They pressed curving molds of sucking paste against my teeth, bearing down with all their adult weight, grinding stainless steel edges into my gums until my nose ran with pain. I gagged, mint-flavored rubbery stuff oozing into my throat. The doctor's eyes were squinted with concentration, glancing sideways at the clock, which marked each second of the two minutes. My breathing came in frantic whimpers, greedy for oxygen, full of helpless fury at the second hand for quivering so long on each tick. They pulled the mold out of my mouth with a stretching pop. I breathed, grateful for air, and late afternoon sunlight through the dusty second story window, for the sweetish chemical smells in that tiled and paneled hole in the wall. He examined the casting, and I tried not to care whether he would discard it to make another. I tasted the blood in the shredded gums under my tongue, and exulted in this one moment when air was free and pain was waning.
They cemented the plastic casing over my teeth, leaving only the top front cutting surfaces bare. Screwed into my lower eyeteeth were the rods that fit into pistons affixed to my top rearmost molars. I had to relearn how to talk, how to eat, how to swallow liquid before it dribbled out of my distorted mouth. For a year I wore this thing. My jaw learned that it could not move laterally, I learned to eat patiently, pressing food against my only teeth with my thumbs, pummeling it steadily as it softened with saliva. I spoke around my S's. I tried to remember not to smile, to show yellowed plastic filled with cement crumbs, and screws that as often as not were coated with slimy remains of the last meal, sometimes stained with my blood. I swallowed my share of dental wax. All this was to move my jaw forward, to compensate for my overbite.
When it was out, I would measure the distance between upper and lower teeth daily. I would have nightmares of the doctor's disappointed eyes as he told me I would have to wear the appliance for another year. I would wake in the night, afraid that in the relaxation of sleep I had let my lower jaw slip back lazily into its old, deformed position. I was ashamed of my defect, yet guilty of complacency, and lax in following the discipline of my re-formation. I was not dedicated to improving myself.
They coated my crooked teeth with a sticky substance that tasted of lemon juice and vinegar together. They cemented gleaming stainless steel squares onto the outsides of my teeth. My teeth were huge, I was told. I knew that, horsey teeth, they were called at school. But now it was more than simple ugliness; it was inconvenience for the doctor, who could not find wire strong enough to bind my teeth into their desired straightness.
Every two weeks the doctor would clip off the old rubber rings, and have me select a new rings of a new color. Purple. Red and green alternating. Fluorescent pink. They snapped onto my teeth with a force that jarred my skull, clamping my teeth to a shorter wire. Progress. A half millimeter closer to perfection. I would leave the office feeling slightly detached from my aching face. My teeth seemed to take up my entire awareness; they grew nerves of their own so that if I brushed my finger across them, my whole face would throb.
The cabinets of before and after molds haunted me. My first mold was there in the center, right next to the poster of how a girl's teeth should really look. It seemed to be waiting for the casting of my future self, at last made beautiful by orthodontic science.
The retainer filled with spit, had rough edges because it was cheap, and so it scratched at my gums, pulling them down to expose the sensitive roots of my teeth. I hated the thing. I hated wearing it to school, and setting it on my lunch tray to drip and look slimy while I ate. I hated how it slurred my words, sucking the breath out of H's and blocking the passage of S's and Z's. Taking off the retainer was a shortcoming, a failure, a weakness. Guilt. Putting it back on was anxiety-would it still fit? Or had I lost ground in my stolen moments of oral freedom?
I stopped wearing it, even at nights. It was one of the few things I lied to my parents about. I would force it over aching teeth an hour before a check-up, hope that the doctor didn't notice. I lied to him too, telling him that I wore the damn thing faithfully. I stopped going to those check ups a year after I came to college. But the retainer rattling in its plastic case with my faded address on it is still somewhere in my dresser drawer, here at college. Whenever I come across it, I lick my teeth, feeling their largeness, their protruding shape. A sour feeling invades the pit of my stomach like momentary nausea. Perhaps I just didn't try hard enough.
The next time I find that thing, I will throw it away.
This page copyright to Sarah Morehouse,
March 30, 2000