Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  “Actually, I think I’ll pass.” I sigh, restraining myself from explaining that money is tight and that this is the first time in five years that someone hasn’t been diagnosed with something awful or dying in hospice. Look at me, keeping my mouth, with its relapsed bite and its crowded lowers, shut.

  He shrugs, then takes the crinkly paper bib off my chest, flips the light away from my head and angles my chair back up. “Okay, but don’t blame me in a few years when your teeth start falling out.”

  * * *

  I sit in on Teddy’s consultation, then sign the proposed but nonbinding treatment and payment plan for his braces—a minimum of two years with the probability of an extra year, depending on the growth of his chin and subsequent exacerbation of his pronounced under-bite. We schedule his appointment—the big day—for the second Wednesday in November, after Inhabitancy ends—and then, since the idea of my teeth falling out is still haunting me, we schedule an official consultation: there has been a cancellation for tomorrow, the receptionist tells me. Do I want it? I reluctantly accept. Why not have all the information before probably saying no?

  Back in the car Teddy is quiet. I can’t tell if he’s glad to be getting braces like everyone else did two years ago, or if he’s horrified to be joining the adolescent masses so late. I know I could ask him—shouldn’t I just ask him?—but sometimes I think it’s easier for both of us if I just leave him alone with his feelings, instead of making him share them with me. Because maybe he doesn’t want to share them with me: maybe he’d rather process things himself, silently, without parental intrusion, the way I did.

  On the way to school I don’t bother telling Teddy that my appointment with Michael was not to continue our trip down memory lane, but to talk about the possibility of braces for me. Why does he need to know, ten minutes before school, that the same mother who wears the family dog for comfort and mental stability might soon have a mouth full of embarrassing metal bands? Hasn’t he suffered enough? Instead, when we pull up in the blue zone, I hand him a note to give to Grace excusing his late arrival that I’ve scribbled on a piece of paper I rip from a notebook in my bag:

  Please excuse Teddy. He had an orthodontist appointment even though he doesn’t have braces yet.

  * * *

  The next morning, though I don’t want to leave the dog, I decide to try going it alone again. It will be good to hear my options before committing either way without the distraction of the dog—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little embarrassed to face Michael again wearing my neurosis in my sling. While the subject of his marriage, or divorce, didn’t come up in the few quick minutes I spent hyperreclined in his examination chair, I’m still somehow convinced that running into Michael and his encouraging me to come back to his office—for the second time—might be fate’s hand. Maybe there will be a way out for me. Maybe Michael Wasserman and I are meant to be.

  I ask Gary to take Charlotte to the reservoir for a walk today before work.

  Unencumbered, Teddy and I make the drive to school with considerably less tension. He seems more relaxed, now that it’s just us two in the car and I don’t have to drive with my seat pushed back as far as it will go in order to give the dog room between me and the steering wheel. When we pass the house getting the big stupid addition, I slow down the way I always do, only this time, Teddy looks, too.

  “Isn’t that house big enough already?” he says.

  “Seriously.” I breathe deeply, full of wonder. My work here is done.

  After dropping Teddy, I get to my 9:00 A.M. appointment with Michael exactly on time, though it requires speed-walking from the parking lot to the waiting room. When I catch the young receptionist staring, I realize I must be beet red, or sweating, or both.

  I fill out paperwork—financial and insurance information—then get shown to a chair in a different examination room—this time, one with more advanced equipment in it. When Michael arrives, he and his assistant take X-rays, then do a series of close-up digital pictures of my potential new virtual “smile.” They hand me an iPad so I can watch a time-lapse version of my teeth in motion: what they’ll look like and how they’ll get there.

  I nod, marveling at the technology that can animate the seamless transition from my now-teeth to my future-teeth. Even after the iPad is taken away, the loop continues playing in my head. My teeth in motion, going to a better place. Maybe they’ll take me with them.

