The smell of a dental office has not changed since Eisenhower was in office. It is always that sharp bite of eugenol, old floor wax, and lemon-scented disinfectant hanging in the stale air like a permanent weather system. I had been working out of the same four-operatory clinic on Maple Street for fourteen years, and by three o’clock on a rainy Thursday in November, my feet felt like lead weights inside my orthotics. My last appointment of the day was reserved for a routine sixty-month check and polish on a patient named Clara Vance.
Clara was seventy-eight years old, lived alone out past the old quarry road, and had the kind of posture that made you suspect she spent her entire girlhood balancing encyclopedias on her head.
She sat rigidly in the dental chair with her hands folded over her purse so tightly her knuckles were the color of skim milk. I could tell she was nervous before I even picked up my chart because her breathing had that shallow, rhythmic hitch to it that regular patients get when they are trying not to think about the high-speed bur. I always tried to say something stupid to break the ice with the nervous ones. It was a bad habit, really, but thirty years of staring down people’s throats teaches you that silence makes the drill sound twice as loud. I pulled a fresh pair of powder-free latex gloves from the box on the wall and snapped them onto my wrists with a sharp little pop.
“Do you know how they make these gloves?” I asked, leaning against the counter to check my mirror angle.
Clara did not blink. She just stared straight ahead at the little plastic cup on the bracket table. “No, I don’t,” she replied in that dry, paper-thin voice of hers.
“Well,” I spoofed, feeling rather clever for a Thursday afternoon, “there’s a building in China with a big tank of latex and workers of all hand sizes walk up to the tank, dip in their hands, let them dry then peel off the gloves and throw them into boxes of the right size.”
She did not crack a smile. Not a twitch of the cheek, not a flicker of the eyelid. The silence in that little room suddenly got very heavy, heavier than the rain beating against the frosted glass of the ground-floor window. I felt a tiny prick of embarrassment crawl up the back of my neck.
I tossed my pen down on the counter and grabbed the explorer probe. “Oh, well. I tried,” I thought to myself, kicking myself for making a fool of myself in front of a woman who probably remembered when bread cost a nickel.
For the next ten minutes, we worked in total silence save for the whine of the suction and the scrape of steel against lower molars. Clara kept her eyes fixed on the acoustic ceiling tiles while I worked around a stubborn little bit of calcified plaque on tooth number nineteen. It was delicate work, right down near the gumline where the root surface is soft and easy to nick if your hand slips even a millimeter. I held my breath, resting my little finger against her chin for stability, completely focused on the tiny mirror reflection.
Then, out of nowhere, the entire chair shook.
Clara burst out laughing. It was not a polite little chuckle behind a gloved hand; it was a full, chest-deep laugh that started somewhere down around her sensible orthopedic shoes and rattled her sternum right against my instrument hand.
My explorer slipped, grazing the interdental papilla just enough to draw a tiny pinprick of crimson. I pulled my hands back instantly, staring down at her in complete bewilderment as she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with a wrinkled thumb.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, my voice dropping an octave as I grabbed a piece of gauze.
“I was just picturing how cond*ms are made!” she said.
The clinic went dead quiet. The hum of the sterilization room down the hall sounded like a freight train. My brain simply stopped working for three full seconds while the words hung in the sterile air between us. I stood there with my mouth half open, the blood draining out of my face so fast I thought I might actually tip over backward into the supply shelves. Clara just sat there, perfectly calm now, smoothing down the front of her beige cardigan as if she had not just dropped an atomic bomb in the middle of a family dental practice.
“Clara,” I managed to choke out, looking wildly toward the half-open door where my dental assistant, Brenda, was usually clattering around with the chart trays.
“Well, think about it,” she said, her eyes twinkling with a wicked little light I had never noticed in the fourteen years she had been coming to my chair. “If they have workers of all sizes walking up to a tank…”
“Clara, please,” I whispered, holding up a gloved hand like a traffic cop while my ears burned hot enough to fry an egg. “Let’s just pretend you didn’t say that.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she chuckled, adjusting her handbag on her lap as she stood up straight and smoothed her skirt. “Dentists think they’re the only ones who know how the world works just because you went to school in Marquette.”
She patted my shoulder on her way out of the operatory, leaving me standing beside the spittoon with my mouth still open. Brenda walked in two minutes later with a stack of pink recall cards and took one look at my face before dropping the whole pile on the counter. She did not even have to ask what happened because she could hear Clara chuckling all the way down the carpeted hallway to the front desk. That was the last routine checkup Clara Vance ever had at my office, mostly because I didn’t have the nerve to look her in the eye when her six-month postcard came due the following May. Brenda never let me forget it either, slipping a small box of industrial latex gloves onto my desk every year on my birthday with a red ribbon tied around the top. My license is still hanging on the wall, but I have never told a single joke about manufacturing processes to an elderly patient since that rainy Thursday afternoon.
