Deep Down True

by Juliette Fay

  When she pushed on the heavy glass door and entered the office, there was no one behind the reception desk, but there were people in the waiting room. The phone seemed ready to ring out of its cradle. “Where is everyone?” she asked an elderly gentleman.

  “The place is practically abandoned!” he yelled, as if the ringing phone were a foghorn. “Ahh, I’ve had about enough of this.” He struggled out of his seat and left.

  The only remaining occupants were a young mother and a preschooler sitting on her lap. The little girl looked unhappy, and the mother was whispering in her ear. “But I don’t want to,” insisted the girl loudly. The mother whispered again. The girl answered, “I don’t care if they all fall out. I’ll just eat mashed potatoes forever!” And she began to cry.

  The mother sighed. “I know it’s only ten o’clock,” she said to Dana as she rose to leave, jostling the girl onto her hip, “but it’s already been a really long day.”

  For you and me both, thought Dana, now alone in the waiting room. The phone began to ring again. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she muttered, and went to the receptionist desk. Reaching over the high counter for the phone, she picked up the receiver. “Hello, Cotters Rock Dental Center.”

  “Yeah, I got this bill here, and it can’t be right. I’m saying to my wife, this just can’t be right. And I’m just going to call this dentist guy up and check it out, because you never know if someone typed the wrong number, or something of that nature . . .”

  He seemed to have a lot on his mind, and Dana let him go on for a while, her tongue flicking across the broken tooth. Finally she said, “It sounds like you have a question about your bill.”

  “Yes!” he said. “I do!”

  “I’m just helping out at the moment, so why don’t you give me your name and number and I’ll have a member of the staff get back to you in a timely manner. Would that be all right?”

  That was just fine with him, and he thanked her several times. He was satisfied. Dana remembered what that was like—listening carefully to a problem and providing an answer that was satisfactory. She remembered what it was like to have people say thank you.

  As soon as she leaned back over the counter to put the phone down, it rang again. She opened the door to the left of the counter that led back to the operatories and Dr. Sakimoto’s office and heard the high-pitched whine of a drill. “Hello?” she called tentatively.

  “Be right with you!” called Dr. Sakimoto. His voice sounded harried.

  Poor guy, she thought. Where was his staff? She went around to the reception desk to see if she could put the answering machine on, but it was a more complicated system than the one at her old job. Dana sank into the vinyl swivel chair. She’d had a chair like this. Back when people appreciated her. By the time she’d answered four or five calls, taken messages in her careful handwriting, and tidied up the desk area, a patient emerged from the office behind her. “Oh,” he said, the right side of his mouth drooping like an unwatered plant. “You came in.”

  “I’m just helping out,” she told him. “A staff member will call to schedule your next appointment.” He smiled at her with the un-anesthetized half of his face and went out through the heavy glass door. Dana turned to find Dr. Sakimoto leaning in the doorway.

  “So,” he said, motioning to her with his chin, his voice warm with humor. “I’ve known you for years, and I had no idea you were my fairy godmother. How’d I miss that?”

  Dana grinned up at him. “Oh, I just can’t stand the sound of a ringing phone. Why didn’t you put the answering machine on?”

  “I don’t know how, if you can believe it! My receptionist, Kendra, went home with a stomach bug this morning, and Marie has the day off. I didn’t want to bother them.” He caught sight of the cracked tooth. “How the heck did you do that?”

  She sighed. “It’s so embarrassing, I can’t even say it. Besides, you have all these people to call back.” She handed him the list of messages.

  “I’ll call tonight, after hours.” He glanced at the waiting room. “And it appears you’re my only customer at the moment.” She followed him into one of the operatories and sat in the exam chair. “Come on,” he goaded her. “I could use a good story. How’d you do it?”

  “You’re going to think I’m some sort of . . .”

  “What? Some sort of normal human being? Everyone slips on a banana peel now and then.” Still she hesitated. “Okay,” he said, and seemed to be letting her off the hook. He leaned his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles. It reminded Dana of a boxer entering a ring. “You know,” he said, “it’s not like you’d shock me. I have plenty of embarrassing stories, too.”