  But the big decision still looms: full metal braces and brackets—the old-fashioned kind—or translucent ceramic brackets—both of which get cemented to the front of the teeth with wires threaded through them that get replaced every few weeks when the tension gets worn out. I ask Michael to explain it more—how it all works—how teeth actually get coaxed into moving—so he sits down next to me with a plaster model of a braces-filled mouth in his hands.

  “The power is in the wire,” he says, pointing. “That’s where the movement comes. The brackets sit low on the teeth, but instead of tightening the wire like we used to, we switch out the wire at every visit so that each new tight one pulls the teeth to where they need to go. Not too fast, not too slow.”

  I look behind his elbow to the framed photos of his three children on the wall beyond the swing-arm light, two boys and a girl in the mountains, at the beach, on bikes. I wonder why Janie isn’t in any of the pictures and notice suddenly that there’s no wedding ring under the purple latex glove. Why wouldn’t he have just said that he was divorced?

  I try to focus on the photos Michael is showing me of my orthodontic options—always so many choices, too many choices in life—but after I see the translucent brackets, I make up my mind.

  “The invisible ones. Obviously,” I say.

  “Just so you know, they’re a lot more expensive than traditional stainless brackets.”

  I sigh, then agree to the more fiscally responsible choice. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not a teenager. No one’s looking at me anyway.

  The final step is taking impressions of my teeth, top and bottom. Michael leaves to see another patient while his assistant looks for the right size metal arch trays for my mouth and prepares the gloppy mixture that goes in them. I settle in, play with my bib, and think of Charlotte.

  “I left my dog at home,” I chatter nervously to her as she spreads the amalgam into the two trays. “She’s kind of a therapy dog but not really. She’s an unofficial therapy dog. She doesn’t wear a stupid vest and I don’t walk her—I wear her, in a sling.”

  The assistant looks at me. There’s a giant bird on my head. I’m just another weird person her mother’s age babbling about something totally gross and embarrassing, but I’m too distracted by sling-withdrawal—I should have brought the dog. Why didn’t I bring the dog? Isn’t this exactly the sort of stressful event when I should have the dog with me?—to really care. We’re both clearly relieved when Michael finally returns.

  “So,” he says, rolling toward me on his wheely-stool, clasping his gloved hands together. “Have you decided? Are you going to stop the entropy and control the chaos of tooth regression?” I don’t know if he’s trying to sound like a dental brochure on purpose or not, but it’s time to commit to a yes or no.

  I think of Glenn’s body, her chaos, cells dividing everywhere. Suddenly my physiologic mesial drift and malocclusion don’t seem so bad. In fact, I’m lucky to have my chaos, the relapse of shifting teeth, so minor and harmless by comparison. I reach for Michael’s arm. I tell him I’ll do it, but only if he can squeeze me in now. “Before I change my mind.”

  * * *

  I wait, reclined, with all the comforts of modern dentistry—fancy headphones blasting Enya into my ears, which I’m too lazy to change and too embarrassed to admit, even to myself, that I actually like—the little remote that controls the wall-mounted flat-screen television where any number of movies are available for distraction—it’s all too complicated, just like the one at home that I always have to beg Teddy to show me how to use.


  But who needs a flat-screen when the flashbacks are coming, fast and furious, inside my head: I’m eleven, twelve, thirteen; the metal brackets are fitted around each tooth, not just affixed to the front of the teeth the way they are today: the tiny dental pliers thread the wires from tooth to tooth, on uppers and lowers, the gums bleeding. All while my mother sits in the waiting room, distracted behind a copy of Better Homes and Gardens, in which she’s folded down pages of rooms with wallpaper she liked and recipes for easy weeknight chicken, even though she will always leave the magazine behind the minute I come out and even though she never cooked from recipes anyway.

  After the impressions are taken and the cementing phase has started, I’m given a few plastic masks full of nitrous oxide to stop my squirming and complaining, and my constant apologizing about the squirming and complaining. And at some point after that, I start asking Michael questions.

