by K.C. Field
I lost my new house key almost immediately after moving in. Playing with my dog in the unfamiliar backyard, I tripped over a bulge hidden in the tall grass, launching myself and the contents of my pockets in opposing directions. The dog was delighted about our sudden change in circumstances, chasing me in circles as I accidentally cartwheeled into a small disaster. I was living alone for the first time and there was no one to call. It didn’t matter. I figured it out. A groundhog probably has that stupid key now. May the tunnel-ridden ground keep them both.
Things come back or they don’t. I lost the dog too, left behind when I went away to college. Some things don’t come back and their sullen ghost hangs around, picking at you. Remember that thing you loved? You were bad at loving it. These are entirely unnecessary specters, rubbing salt in the wound and sunbathing where I last wore my favorite floppy hat. I see the lazy brim out of the corner of my eye everywhere I look, but it’s nowhere to be found. Squinting into the brightness, I resolve to get another but put it off for ages, suffering sunburns and wrinkles in penance. I deny myself the same absolution with deeper losses: a friendship I let wither away to nothing; a check lost and found in the lining of my purse too late to cash; a pair of pearl earrings gifted by my grandparents, gone and lost forever despite their lock backs and a deep reverence for the legacy. A decade later, a stranger in front of me at the grocery store checkout tucks her hair behind her ear, pearl earring gleaming under the fluorescent lights, and I’m devastated all over again. Some ghosts never go.
Debt haunted every decision I made after college but that ghost didn’t stop me from losing the check in 2011. It was a lean year that whole year, and lean led to brittle and brittle led back to broke. Nobody kissed me that year. I didn’t yell at a single soul. I was too focused on staying afloat to look up for a lighthouse. Like a fool, I tried to ignore a toothache. And all the while I was carrying around that money, not knowing it was there with me hiding behind a failed seam in my purse.
It didn’t matter. The tooth had to go. If only it would have slipped away like the earrings; their departure required nothing of me, not even my attention. One day I reached up and they were already gone. Not the tooth though. That summer it turned diva and demanded top billing in my marquee of anxieties, launching itself from the wings and onto the stage, screaming for the spotlight. I complied, horrified.
My dentist sent me to a specialist in another city because digging the dying molar out of my jaw was going to be a problem. He didn’t say that, but I could see it in his eyes.
“Your mouth is small,” he told me instead, frowning. The specialist would have the necessary equipment for a root canal.
I remember thinking that this was a ridiculous complication, the bill for which I would have to intrust to a future version of myself who already had a swelled docket of minimum payments to schedule. Would there be a line item added to the invoice for cramped mouth syndrome or the use of a jeweler’s minuscule drill bit? Maybe the specialist was special because of her tiny fingers. Maybe size was as important as skill for this sort of job, like horse jockeys.
I should have scheduled the root canal for the afternoon and then climbed back into bed with an ice pack, but Tiny Fingers had a cancellation first thing the next morning so I only took a half day off work. Everyone at work seemed to think I was being naively optimistic and tried to warn me against coming back into the office afterward, but I have only ever been mildly fatalistic so I ignored them. Those two interpretations of the world look similar enough from the distance between cubicles, I suppose. Can’t really blame them for seeing a young woman about to do something painful without a contingency plan and thinking gosh, she hasn’t done this before, she doesn’t know instead of gosh, she’s been through a lot if she thinks this is nothing.
In reality, I was too scared to use up sick time that I might have needed later. A well-intentioned, mothering Executive Assistant who ran the place reminded me that people used to die from teeth gone bad, that healing bodies need rest. She was right, of course, and she might have understood how the lack of money steered my decisions, but she wasn’t alone the way I was. She wasn’t in pain every day like I was, self-medicating headaches from a condition that hadn’t been diagnosed yet (that wouldn’t happen until years later). I didn’t want to lose a tooth, and I certainly didn’t want to pay someone extra for the privilege of plucking it from my malformed, child-sized mouth, but I could lose a tooth. I couldn’t lose my job or the health insurance that came with it.
I was still living in the desperate headspace of graduating from art school two months after the Great Recession started, years later making income-based payments on dreams that would probably never happen. I didn’t love my job, didn’t even like it, but I lived paycheck to paycheck like most people do, and too often paycheck to credit card to paycheck, and more than just my sense of self-worth needed that job desperately. There was pride in working as a poor artist, but not so much surviving as merely working poor, without the badge of artist. My suffering was a snob.
