Night Movies

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Ella frowned and wedged the side of her thumb into the groove.

  Something was growing there. From the feel of it, she thought it was another tooth. A new tooth, sharper and thinner.

  In the bathroom mirror, she dropped her jaw and studied the tiny tip of white growing from the angry red folds of her gums. She turned her head and saw her jaw stretch grossly out of proportion, unhinging like a snake, and for that moment, the teeth reflected in that alien mouth were all long and sharp, fully grown versions of the fang-tip she could feel with her tongue. The eyes above the gaping maw clouded over in black – shark’s eyes – and she shrank away from their savage, intelligent, hungry gaze with a cry.

  A moment’s dizziness blurred her vision, and when it cleared again, there was her own pretty face, her own dark, warm, very human eyes, her own mouth, hanging open in surprise. There was fresh blood in her mouth, though, and a small, hard object rolling around on her tongue. She spit it into the sink, and a dank, heavy feeling settled in her gut.

  A light spray of blood on the white porcelain fanned out like a halo around an upper incisor, perched on the edge of the drain. This time, her vision blurred with tears. What the hell was happening to her? Cancer? Did your teeth fall out when you had cancer? She didn’t feel sick, other than that awful heavy feeling in her stomach. She pulled back her lips, glaring at the bloody hole through the tears.

  A stupid thought struck her then, but one that made her heart ache.

  “Do things have to be different?”

  He’d told her the morning after that he’d missed her, that it had been good to see her. Would Greg really miss her with the blood dribbling from her trembling lips? Miss her black-gapped smile? Would he miss her gumming his dick to get him hard?

  Ella picked up the tooth and dropped it into the Dixie cup without looking. Her hands were shaking. She watched them shake for a bit, willing them to stop, tensing the muscles in them to make them stop. They wouldn’t. Blood crusted the cuticle of one of her ring fingers. She dropped one hand on the faucet, turned it, and flushed the blood down the drain, and returned to the bedroom to call in sick from work.

  Her closest friend in the world, Nina Haviland, picked her up twenty minutes later. Nina worked nights as a bartender, so days were no problem. She was an enviably pretty creature, leggy and exotic-looking, with captivating eyes. Her brother, Chris, sat in the back seat, considerably less possessed of his sister’s mystique. He’d had a simple, honest, and all-consuming crush on Ella since they’d been kids, and had never managed to work up the nerve to even ask her for a date. Not that Ella would have gone, anyway – Chris had that kind of nice-guy streak that baffled well-meaning match-making friends who couldn’t understand why it would be a turn-off to the kind of women Chris liked.

  “So you going to tell me what’s up?”

  Ella pulled the sweater tighter around her. “Teeth falling out.”

  “No way.” Nina, wide-eyed, glanced back and forth between Ella and the road. “Let me see.”

  Ella drew back her lips and flashed Nina her teeth.

  “God, Ell.”

  “Does it hurt?” Chris leaned forward from the back seat. “Are you okay, Ella?”

  “I’m fine, I just...I need to know why, you know? I need to see the dentist. I don’t want to lose any more if I don’t have to.”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of gum disease,” Nina suggested thoughtfully. “They have pills for that now, and special toothpaste. You’ll be fine.” She squeezed Ella’s hand.

  Ella worried, though, that pills and toothpaste would not prove to be the solution, because gum disease was not the problem.

  As a general rule, Ella hated dentists. It was nothing personal against the people so much as the profession. People whose job it was to delve into the sticky plaque and rotted black cavities and foul-smelling germs of strangers’ open maws weirded her out. Compounding that with tools of cold air, suction that never quite found a comfortable spot, and awful metal implements that tore and gouged and scraped her mouth, Ella was sure that she’d give up family skeletons and government secrets just to avoid a cleaning. Ella took good care of her teeth in hopes she could keep dental visits to a minimum. She brushed two, sometimes three times a day, flossed at least once a day, and grimaced through regular cleanings and check-ups like she was supposed to. So when Dr. Bernard said he could find nothing wrong to cause the tooth loss, she wasn’t really surprised. Dismayed, sure. When it came to medical things, not knowing why was always worse than knowing what.

