Teeth
how they betray us
Before we begin…
If your teeth could talk, what are the stories they would tell about you? Have your teeth ever been a source of pain, joy, confusion, embarrassment? Are there stories you’ve loved or hated in which teeth played a role?
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When you open this letter, I will be under the covers with an icepack on my jaw. I will be recovering from back-to-back dentist appointments scheduled for Thursday and Friday morning of this week. Because the only thing better than starting one day by gripping the armrests of a dental chair while the whine of the drill winds higher and higher is doing it two days in a row, – pre-coffee, pre-breakfast - just my unshelled vulnerable self and my poor broken mouth agape and ashamed before the steel drill and steelier gaze of a dentist I barely know.
It’s all my fault. I am a jaw clencher, a tooth grinder. I do not gnash, I just bear down. My mandibular muscle cranks tight and my upper and lower jaws form a vice capable of exerting as much as 250 pounds of pressure on my molars while I sleep and, often, when I am awake. To my horror, I’ve caught myself doing it when I read, when I write, or pursue other activities that normally elicit joy. Kissing, for example. Various sexual acts. It’s a risky thing for all concerned.
This trip to the dentist is to cut away gums and replace two crowns that once again gave way under the strain. One minute I was eating a peach and the next I was chewing the rubble of a porcelain crown. In seconds, I was hurtling back in time to the days of my childhood when I learned the value of clamping my teeth together in the dentist’s chair. Our family dentist believed in the element of surprise and hid the novocaine needle behind his back. He’d ask me what kind of ice cream I liked or some silly question that, because he was an adult and I was a child, I believed I had to answer. Halfway through my first sentence, he’d jam the needle into my gums and then tell me to stop crying. As an adult, I have tried to bear up more bravely with mixed success. Now, along with the needles, I have to face the judgment and head shaking of the dentist when he chides me for the grinding and recommends yet again that I wear a mouthguard (for the record, I wear one faithfully).
I’ve spent most of my life trying not to look too closely into the reasons I do this awful thing. Yet this visit - which, as I write, lies ahead and, as you read, is safely in the rear view mirror – is dredging up feelings, memories, and the reawakened understanding that teeth are not just the tools we need to survive. People form opinions of us when they glimpse our teeth - are they straight? Are they crooked? Are there gaps, stains, signs of how we’ve used them? Or do they gleam with unnatural glare in beautiful alignment that no one was ever born with? But teeth also say things to us about ourselves. Mine do, anyway.
Here’s are a few of the things my teeth reveal about me:
I live in shame. Years ago, the cartilage in my jaw wore so thin that the bones began to click when I chewed. A long-ago date paused half-way through a meal and asked incredulously, “Is that YOU???”
I am privileged and, thanks to my jaw, I may sound it. I have had the resources to repair the damage so no one is the wiser, except for the times my jaw has locked in place so tight that it has gotten stuck mid-yawn and those other times when I have had to force out words between unmoving lips like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz or a snooty Connecticut WASP.
According to the experts at Johns Hopkins my compulsion to clench - aka bruxism – could be related to my personality type. Bruxism, they go on to explain, “affects people with nervous tension, such as anger, pain, or frustration. It also affects people with aggressive, hurried, or overly competitive tendencies.”
Concerned, and dying to be distracted from this meditation on my mouth, I took a test over at 16personalities.com to determine my personality type. I saw nothing that would lead me to bite down. My personality type is the “Advocate” according to the website: introverted, intuitive with lots of feelings and average when it comes to judging or being assertive. I could live with that.
Then, in the email that followed up on my results, I found a potential clue:
“Advocates, filled with lofty goals and ambitions, are far from idle dreamers. But it’s all too easy for them to feel weighed down by internal pressures when their reality doesn’t match their great aspirations.” Advocates also hesitate to open up about their own problems and fears.
Aahh. Now I understand. Reality has rarely matched my aspirations, even when my aspirations were modest. And, it is true, I tend to keep my problems and fears to myself. I tell myself this is because I don’t want to bother others; in fact, it is because I can’t bear sometimes to face how little I’ve grown, how much more work I have to do as a human being, and how hard and just plain embarrassing it is to list all the ways I’ve failed. So I grit my teeth in a smile, showing only the relatively straight incisors which conceal all the damage hiding behind them.
