SOMETIMES WE FAIL TO appreciate certain hard, basic factors enough, I told my lady friend Felice, as I brought her to the Teeth Festival. I doubted she shared my sense of teeth, though hers are glossy from regular brushing with a sweet, white paste she first heard of through a television ad, in which a young couple sang.
As we entered, we saw display cases highlighting various kinds of teeth:
BUCK
CARIOUS
GAT
Teeth through the Ages was an eight-minute film. Early teeth, it is felt, were crudely designed, even soft. They could themselves have been chewed up by a set of modern home-fried potatoes. It was amazing, the progress across the years.
CHIPPED
GNASHING
MISSING
Over next to the refreshment booth, maintained throughout the festival by the floss industry, a shapely couple in flesh-colored body stockings took turns reciting.
“Why must you always be uptight?”
Said Eve to Adam. “Take a bite.”
Fair as she was, however, fairer
Is mouth-ease to a denture-wearer.
The male was toothless in those days—
“Scarce as men’s teeth” was the phrase.
It may be Eve was made of those
And not of rib, as most suppose.
If Adam had ’em, they were false.
Eve prepared some applesauce.
“Still al dente,” did he mutter.
Eve prepared some apple butter.
And then they had some. “Oh wow, we’ve
Been going naked,” fluted Eve.
“I guess we are …,” said Adam, “nude.”
You know, for all these weeks and months
I only told the difference
Between us by the way we chewed.”
The Tooth Fairy passed among us, mincing, winking, in costume, leaving to each visitor a facsimile quarter. LOOK AT YOUR TEETH, said an old Army latrine notice, in the nostalgia section. EVERYBODY ELSE DOES.
FALSE
EYE
CANINE
We heard a song sung in country fashion, with guitar:
When you
Said you
Were on my side,
You lied.
When you
Said your
Love would abide,
You lied.
When you
Said I’d
Be satisfied,
You lied.
But when you said
You’d hit me and knock out my tooth,
You told the truth.
Musing, I held Felice. Nibbled mentally three, four, five of her vertebrae. Sweetflesh-muffled. Six.
HORSE
JAW
DEAD
Ruminant is how she seemed. I told her of a man I met in my travels, near Tigerdale, Florida, in a trash-and-treasures shop, who had had all his teeth removed, who said: “I keep ’um on the shelf in a little plastic dilly, and after supper in the ebenin’ or after breffust in the mawnin’ or after lunch in the affnoon or after cheese ’n crackers fore, bedtime, I get ’um down and take ’um out and count ’um and spread ’um out on the breffust-room table and arrange ’um like they was in my mouth. And then diffunt ways, the back ones front …”
CROOKED
WISDOM
BABY
I led Felice to where a dental-hygiene jingle was being sung, by the Cuspid Singers, in another part of the hall:
Don’t call it incidenta—
It may be sentimental
But teeth are quite important in romance.
Whether owned or rental,
Teeth to some extent’ll
Sway the course of love as much as pants.
So keep your dentifrice
Close by you, Bro or Sis,
When going out to dinner or to dance.
If bad teeth make you hiss
While framing that first kiss,
It may be you won’t have a second chance.
Oh, whether owned or rental,
Teeth to some extent’ll
Sway the course of love as much as pants.
“There should be a crockery/mockery rhyme in there,” I chuckled to Felice. “Listen,” I added—for we were not the only enthusiasts present, and the air was filled with snappy talk:
“Molars are like nothing so much as the stumps of trees. What if the rest of the strange white trees were there: trunks, branches, leaves, burls, crotches, twigs, bark, moonlight through the branches, and acorns or whatever.”
“We cherish teeth. Vide savage tribes. And chain saws.”
“Teeth are the only bones we have that show. If we were arrows, they would be our heads.”
PERMANENT
GRINDING
NICE
We heard readings from that great symbolic naturalistic dental work McTeague, by Frank Norris—whose dentist hero, upon unwrapping the lustrous, four-rooted sign his betrothed has bought him, is beside himself: “It was the Tooth—the famous golden molar with its huge prongs—his sign, his ambition, the one unrealized dream of his life. … No danger of that tooth turning black with the weather …” Later, the dentist finally gains the upper hand over his wife, on the way toward utter ruin, when he develops the practice of biting the tips of her fingers till they turn black.
Erich von Stroheim, I told Felice, made of that great story an epic lost movie, Greed, whose original version ran longer and far more compellingly than a working day; and the studio—MGM, the one with the growling lion—chopped and ground that gargantuan, unprotected film down to a venal two and a half hours, for shopgirls to enjoy.
BAD
LIED-THROUGH
LOOSE
“‘The fathers have eaten a sour grape,’” I quoted to Felice, “‘and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’” We were passing a breathtaking exhibit: long, long ranks of teeth set just so; so delicately balanced, one upon the other, that it seemed a breath of wind would send them pittering to the floor like sleet; set just perilously shy of meshing; not short of, but just finely higher than, meshing; we do not appreciate enough teeth’s flinty interaction.
GRITTED
JEWELED
ACHING
“Ah, but ‘the Lord who made thy teeth,’” I continued, “‘shall give thee bread.’ And you are toothsome, Sweet. And all of mine are sweet for you. But will you still esteem me,” I said to her lightly, “when my teeth are gone?”
“No,” she said.
She bared hers for me.
Mine fell in my lap.
All around was a sound like castanets, only harder, whiter.