sisters liked to joke about Queen Louise living in the edge of the woods, bathing in the cedar lake, eating roadkill for dinner, but I knew after visiting Louise at the lake that there was nothing wrong with the smell of cedar and pine in the warm afternoon air. Louise told me then that she had been in rehab twice for alcohol addiction, so we sat next to each other in deck chairs down by the lake eating burnt hot dogs from a charcoal grill and drinking ice water out of pink plastic tiki cups. Starr came home from her job at a garden center and joined us at the lake. She was tall and broad with a hint of red hair from her father whom she hadn’t seen in years. Quiet, like her father. Starr went into the mobile home, and I saw her in the kitchen heating up something in the microwave and then sitting at the table by the bay window, eating and chain smoking. When the sun went down, we moved inside and that’s when I saw it—a ceramic ashtray on the kitchen table, brimming with the crushed butts of Starr’s Camel Lights. Obviously handmade, rough-hewn, mottled gray and brown, but what caught my eye were the cracks– long lacerations throughout the ashtray painted a metallic yellow. Louise said she had made it for Starr and pointed to a shelf loaded with bowls and mugs in the same style—rustic, irregular, but with the sparkly deep cracks. They looked like the broken dishware from the ruins of Pompeii, glued back together with pure gold. I remembered the pottery she had made when we were young—a little crooked pumpkin you could put a candle in—and I was happy that one thing she had studied in childhood had stuck. Louise poured coffee into those mugs and we sat at the table and talked about her older sisters: Lucy, the middle one who she still spoke to, a public school teacher who was still single and living in Philadelphia; and Lena, the oldest, who was running for Congress in New Jersey on a conservative platform that promised to roll back reproductive rights and do away with promised pension payments for school teachers. Louise and Lucy had stopped speaking to her two years before when she coerced them into a political discussion at their mother’s funeral mass and ended up calling them lazy and entitled as she got up from the pew to deliver the eulogy. I sipped from the mug that Louise made and wondered if this was how she saw our family—fractured, defined by its rifts, but when I asked her why she chose to highlight the cracks in her pottery she said it was because she “thought it looked cool.” I showed Louise the dead tooth which under the fluorescent kitchen light was the color of ash. She didn’t think that she was the cause that night at the miniature golf course. “I hit you in the cheek, not the front teeth,” Louise said, but I told her that she had hit me hard in the mouth and jaw, and the damage was to the tooth and the cheek. She laughed and said that was impossible, but I knew that the only blow to the face that I had ever gotten had been dealt by Louise.
***
Dr. Jerry had an office in the Williamsburg Bank Building, a concrete monolith clock tower that once housed many of the best dentists in Brooklyn. It was also the once the tallest building in Brooklyn, and Dr. Jerry remembered when his office was on the 22nd floor, with stunning views of the city, from the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the waiting room, to all the way out to Coney Island from the dental chair. But the upper floors were converted to luxury condominiums and all of the dentists were moved down to the lower floors, and then Dr. Jerry could only see the pigeon-spiked roof of a boarded-up brownstone and the dumpsters in the alley from his fifth floor office window. Dr. Jerry was So Sick Of This Shit – sick of the soulless yuppies with their obscene amounts of money that inhabited most of the building, even though he never got to see them since they entered from a separate entrance than the dentists. One or two tenants came as patients, and were able to pay up front, but he was sick of their entitled, privileged paid-in-full assess. He was sick of the cold relentless winter. He was sick of New York. I went to see him when my tooth had turned gunmetal grey.
“Were you waiting for it to turn black?” Dr. Jerry shook his head as he spoke. We had just met, and I could tell he was already sick of me. We discussed the possible options for the tooth. I told him that past dentists had recommended a root canal, then bleaching from the inside. Dr. Jerry shook his head. “Too late. You might want to consider ceramics.”
When I heard the word “ceramics” I thought of the ashtray that Louise made for Starr, and how she would flick her ashes into its smooth gray center. But Dr. Jerry was talking about a porcelain veneer, a thin ceramic sheet that wrapped around the tooth and best replicated the look and feel of enamel. It was an expensive, time-consuming procedure, which involved drilling down the dead tooth about a millimeter in size, taking a resin composite, matching and selecting color, and sending it to the lab to be fabricated. When the veneers came back from the lab, he would bond them to the teeth with heat and light. “Go Ahead, Smile” was the tag line on the back of the brochure that Dr. Jerry dropped in my lap.
