Authors: Jane Smiley
After that, we’d go back to her place and make love
until the adrenaline in our systems had broken down. Sometimes that was a long time. But we were up at six, fresh and sexy, Dana pumped up for the daily challenge of crushing the dental school between her two fists like a beer can, and me for the daily challenge of Dana. Now we have three daughters. We strap them in the car and jerk the belts to test them. One of us walks the older ones to school every day, although the distance is two blocks. The oldest, Lizzie, would be floored by the knowledge that Dana and I haven’t always crept fearfully from potential accident to potential accident the way we do now.
If Dana were reminded these days that she hadn’t graduated first in our class but third, she would pretend indifference, but she was furious then. What did it matter that Phil Levine, who was first, hadn’t been out of his apartment after dark in three years and his wife seemed to have taken a vow of silence, which she broke only when she told him she was going to live with another guy? Or that Marty Crockett, number two, was a certified genius and headed for NASA as the first dentist in space? The result of her fury was an enormous loan, for office, house, equipment, everything the best, the most tasteful, the most up-to-date, for our joint office and our new joint practice. We had been intending to join two separate and established practices, etc., etc., the conservative path to prosperity. Another result of her fury was that the loan officer and his secretary were our first patients, then his wife, her five children, one of her cousins. The secretary has proved, in fact, an inexhaustible fount of new patients, since she is related to everyone in three counties and she calls them all regularly on the bank’s WATS line. I root-canaled three of her teeth last year alone.
Anyway, we dropped without pause from the drama of
Dana’s four-point grade average into the drama of a $2,500 mortgage payment in a town where we knew no one and that already had four dental clinics. Dana put our picture in the paper, “Dr. David Hurst and Dr. Dana Hurst, opening their new clinic on Front Street.” I was handsome, she was pretty, people weren’t accustomed to going to good-looking dentists, she said. They would like it. Our office was next to the fanciest restaurant in town, far from Orthodontia Row, as Dana called it. It wasn’t easy, and some of those huge mortgage checks were real victories of accounting procedure. As soon as it got easy, just a little easy, Dana got pregnant with Lizzie.
Dana likes being pregnant, even though, or because, each of our fetuses has negotiated a successful but harrowing path through early bleeding, threatened miscarriage, threatened breech presentation, and long labor. She likes knowing, perhaps, that when Dr. Dana Hurst comes through the obstetrician’s door with the news that she is pregnant, the man had better get out his best machines and give his assistants a little extra training, because it isn’t going to be easy, and wasn’t meant to be.
Then there was the drama of motherhood—babies in the office, nursing between appointments, baby-sitter interviews that went on for hours while Dana probed into the deepest corners of the candidate’s psyche, breasts that gushed in front of the dourest, least maternal patients. Assistants with twins. Those were the only kind she would hire for a while, just, I thought, to raise even higher the possibility that we wouldn’t make it through the morning, through the week, through our marriage. I used to meditate over my patients in the dental school, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be a dentist and have drama, too.
Now the children are all in school, or at least off the breast, we are prosperous and established on a semi–part-time schedule, and all Dana has to do is dentistry. Little machines. Itsy-bitsy pieces of cotton. Fragments of gold you can’t pick up with your fingers. I think she thought it would get bigger, like Cinerama, and instead it gets smaller and smaller.
If she were writing this, she would say that I was an exotically reckless graduate student, not dental at all, and that she pegged me for that the first day of classes, when I came in late, with my bike helmet under my arm, and sat down right in front of the teacher, stuck my feet into the aisle, and burped in the silence of his pause, loud enough for three rows to hear. But it was the only seat, I was too rattled to suppress my digestive grind, and I always stuck my feet into the aisle because my legs didn’t fit under the desk. It was she who wanted me, she would say, to give her life a little variety and color. When I tell her that all I’ve ever longed for is the opportunity to meditate over my work, she doesn’t believe me.