  “It’s an odd case, to be sure,” Dr. Bernard said as he pushed a button to bring her seat to an upright position. He unclipped the tiny clamp of her paper bib and removed it. “Your teeth seem to be in fine condition. No signs of illness. No gum disease. The x-rays don’t show shriveled nerves. However, I’d like to recommend a specialist I know – he’s an oral surgeon, and he’s seen nearly everything.”

  Ella nodded, hearing but not really hearing what he said.

  “See, there is one thing I can tell you, Miss Briselle. In fact, it’s really why I’m sending you to that oral surgeon.”

  “They’re growing,” she whispered.

  Dr. Bernard sighed, slow and soft. “New teeth, yes. All cuspids, but growing where cuspids shouldn’t. Miss Briselle, I know scientists are working on dental regeneration with stem cells, with alternate diets, that sort of thing, but...well, in thirteen years of dentistry, I have never seen spontaneous regeneration of teeth before. I just....” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  He gave Ella the oral surgeon’s card.

  * * * * *

  She kept waiting for the cramps to come, but they didn’t. She did feel nauseous and very tired, but there were no cramps, no blood. Maybe she was skipping a month. She thought back to when Greg had spent the night – over a month ago now – and tried to calculate how late she was. The possibilities the thought engendered were almost too overwhelming to think about. Another chance with Greg, maybe...did she want that? She thought she did. She thought she wanted it almost as much as a new baby, a little life to hold onto, too hug tightly to her soul with her own womb. No loss this time, no blood and ripping pain, no watching a future of tiny kisses and hugs and little laughter and pitter-patter feet leak away from her to stain the floor in ugly red-black clots.

  She wondered if pregnant women ever lost teeth.

  A baby would change everything. Ella rubbed her stomach. She ought to get a pregnancy test – maybe even two, to be sure. She’d read somewhere that a woman should take the test twice to really know, and then follow up with a visit to the gynecologist/obstetrician. She smiled to herself as she lay on her bed, the bed where she and Greg had made a baby who didn’t survive, and maybe made one that had. She was aware in the periphery of her thoughts that when she turned on her side, moving her head on the pillow, some of her hair came away in fine clumps. Had she been looking in the mirror then, she would have seen her eyes darken over like a shark’s before she closed them and went to sleep.

  * * * * *

  I didn’t understand, about...babies. I didn’t realize that pregnancy was the kind of experience that could renew my faith in how people connect to each other. For a while – a very short while, comparatively – your souls do connect. You do share everything, and you do feel a joinedness that is unlike any other connection people make. You grow another person inside you, eating for it, feeling with it, dreaming with it, protecting it, exploring your awareness every day of its development and experience. Ella, I’m so sorry for that loss. After pregnancy, what kind of closeness could ever compare? All others around you pale in comparison, because you’ll never share with them what you did with the baby. I see that now. I have been so stupid, so blindly unaware. But Ella, I promise you, it doesn’t have to be that way – you don’t have to be lonely anymore. Please let me in.

  * * * * *

  She tried calling Greg that night but he didn’t answer the phone. She tried a couple of
times, but when 8 p.m. rolled on steadily toward 10:30, Ella actually did shut off her phone. She brushed her teeth, long and slow, the harsh bathroom light making her look pale and dry and older than she could ever remember looking or feeling. Two more teeth had fallen out that week, and beneath them were the hard, sharp nubs of new teeth. The oral surgeon was booked until the beginning of next month. Her hair had thinned some – mostly on the sides and underneath, by the nape of her neck. She’d gotten thin and still felt nauseous, although she hadn’t thrown up yet. The pregnancy tests had returned negative results. She called to make a doctor’s appointment anyway. The gynecologist told her it was probably a bug and that he’d see her but couldn’t take her until the end of next week.

