by Susan Perabo
Meredith Oliver lay alone on the floor of the Chestnut Street Deli Barn for eleven glorious minutes. It was the most wonderful place Meredith Oliver had ever been, more comfortable than any bed, warmer than summer sand, safer than her brother’s famous polar bear hug. The tile was smooth and cool on her face and she could see dull stains from spilled sodas under the counter and her body slowly and resolutely attached itself to the floor as if the floor were mud or glue. Meredith thought about her algebra test. She went over every problem in her mind. She thought again how Mrs. Adolphson would probably only give her half credit for the last problem because she hadn’t graphed the asymptotes. Find the vertical & horizontal asymptotes. Find x- and y-intercepts. State the Domain and Range in interval notation. She had run out of time; that was all. She knew what they were. She just hadn’t had time to graph them.
y=x+2/x-2
If she hadn’t had to get up and walk across the room to sharpen her pencil, between problems 14 and 15, she would have had time to graph the asymptotes. Next time there was a test she would remember to bring two sharpened pencils to class. This would be her goal on the morning of the next test. On the morning of the next test she would write herself a note. She would use a black pen. There was probably a black pen by the cash register. The note would say: “Remember to bring two sharpened pencils to algebra.” She would write the note on her hand so there would be no question but that she would see it. She would use a black pen. There was probably a black pen by the cash register. She would definitely use a black pen. As soon as she got up from this floor she would write it on her hand. This would (vertical asymptote: x=2) be her goal. The best way to remember something was to write it on your hand. There was probably a black pen (horizontal asymptote: y=1) by the cash register. People needed pens to sign their credit card slips. On her hand she would write: “Remember to bring two sharpened pencils to algebra.”
Later, after a customer came in and discovered the scene—Meredith facedown on the floor beside the counter, the sandwich farmer unconscious in the doorway to the back room, the register drawer ajar—and called the police, the paramedics tried to coax her to her feet, but she would not budge. When they attempted, as a group, to lift her, Meredith shrieked and thrashed and dug her fingernails into the neck of the EMT who knelt beside her. Finally it took a needle full of Thorazine to peel her from her cherished spot.
4
Claire had long since resigned herself to the question, “What made you go into dentistry?” The question—regardless of the asker—was almost always delicately posed with a cautious, falsely friendly tone that was obviously meant to very clearly state, I’m not passing judgment, but . . .
It went without saying that no one ever asked this question of a medical doctor, except possibly podiatrists, the only group that regularly fell below dentists in the general public’s unwritten pecking order of respected health professionals. Feet and mouths no one could understand, a kneejerk underestimation of the importance of each, Claire felt, a remnant from the seven-year-old mentality that mouths and feet were icky. Hearts and brains, of course—she could give them that. It was natural that those should be at the top of the list. They were the heavy hitters, the prestige organs. (What parent had not dreamed of the words, “And this is my son . . . the brain surgeon”?) But what about ENTs or rheumatologists? What about orthopedists or gynecologists? Why did no one suspect that they had settled, that some flaw had prevented them from reaching their potential, that somehow—intellectually? emotionally?—they just hadn’t been able to cut it?
In dental school the majority of their friends admitted they had decided on dentistry for the money. The pay was good—sometimes outstanding—and there was job security and a steady paycheck (teeth were never not going to be a problem), and unlike most of the med students they knew, they would all be able to go home at the end of the day and not go back to work until the next morning. Many of them were already planning on a four-day work week. So now in addition to settling and/or failing, they were also greedy and/or lazy.
It was an impossible situation, one that infuriated Claire because it just wasn’t fair. No one accused bankers of being lazy, or plumbers of being greedy. How could you begrudge someone for choosing a lucrative career? And yet there was a sense particular to dentists that they had simultaneously succeeded and failed, that they had sold out, that their moral obligation to help their fellow man in a more significant, meaningful way had been first acknowledged and then, poof, dismissed. Sure, I could be a doctor, but I choose to be a dentist. Why? Because it’s easier.
Well, she was done thinking about it. She had been done thinking about it, officially, for almost twenty years. She was not going to apologize or make excuses for having a steady job in which she helped people, contributing to society in a way that was desperately needed. Wasn’t that supposed to be what you did in life? Fill a need, and make a wage doing it? Yes, she was done thinking about it. No one was going to make her feel bad about it. She was free to make her own choices, and she had.
Except that, in truth, she had been somewhat talked into it.
Mark’s father had been a dentist. He preached dentistry like a religion. He was called to dentistry; it was his professional duty and personal joy. Neither settling nor greedy nor lazy, he loved his work and believed in it absolutely. “The teeth are the unsung heroes of the human body,” he was fond of saying, to whatever unsuspecting partygoer he managed to corner to talk about it. She and Mark used to laugh at this. For years they said it to each other at least once a week as a private joke, usually to lighten the mood when one of them was feeling down about something. She’d said it to him when it rained throughout their honeymoon, he to her when she broke her ankle on their icy front steps. It was the secret phrase that instantly improved every situation. The teeth are the unsung heroes of the human body.