Dana would say that she loves routine. That is how she got through a biochemistry major and through dental school, after all, with an ironclad routine that included hours of studying, but also nourishing meals, lots of sex, and irresponsible activities with me. Her vision of routine is a lot broader than most people’s is. You might say that she has a genius for knowing what has to be included. She has a joke lately, though. At night, standing in the bathroom brushing her teeth, she will say, “There it goes!” or she may get up on Saturday morning and exclaim, “Zap! another one vanished!” What she is referring to is the passage of the days and weeks. A year is nothing any more. Last fall it happened
that we got Lizzie the wrong snow boots, fat rather than thin, and not acceptable to Lizzie’s very decided tastes. Without even a pause, Dana countered Lizzie’s complaints with the promise that she could have some new ones next year, in no time at all, she seemed to be saying.
It used not to be like this. Time used to stretch and bunch up. Minutes would inflate like balloons, and the two months of our beginning acquaintance seem in retrospect as long as all the time from then until now. A day was like a cloth sack. You could always fit something else in, it would just bulge a little more. Routine is the culprit, isn’t it? Something is the culprit. The other thing about routine is that it frees you for a more independent mental life, one that is partly detached from the business at hand. Even when I was pulling out all of that guy’s teeth today, I wasn’t paying much attention. His drama was interesting as an anecdote, but it was his. To me it was just twenty-four teeth in a row, in a row of hundreds of teeth stretching back years. I have a friend named Henry who is an oral surgeon at the University Hospital. He is still excited when he finds someone’s wisdom tooth up under the eyeball, where they sometimes migrate. He can talk about his patients for hours. They come from all over the state, with facial disfigurations of all types, no two alike, Henry says. But does his enthusiasm have its source in him or in them? In ten years, is he going to move to New York City because he’s tired of car wrecks and wondering about gunshot wounds? Should Dana have gone into oral surgery? I don’t know any women who do that.
I sound as if we never forget that we are dentists, as if when someone smiles we automatically class their teeth as “gray range” or “yellow range.” Of course we are also parents. These are my three daughters, Lizzie, Stephanie, and Leah.
They are seven, five, and two. The most important thing in the world to Lizzie and Stephanie is the social world of the grammar school playground. The most important thing to Leah is me. Apart from the fact that Lizzie and Stephanie are my daughters, I am very fond of them.
Lizzie is naturally graceful and cool, with a high, domed forehead and a good deal of disdain for things that don’t suit her taste, for instance, turtleneck shirts and pajamas with feet in them. She prefers blouses and nightgowns. Propriety is important to her and wars with her extremely ready sense of humor. She knows I exploit her sense of humor to get my way, and I would like to get out of the habit of tricking her into doing things she doesn’t want to do, but it is hard. The tricks always work.
Stephanie is our boy. She is tall, and strong, and not interested in rearranging the family’s feelings. She would rather be out. Sometimes she seems not to recognize us in public. She feels about kindergarten the way people used to feel about going away to college: at last she is out of the house, out of her parents’ control, on her own in the great world. I think she has an irrational faith that she won’t always be two years younger than Lizzie.
There is a lot of chitchat in the media about how things have changed since the fifties and sixties, but I think that is because nothing has really changed at all, except the details. Lizzie and Stephanie live in a neighborhood of older houses, as I did, and walk home from the same sort of brick schoolhouse. When they get home, they watch Superman cartoons and eat Hershey bars, as I did. They swing on their swing set and play with Barbie and talk about “murdering” the boys.
They have a lot of confidence, and even power, when it
comes to the boys. To hear them tell it, the boys walk the playground in fear. Dana says, “Don’t talk about the boys so much. When you grow up, you’re going to resent them for it.” It is tempting, from their school tales, to think of the boys as hapless dopes—always in the lowest reading group, never earning behavior stars for the week, picking their noses, exposing the elastic of their underpants. It is tempting to avoid mentioning that I was a boy once myself.
It’s not as if they ever ask. The unknown age they wish to know all about is their own—what were their peculiarities as babies, and toddlers, in the misty pasts of five years ago, three years ago, last year, even. When Dana pulls out a jacket for Leah that was originally Lizzie’s, Lizzie greets it with amazed delight—how can it possibly still exist, when the three-year-old who wore it has vanished without a trace?