  Her mother had died when she was six. Ella remembered her as a beautiful thing, but translucent, a smoke-mother, a not-quite-substantial shadow that had maybe been the same kind of real as her childhood princess castles and dollhouse dramas and tea-party guests. Her father worked a lot. She remembered him as pants – men’s suit pants and polished shoes, from when she was just that height that most people existed as waist-down creatures. Strangely, he’d been there all her life, behind his newspaper, in his study working, all through high school and college (she was sure he’d attended her graduation), but she still thought of him, even now, as that pair of tan suit pants.

  That she’d been lonely since long before they died had just become a part of her, like her eye color or her smile. Dolls and imaginary subjects notwithstanding, she had spent much time alone, and had she thought about it at length, she might have been able to acknowledge that she didn’t much see the difference between being lonely and being alone.

  The baby should have changed that. The baby, a little creature who had stopped being the baby one day and had simply become the miscarriage. She couldn’t quite think the thought all the way through without choking up, but she thought she would have made a good mom. She would have been there and she would have been real – more real than the shade in the grave and the shade in his study, more real than the suitors and subjects who had sworn undying love and devotion to her as a pretend-princess. She would have had real family, with the baby. Even without Greg, she would have had family. Who knew what the future held? Maybe she would have found a stable husband and partner in Chris, an aunt for the baby in Nina. There would have been trips to buy cute baby clothes and videos of first words and pictures of first steps. There would have been potty training and PTA. There would have been packing lunches and report cards and skinned knees and dating and packing for college. There would have been –

  She stopped brushing. The foam around her mouth and on her brush was a dark pink. She spat in the sink. Another tooth tinkled against the porcelain in a sprinkle of saliva, toothpaste, and blood. Another upper tooth – a molar, this time. She dropped it with the others in the Dixie cup. Then she burst into tears.

  * * * * *

  This world – your world – makes me sad. I wonder if you ever feel alone, if you find this world as strange a place as I do, if you ever mourn how all things here buck against the fluidity of change. It’s hard to imagine how people stand to function every day knowing this is all they have – that this is all they will ever be, all they’ll ever experience. It appalls me that they are satisfied to take comfort from only one kind of communing act, or take its intimacy for granted. They make sex a crude rutting where flesh touches flesh, but souls can be so distant. And souls can be distant, can’t they, Ella?

  That can’t be how people are meant to love each other, can it? Is that the kind of sharing that carries men and women through life? It seems so minimalist, so devoid of true connection. Ella, if I thought sex was all I could do with you, for you, I think I’d wither inside here. The smile behind the eyes of this mask would flicker and die out. There is so much more I can show you, if you just let me be close to you.

  * * * * *

  When Nina called her two nights later, Ella was in bed with Chris. It had happened quickly, out of a drunken desperation. The calls from Greg had stopped, and hers to him remained unanswered. She was glad, in a way, that Greg hadn’t responded. She’d lost three more teeth since then, another molar, an eye tooth, and one of her bottom front teeth – a total of eight, now – and she felt ugly. She felt monstrous and reckless. And she turned to the one man who seemed to love her no matter what incarnation she took on.

  He’d been terribly nervous, quiet through the first couple of drinks, and later, fumbling around with her blouse and her bra. She tried to make it as easy as possible. She didn’t want to talk about feelings. She wanted someone to love her and hold he, who didn’t care if she tasted like blood. Chris took her without asking questions, without exploring what was happening with conversation. He accepted what she offered, and lay quietly beside her after with an arm draped over her waist.

  Nina asked questions, though. She sounded odd – not mad, exactly, and not excited for her, not eager for the details. in fact, she sounded off, (stale, like the blood taste in her mouth) like she wasn’t feeling well. “Tired,” she said. “Surprised, but happy, if it makes you happy.”

  Nina knew her better than that. Even Chris knew better than that. He couldn’t make her happy. He could only keep her from being overrun by the thoughts that made her sad. For a while, at least.

  “Maybe I should come over,” Nina said. Something in her voice, some unusual quality to it, the way the words were formed, maybe, reminded her of Greg on the night he’d spent with her. It was jarring, how familiar that unfamiliar vocal quality was, a quality which had never belonged to Greg or Nina before.

