Joy

by Erin McGraw

  “It isn’t pretty. It’s spiky, like knives coming at you.”

  “Where does she get this?” Grandma says.

  Mom shrugs. “TV? We’ll be going along fine and then suddenly something will go wrong and—well.” “Well” is me frantically trying to break away from her grip, which keeps getting tighter. “Annabelle, stop. Just stop. You’re too old to throw a tantrum.”

  “At school my teachers tell me to name danger when I see it.”

  “Well, they aren’t talking about the Nutcracker,” Mom says.

  “This wouldn’t happen if you sent her to church school,” Grandma murmurs.

  “Not the time, Ma.”

  When things are better, it’s Mom and me against Grandma. Mom makes fun of Grandma for not knowing how to use her phone, and I show her new apps and settings while she tells me to slow down. Mom and I laugh. But now it’s the two of them bearing down on me, waiting for the shell to shatter.

  “Honey, smile. You’re so pretty when you smile.”

  Grandma’s not as tall as Drosselmeyer, the man who gives Clara the nutcracker, but like him she grins too much and comes close enough for me to cough from her powdery perfume.

  “Fuck you.” I’ve been saving it up. Mom is shocked enough to loosen her grip and I’m out the door. She closes the door behind me. It’s cold, and I don’t have a coat.

  Who thinks that snowflakes are anything like ballerinas? Stinging pellets shoot through my socks. I tuck my fists under my arms and keep half running, half sliding away from the warm house. Mom and Grandma are probably still laughing, the way you do when you know you’re going to win.

  At the end of our backyard is a cruddy drainage ditch that doesn’t get enough water to wash out the rags and plastic and food wrappers that slide down the hill. Stuff just collects. My friend Marnie said she found a syringe but I don’t believe her. She’s too prissy to sift through trash for something as small as a syringe, and she never showed it to me. She came to school looking sleepy and said she’d shot up, but I don’t believe that, either.

  It’s ugly down here, but the sides of the ditch stop the wind and it’s too cold to stink. I smooth out two plastic bags and sit on them, pretending I don’t mind the cold that flares across my butt. Everybody knows what happens to girls out by themselves in the snow, so I wrap my arms tight around my legs and wait for a man to show up.

  No man materializes. Aside from the shadows turning purple, nothing happens at all. I hear a door open, and Mom calls, “Annabelle? You made your point. Come back in now.” In a different neighborhood, she’d be worried.

  I’m shuddering more than shivering, heavy waves running over me. Mom and Grandma agree that if there’s a delicate way to do anything, I won’t find it, another big laugh line. By the time I stand up, my feet are so numb that I’m walking like Bigfoot. I trudge up to the road and stick out my thumb for a minute, but that feels fake, so I just walk, clumsy on numb feet. Ten minutes? Fifteen? I’m about halfway to the railroad crossing when the police car pulls up next to me.

  The lecture is everything I know it will be: danger, risk, do I have any idea. I’m rubbing my feet. He takes me back home, where Mom and Grandma are drinking Cokes and watching TV. “Missing something?” he says, pushing me ahead of him.

  Mom looks at Grandma. “What do you think, Ma? We missing anything here?”

  “I can’t think what,” Grandma says.

  The policeman has barely stopped laughing when he looks at me with his teacher face. “Don’t let me hear about you taking off again. Next time you won’t be so lucky.” Mom pinches my shoulder, which keeps me from being nice.

  “That’s the plan,” I say.

  Stingers

  1964

  Bob gunned the Pontiac the whole way here—he drives aggressively when he’s mad. Tonight he was complaining in advance about Lance’s liquor, his record collection, his insistence that we all take off our shoes at the door, which is strange but makes dancing more fun. “He wants to make sure we all know how nonconformist he is,” Bob said, yanking the Pontiac around a corner so the tires squealed.

  “We don’t have to go,” I said.

  He glanced at me, then squeezed my knee. “You’re so funny.”

  Since we got engaged he’s been more handsy, squeezing and rubbing my arms and waist, and I don’t need to be a mind reader to know he’s counting down the nights till our wedding. He wants to make me happy. He gave me the pearl necklace I wear when we go out.

