I Want My Dentist to be Proud of Me

I want my dentist to be proud of me. I realize this is a strange desire. Some inchoate impulse to please left over from a mostly normal childhood. She is a new dentist for me. My fourth. Every time this happens it feels a bit like coming out of a break-up. My dentist retired and moved to Mexico. The dentist before him became too expensive and locatively impractical. I have only hazy memories of the one before that.

Finding a dentist in your late forties is, I imagine, like trying to find a new spouse. Painstaking, exhausting, and teeming with the doubt that no one can ever measure up. I know nothing about either. Thankfully, my wife and I have been married for twenty years and when my former, former dentist grew too expensive I started seeing my wife’s dentist who had been her dentist since she was a child.

My wife handled the logistics of finding this new dentist, so I don’t know why it became a source of anxiety for me.

As our old dentist’s retirement loomed I wondered aloud what we would do. This was not a passive aggressive request for my wife to look for a new dentist, but a plea to the dental gods, a verbal talisman against the inevitable unknown.

“Well,” my wife reassured me, “We’ll see how the new one is and if she sucks we’ll find a different dentist.”

Are things ever as simple as that? Probably.

His replacement, a gloomy Jeremiah of dentistry, had us all paranoid about receding gums and on the brink of tooth extractions, whitening treatments, more X-rays, and an extra cleaning within the calendar year. And we live in a state that flourinates its water!! My sons and wife and I each had a cleaning from this replacement dentist, but I like to think it didn’t count- a forgettable rebound.

I suppose dentists pass through your life like distant relations. A great uncle or third cousin you see a couple of times a year. The only difference is that the awkward small talk about the weather or football or children comes between someone suctioning saliva from your mouth. Yet, I would argue a good dentist is more important to our yearly existence than a good president. You can’t trust just anyone with your teeth.

Do I long for the days when not having a reliable dentist didn’t disturb the rhythms of existing? I do. I didn’t have my children’s teeth to worry about then. During my post-collegiate years when health insurance was erratic as my job status and a pack of Marlboros cost under three dollars. I went years between cleanings sometimes. I am retrospectively ashamed. Yes, Marlboros. And these days, Peter Stokkebye Amsterdam Shag I hand roll, and black coffee -one cup after another. Habits that yield abhorrent stains that prolong a standard cleaning into something like infinity or so my sons have told me. All three are teenagers now or close to it, and after their brisk and effortless cleanings, they wait begrudgingly for me to emerge. Sometimes it’s an hour, sometimes longer. They have yet to learn what decades of living do to teeth.

I think my new dentist appreciated the challenge my teeth presented. Like anyone good at their job, her approach is obsessive determination. I admire it because it is the kind of task akin to lancing boils or raking leaves. It takes a certain person to derive satisfaction from it. She wouldn’t let me go with one whit of plaque or stain.

But on my most recent visit, I want her to be proud of me. I want to make her job easy. I want her not to be lying when she says, “I’ve seen worse.” I started using an electric toothbrush, became a consistent flosser, and vowed to reduce the embarrassing slits of cigarette stain and cut her cleaning time by half.

I am reasonably worried about dental hygiene, but I am also resigned to the fact that cigarettes will probably kill me long before tooth decay.

My grandfather, deep into the riddle of Alzheimer’s, would talk about women and food. But he was proud of his teeth. Once in a moment of clarity, he grinned toothily at me and said, “See these choppers? All mine. Wanna know the trick? Floss.Morning and night Now your grandmother’s? Coulda’ bought a Cadillac with what I spent on those teeth.” He smoked cigars for years and after bypass surgery he chewed them and when he died at 82 he had all his teeth. A feat I didn’t appreciate until now.

Dental health is an indicator of overall health. That is a platitude or a truth I read or heard somewhere at some time or another.

When I was nine or ten my mother knew a woman who was bulimic. She came over once and my mother warned me not to be alarmed by her appearance, so when I answered the door and she stepped into our front room I was, of course, transfixed. Her wrists, thin as carrots, were not as alarming as her teeth. Yellowed and brittle and corroding from stomach acid, they terrified me and made me sad.

Years later I overheard my father and one of my mother’s friends commiserating how they’d wouldn’t dare eat corn on the cob or an apple because they were afraid of breaking a tooth. They were in their late fifties then.

Of course, you can live without teeth, but mastication is one of life’s more trenchant pleasures. The soft crunch of a popcorn kernel, the moist sugars of a slice of chocolate cake, the various textures of a slice of pizza or a hamburger. How the teeth adjust to the task’s particulars, feeding the flavors to the tongue like a graceful hockey assist.

I can’t help thinking of Don Draper’s toothache in a particularly poignant episode of Mad Men. Yes, it is a physical manifestation of Don’s putrid soul, but sometimes a toothache is just a toothache. A reminder of our mortality.

If physical pain doesn’t remind us of mortality then I don’t know what does.

The first time I saw my new dentist she was impressed by my pain tolerance. Drawn to the hermetic properties of a biannual dental cleaning I was already inward on some astral plane beyond my body, hoping there are few pains greater than the sudden tweak of a tooth’s nerve.

“Are you ok,” she asks periodically.

I am.

“You’re pretty tough,” she says later and I feel the same adolescent pride as I did when my football coaches expressed the sentiment 35 years before. The same dumb pleasure of withstanding. My dentist scraping away plaque along with my mortal coil.

And maybe that’s why, lying prone, staring into dazzling light I hope it is what death feels like. The dull white noise whoosh of machinery- a stuporous reentering of the womb while someone polishes your bicuspids. But then the chair is lifted to the upright position, and I am Lazurus come from the dead. Come back to say have a nice holiday. I’ll see you in six months. I may even quit smoking by then.

 

Ken Malatesta is a teacher and writer from Chicago. He lives in Skokie, Illinois, with his wife and three sons. His work has appeared in Bridge VIII, Oddball Magazine, Book XI, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Hopper, The Compressed Journal for Creative Arts, Fatherly, and Motherwell Magazine. His essay “Puzzling Toward Oblivion” was named a Notable Essay of the Year by Best American Essays 2023.