Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  Several days later, after not seeing him or talking to him at all, Ian called and said in a very serious tone of voice that we needed to talk.

  I prepared myself to hear the worst. Ian realized what we did was a mistake. He was very drunk. We were both drunk. He sees me as a very good friend. He hopes things can be normal between us.

  He came over and we rode our bikes to Lake Merritt. We bought forties at a liquor store and sat at the edge of the lake, barely talking.

  “I want to ask you a question but I’m not sure how to phrase it,” Ian finally said.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have an opinion about what happened on Friday night? Or, what is your opinion?”

  “What are you asking me?” I said, refusing to be the first one to say what was going to be said, even if that meant it would never be said at all. “What do you want me to talk about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, and I decided to try to be as straightforward as possible. It didn’t benefit me to be anything but honest about my feelings for him. I liked him. I should just say, “I like you.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. It wasn’t at all complicated. I was lying. I was still trying to protect myself from becoming vulnerable by holding on to the last dying shreds of any doubt he might still hold about my feelings for him. What was the point?

  “Actually,” I said. “I feel good about it. I like you a whole bunch.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I like myself a lot.”

  Minutes went by without either of us speaking. I counted five shooting stars. I tied my shoe. I peeled the label off my beer and polished the glass underneath it with my fingers.

  “I think if we were in a relationship it would be very weird,” Ian said, not looking at me.

  “Why? Why wouldn’t it be normal?”

  “I just think it would be a very strange and unique relationship.”

  “I think it would be very intense,” I said.

  “I’m not into intense.”

  “Really?”

  “Or, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

  17

  i lost a tooth at work

  I lost a tooth while eating pizza at work. “Lost,” as in it fell out of my mouth and was nowhere to be found.

  It was already a trying day. I was preparing Christmas merchandise for the chocolate café where I worked, and because the hand-packaged items were selling faster than I could package them, I was falling further and further behind.

  My boyfriend Ian had come with pizza to cheer me up.

  It was 9 p.m., and Ian and I were the only people in the warehouse. I was preparing to stay for several more hours to make sure there would be plenty of items available the next morning for everyone who needed a quick, moderately cute, sweet, edible gift for under twenty-five dollars.

  “I think I swallowed my tooth,” I said, feeling the outside of my throat with my fingers, as if the tooth might be poking out of it.

  How long had my tooth been missing? I had no idea. I’d only noticed the tooth was gone because I periodically checked that I still had all my teeth by gliding my tongue across the front of them, and this time around they weren’t all there.

  The pizza was a large thin-crust with caramelized onions, mozzarella, arugula, garlic, and lemon-thyme oil. The slices were pretty big. Did any of these details help me in this moment? No, not really. But my tooth had only been missing a few seconds. I was bound to have a thought of some practical use very soon.

  It wasn’t a real tooth. It was one of the two tooth-colored, tooth-

  shaped pieces of plastic that sat on either side of my top front teeth, and were attached to another piece of plastic, pink and semitranslucent, that was molded to fit against the roof of my mouth.

  Okay, they were dentures. Though the specialized orthodontia term for it was flipper.

  Flippers have a lifespan of less than one year, and are supposed to be used as a temporary fix for missing teeth. They are expensive to replace, and I didn’t have dental insurance, so I tried to take care of them so they’d last as long as possible. This particular piece was the fifth I’d owned in eight years. I was supposed to take it out before I

  ate, because biting into food weakened the bond the fake teeth had with the pink plastic, but taking it out when it had recently been glued in with denture adhesive was likely to break it as well, so I tried to make the best choice about whether to take it out each time I ate. I’d made the wrong choice this time.

  I took out what remained of my flipper and examined it. The tooth had cleanly snapped off from the thin pink plastic. I touched the other tooth. It felt firm.

  I went to the bathroom, laid some brown paper towels in the sink, and ran water over them so they would stick to the sink, creating a cover for the drain. I performed each action calmly and methodically, as if I had been trained to handle this kind of emergency. I then began to try to make myself vomit.

  I began with the traditional way to self-induce vomiting: sticking my fingers into my throat. It didn’t work. I choked and gagged, but nothing came up. So I tried to physically force the recently eaten pizza out of my body by pressing into my abdomen with my fists and clenching my abs as tightly as I could.

  I barfed into the sink and gently sorted through the barf with my fingers, searching for the missing tooth. It was chunky and hard to look through.

  Vomit carefully, I told myself, because there’s a good chance the tooth could enter your nasal passages. And dig through the vomit pile even while you’re vomiting. There’s no sense in wasting any time.

  Also, try to keep your back straight. You have a posture problem. You’re barfing, so don’t worry about it right now. This is more like a general reminder. It could lead to serious issues down the line if you’re not careful.

  Speaking of which, weren’t you supposed to be joining the gym? Or something? And was there something about trying to eat better? I guess you think pizza probably fits into that category, though.