  Lance meets us at the door wearing a red plaid sports coat. “Welcome!” he says, and Bob says, “What’s that you say? I can’t hear you over your jacket.” Everybody laughs. Bob’s a card.

  Lance has mixed up a pitcher of stingers, and Bob says, “What’s the matter? Run out of gin?”

  “I like stingers,” I say. “This is a nice change.”

  “Better watch out, Bob,” Lance says. “She’s already getting feisty.”

  “She’ll learn.” Bob pulls me to his side and runs his thumb over my hip.

  Lance is throwing the party all by himself—to prove, Bob said, that he can. Lance and his wife separated a month ago, and now everybody at their company has an opinion about who did the cheating. Since Bob and I are together, I hear the gossip, but my job, Bob says, is not to talk about it. Bob does, of course. He’s certain that Lance has a nonconformist girlfriend on the side. “Too bad she couldn’t do anything about his taste in clothes!” What Bob doesn’t see is how thin Lance has become, and the way his face loses its shape when he thinks no one is looking.

  “Shrimp!” I say, looking at the coffee table. The ashtrays are already little pyramids of shrimp tails and cigarette butts. “Lance, you’re treating us like royalty.”

  “What are friends for?” he says.

  “Didn’t help yourself to the petty cash, did you?” Bob says just as the record comes to an end, and his words blare through the smoky room. I don’t think I’m the only one to see the weariness in Lance’s smile, but he just goes to change the record. He’s playing bossa nova, and I hear Bob explaining to the men beside him that he himself likes Al Hirt, which he certainly does.

  Carol, married to Pete in Receivables, asks me how the wedding plans are coming. This is nice of her. The wives don’t have to talk to me yet; I’ve still got six months of college to go, and I’m not quite baked, as Bob likes to say. “We’re still fussing over the guest list. I wanted to keep things small, but Bob has so many friends.”

  “He’s social. I wish Pete had a little more Bob in him. Pete’s idea of a great weekend is a ball game on the radio.”

  “Hey. That’s my idea of a great weekend, too,” says Lance, materializing with a drink for me. He’s drenched in English Leather, and his smile is full of effort. “How about you, Connie? What does Bob need to do to please you?”

  I can tell from the angle of Bob’s head, ten feet away, that he’s listening to us. “Weekends in Paris are always nice.” This gets a good chuckle from the group; the only one to keep looking at me is Lance, who says, “He should take you.”

  “He will, one day.”

  “He should take you now.”

  “Lance, sweetheart, have you been drinking your own cooking?” says Carol. Her solicitous arm turns him toward the group. Alone with my stinger, I examine the magazines on his coffee table, a trick I learned many cocktail parties ago. Life has a cover picture of Gordon Cooper holding his helmet; even in a space suit, he’s handsome. Bob’s insecure about his looks, and I’m not about to gush over an astronaut in front of him. Still, I have eyes.

  “Desafinado” grinds to an end, the record so scratched that I can hear every night that Lance sat up late, his marriage crumbling around him, and listened to soft, sad music. He’s carrying a tray of glasses back to the kitchen; all he needs is an apron. On the drive home, Bob and I will laugh.

  When Lance comes back out of the kitchen, I hold up my arms. “Got a dance for a girl?”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” he
says.

  The song is whispered and sultry, and Lance is a good enough dancer to make me look good, even with both of us still holding our drinks. After Bob and I are married I can tell Lance that he has soft eyes. He murmurs, “You’re too good for him,” the kind of flirting these fellows always do. It saves them the trouble of thinking up a new line. Then he says, “We’ll have to be careful.”

  “Whoops!” I shriek, my stinger going all over Lance’s awful sports coat. He ought to look angry, but he just steps back, and now we’re ten safe feet away from each other.

  “That’s my girl. Can’t hold her liquor!” Bob says.

  “Cheap date!” says Pete.

  “They all start that way,” Bob says, and everybody laughs. They didn’t laugh so readily before he was promoted, but he’ll always be the manager now. I touch my necklace and smile at Carol, who turns away. I’m not quite baked.