I don’t think I laid it out in stark terms like that in my mind at the time, but the ghosts pitched me into unreasonable sacrifice. Pain? Fine. I’ve run that rut deep. Give up my teeth? Take the poisoned ends, please. But, risk losing a design job that paid me too little and was boring and didn’t care if I came back chewing on wooden dentures? Have mercy on my debt-ridden soul.
After a sleepless night, I drove out of town in the early morning dark, fidgeting with the radio stations and trying to ignore the pulsing threats coming from the would-be murderer in the back of my mouth. There was not enough traffic, and I got there quicker than I would have liked. Inside, the endodontist’s office was startlingly beautiful. There was a gently crackling fireplace and the steady, low hum of vibrating yoga tones coming from a hidden speaker. The chairs were the kind of comfortable that swaddles and supports, not just a place to park yourself. It was a waiting room designed more for anxiety than boredom or expedient processing, and I wanted to find it all infuriating, but it worked on me. Despite arriving on time and the lack of any other patients, the receptionist had me wait for half an hour in this stress-soothing cocoon. By the time she called my name, the bubbling fish tank in the corner had manipulated my body into calmness, my blood pressure noticeably lower.
The endodontist was not a woman with tiny fingers, but a large man who moved carefully in the way of large men who grow too tall too quickly in what should be their small years. Stooping in his white coat, his long arms folded like bringing together the corners of a bed sheet, he spoke gently and quietly, pushing and pulling equipment to and fro on casters from where we sat in the middle of the room. Each tooth scraper and drill were unnecessarily explained with earnest enthusiasm, and I felt as if I’d wandered into conversation with a devoted museum docent. He told me about the city where he went to college while we waited for the novocaine to deaden my nerves. When the first injection didn’t entirely numb the problem area, he injected more and told me about his latest vacation. I ended up with half of my face numb, and I didn’t feel anything but a bit of pressure during the procedure, my heart rate slowed by the spa music and travelog of dolphins and mint juleps.
Things fell apart back at the reception desk. Looking back, maybe the idea of minor surgery distracted me from double checking the going rate of an endodontist’s work. Judging from the receptionist’s disciplined reaction, I was not the first person to sail smoothly through the bloody part of the appointment only to run aground at her desk. I handed over a credit card. The right side of my chin trembled but I didn’t cry, not even when I was alone back in the car. I took deep breaths and the oxygen exchange fixed nothing.
My boss was genuinely surprised to see me back at work. I was genuinely surprised he had underestimated how stubborn I could be. Lopsided and numb from the novocaine and the bill, I tried to work through the rest of the day with metaphorical blinders on, determined to appear fine. I was fine. I was down one tooth and thousands of dollars and it was fine to spend savings on emergencies. I was blessed to have any amount of savings and credit cards, lucky to be on the edge instead of hanging out over it.
But edges are dangerous. Disaster is just beside you, if you’re lucky. More likely, disaster is looming over you – a heavy, rolling wave about to break and slam your worrying body down under the water, into the ground beneath it, down to join the millions of other bodies that were once alive and scared, and are now just sand and muck.
Slumped over my desk, head pounding and stomach rumbling, I gingerly tried to eat but couldn’t manage it because my mouth was still numb. I scrounged around in my purse for a stray ibuprofen and found the failed seam instead. I wiggled my fingers inside and discovered the lost paycheck from a freelance job, completed ages ago. Joy rose up in me, and then my mind processed the expired date.
It was too late. Checks are promises that don’t keep forever. It was just a piece of paper.
Sitting there in that disastrous moment, the limp grasp I had on gratitude slackened and detached. The recognition of anything good, that holy-tinted choice to see anything good in between all the bad, fled in that dark moment, blinded. I felt something else boil up inside me: hot, straightforward anger. I hated the small desk I was hunched over. I hated the small life I was scraping together. I wasn’t fine. I woke up every day with my head pounding like it was squeezed in a vice, and I stopped talking about it because no one cared and I couldn’t afford to get care. I missed my dog. I had one less tooth in my body and I was tired.
One day many years earlier at summer camp, the teenagers in charge of our lives made all of us kids who wanted to swim in the lake endure a safety test of actively treading water for about fifteen minutes. It felt like forever. If we started to float or weren’t running and pushing in the water hard enough, they blew their whistles and made us hustle. It was not enough to be moving; you had to struggle. That seemed to be the point. While we worked hard to go nowhere toward the hope of some future fun, the camp counselors lectured us from the dock about amoebas and alligators. Not everyone was able to finish the test, and no one was happy at the end. We were active kids walking miles every day in the South Florida heat, trapping animals in the scrub, inspecting fire ants, and tracking scat. Nothing was too much for us until the treading water test. Afterward, hardly anyone went swimming. We brought out the aluminum covered sun ovens we’d built on a rainy day and made smores.