For Leah, the misty past is still the present, and no amount of future dredging will bring to the surface her daily events of right now—her friend Tessa, at preschool, whose claim on Leah is that she wears a tiny ponytail smack on the top of her head, for example. Were we to move this year, that might furnish her with a memory of this house—a ghostly sense of lines and the fall of light that would present itself to her in some future half-waking state. I wish that Leah’s state of mind weren’t so unavailable to us all, including herself, because she is driving us crazy.
Dana was glad to get Leah for her third, because Leah was big and cuddly and slept through on the tenth day. There is no subsequent achievement that parent wants of child with more ardor than the accomplishment of eight hours at a stretch, during the night. Leah slept ten, and then, at three months, fourteen rock-solid nightly hours, and woke up smiling. She didn’t even crawl until ten months, and could be
counted on to stay happily in one place when infants who had been neonates with her were already biting electrical cords and falling down the stairs. At one, when she said her first word, it was “song,” a request that Dana sing to her. Since the others were already by this time covering their ears and saying, “Oh, God!” whenever Dana launched into a tune, Dana thought that her last chance for that musical mother’s fantasy was a dream come true. Everyone, especially me, liked the way Leah gave spontaneous hugs and said, “I love you,” at the drop of a hat. She seemed to have an instinctive understanding of your deepest parental wishes, and a need to fulfill them. Patients who had seen her at the office would stop us and say, “That Leah is such a wonderful baby. You don’t know how lucky you are.” My brother would get on the phone from Cincinnati and shout in her baby ear, “Leah! Cheer up!”
Dana was overjoyed but suspicious. She would say, “No one grows up to be this nice. How are “we going to wreck it?” But she would say it in a smug tone, as if experience alone assured that we wouldn’t. Dana felt especially close to Leah, physically close and blindly trusting. They nursed, they sang, they read books, they got lost in the aisles of the grocery store companionably choosing this and that. “The others are like you,” she often said, “but she is like me, lazy.” That’s what she said, but she meant “everything anyone could want.” Leah was everything she could want and she, as far as she knew, was everything that Leah could want.
Not long ago, Dana got up first and went into Leah’s room to get her out of her crib, and Leah said distinctly, “I want Daddy.” Dana came back to the bedroom, chuckling, and I got Leah up. The next morning it happened again, but the days went on as before, with Dana sitting in the mornings
and me taking the early appointments, then Dana dropping Leah at preschool, where she said, “Bye-bye, Mom, I love you.”
At three I leave the office and go home to meet the schoolgirls. At five we pick up Leah, at six Dana comes home to dinner. Twelve hours of dentistry at about $100 an hour. We work alternate Saturday mornings, another $500 a week. Simple multiplication will reveal our gross income for parttime work. This is what we went to dental school for, isn’t it? Since they got the dental plan over at the university, people ask me if business is better. I say, “You can’t beat them off with a stick,” meaning new patients. The idea of Dana and myself on the front stoop of our office building beating hordes of new patients off with sticks makes me laugh every time.
Anyway, other things were going on. They always are. A patient called me at nine thirty in the evening and said that her entire lower face was swollen and throbbing, an abscess resulting from a long overdue root canal. You remove the dead tissue and stir up the bacteria that have colonized the region and they spread. That’s what an abscess is. I met her at the office and gave her six shots of novocaine, which basically numbed her from the neck up. Meanwhile, at home, Leah awakened and began crying out. Dana went in to comfort her, and Leah began crying, “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” as if Dana were a stranger. Dana was a little taken aback, but picked Leah up, to hug and soothe her, and this made Leah so hysterical that Dana had to put her back in bed and tiptoe out, as if in shame.
By the time I had taken Mrs. Ver Steeg home and put the car in the garage, all was quiet. I was tired. I drank three beers and went to bed, and was thus unconscious for the
second bout of the night, and the third. In each instance, Leah woke up crying for me, Dana went to comfort her and was sent packing. The longer she stayed and the more things she tried, the wilder Leah got. The first bout lasted from midnight to twelve thirty and the second from two forty-five until three forty. Leah began calling for me to get her out of bed at six. I woke up at last, wondering what Dana was doing, motionless beside me, and Dana said, “I won’t go to her. You have to go to her.” That was the beginning