  Bob’s wrong about me; I have a good head for liquor. He’s the one who’s swaying a little at the door, and I’ll cross my fingers all the way home. Lance finds our coats in the bedroom and rests mine gently over my shoulders. “Good night, beautiful,” he says, making sure Bob can hear him. His fingers are light as breath on my neck. I move just barely away from him. Careful, careful.

  Teeth

  My car didn’t want to start this morning—Dan says it’s the distributor cap—so I was late getting to work, and the first patient was already in the chair. Dr. Ross will be mad at me when he has time, and his assistant, Marnie, will say, “The receptionist is supposed to greet people,” using her slow voice. This patient must have been a walk-in, probably waiting at the door when Dr. Ross arrived. Meaning a mess in the mouth. Meaning no insurance. Meaning four or five wadded bills pulled from a pocket. Later today my job will be to start the quiet conversation about payment plans. “You know what to say to these patients. They listen to you,” Marnie says, pretending she isn’t looking at the hole in my mouth where a tooth should be. This is steady work, with air-conditioning, and I make out the vacation schedules and give myself twelve days a year.

  Marnie put the patient in the far examining room and turned up the music, but there’s no missing the moans, and I wonder how long this woman has been living with the pain beating like a hammer in her head. We get one or two a month like this, people who’ve put off and put off the visit and who hope oil of clove can combat an infection that’s already blown a hole right up through the sinus cavity. I lost my best aunt that way. The undertaker had to puff up the side of her face with cotton balls.

  “I don’t mean to lecture,” Marnie likes to say to Dr. Ross, “but damn.”

  I’m listening to Dr. Ross’s steady voice, and I can make out the speech about saving the viable teeth and about bridges, how teeth are a structure meant to last a lifetime, but they require maintenance. Does he know that everybody in town calls him Dr. Dollar? Probably.

  Then there’s another voice, a man’s. Usually Marnie’s good at keeping family from going back with the patient. Nobody wants to see their loved one’s rotten, stinking tooth ripped from whatever is left of the bone, but this man must have bulled past her. I’m curious enough to stroll back and glance in at him—big, handsome, expressionless, maybe forty. He and his wife aren’t tweakers. They’re probably carrying cavities that started when they were eight years old. “Take them all out,” he’s saying to Dr. Ross, who winces. Marnie frowns at me to get back to the desk, but I can still listen from there.

  “Mr. Poole, she still has several viable teeth. I can’t remove them. That would be malpractice.”

  “I live with her and see her cry from the hurt. You don’t. Get ’em out of there.”

  “We can make things better. Once we remove the teeth that are destroyed, just one bridge—”

  “Listen.” He could have sounded threatening, but the man just sounds tired. He must have known what to expect, coming to Dr. Dollar. “Last night our boy was sick and she couldn’t even hold him because when he moved her head swam. I had to pull him away.”

  “That’s the one tooth where the infection is worst.”

  “And then it will be the next one. Everybody in my family has took them out. She can get dentures.”

  “Dentures are not an inexpensive . . .”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  Not one sound from the woman. From thirty feet away and around two corners I can tell that she’s used to having her husband talk for her. I can also imagine Dr. Ross staring at the light fixture and Marnie pushing back her expensive hair, red this month, and pulling on a pair of gloves over her first pair of gloves; the woman’s mouth is probably a riot of bacteria.

  I run my tongue along my gum line, checking for breaches. Sometimes at night I don’t stop flossing until blood comes, going around and around the space where 4, my second bicuspid, used to be. That one went before I started working for Dr. Dollar and, Dan says, decided to play with the team—he means the fluoride rinses, which he thinks are silly. I nag him to floss, but he shrugs and goes to bed. At least he brushes now.

  I wanted to get a false tooth once I’d been working ninety days and my insurance kicked in, but Marnie and Dr. Ross said no. “The deductible’s costly on your salary, and really, you don’t need it. Your other teeth are good,” Dr. Ross said. “We could whiten them, if you want.”

  “But you don’t need to,” Marnie said fast, before I could agree. “You’re good just as you are. People see you and they know this is a place they can come, where there’ll be people like them.”