Post script (one down, one to go)
I survived the first appointment. I was let in and asked to wait while the office fired up its computers, waiting room televisions, and they could hand me forms so I could acknowledge all the potential things that could go wrong with blades, drills, anesthesia, etc. As I scribbled my initials over the documents, a National Geographic montage began to play on a screen that took up an entire wall. The theme was stalker and prey.
A polar bear dragged a limp seal over the ice and tore out its tongue with its own teeth, a lion seized the leg of an infant zebra in its jaws and then crunched down on its neck, a wild canine of some kind snatched up a duckling and ran off, its webbed feet flapping from the killer’s mouth.
The message was clear: teeth are essential to survival, mine and the dentist’s. Shortly after I initialed the final waiver, he appeared in the waiting room and smiled as he summoned me. He showed all his teeth.
Novels that bite (or just have teeth in the title)
Sharp teeth mean danger. Who can forget the Big Bad Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood? Pearly, even teeth mean perfection. Rotted, missing teeth mean decay and crooked teeth, buck teeth, or underbites are opportunities for comedy, often cruel comedy. When someone says, they want a law with “teeth in it,” they mean they want a law with real consequences for anyone who breaks it.
“Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.” ― Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth
As a literary device, teeth are reliable and ever present. Writers use teeth or tooth imagery to convey character, class, good, evil, safety, danger, strength, and weakness. Teeth have roots, sensitive cores, and hard brittle exteriors that seem made for metaphors. They make for wonderfully short, punchy titles. Think Zadie Smith’s brilliant and sprawling 2000 debut novel, White Teeth, Kristen Arnett’s breakout novel about a family, With Teeth, or Valeria Luiselli's experimental second novel The Story of My Teeth. A quick search on bookshop.org, turned up a long list of novels, memoirs, and books of fiction, and nonfiction with teeth in their titles.
Writers and their own teeth
MartIn Amis drew barbs from fellow author A.S. Byatt when he sought a huge advance from his publishers for his novel, The Information so, Byatt wrote scathingly, he could pay for his divorce and his new teeth. In his essay “Dentists Without Borders”, David Sedaris writes about the shame he feels about his teeth and ongoing efforts to fix his teeth as he wanders from country to country. He writes about the braces he finally gets in his most recent collection, Happy-Go-Lucky. Sarah Smarsh, author of the brilliant memoir Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Growing up Broke in the Richest Country on Earth wrote this essay about how teeth reveal the disparity between the privileged and those without it in the US.
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I appreciate your writing about teeth today. I too experienced horror at the dentist at a very young age (I was 3 the first time. Dr. Ousley was already 65 the first time I saw him, and had been practicing for probably 40 years). The equipment was old school, and Mom didn't like needles, so no Novocaine. I have a long history of teeth horrors. Happy now to have good dentists at Kaiser, although my body still tenses the second I walk in the door, and I fill with adrenaline even for a cleaning. I don't believe people should be shamed for grinding their teeth. That's just wrong. Do they get shamed by their doctors for clenching their fists? Having their shoulders around their ears? Good for you for continuing to bear up under all that in order to take care of your teeth. Personally, I believe we all should have free medical care that includes every part of our bodies, including teeth, hearing, eyes, and mental health.
I did the quiz and have been classified as ‘A Defender’. For the most part I recognise me in the analysis, though I must have answered the question about standards incorrectly. I see myself as something like an unedited book and I’m happy to stay that way. My friends are far from perfect and I take comfort in this. There is something reassuring in a book with a few howlers. Fully edited people (and books) can be a pain and I often wonder how many others does it take to achieve such perfection?
How much money we spend on our teeth, and on what, says a great deal about us and the societies we live in. Teeth are like toilets. Most writers ignore both. As always Betsy you have that lovely willingness to boldly go/go boldly where others dare to tread. Teeth? No. Sex? Yes. Great stuff.