  She sighed. “Bet you can’t beat this one.”

  “Bet I can. I’ve got a ripsnorter. Want to hear it?”

  “Yes!” She was desperate, she realized, to be reminded that she wasn’t the only person who’d ever made a raving idiot of herself in public.

  “All right. This one time . . .” He glanced at her and grinned. “I’d gotten up the nerve to ask out this woman I liked. And to my surprise she said yes, so I wanted to take her somewhere really nice. I picked this upscale restaurant—the PolytechnicON20—you know it?”

  “Oh, yes, Kenneth and I went there once. Beautiful. And the food was fantastic.”

  “Right. Well, I put on my best suit and drove over to her house. It was winter, very cold, so I wanted to be considerate and leave the car running with the heat on. I get out of the car, and just as the door closes—you know, when you hear the latch go ca-chunk?—I see the button on the door is down.” He shook his head. “I locked myself out with the car running.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Dana, secretly disappointed. It was embarrassing, but nowhere near as bad as her own story.

  “That’s nothing,” he said, his hand batting the air. She hadn’t noticed this before, that he talked with his hands. Until now most of their conversations had occurred with his fingers in her mouth. “So I’m thinking I’ll call one of my daughters to bring me a spare set of keys,” he went on. “Maybe she could get there before this woman even noticed. I go to reach into my suit pocket for my cell phone, and that’s when I realize I’ve caught the side of the jacket in the car door. So I start pulling and tugging”—he pantomimed this for her—“and I wrench so hard that I split the seam of my best suit jacket, right up to the armpit!”

  Dana started to laugh. “Oh, no!”

  “And why won’t the jacket come out?” Dr. Sakimoto continued, his hands going up as if to implore the gods. “Because the cell phone is stuck in the pocket on the other side of the door! But wait, it gets even better . . .

  “So she comes out, and by this time I’ve wiggled out of the jacket, and I’m standing there in the freezing cold with my silk tie flapping in the breeze. And I try to be all nonchalant about it, like this happens all the time and if she could just get me a coat hanger, I could pop the button out. No worries, we’ll still make our reservation.

  “Well, the one thing that went right is the button popped up quickly. But there was still the problem of the jacket. I had nothing but my shirt and tie, which looked silly in the winter and seemed too casual. There wasn’t time to go home and get another, so she insists—insists, mind you—that I wear one of her dead husband’s jackets.”

  “Her husband was dead?”

  “Yes, he’d been dead for three years, and she still had all his clothes.” He gave her a glance that said, We both know what that means. . . . “So I wear this horrible old jacket, which is too long and too narrow and clearly hadn’t been dry-cleaned since it was last worn. I looked like a little boy dressing up in his daddy’s suit, with the arms flapping this way and that. A total nightmare.

  “And to make matters worse, she has herself a little trip down memory lane with the jacket! Goes on and on about all the times he wore it, and where they went, and how much fun they had. One glass of wine was not enough, not for this evening, no way. So I order another, and
the waiter sets it down before me, and I go to reach for it . . . but the sleeve is too long, and I forget to push it up as I’d been doing all evening like a five-year-old, and I knock the glass over!” His hands began to wind in circles toward his chest. “I see it coming toward me like it’s in slow motion, and I know in another nanosecond I’m about to be doused with red wine. And all I can think is, ‘No, this can’t be happening. It’s not believable.’ Can you believe it, even now?”

  “No!” Dana breathed. “And you did it to yourself!”

  “Yes!” he said, pointing at her. “Thank you—that’s the most important part. If the waiter had done it, that’d be bad, but it wouldn’t have been my fault. This was my fault. It was all me!”

  “She got upset, didn’t she?” asked Dana.

  “She began to cry—loudly. I had to throw some cash at the waiter and practically carry her out. I got her home, and of course I said I would have the jacket dry-cleaned.” His voice went falsetto. “‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s not really his anymore. Just throw it away.’”

