The smell of a dental office has not changed since Eisenhower was in office, just that sharp bite of eugenol and lemon-scented disinfectant hanging in the stale air near the water fountain. I have spent twenty-six years in practice out here in Kettering, and most days run together like gray flannel. You see the same gums, the same plaque, the same nervous little twitches in the waiting room chair every single Tuesday and Thursday. People hate coming to see me.
I accept that as part of the job description. They sit down, they grip the armrests until their knuckles turn the color of skim milk, and they wait for the drill to start whining.
Mrs. Clara Higgins was slot number four on my Tuesday afternoon sheet. She had been coming to my clinic for nearly fourteen years, ever since her husband Arthur passed away from his ticker out by the county fairgrounds. Clara was seventy-four now, with silver hair that always looked like it had been set with wire rollers and a pocketbook the size of a small watermelon that she kept clutched in her lap like a shield. She sat in that chair staring straight ahead at the framed dentist school diploma on the wall, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line that told me her blood pressure was already climbing.
I washed my hands at the little porcelain sink in the corner, letting the warm water run over my skin while I thought about the stack of root canal referrals waiting on my desk.
My lower back had been giving me fits since breakfast, a dull, nagging pinch right above my belt line that made me want to lean against the counter. I pulled a fresh pair of latex-free examination gloves from the cardboard box on the wall and gave them a sharp snap as I stretched them over my knuckles. Clara didn’t turn her head, but I could see the muscles in her jaw twitching beneath her skin. She looked like she was waiting for a firing squad to give the final order.
“Rough day out there?” I asked, reaching for the adjustable overhead light to tilt it down toward her face.
“Traffic on Route 48 was backed up all the way past the hardware store,” she said. Her voice had that dry, paper-rustling quality it always did. “Some fellow stalled his Ford right in the middle of the left lane and wouldn’t move it for twenty minutes.”
“People forget how to drive the second a cloud appears,” I muttered, settling the stool behind her head.
She looked smaller than usual in the chair today, her shoulders tucked down inside a heavy wool cardigan that looked entirely too warm for a Tuesday in May. I wanted to break the tension before I had to go digging around her lower right second molar, which had a pocket of decay deep enough to give me nightmares. I always tried to say something silly to the ones who looked terrified. Usually it fell flat, but it gave them something else to focus on besides the stainless-steel pick sitting on the tray.
“Do you know how they make these gloves?” I asked, holding my hands up near the light so she could see the pale blue rubber stretching tight over my fingers.
Clara kept her eyes glued to the ceiling tiles overhead. “No, I don’t.”
“Well,” I said, leaning in with my best deadpan radio-announcer voice, “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.”
I waited for the little polite nose-snort people usually gave me to be nice to the dentist.
It never came. Clara didn’t crack a single millimeter of expression. Her mouth stayed clamped shut, her eyes fixed on a water spot on the acoustic tile above my head. I stood there with my hands hovering in the air, feeling like a complete idiot in my own clinic.
“Oh, well. I tried,” I thought to myself, swallowing down a sudden wave of foolishness.
I picked up the mirror and the explorer pick, tapping them against the metal tray with a little more force than necessary. “All right, Clara. Let’s tilt you back and take a look at that molar we talked about last time. Open wide for me, please.”
She didn’t argue. She leaned back until her silver head hit the leather cushion with a soft thud. I adjusted the spotlight, squinted through my loupes, and positioned the mirror inside her mouth. The tissue was inflamed right around tooth number thirty, angry and red against the pale pink of her gums. I needed a dry field immediately before I could even think about touching the decay with the high-speed bur.
“Hand me the cotton rolls, Brenda,” I muttered under my breath, though my assistant was out front dealing with a billing dispute over the phone. I reached for them myself with my left hand while keeping the mirror braced against Clara’s tongue.
The procedure entered that delicate, quiet phase where my entire world narrowed down to a tiny patch of bone and enamel about the size of a postage stamp. The clinic was dead silent except for the low hum of the sterilization unit in the back room and the steady whistle of the air compressor kicking on in the utility closet down the hall. I concentrated so hard my forehead started to prickle with sweat beneath the plastic face shield. I wedged the cotton roll into the vestibule, dried the area with the air syringe, and picked up the excavator to clear away the soft, infected dentin.
One millimeter too deep and I would hit the pulp chamber. Clara knew it, too. Her left hand came up and gripped the armrest so hard her fingernails made a faint scratching sound against the wood grain. I held my breath, resting my pinky finger against her chin for stability, and leaned in closer to see the margin of the decay.
Then, right in the middle of the most critical scrape, a strange sound erupted from the back of Clara’s throat.
It wasn’t a cough. It wasn’t a gag. It was a sharp, explosive bark of laughter that shook her entire upper body and sent my hand twitching sideways. The metal explorer skipped off the side of her molar with a tiny ping that made my stomach drop straight down into my shoes.
“What’s so funny?” I blurted out, pulling my hands back and dropping the mirror right onto the instrument tray with a loud clatter.
Clara’s shoulders were shaking violently beneath her cardigan now. She didn’t try to cover her mouth or apologize for nearly making me drill a hole straight through her jawbone. She just lay there with her eyes squeezed shut, tears of pure mirth leaking out the corners and running down into the wrinkles beside her nose.
“I was just picturing how cond*ms are made!” she wheezed, her voice cracking with suppressed laughter.
I stood there frozen behind her head, my blue-gloved hands still raised in front of my chest like a surgeon caught mid-operation. The silence in the room suddenly felt completely different, heavy with a ridiculous, absurd weight that I didn’t know how to handle. For five full minutes she had sat there like a stone statue while I told my terrible factory joke, letting it marinate in her brain while I drilled around her roots. She had waited for the exact worst possible micro-second of the entire afternoon to deliver the punchline.
“Clara,” I managed to say, feeling the corners of my own mouth start to twitch despite every professional instinct I possessed. “You nearly made me take out your canine.”
She finally opened her eyes and looked up at me through the glare of the dental light, her chest still heaving with silent chuckles. “Well, Doc,” she whispered, wiping a tear away with her knuckle, “you started it.”
I didn’t say anything back. I turned around to the sink, pulled off the rubber gloves with a sharp snap, and threw them into the trash can by the door. My lower backache was completely gone, replaced by a strange, lightheaded warmth that I hadn’t felt since the practice started losing patients to the new clinic across the highway six months ago. I turned the water on, let it run cold over my wrists, and stared at my own reflection in the small medicine cabinet mirror.
“Next time,” I told the empty room, “keep your material to yourself.”
When I walked back over to the chair with a fresh pair of gloves, Clara was still grinning, her silver curls slightly askew against the vinyl headrest. She didn’t say another word, and neither did I, but the tension in the room had vanished as completely as if someone had opened a window to a spring breeze. I finished the prep work in six minutes flat without another slip of the wrist, wrote out her follow-up slip for next Tuesday, and walked her all the way to the front door myself. She gave my elbow a brief, dry squeeze as she stepped out into the afternoon sunlight on Route 48, her big watermelon purse swinging at her side. I stood on the clinic porch for a long moment watching her little blue station wagon pull out of the gravel lot, realizing I hadn’t thought about root canal referrals once in the last half hour.
