A beautiful smile is always in style: Round Seventeen
We fought the whole time, and for the rest of the night all I could do was lie in bed, almost crying and unable to eat, but my seventeenth appointment was still kind of awesome, in a cheap-trashy-novel kind of way:
“So, how are the teeth looking?”
“Exactly the same,” I said. Except now, instead of a crossbite, I have an underbite.”
“Whatever. We completely fixed that crossbite.” Doc poked and prodded around my mouth, gloating about his sadistic prowess to his new, attractive assistant: “I’ve made this woman cry so many times, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “And I see how proud it makes you.”
“Oh please,” Doc snuffed, gesturing to the computer screen with its before photos of my mouth from April 2005. “Look how awful your teeth looked when you showed up here. Those were tears of gratitude, darlin, not of pain.”
“I want so badly to hit you.”
Thus began another twisted appointment at the orthodontist’s. To really smear his smugness all over my face, as it were, Doc proceeded to force a thick METAL wire onto my bottom teeth. “Metal!” I yelled. “You’re breaking our agreement! I never agreed to a metal wire!”
“Oh suck it up!” he said. “This is the only wire that will really turn out your canines and widen your bottom jaw, which will fix that underbite you’re complaining about.”
“I can’t believe you’re so mean to me,” I whispered, barely audibly, his fingers twisted in my mouth.
“Are we whispering now?” he mocked back, his voice a shadow of my own. “Does it make you feel better if we whisper? You enjoy the torture, admit it.”
“I hate you.”
And then we started laughing, because shoving a heavy metal wire into the metal clasps on my back molars hurts like crazy, and sarcasm, sadism, laughter and pain have become the nature of our relationship.
And then he started singing “Sweet Caroline” so I wouldn’t notice how much it hurt, except he couldn’t remember the lyrics so he supplemented words with “daaa daa daaaa”.
“Good times never seemed so good,” I mumbled.
“Good times never seemed so good!” he sang.
“I’d be inclined,” (da da da) “to believe they never would…”
“I’m going to miss you,” he said suddenly.
“Uh huh,” I answered, because what else are you supposed to say to your young, cheeky, married doctor with six months of appointments left until you can eat a hamburger again?
This whole experience is so weird.