  “Oh, Dr. Sakimoto, that is just about the worst date story I’ve ever heard!”

  “Please call me Tony,” he said with a satisfied grin. “Now that you know my most embarrassing moment, it’s weird to be so formal.” He clasped his hands together, “Okay, are you going to tell me how you busted this tooth, or should I just shut up and get to work?”

  Dana sighed. Of course she had to tell him now. Part of her wanted to, she realized. He would laugh, and his laughter would dilute her shame, and it would seem just a little less mortifying the next time she thought of it. “Well, my son, Grady, he loves Cheez-Its. . . .”

  By the time she was imitating the pimply clerk saying, “Dude, you know you’re bleeding, right?” Tony Sakimoto was shaking with hilarity. Finally their laughter subsided, and they sighed themselves to composure. “Thank you for telling me,” he said. “Until now it’s been a hell of a day.”

  “For me, too.” She nodded, relieved. Now that she’d confessed, the sin of her indecorousness was absolved.

  Tony examined the tooth and took X-rays, after which he told her, “Well, this is one of those times the glass is half full and half empty.” Dana felt her shoulders tense as he went on. “There doesn’t appear to be any nerve damage, so you won’t need a root canal. But the chip is just large enough that I’m afraid a filling wouldn’t hold for very long. We’re going to have to put a temporary on today, and have you come back for a veneer.”

  Is that covered by insurance? was all Dana could think. And if not, how much would it be? But she didn’t ask. He was having a hard enough day without considering her money worries.

  Like a commentator murmuring at a golf tournament, he told her what he was doing at each step. “I’m smoothing these little rough pieces of enamel your steering wheel left behind . . . Now, where is that three-thirty bur?” he muttered to himself. Metal instruments clinked as he rooted around. The drill spun out its zeeeeee! sound off and on like a tiny siren as he buffed the newly composed fill. “This polishing paste,” he said. “It’s made with crushed diamonds. You’ve got diamonds in your mouth right now.” His gaze flicked up to her eyes. “Go tell that to those goons at the party store.” When he bent toward her, she could smell peppermint as he exhaled, with a faint undercurrent of aftershave.

  “Now I take an impression of the tooth to create the veneer.” When he was done, he handed her the mirror. She couldn’t see very clearly without her reading glasses, but it seemed fine. “I can’t even tell!” she said truthfully.

  “Yeah.” He grinned as he yanked at his latex gloves and tossed them in the trash. “I’m pretty good with a chip, if I do say.” He gave her follow-up instructions. “No nail biting. And chew hard stuff with your back teeth.”

  “Thanks for taking me so quickly,” said Dana.

  “Don’t thank me.” He ducked into his office for a moment, then walked her out to the waiting room. “Thank my receptionist and hygienist for being out and all those patients for leaving. Sometimes a good thing comes when everything else falls apart.”

  He handed her a sheet of paper with some names and phone numbers. “Association for the Prevention of Eating Disorders” blared out at her from the list. “I’m sure you’re already working on it,” he said, “but just in case you needed some further resources.” Then he reached for the ringing phone. “Cotters Rock Dental,” he said into the receiver. “Speaking . . .” He rolled his eyes at her. “Yes, I’m a regular one-man band today . . .”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE COLLISION DEDUCTIBLE ON THE CAR WAS A thousand dollars. Dana called the insurance agency to confirm that there’d been a mistake. The agent, a woman with a practiced customer-relations brand of charm, told her, “We’ll get to the bottom of this in a jiff!”

  We’ll get to the bottom of this, and we’ll find the deductible is only two hundred fifty dollars, Dana told herself. She’d set up the coverage herself and would never have agreed to such a large deductible. Kenneth was the one who thought bad things would never happen. “Insurance companies make their millions off people like you,” he’d often told Dana.

  People like me, she brooded as she waited on hold. People who sideswipe light poles and chip teeth and act like a lunatic in public . . . we need insurance.

  The breezy voice of the agent came back on the line. “Apparently Mr. Stellgarten increased the deductible about a year ago. He preferred a lower premium.”