  Oh, and don’t forget that your new showerhead is going to be delivered on Monday, so make sure you don’t leave the house until it arrives. You’re working on Tuesday and Wednesday, so if you miss it on Monday you’ll have to call the post office to figure out how to pick it up. It will be a nightmare. Just make it your business to be home on Monday.

  Or wait, maybe it’s coming on Tuesday.

  Ian stood behind me as I worked through the barf, looking horrified. I knew I was testing the limits of what I could do in front of him. As it was, we already had very few boundaries. We could burp, fart, pick zits, and pee in front of each other, no problem. We had barfed in front of each other when we were sick or drunk and it hadn’t been a big deal, but we hadn’t yet determined whether we could then dig through the barf with our fingers, looking for our own missing tooth in front of each other. It just hadn’t come up.

  My two missing teeth had been missing since I was around seven years old. My baby teeth fell out, and all my permanent teeth grew in except the two lateral incisors, which are easily the third and fourth most prominent teeth in your mouth, right after your top front teeth. I had evenly gappy teeth until I was fifteen, when I got braces to shove them all into their correct places. Once there was enough room, two fake teeth were attached to my braces, dangling there until my braces came off, when I got my flipper. The next step was dental implants, but my family had exhausted my dental plan with braces, and we had no money. Dental implants were expensive, and I was told I would have to wait.

  If I had been more forward-thinking, I would have asked, “Wait for what? And for how long? Until I’m done with high school? When I’m in college? After college? In my thirties? When will dental implants ever be possible?” But I have never been very forward-thinking, and those questions didn’t occur to me for a very long time.

 
I was sensitive about the subject because Clearlake had a big meth problem and a big poverty problem when I was growing up, and, unsurprisingly, many people couldn’t afford dental work. Ask anyone in the region about Clearlake, and they’d inevitably make a joke about missing teeth. In Urban Dictionary, the definition for Clearlake, CA, is, “A place where no one has a full set of teeth.” Someone in Clearlake once found a human skull in their yard, and the big joke was: How are they going to identify the skull without dental records? Har har.

  I knew that the joke was directed toward meth heads who used until their teeth fell out, and wasn’t meant for people with congenitally missing teeth like me. But I still felt insulted by the stereotype. I may not have been on meth, but I did live in Clearlake, I did have missing teeth, and I was too poor to fix them. I had done so much to separate myself from the stereotypes of my hometown. I’d left immediately after high school, put myself into debt to attend an expensive private art college, and now had a job catering to the high-end chocolate cravings of Oakland’s most privileged stay-at-home mothers. But it only took a single second for my shame and embarrassment to come rushing back.

  I was still the poor, toothless girl I had always been.

  The tooth wasn’t in the barf pile. I barfed again, but it wasn’t in that barf, either. I barfed and barfed, until all the pizza had come up and all that was left was bile. The tooth was nowhere. I had swallowed it and my body was refusing to choke it up so that I would be reminded of my place in the world. Or, it was stuck in my nasal passages and the area around it would become infected and swollen and the mass would prevent nasal discharge from leaving my body and would build up inside my brain and slowly kill me.

  I was exhausted. I lazily stirred the sink, hoping there was some chance I had missed it, not wanting to say goodbye to my tooth or my barf just yet.

  “Here it is,” Ian said. He was looking into the pizza box across the room.

  I dragged myself over to the pizza box, knocking over my carefully stacked bags of homemade chocolate-covered marshmallows, and weakly examined the tooth, confirming that it was in fact my tooth and not some other stray pizza-box tooth.

  At home, I glued the tooth back onto my flipper with regular super glue. The internet said it was barely toxic.

  18

  the man who famously

  inspired this essay

  I decided to stop having a dad one day in late winter when I was twenty-three.

  Decided is too strong a word. It makes me sound confident and in control, and I was mostly frazzled and unsure.

  A couple of months before this, the last time I had seen him, he’d picked me up in Oakland and we’d driven north together for Thanksgiving at the house my mom and Jett had recently moved into. During the hour-and-a-half car ride, my dad accused me of harboring resentment about him not being in my childhood, angrily asked why I didn’t call him “Dad,” told me that anything I heard about his supposed pill addiction was bullshit (I had not heard anything), told me I was being brainwashed by my mom and Jett, refused to listen to any counterargument regarding the brainwashing, told me I had a responsibility to visit L.A. to babysit his baby daughter, asked if I would consider going to group therapy with him, asked me not to call him “Dad” anymore because he didn’t need that kind of pressure, and accused me of “faking” the bloody nose I got while crying in the dry heat of his car.

  “You’re going to thank me one day for giving you all of this material for your writing,” he said when I stopped crying.

  I avoided eye contact and silently promised to never write a damned thing about him.