***
For the first appointment, he prepped the tooth, buffing it down to a fraction of its size. My mouth was full of blood and calcified bits of material, and I couldn’t tell if it was a scent or a taste but some sense was overwhelmed with burnt and decimated tooth.
“I have to pee,” I told Dr. Jerry with a mouth full of dental debris.
“Rinse,” Dr. Jerry said, pointing to the small spit sink next to the chair. “And whatever you do for god’s sake don’t look at yourself in that damn bathroom mirror.”
I got the key to the bathroom in the hallway and went inside. I ran my tongue along the top row of teeth and felt the almost stump that was left of that dead tooth. The tooth felt buffed, numb, and unnaturally smooth. I washed my hands and saw myself in the mirror, and with morbid curiosity, I slowly parted my lips into a smile. The tooth was brown and horrendous, and I looked like a thing I could not name – something desperate and feral. Suddenly, I felt dizzy. I didn’t know how Dr. Jerry did it, staring into ugly mouths all day.
“Relax. I’m going to put on a temporary tooth.” He picked up a felt swatch of fabric lined with the front of different shades of porcelain teeth, from Hollywood red-carpet sparkling white all the way to various shades of grey and held it up to the remaining normal front tooth. “Off to the lab,” he said, as he noted the color selection on a form. He took the composite by telling me to bite down into a blue plastic gum resin, and then installed the temporary. I went home happy with my fully formed tooth, but that night I dreamed that I was in the Artic Circle, floating on an ice drift in a frozen tundra, surrounded by the clean white bones of a water buffalo.
***
Dr. Jerry called a week later to tell me that the tooth was ready, and I went to his office the same day. He bonded the porcelain to the ravaged tooth, and it was done.
***
But when I looked in the mirror, I knew that nothing had changed. The grey shadow was still in my mouth, but it switched to the other tooth. The fabrication was a bit off; the new tooth was too white. The porcelain veneer looked vulgar next to the natural tooth. I was back in Dr. Jerry’s office less than a week later to show him the problem. He agreed that the veneer didn’t match up well to the real tooth.
Dr. Jerry pulled several teeth from the color samples on the felt cloth and held them up to my mouth, scrutinizing each one. He put down the color samples and sighed. “I can’t,” he said as he stared out at the diminished view outside the window. “I’ll be right back.” He left the room and came back five minutes later.
“I can’t match the color. There are too many shades in your real teeth, competing.” Dr. Jerry scribbled something on a notepad. “I’m sending you directly to the lab, right here in Brooklyn. The owner is the best ceramist in the city. His name is Julie.”
***
I took the train to a stop at the far edge of the Kensington section of Brooklyn. When I got out of the station I walked along MacDonald Avenue, under the elevated train platform. It was midday; there were people out on the streets, but it was hardly bustling. It seemed that every language was being spoken and printed on the signs that hung above business and drifted through the air like sonorous smoke – Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Hindi and Urdu. I caught the whispered words of Portuguese in a Bossa Nova song blasting through the open doors of a dance studio. I checked the address that Dr. Jerry had given me, and found the lab, a non-descript one-story building set off from the brick two-family homes on one of the numbered streets.
Inside was a dark and narrow office space, crammed with desks and chairs that seemed to be leftovers from the early seventies. A woman seated at a desk caught my eye, and I told her I was there to see Julie. The desk had a lived-in look, with almost a dozen framed photos of children looking stunned and surprised, a girl with a big pink bow stuck to her bald infant head and a boy holding a baby blue football wider than his toddler body. There were boxes of crackers and cookies, two liters of diet Coke, and packets of Cup O’ Soup and Swiss Miss cocoa lined up in the corner of her desk. An extra pair of sling-back shoes lay on the floor, next to her feet. A microwave and an electric teakettle were plugged into a utility cart behind her chair. The name “Natalie” was etched into a decorative wood plaque that hung above her desk, but she looked too old for a Natalie. She wasn’t much older than I, but she seemed ancient, hair piled high on her head in a teased bun.
“Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a banquet hall type chair against the wall to the right of the front door. I sat for a few minutes when Natalie looked up from her desk. “Go right in,” she said, but I didn’t know where I could go. She pointed straight ahead, and then I realized that on the other side of the wall behind me, there was another part of the office. I got up, walked in the direction where she had pointed, and I saw a small white-haired man dressed in a heavy wool suit standing several yards in the distance, waving to me. As I went towards him, I found myself in a wide hallway, and when I looked to the right I found that there an entire other world behind several glass windows – an airplane hangar-sized space with a skylight roof, decorated with dozens of tall, artificial ferns standing stoically in pots placed around the floor. It seemed that all of Brooklyn was in there, standing at long metal laboratory tables, making teeth. I stopped and watched them work, their hands illuminated by the rays of sun that poured through the glass ceiling.
“Come,” Julie said, breaking my trance, and he waved me into a small makeshift examination room. I sat in the dental chair, and Julie was ready with a tiny mag light in his hand. He shined the narrow light into my mouth and studied it with an intensity that I had never witnessed before. I stared at the wild silver hairs that sprung out from his temples, and I realized that like Natalie, he was ancient, but he was also old. He held that light with a steady, stealth-like precision. “How did this happen?”
I told him the story about standing behind Louise, and her wicked swing. Julie kept his focus on my mouth and never looked at me as I spoke. I was just about to get to the end, the part about Louise and I sitting next to each other down by the edge of a cedar water lake, but Julie screamed “RAMESH” at the open door.” Within seconds a young, tall handsome man dressed in blue jeans and checkered shirt sleeves appeared in the room. He joined Julie and gazed into my gaping mouth without saying a word. Ramesh pulled some sample veneers out of his pocket and held them up to my teeth. He shook his head and turned to Julie, and they stared at each other in silence for what seemed like a long time. Julie flicked off the mag light and Ramesh left the room.
“Ramesh and I have to talk about some things. You can go.”
“I can leave?” I sat up in the chair and faced his back as he pulled some color charts out of a portfolio drawer.
“No, go out there.” He pointed out the open door. “Go see Natalie. I’ll get you when we’re ready.” I got up from the chair as I approached the door Julie said, “So did she make the shot?”
I turned around to face him. For the first time, he was looking at me and not my tooth. “Excuse me?”
“Your cousin, the one with the golf club.”
I had no idea if Louise had made it, not even a guess. All that I could recall was that it was the final hole, so the machine would have swallowed the ball down a drain to end the game, whether she made it in the shark’s mouth, or not. Julie stared at me over the black rimmed tops of bifocals.
“She missed. I ruined her shot.” I wanted to tell him that Louise was a ceramist just like him – firing, painting and glazing, but he turned away from me and placed his hand on Ramesh’s shoulder.
As I walked once again past the massive expanse of the dental lab, I was even more struck by its depth and size. A secret civilization seemed to expand before my eyes, like a carefully choreographed Busby Berkley sequence in one of those musicals from the 1930’s, where the leg-kicking chorus girls seem to multiply into infinity. I realized that it wasn’t just all of Brooklyn that was at work, it was the entire world, including me, and maybe even Louise. We all stood stooped over our workstations, and we were making things again. We are making teeth – ceramics and acrylics, partials and crowns, a perfect set of implants the color of wedding china. We pour latex into molds, and fuss over the various gradations of shade in the color spectrum.
I sat back out on the banquet chair and chatted with Natalie. She was born and raised in Kensington and planned to never leave. She offered me some tea and Cup O’Soup, and we talked about Brooklyn, and how fast it was changing, and the new developments that had gone up in the neighborhood last year alone. As Natalie spoke, I imagined that this was all gone, replaced by the glass-box condos that she was describing. I imagined that Julie had retired, and Ramesh had moved on, and Natalie went to live around her brother in Long Island even though she “hates the place, like poison.” I imagined the last day, when they closed the lab, and the last tooth that was made – a shiny crown that Julie puts in his pocket as a keepsake gem before boarding a plane to Boca Raton.
Julie called me back to the exam room. I lay down in the chair as Ramesh came in carrying a veneer sample in a felt covered box. He handed the sample to Julie, who held it up to my mouth.
“Pink,” said Ramesh, and it was the first time I heard him talk.
“Pink?” Julie looked at Ramesh with surprise. “Pink, huh,” Julie said again, and then looked back at the tooth. He took a few steps backwards, pleased with what he saw. Julie smiled wide and I saw his teeth – small and mature, yet gleaming, like little yellow sapphires.
“Perfect,” Julie said, even though it wasn’t, even though it never will be.
***
You can learn more about Nancy Weber by clicking on her bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/nancy-weber-bio/