  “He preferred?” said Dana. “But it’s my car!”

  “He’s listed as the primary policyholder,” said the agent, downshifting to a friendly-but-firm tone. “If he instructs me to change the coverage, I’m bound by law to make that adjustment. You might want to discuss this with him.” Dana called several repair shops instead. The lowest estimate for the replacement mirror was almost five hundred dollars.

  The front door opened, and Morgan came into the kitchen, studying the package of paper plates Dana had left in the mudroom. “Did they have any that weren’t so, like, happy?” she said.

  Dana sighed, feeling certain that a return trip to Party On! was in her future. “Happy-face plates, honey. That’s what you asked for. They’re happy.”

  Morgan shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Okay? You like them?”

  “Well, I’m not going to frame them or anything. They’re just paper plates, Mom. No one will care that much.” She sank down into a chair next to Dana. “What happened to your lip?”

  Dana told Morgan the story, and Morgan interjected regularly with mortified gasps of, “Oh, my God, Mom! You were scared of a chipmunk?” and “Oh, my God, Mom! They all saw you?” When Dana got to the part about chipping her tooth, Morgan said, “Let me see.” Dana rolled up her lip, and Morgan leaned close, running her tongue across her own teeth. “Did it hurt a lot?”

  “A little,” said Dana. “You think it looks okay? It’s just temporary. I have to go back for a veneer next week.”

  “Smile,” said Morgan, leaning back to get a fuller view. Dana smiled, her lips pulling taut across her face. Morgan started to giggle.

  “What?” said Dana.

  “I just can’t believe a cute little chipmunk made you freak out!”

  “He wasn’t cute, he was horrible—his face was orange!”

  “Whatever you say.” Morgan laughed. “At least your hair looks good. Are you using a new conditioner or something?” She reached her hand out to stroke her mother’s hair, shifting it to one side, then the other. “It’s shinier. It almost looks like Kimmi’s.”

  Then Morgan began to recount the cogent facts of her day, the most important of which always revolved around lunch. She’d been thinking about sitting with the popular girls, because she’d helped one of them make an ecosystem terrarium in science. “She didn’t get it that the dirt goes in first, not the little plant.” But Morgan couldn’t catch her eye to see if she would move over. “It would’ve looked like I was squeezing in, not just sitting down, you know,
normally.”

  But then Darby called out to her, “Hey, nice shirt!” and they laughed really hard, because it reminded them of the time they bought the same shirt in different colors. The clerk at Hollister was really cute, but he had a little snot in his nose and it made him look totally disgusting. Morgan and Darby told all this to Kimmi Kinnear, who’d had that very same thing happen once, only it was her brother, who’s not cute at all, but girls seem to like him for some dumb reason.

  “It was so funny, Mom, and it was really good, because I was sitting between Kimmi and Darby, so they couldn’t turn away from me.”

  “Why would they turn away from you?”

  “I don’t know. Kids do it all the time. You’re with someone, then somebody else comes over and says to the person you’re with, ‘I have to tell you something!’ and they turn away.”

  “But that’s not right. If they need to speak privately, they shouldn’t do it in the middle of a crowded lunchroom.”

  “Mom, I know, but that’s what they do.”

  “Well, I certainly hope you don’t.”

  “Not that much,” said Morgan wistfully. “I can never think of anything good enough to say.”

  Grady banged through the door and unloaded his backpack, jacket, baseball mitt, and spongy Nerf football onto the mudroom floor like so much fill dirt dropping from a backhoe. “How was school?” Dana asked.

  “Good.” He shrugged, as if the question were meaningless. “Can you move your car? I’m gonna skateboard in the driveway.”

  “Okay, but you have to use knee and elbow pads—Please don’t give me a face,” she said, stopping him mid-whine. “I only want you to be safe.”

  She had just parked out on the street when another car pulled up, an avocado green station wagon with graffiti scrawled across the door panels. Music throbbing from the car cut out suddenly in the middle of a barrage of pulsing, unintelligible words.