  “Nina, why? It’s like, 2:30 in the morning. We’re fine.” She didn’t want to talk to that voice, that Nina-voice that somehow wasn’t. It made her feel wrong and nettled. In a lower voice just over Chris’s light snoring, she added, “No harm, no foul.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Nina said.

  “You okay? You mad about this?”

  “No – no, of course not. You’re both adults. Like I said, Ell, I’m just tired, is all. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Even with Chris beside her, she had dreams. In the dreams, Ella’s teeth crunched sickeningly, tumbling out of her mouth like loose rocks from a mountain. She’d look down and see the shattered remains of tiny ivory shards in a red-black swampy puddle, a scattering of tiny bone and clots and pieces of baby that would never be born. She felt blood, a lot of it, cooling on her chin, making her skin tight. When she looked down at herself, the front of her tank top and pajama bottoms were soaked with blood, and through it, stringy blackness clung in spiderweb patterns. Her hands shook, the fingernails tottering on the edges of her fingertips. They clattered, way too loud, onto the pavement to mingle with her teeth.

  She’d read somewhere that these were insecurity dreams, meant to signify something in her life that caused her undue stress. Ella remembered thinking once after one of these dreams that it was kind of funny that losing baby teeth had been so exciting; she could remember putting teeth under her pillow for the tooth fairy, closing her eyes and willing sleep to come (all magical entities like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus never came unless you were asleep), and wondering if the Tooth Fairy would remember to come and leave Ella a quarter, and take her tooth back to fairy-land, where she would add it to the countless children’s teeth that had helped build her castle. She remembered thinking the fairy must be beautiful, blonde with a blue dress, like the fairy in the Disney version of Pinocchio, who had changed him from a wooden puppet to a real flesh-and-blood boy. She had hoped someday to grow from a gawky little kid with missing teeth and mismatched ears and big feet to something as beautiful as the tooth fairy. Beautiful like her mother.

  She wondered about the Tooth Fairy’s teeth. She knew grown-up teeth were a big responsibility, that she couldn’t lose any of these teeth, these per-ma-nent teeth. Those would never grow back. She hadn’t ever dreamed about losing them then, but she knew all the same how important it was to keep them,
especially if she wanted to look like the fairy some day. Being beautiful was being whole. It was being transformed into something complete, becoming something different, something more important than she was.

  Like being pregnant. That glow, that ability to carry life, to be connected, even for a short time, to an experience both naturally human and also spiritually bigger than herself.

  It might have been around the time she got pregnant that she had started having the dreams about her teeth falling out. They continued months after she’d lost the baby. In one, she’d dreamed of feeding her teeth to the tiny, hungry mouth she’d swaddled and rocked.

  Moaning, still mostly asleep, she felt Chris put his arm around her, and the dream petered off.

  * * * * *

  You know, these men won’t save you. They won’t make those bad feelings go away. They can say you’re beautiful, that you have a great body. They can have sex with you, make you feel good, desirable, wanted for a time. They can trace every curve of your face, touch your mouth, run their rough, filthy hands all over you, but they don’t understand you inside, like I do. They don’t love every part of you like I do. I think you know that, don’t you? I think you feel it. Still, I envy both of them. I envy what must be inside them, what defines them in such a way that you still want to be with them, even though they will never do for you or be to you what I can be.

  I want to hurt Christopher, like I hurt Greg. I want to dissolve him until he’s all gone.

  * * * * *

  She was changing. It wasn’t just her teeth anymore, nor was it just her dreams. Though it made her cringe to do so, she thought again of her pregnancy. Her body had changed then, too. It had become something different – different proportions and dimensions. She had changed into something else, a bit at a time. An archetype, a model of something. She had felt new, powerful, strong, alive in ways she never had before. She carried life, a phenomenon that amazed her daily. She was no longer just Ella, just daughter or lover or friend, but a host of other interchangeable things – mother, pregnant woman, goddess. She felt beautiful, every cell of her singing, every curve of her smooth, every part of her flexible and shifting and breathing life of its own, working toward the protection and completion of the baby.