All Adults Here(97)
A new orthodontia practice had opened across the river in Kingston, which would take Barbara twice as long to get to as Dr. Piesman, who affixed metal brackets to every adolescent’s teeth in Clapham. That was part of the point, the time it would take to drive there and back. Barbara had searched online and found a dentist with a nice photo, a young man with a white coat and a (of course) gleaming smile. Barbara wanted a smile like that—her teeth had started to drift decades ago, slow as glaciers, but now they had solidly collided with each other and overlapped at odd angles, everything the color of pale yellow corn on the cob. It was time.
River Valley Orthodontics was on the first floor of a newly renovated building in downtown Kingston. The waiting room was neat, as it had not yet been destroyed by teenagers putting their dirty sneakers on the seats of chairs. Barbara gave her name at the desk and then waited for her name to be called. When the dental hygienist led Barbara into the exam room and she put her purse on a chair in the corner, Barbara was happier than she would have been at a day spa, a place in which she always felt too old and too soft. But taking care of your teeth wasn’t vanity. Teeth were important.
The hygienist attached a paper bib around Barbara’s neck and adjusted the chair so that Barbara was lying parallel to the floor.
“Would you like to watch something?” the hygienist asked through her mask. She was arranging tools on a little steel tray, and they clinked as she set them all in a straight row.
“Watch something? Oh, no, thank you,” Barbara said. She wasn’t one of those people who needed to be stimulated all the time, with a smartphone and a TV screen and a podcast in her eardrum. She liked to be where she was.
“Are you sure? We have Netflix.” The hygienist swiveled a small rectangle until it hung directly over Barbara’s face. She clicked a button and the screen lit up.
“No, no, thank you,” Barbara said again, now self-conscious about her choice. The menu screen stayed illuminated, and so she stared at the colorful little boxes, each one promising a half hour of jolly entertainment. The hygienist patted her on the arm and told her that the dentist would be in shortly.
Barbara hadn’t had braces as a child—her teeth had been straight enough, and it wasn’t so common then, not like it was when she was a crossing guard and half the middle schoolers had mouths full of metal. When she was twelve, in 1962, her only worry had been how to make her hair curl like Shirley Jones in The Music Man. It never did, and eventually she stopped trying. Her sister, Carol, had the curls in the family, and the attention from the boys, and the worry from their parents. Her sister was the pretty one, and Barbara, two years younger, was the family dog, dutiful and always hungry for scraps.
After high school, Barbara had taken courses at Norwalk Community College, some business administration classes, with thoughts of becoming a secretary. Carol wanted to be an actress and had moved to Los Angeles, where she was living with a man whom she wasn’t married to, a source of great pain for their parents. Barbara met Bob in the small cafeteria—he was studying engineering—and they had an easy time together. Barbara couldn’t remember a single conversation they’d had in that period, just that Bob looked at her like she were the movie star, like she was important, and desirable, and before long they were engaged and then married. Her parents were thrilled, and the wedding—in the backyard in high summer, with two dozen guests, mostly friends of her mother’s—was short and sweet. Barbara had worn pearls, and Carol had scowled throughout, irritated at their parents for not inviting her boyfriend, just because he was (as it turned out) married to someone else. It was 1972, and free love still hadn’t reached Connecticut.
Of course she and Bob planned to have children. That was what you did. The only woman Barbara knew who had chosen not to have children was her maiden aunt Dora, a nurse who lived happily with a roommate in Rhode Island, and who brought her roommate home for holidays with several pies and cakes that they’d baked and no one thought anything of it except that it was rather sad that two very nice women had never found men to marry them. Barbara wanted to have enough children to spread the responsibility and pressure evenly, the way a baseball team all felt it was their duty to get a hit, not just whoever was swinging the bat at any given moment.
And they had tried. Barbara remembered tossing her diaphragm in the garbage dramatically after the wedding, though she went back later that night to rescue it. She and Bob made love over and over that week, almost every night, so excited to finally live together. They had had sex before the wedding, but not often—it had been too hard to find the space and time to be alone. But now, in their own apartment, they could have sex whenever they liked, and so they did. Barbara drew the curtains, as if anyone could peek into their second-floor windows, and when they got home from work, after a perfunctory dinner, they would leap into bed and play with each other’s bodies like the shiniest toys on their birthdays.
When a year passed and Barbara still hadn’t gotten pregnant, she went to her doctor, who asked lots of questions about her menstrual cycle and took what felt like pints of blood from the crook of her arm. The next year, there was a miscarriage, and the year after that, two more. Barbara’s doctor told her that she could expect more of the same, and that she should look into adoption, if parenthood was what she was after. She and Bob talked about it for years, until Barbara was thirty, and finally Bob said, “You know, Barb, I just don’t think I want someone else’s baby,” and then that was that. It was a good thing to know about yourself, Barbara thought. Better to know that and not do it than to feel conflicted and go ahead with it. Better for the long term, anyway. She didn’t feel that way—she could have loved any baby put in her arms, she knew it like she knew her own name—but it wasn’t only up to her, was it.