  “Bang and Olufsen,” I slur, pulling the headphones off my ears and trying to look at them as they flop against my neck. “Are they from Sweden?”

  “Denmark,” he says through his blue paper mask.

  I don’t buy it. “I think they’re from Häagen-Dazs.”

  Another question: “How old are your kids?”

  “Eleven, nine, and seven.”

  My eyes fill with tears. “I remember eleven, nine, and seven,” I whisper. “Teddy still liked me then.”

  Then the real question: “So why did you get divorced?”

  Michael’s brow tenses over his mask. “What makes you think I’m divorced?”

  “It’s obvious,” I slur, trying to point with my floppy hands, at the walls and at him. “There’s no Janie in the photos, and you don’t wear a ring.”

  “You’re a real Columbo.”

  I nod, then point to my brain, smugly. “I’m a writer. It’s my job to notice this stuff.” I let a few moments pass, then I ask again. “Seriously.”

  “Seriously what?”

  “Seriously why did you and Janie get divorced?”

  “Oh Judy,” he says, smiling, with the tiny pliers still in my mouth. “Wasn’t it enough that you wrecked my Passover diorama?”

  I laugh, and close my eyes. I’m floating in the chair, my head a swirl of cotton candy. “Then let me ask you this,” I say, forcing my eyes open again. “How did you both know you were making the right decision? When did you go from thinking maybe splitting up was the right thing to do, to knowing it was? My husband and I are separated but we still live together, and there’s a weird kind of shame about not being brave enough to leave.”

  “Judy.”

  “Yes, Michael.”

  “I didn’t marry Janie. I married her brother. And we’re still together. Very happily so.”

  * * *

  I drive home with my mouth closed over teeth already hurting from being pushed and pulled, reluctant participants in the drama and chaos that I’m trying to control. I’m deep in the black hole of shame for how badly I misread the situation with Michael, thinking he might be my vine, my way forward, the perfect ending to my sad story. Isn’t this what would happen in the movie version of a person who moves back to their hometown? Wouldn’t this have been the perfect plot point?

  I suddenly wish I’d kept some of my mother’s OxyContin to dull the tooth pain and erase the humiliation and disappointment of the death of a tiny fantasy. Just a few pills, or a handful of pills; maybe just one container from the drugstore, that giant-size refill she was getting at the end, which wasn’t enough and required the addition of a fentanyl patch. How easy it would have been to slip a few pills into my pockets at the end, in hospice, when they sat unused in the overnight bag my father and I had brought for her, because there was no time to wait for pills to work when liquid morphine under the tongue was so much faster and didn’t require swallowing. For five days we moved that bag, full of other things we didn’t use—Enya CDs, slippers, hand cream, a bathrobe—from chair to closet to chair again—packed because I’d glanced at a few end-of-life websites and taken the advice of the home hospice nurse to bring nightclothes and soft sweatpants and socks; family photos to put around her temporary room; things to remind her of home, of her happy life, to make the phase of active dying—her transition—her passing—easier. To make it easier for her to let go.

  But she didn’t want to let go. She didn’t want to leave early. Not even a little bit early.

  Unlike me, my mother was always the last one to leave: birthday parties, dinner parties, get-togethers of any kind. She always stayed to the very end of everything, as if to get every drop of whatever experience she’d signed on for. Growing up, while waiting to go home, I’d always find my mother in somebody’s kitchen with a dish towel in her hands, helping to clean up, laughing and talking and smiling, flushed with energy and life, so unlike the way she was in our kitchen, in our house. Sometimes I’d watch her from a doorway, from another room, from where she couldn’t see me—Who was this delightful social fun person?—wishing that version of her could come home with us and be my mother. But somewhere on the ride home, on the highway or on the quiet side streets that led past all the Victorian houses that surrounded our modest street of tidy Colonials, the air would seep out of the balloon. The world, our world, deflated back to its normal size. Back in our own driveway, in our own house, we were once again ourselves: quiet, disconnected, passing each other like strangers in the kitchen or on the stairs on the way to bed. Did we ever say good night to each other when I was growing up? We must have. We should have. Isn’t that what families do?