  My dad had a specific talent for saying things that made me hate things about myself that I had never considered problems before. Why wasn’t I more enthusiastic and easygoing? Why didn’t I color my hair? Why didn’t I talk unprompted about my social life? Did I even have a social life? Why didn’t I have a driver’s license? Why had I never called my mom’s husband “Dad”? Why was I so selfish and cruel as to not call my mom’s husband “Dad”? Why did I wear my makeup like that? Did I think that looked good? Why wasn’t I asking him questions about his life? Why wasn’t I more curious about him? Was I completely socially inept? Or was I really just that self-centered?

  I considered a visit with him successful if the depression it threw me into afterward lasted less than two weeks.

  Before each visit, I told myself that this time would be different. I would be more lively and interesting, and tell him about all the things I liked, all the things that I liked about myself and were interesting to me. This time we would talk in a way that didn’t feel forced and horrible. I would ask him emotional questions like, What did you do after you left my mom? Did you ever think about me? Were you afraid to contact us? And we would begin to feel the closeness I’d always assumed was the point of having a dad.

  But when the time actually came to attempt these conversations, he would say something like “I don’t want to talk about the past. I did what I had to do and I’m not going to be made to feel bad about it.”

  He wanted to start our relationship in the middle, without even addressing the fact that it had no beginning. To him, my anxiety and trepidation about our relationship were symptoms of resentment and anger that he decided I had before he even met me, when actually anxiety and trepidation were basic aspects of my personality that I brought with me into every situation. I felt fundamentally misunderstood.

  “Why are you so fucking sad all the time?” he said to me once at the beach. I had just successfully stood upright on a surfboard while a baby wave slowly propelled it to the shore. I felt like I was beaming.

  “I’m not sad,” I said, trying to visualize my own face. Was I frowning?

  “Jesus, you look like someone just died.”

  I internalized our lack of connection and blamed myself for it, which gave me an air of insecurity and weakness, traits my dad found pathetic, further snowballing our problems with each other.

  I cried to my mom over the phone about how I broke one of my fake teeth and barfed up my dinner trying to find it, how expensive it would be to see the dentist with no insurance, and how it would take months to save up enough money just to replace my dumb little flipper. My mom talked to my nana, and then my nana called me to tell me the whole barfing thing wasn’t going to happen again.

  “It’s going to be really expensive,” I said. “The quote I got years ago was like six thousand dollars.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “I’m an old lady and have nothing much to spend my money on, anyway.”

  I was hesitant to let my nana pay for such a thing, because money had caused problems in our family before, and because I didn’t know how well my nana understood her own finances. But she urged me not to worry about it. It was worth it to her, she said, to help me in a way that would last a lifetime.

  “Fixing my teeth” permanently involved the surgical implantation of two metal rods that fake teeth could be inserted onto. It was expensive and scary, but I made appointments to get quotes to my nana within a week, worried that someone would talk her out of helping me if it took too long. My initial visit to the periodontist made clear that the procedure was going to be even more complicated than we originally thought. The spacing in my teeth didn’t leave enough room to insert the metal rods. There was no way around it. A visit to an orthodontist added eight months of braces and thousands of additional dollars onto the estimate, which my nana agreed to immediately. But it meant I had to spend eight months in braces.

  The braces weren’t that bad. It was my second time having them, so I already knew all the little tricks to keep them clean, all the things I couldn’t eat, how to adapt my smile so that my lips didn’t get caught in the metal. I was an old pro.

  Since my dad and I didn’t speak that often, I thought it would be easy to avoid him for a few months, to give myself space until I sorted through my feelings. But my s
ilence and short noncommittal replies to his texts and emails seemed to provoke him, and suddenly our relationship was an urgent priority for him.

  He started calling and emailing almost every day, bewildered by my cruelty, alternately angry and sad that I was being so immature and self-righteous. I stopped answering the calls and ignored most of the emails. In the few responses I sent, I asked him to stop contacting me for a little while, told him that I needed time to think. He ignored every request.

  “Do you think I should just stop talking to him completely?” I asked Ian.

  Ian and I had recently moved in together. I was sitting on our bed in our tiny bedroom in the back of our apartment. Our mattress sat on a bulky elevated frame that Ian had built to increase our storage space. We were using the space under our bed to store our moldy “guest” mattress, some bags of unwanted clothes, and a table saw. I complained about the height of the bed, as it was a good five feet off the ground and difficult for me to climb onto, but I felt proud that Ian had made something so large and practical, and I liked that the height allowed the bed to be pushed right up against the glass of the bedroom window. Even that day in late winter, I felt warm and summery from my perch on our elevated bed.

  “I can’t answer that,” Ian said. “It’s a very complicated situation. And I’ve never met him. I have no idea what he’s thinking.”

  It was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted Ian to say that I was doing what was right for me in this moment. That there was no way for me to be wrong about my feelings. I wanted a complete and unquestioning agreement with my narrative. Actually, that wasn’t at all what I wanted. I wanted a nuanced and sincere perspective unbiased by fear or cowardice, which was exactly what Ian had offered.