When they met as college juniors, both bio majors, she still did not know what she was going to do, what path to follow. She had always pictured herself in an operating room—yes, probably at work on the prestige organs –with classical music playing in the background, a nurse laying a glittering scalpel in her gloved hand. It sounded strangely peaceful, and she imagined herself feeling totally in control of the situation, the conductor, the scalpel her baton, always certain of what note, what incision, was to come next.
Senior year, spring break. They’d been together for eighteen months. They were on a community service trip, helping rebuild houses in a little town in Oklahoma that had been all but wiped out by a tornado. At the end of the day they sat on the floor in an empty second-story bedroom, passing one beer between them, and Mark—maybe inspired by the promise of the house going up around him?—had said, “Listen, we could open our own practice. We could run the show. We just pick a place we like and move there and be our own bosses and set our own hours.”
And it wasn’t as if she didn’t like the idea—she did. If she had had more than the vaguest notion of another direction, it might have been different. But she was open to suggestion, and he suggested, and now here they were twenty-five years later, being their own bosses and setting their own hours, a busy office in Sick City, both of them well respected in their community of dentists, and with enough money to do almost anything they wanted. And yes, she was the conductor of sorts, only her theater was noisier than the operating theater she had imagined, and you couldn’t hear classical music over the hum of the drill.
Here was the thing: they relieved pain. She liked relieving pain, especially for people who were older, patients in their sixties and seventies who were spending an awful lot of time going from office to office in Sick City. She liked giving people something they could rely on, something that could be fixed, even as the rest of their bodies failed. Dentistry had its disadvantages, to be sure—that devastating look of betrayal chief among them—but there was something that made dentistry more fulfilling than other medical pursuits: you could almost always fix a tooth, and when you couldn’t, you could t
ake it out and put in something that was just as good, or better. She liked to be able to say, “Mrs. Elscott, you don’t need to worry about this anymore. This will not fail you. Yes, your heart might stop or your brain might stroke (she did not say this part), but those teeth in your mouth—provided you continue your stellar record of yearly visits to the dentist!—are not going to turn on you.”
They are, in fact, the unsung heroes of the human body.
After his retirement from private practice, Mark’s father (and his mother, as his assistant) moved to Honduras to work at a free clinic, providing dental care to people who would never live a single minute of their lives like the fourteen hundred and forty minutes Claire lived every day. Mark’s parents resided in a small apartment above the clinic and were often awakened by pebbles tossed against their bedroom window by their first patients of the day, children who came to have cavities filled before walking miles to school. They occasionally talked of returning to the States, but Mark did not believe this would ever happen. “They’ll die there,” he told Claire. “Right in the middle of a root canal.”
Sometimes she thought Mark’s favorite part of being a dentist was rolling around on stools. Sundays when the kids were little, Mark would race them down the office corridors, stool versus stool, a contest that normally ended with him on the floor and his stool upside down, its wheels spinning. He also occasionally liked looking at the dental hygienists. He was not an ogler, but she could slide something into the space between an “eyes passing over” moment and the amount of time that his eyes actually lingered.
“You’re such a cliché,” she often told him.
“I know,” he’d say. “But I’m your cliché.”
The thing was that, like her, he did not like messy. They dealt with it in different ways, but shared the aversion, which got deeper with time. Because of this, she did not fear those occasional lingering glances. Yet another of the Great Things About Mark: he looked, but he did not touch.
•
It was one of the hygienists—Debbie—who came to fetch her on Wednesday afternoon. Claire was in exam room 4, with her last patient of the day, filling a tooth.
“Dr. Oliver? There’s a phone call for you?”
She lifted her eyes. Not for nothing would they bother her in the middle of a procedure. Evan. He’d skipped school. He’d gotten into a fight. He’d disappeared. He’d crashed the car.
“Coming,” she said.
They had called last year, Friday, the twenty-ninth of March. The call had come from the coach. The ambulance was en route to the hospital, he’d said. Evan was talking as they loaded him into the ambulance, the coach had said. He was talking. He was moving. He was conscious. (This was all code for he’s not almost dead. You’re not going to get to the hospital and find out he’s dead.)
Where was Mark? In her panic she had been unable to recall, and the phone line was suddenly lifeless, the coach’s voice silenced, and she was there alone with this information. The receptionist had to remind her: Hillsboro. Their mobile dentistry. Once a month one of them went to the Hillsboro Home and saw patients who were too old to leave, too weak to be moved, but required dental care. They traded months; it was terrible work, but they felt too guilty, too necessary, to give it up. That was where he was. That was why he couldn’t be reached. That was why she was suddenly in her car—having somehow gotten herself into it, and driving, and halfway to the hospital before she realized she was still wearing her rubber gloves, and it seemed she had not breathed nor had a thought since she’d heard the coach’s voice.