  “And not like you,” I snapped, and she had the grace to blush. Single woman making $2,500 a month, she thinks she has a hard time because she has auto payments. Let’s discuss Dan’s mother, moved into our living room after her house was robbed down to the studs. Or Dan himself, hands so stiff from arthritis that he can barely open a jar. Nobody’s brought up whitening again, though Marnie gets hers done every two months like church.

  Now the man says, “You ain’t the only dentist. We can get somewhere else.”

  After a pause, Dr. Ross says, “I’ll take out the worst ones. After that, we can take impressions for temporary dentures that she can wear until the permanent ones are made.”

  “We’re not doing none of that.”

  “I’m sorry, but this is the best we can do. We’ll need at least a month. We’ll try to get the order expedited.”

  I’ll bet it was “expedited” that set the man off. I can hear him lean forward, closing the space between him and Dr. Ross. “Listen. I took off work today. I’ll get cut eighty-five bucks for that. She took off work, and may not have a job tomorrow. We are here today.”

  A long minute passes before Marnie comes up front. I’m already pulling out the form. When no patient is in earshot, we call it the Don’t Sue Us, a joke that’s funny if you’re not the one who will have to explain to Mr. Poole how he can’t blame us for pain, or bleeding, or infection, or a bad outcome, a phrase that covers anything from soreness to death. Marnie reminds me every month or so that it’s the most important part of my job. Of course it is. It keeps her from having to have an actual conversation with the portion of our clientele who don’t arrive in cars with good paint jobs and who really watch the TV in the waiting room.

  “Also,” Marnie says, “could you reschedule Mrs. Toland’s appointment for this afternoon? Any time next week would be fine.” Eighty-five if she’s a day, Mrs. Toland has to move heaven and earth to get her daughter to bring her in, when she talks to us about the old dentist, the one before Dr. Ross, the one she liked.

  Before I call her I enter Mr. Poole’s information into the computer, transposing digits in both his phone number and his address. This way his credit might not get dinged when the bills for $500 worth of extractions go unpaid. It’s worked before. Then I bring him a bottle of water. He looks at the bottle and looks at me and I smile, automatically covering my gap. He’s tan and muscled. Anywhere but here he would turn heads. I say, “It’s all we have on offer. Denti
st’s office.”

  “I’ve been getting the message.”

  “There are machines downstairs. Can I get you anything else?”

  He snorts softly. “Got a miracle handy?” Closing his eyes, he leans back, his features scrubbed of everything but fatigue. He will be sitting back there for better than an hour, feet planted, making sure that the worst of his wife’s pain is taken away. Dr. Ross will get maybe sixty bucks. Out front, I wipe Marnie’s upcoming whitening appointments off the schedule, assign myself a sick day tomorrow, and practice smiling so my missing tooth shows, so Mr. Poole knows who he’s talking to.

  Prayer

  Because you promised to be with me even to the end of time. Because you told me to be still and know who you are. Because it was said you would lead me through the shadow of the valley of death and take away my fear, but I still have my fear. Because you promised me repose.

  Because I have not been made new. Because I still reach for the glass every morning. Because you promised me joy. Because you make promises you don’t keep.

  Because when I ask where the rent money will come from, you say, “How glorious is the daybreak.” When I remind you that my savings have dwindled to pennies, you say, “It is good that there is music.” Because you expect me to be a mystic, but did not make me a mystic. I have clung to your promises until my hands ache. When the day comes that I open them, I am pretty sure I’ll discover they are empty.

  Because destruction might pave the way to salvation, but salvation can be destroyed again. You have lifted me up, as you promised. But salvation has set me swinging on a trapeze, looking for hands to clasp. Because those hands might come, and they might not. Because if I am left to fall, everyone will understand that being left breathless and broken on the tent floor was good for me. Because everything you do or don’t do is good for me.

  Because you promise to break and remake us when we go wrong, and because you have made us so that we don’t want to be broken, and we often go wrong. Because last night I brought home a woman who smelled like olives and whose touch on my wrist made my arm feel electrified. Because I wanted to shout in gratitude that there was such a woman, you made her, and I met her. Because she went home with me, and because we were shaking so hard when we touched each other that we both dropped our glasses—which held nothing but Sprite, a point you should appreciate.