It’s so hard struggling all the time, moving nowhere toward some vague idea of good enough. It’s so hard that by the time I drove out of town for that root canal at twenty-five years old, I was already tired of complaining, tired of pushing through loss every day. I was tired of pretending as if the mindset with which I approached my circumstances mattered more than my circumstances. You can only project yourself into so much happiness. If that were otherwise, we would all just lie to ourselves all the time and hope would never expire.
I hadn’t mourned my failures or sat with the remains of my unrealized dreams, I just felt shame at their existence. They were lovely things, those unfulfilled plans. Even if they never happened, they were still lovely and undeserving of derision. For a while they moved me forward, and for that reason alone I should count them among my blessings.
I don’t know if we have a word in English for missing something you’ve never had, I can’t think of one. Melancholy is too vague. Nostalgia is too familiar, too earned. Miscarriage is too charged. The word should feel like a loss of some kind, but loss alone might imply carelessness. Unsuccessful hope, well tended and endured, should have a stake in the greeting card aisle.
Even if you keep the hope, how do you get back on track when you never managed to make that initial jump onto the right rails in the first place? I couldn’t even pay into the right health insurance network. I could have used that hundred dollars. If I had found the check sooner, it wouldn’t have changed my life, but it would have buoyed me up, probably better than the endodontist’s fish tank or the sun oven smores.
Probably. Maybe not. It might have been great for a second, and then it would have felt like a drop in a bucket with a hole in the bottom, like I would never catch up. I wanted so much, but I was also exhausted from so much wanting, so exhausted that I’d forgotten I could try. That afternoon after the root canal — slumped over a desk I was too discouraged to abandon, hungry due to my own fear-based scheduling, clutching the useless, broken promise of money I’d misplaced all on my own — that afternoon, I was forced to peak out from my metaphorical blinders, and I didn’t like it. Not just because the fantasy of optimism stuck around like the ghosts of things I’d lost, but because pessimism is just as much a liar.
After that day, I started staring Want straight in the eye. There wasn’t so much there once I caught a good look at it. I got the dog back as soon as I could. I ended up in the emergency room three times. I willingly climbed into MRI machines that felt like they would swallow me whole. I took chances, got on airplanes. I told people I loved them. Some days I look up and Joy is right there.
Other days, I might go to a department store and take a walk past the jewelry counter, peering through the glass, searching for pearl earrings similar to the ones that disappeared. It’s not torturing myself. It’s a commemoration. I look and remember and take a deep breath. Nothing changes. Then I move on to the hats. I love hats and they are almost always close to the jewelry counter.
For my own sake, I have eased into this sort of fatalistic gratitude, finding comfort in defining things as they are without shouldering the weight of what could be. Lost things come back or they don’t, but you are never what you lack. You can get out of the water and have a smore if you can’t keep up. It is better to reach a limit and accept your capabilities than to give up and sink down to the bottom of whatever lurks below. You can always say Not today, maybe tomorrow. You don’t even have to mean it; tomorrow will come anyway if you let it, and then you might unexpectedly sit next to a bubbling fish tank or stumble across an abandoned, clearly forsaken floppy hat that no one wanted or missed and now it is yours for as long as you can hold onto it.
Another example of a grim contingency I find oddly comforting: the nerves are removed during a root canal, but the empty shell of the tooth can be propped up and left there, functioning but unfeeling, not entirely dead. Which means it can still die and then rot in your mouth. It might keep chewing for years before that happens, helping you eat and protecting your jaw, but eventually the zombie reduces to a corpse. Our bodies are made to use teeth hard and then lose them, not heal them, but that’s why we’re born with so many buried in our skulls, waiting for their moment of violence or decay to debut.
A few years after the root canal — after the dog was gone at a good, old age, after I moved on to better jobs and better circumstances, after I fulfilled some dreams and let others go — what was left of that tooth became infected again, and I had to have it pulled. This time I went to a different dentist, one who didn’t need to send me out of town. After he extracted what remained and its fused crown, he accidentally dropped it back into my open mouth, nearly down my throat. Somehow, I managed not to swallow it. I sat up and spat it out into my palm, laughing nervously as I handed it to the stunned dental assistant, who looked like she just watched someone jump out of the way of a speeding train. The bill didn’t break me. I took the entire day off work and bought a milkshake on the way home. Half of it ended up on my chin and in my lap instead of my numbed mouth. It didn’t matter.
About the Author:
K.C. Field is a textile designer living in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. She is currently working on a coming of age novel, and occasionally examines her beliefs through introspective essays and short stories.