It was the call she had been waiting for, the bookend—not even to Logan Boone and the porker incident—she saw that clearly during that drive to the hospital—but to a moment in the eighth month of her first pregnancy when she had put her hand on her belly and thought, Stay there. By the ninth month she was not having these thoughts anymore, but she remembered it with such clarity now, a feeling she could not understand nor name but which she felt so strongly (and later attributed to the roller coaster of hormones): stay there.
His eye had been crushed. When she saw him in the emergency room, she knew at once the bloody mass would not see again—how could it?—but in the moment she hadn’t cared about that. She only wanted the MRI. She wanted to know if his brain was bleeding. His brain could be bleeding. While they waited, while she gripped his fingers, his brain could be bleeding, the blood flooding the things (goddamn prestige organs) he most needed to survive. It was only a few minutes but terrible things often only took a few minutes. She had said this to her children, naggingly, “Sometimes a single minute makes a difference.” How she hated that stupid nagger now, wanted to throttle that nagger, because it had always been about homework or being on time for school or getting the trash rolled to the curb before the truck rumbled down the street.
He’d been shaking, her beautiful, terrified boy, those giant powerful hands trembling in hers. She had waited for something to come from her mouth, something useful, something comforting. She had waited and waited and nothing had come.
“Where’s Dad?” Evan had asked, because Dad was better at this, let’s face it, Dad would act rather than standing there in the ER muted and stunned.
“He’s coming, honey.”
And he did come, there he was, soon after—seconds? minutes? hours?—and she could have wept just that he was there and she did not have to carry the burden alone anymore. If she could have physically picked up Evan and dumped him into Mark’s arms in that moment she would have done it.
“Take this,” she would have said. “Take this. Carry this.”
•
Over the years there had been things that had almost split them up. She had nearly left him ages ago, before the kids were even born. Soon after her mother had fallen ill she had fallen, too—someone she knew in high school, someone who had recently returned to their hometown, a brilliant but aimless emotional vagrant who occasionally met her for coffee at the hospital when she flew home on weekends to be with her mother, who touched her hand and said things to her like “Are you sure this is really the life you want?” and “You’re only twenty-six. Nothing’s set in stone”—the worst kinds of things to hear in the days when you are newly married and your mother is dying and you are contemplating your own mortality.
There had been no affair, per se, but there had been long letters and whispered phone calls and panic and indecision. He offered repeatedly to come pick her up at her home in the middle of the night and just drive away. To where? Who knew? For how long? Maybe a month, maybe fifty years. The affair—or whatever it was, she didn’t even know what to call it; it was really just hands and words—lasted through her mother’s illness and continued after her death, and when she found she could not decide for herself what to do, which man to choose, which life to pursue, she told Mark about it in the hopes that he would decide for her, that he would be furious and leave her or forgive her and fight for her. But he misunderstood his role. He was furious and did not leave her. He neither forgave her nor fought for her. Instead, after a day of fuming, he turned it—the admission, the decision—back on her. “Do what you want,” he’d said, “but for God’s sake do something.” That was the night he grew up, she thought now, the night he really stopped being a boy, his ego crushed, his clear vision of the future shaken, his boyish heart hardened, and then, impressively at twenty-seven, his grown-up resolve: “For God’s sake, do something.” Even then she felt sad for the boy she killed that day, in part because she never got to say good-bye to him.
She did something. She made a decision. She decided she would wait and see what happened. She would stop writing the letters and making the phone calls and would see how she felt about things and then after a little while she would decide once and for all what to do. So she waited to see what she would decide. And while she waited, she and Mark went on with their life together and after a couple months she woke up one morning and realized that, in not deciding, she had made her decision. She had n
ot called for the midnight getaway car, had not triggered the escape hatch. She was lying next to Mark, so apparently that was her choice. And so they did not split up.
And then there was Logan Boone, the first-grader whose bright pink gum she had dug into with the point of her scaler, intentionally, to cause him pain, to punish him for mistreating Evan. When she revisited the moment in her mind in the months that followed the incident, she never felt remorse, but rather some delicious satisfaction that was perhaps more damning than the act itself. When she saw Logan Boone outside the elementary school, brushing past the crossing guard, she convinced herself that his strut was less confident, that he’d been taken down a peg or two, that she had won. Yes, won. She had taught the aggressor a lesson, overpowered the powerful, and in doing so had eradicated, permanently, one unmistakable danger from her children’s lives.
Why in the world had she thought Mark would understand? Mark, of all people? Maybe she didn’t, not really. Maybe, as with the non-affair affair, she wanted to tell him so that the feeling of delicious satisfaction would stop. Maybe she needed someone to remind her of the thing Mark had always seemed best about reminding her: “You’re better than that.”
It came up to begin with because he—Mr. Nice Guy!—was complaining about an annoying teenage girl who’d been in for a cleaning that day.