The Good Dentist by Gina Maranto
I went to the same dentist for 35 years until he retired. From California or Florida, I would make the trip back to his offices in a U-shaped brick building near the Darien train station. In the waiting room were large arty black and white photos of his young daughters. I remember vividly the smell suffusing the place, the smell of that yellow fluid he soaked the cotton in before packing it into the hole he had drilled in your tooth.
Until I was in my 20s, I swore I’d never had a novocaine shot. Whenever I got a filling as a child (and there were many), he would say, “Close your eyes and imagine a beautiful butterfly. See it flapping its wings in the clear blue sky, floating slowly down toward a lovely flower? When it lands, you will feel a little something. That’s the butterfly landing on the bloom.”
For a time, he raised champion Newfoundlands, large and stuffed-looking like him. Photos of them and their blue ribbons adorned several walls of the room, smiling down upon you when you were in the dental chair ablaze with bright light. Later, these were joined by diagrams of the human body with meridians crisscrossing them: He was an early adopter of acupuncture for smoking cessation.
His receptionist slash dental hygienist wore flesh colored orthopedic shoes, and I perceived her as pudgy and a bit mean. Every time my father came home from a teeth cleaning appointment, he railed against her for her roughness with his gums. Sometimes when I was a kid and had to get up from the chair to use the bathroom, which was preternaturally narrow and had built in bookshelves like a library, all of them stacked with patient files, I would hear the two of them talking in low voices about cancellations or x-rays. Years later, my mother told me they had a long running affair and once his kids were grown, he divorced his wife and made an honest woman of her. I remember it was the first time I ever realized that not very attractive people could have sex.
Gina Maranto is a prizewinning science journalist recently retired from the University of Miami.
Digital collage by Gina Maranto
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I wish I could read more of this story.
Great theme – of not very attractive people having sex, in addition to dentists’ personalities in general. Why was he interested in acupuncture for smokers, why was the hygienist causing pain to the father?
How did the story kn butterflies help writer to deal with pain later in life??