  There at hospice, in a big room with a view of a Japanese cherry tree in full bloom and a giant bird feeder hanging from its branches—though she was drugged and her mind and body were already shutting down, slowly at first, and then all at once—her eyes were still wide open, taking everything in. Until she was gone, she was somewhere she didn’t want to leave, not until the last possible second.

  In bed now with the dog in the sling, my tongue running over the sharp brackets glued to the front of all my teeth, I think about everyone who has left early: my parents and, soon, Glenn. Not to mention Teddy, who will go off to college in a few years, and Charlotte, who will, like all pets, eventually expire. I think about disconnection, and how I’ve been trying to find ways to keep Teddy and me from growing further and further apart. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that going through the same experience of getting braces right along with him could help him, or me; that our circles could overlap instead of floating next to each other; that we could suffer together instead of alone.

  Maybe we can stave off drift and relapse. I fall asleep thinking about Teddy and me in big white sheets, dressed as giant People Puppet teeth, connected at our waists by chain-link belts, our braces, keeping us together forever.

  Walking the Reservoir

  I get out of the car and walk toward Wheeler’s Field off-leash dog park, where I always take Charlotte first before we do a long loop around the reservoir. The usual suspects are all here—Lady, Atticus, Poppins, Ogi, Bazel, Shelby, Cooper—dachshunds and Bernese mountain dogs and border collies and mutts and shepherds, all running and jumping and chasing balls under a perfect blue autumn sky while their owners, in layers of crewnecks and fleece vests and quilted jackets, stand along the sidelines, making awkward small talk. As always when I approach the group, I feel both ignored and deeply scrutinized. It reminds me of the awful playground years, when Teddy had to be dragged kicking and screaming whenever it was time to leave the slide or the sandbox and all the parents rolled their eyes in judgment.

  It’s a bracingly cold fall morning. I watch the dogs play, and Charlotte, poking her head out of the sling, watches, too. This moment is always a nice transition before I take her out of the sling and let her join the fun for a while, before we go off on the walk. It’s an especially welcome moment of peace today after so much stress: the disastrous trip to Vermont; adjusting to my braces and being in the black hole of shame for what I said to Michael Wasserman; Gary and
I not talking further about the kiss since he first confessed to it in our bedroom. Not to mention: Glenn’s steady decline. Despite it all, I force myself to follow the advice I’ve prescribed in twenty or fifty or a hundred of my Well/er pieces: gratitude. I’m grateful to be outside on such a glorious New England fall day; I’m grateful to have my dog with me; I’m grateful to have a supportive husband, even if that husband isn’t technically my husband anymore, and even if that husband is in-like with another woman.

  But today, before I can take the dog out of the sling, a troll of a woman—big-haired and wild-eyed, with giant hiking boots made for mountains, not urban trails—makes a beeline for me. I ignore her, trying to blend into the sea of puffy coats, but her eyes are on me and on the sling. She weaves through the crowd until she is right on me. She taps me on the shoulder.

  “Is that a baby sling?”

  “Excuse me?” I try to keep my teeth covered when I talk so that she won’t make fun of my braces.

  “Is that a baby sling? You’re carrying a dog in there, not a baby.”

  “It’s none of your business what I’m carrying in there.”

  “Is the dog injured?”

  “No, the dog isn’t injured.”

  “Then why are you carrying it?”

  “Because it’s my dog. And I can carry her if I want to.”

  She nods, all-knowing, seething. “I’ve seen you here before, carrying your dog around like a baby. It’s not good for the dog.”

  “How do you know?” I want to hit her.

  “Because I know.”

  “Are you the animal police?”

  “I’m a concerned citizen.”

  Another woman joins the conversation. “She’s right. You should let the dog out.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m her friend.” She points at the troll. “And I agree with her: let the dog be free.”

  “She is free.”

  “No, she’s not. She’s trapped.”