Emma Rowan
Short story
The tooth landed on the kitchen counter. It stared up at me with an air of indifference that felt radically inappropriate. A small, white, jagged stone on the speckled beige laminate—sparkling clean now since I rinsed it off. I had held it tightly between my index and my thumb under the faucet, watched the pink blood seep into the sink in mere seconds, held it under the running water for longer than was necessary, if only to have something to do. The drain loomed underneath like a black hole, daring me to slip. Clara stood silently, a hand cupped over her mouth as if to prevent more pieces of her teeth from cleaving off and flying out. I washed my hands for the second time.
“Do you really think they could reattach it?” she asked. She was also saying the fight wasn’t over until they could.
I sighed. “I think so.” I was also saying I understood that.
I dried my hands and looked out the window above the sink to the parking lot four stories below. With it cracked open, I could smell the dusty screen, the lemony black walnut trees and the chocolate red cedars, hear the crickets and the screech owls, watch the streetlights stab holes in the black sky above. Behind the parking lot, across the street, was the shopping center which housed the dollar store where we bought our first pair of oven mitts and the laundromat that’s holding twenty-two of Clara’s socks hostage and the Chinese restaurant where we stuff a dozen fortune cookies in our pockets as June, the owner—who adores Clara since she also grew up in Flushing and loves to talk about how much Queens has changed—bags our wonton soup and vegetable fried rice every Friday night. Last Friday, when I had come in alone on my way back from the library, June had asked me where my girlfriend was. I shrugged, “home probably.”
I remembered my role then as dutiful partner, turned around, and pulled her to me. The sticky tears on her cheeks dampened my shirt as I rubbed her back. A touch I swear I could use to pick her out of a crowd of thousands. After a moment, I grabbed my keys.
I couldn’t tell what the receptionist was thinking. The older woman in her periwinkle scrubs only eyed me once before tossing the clipboard across the counter and telling us to have a seat. I swear this wasn’t my fault, I wanted to say. I didn’t think she’d really try to open the pickle jar with her teeth. I was going to help; I just had to finish one sentence. I wanted to throw both my hands in the air. I mean, who would even think to try that? But I didn’t.
The television hanging in the corner of the small waiting room played a home renovation show on mute, the subtitles drastically delayed. The only other person waiting—an older, bearded man with a round, flannel-enveloped stomach protruding out of an army green parka—slouched in the cushioned chair across from us with his eyes shut. With his elbow propped on the armrest, he held a bag of frozen peas to his cheek. To my right, a small wooden table covered in magazines several years old and various pamphlets on gum health and denture maintenance. To my left, Clara. She held a glass of milk in both hands, the chipped piece of her tooth floating at the top like the last soggy cornflake—she read online that’s what you’re supposed to do with it. She’d clutched it in the car between her legs, her left hand gripping the top and her right holding her phone, tapping on maps to figure out directions to the emergency dentist. I told her to put it in the cupholder, but she just shooed me off, like she didn’t want to part from it for even a second.
Now, she was oddly quiet. She sat up with her back straight against her chair, a dancer’s posture. Despite the silence the stage demanded, Clara never stopped talking—or maybe it was because of the silence the stage required, that everywhere else she went needed to soak up her voice like a sponge. I found it endearing. She pirouetted through conversations with ease; her sentences pliés before jokes and stories that land like grande jetés. I’ve never seen an audience that wasn’t completely enamored with her. In the city, I spent the parties she’d drag me to looped through her arm, quiet save for a few yeses or nos, or leaning against the wall, just watching her. I didn’t mind. I like watching her perform. She hasn’t gotten to on a stage in a long time.
I stand up to stretch my legs. I look down at her. Her dark curls spilling out of the knot at the top of her head, her bangs curling at odd angles, strands falling at the sides of her heart-shaped face. Her cheeks blotchy, her green eyes like two lily pads caught in a storm. The tiny, pale birthmark on the curved ledge under her right eye like the sticker on a peach. She looked preposterously small, swallowed up in my sweatshirt. Like I could just pick her up and put her in my pocket. When I surprise her at the studio where she teaches ballet to second graders, all the little girls giggle and shriek when I sneak up behind her and pick her up like a bag of oranges. She laughs and swats at me until I plop her back down. I haven’t been by in a while, I realize.
I watch her fold her long limbs onto her chair, hug her knees, stare at a blank spot on the wall. Even now, I’m itching to write it all down. In my head, I’ve already started putting the last hour into words.
“How will I ever get a part again?” she cried. “Nobody will cast me like this!” The pickle jar, still closed, mocked her from the counter.
“Clara,” I said. “It’ll be alright, maybe they can reattach it.” I was cupping her face in my palms. “Let me see.”
She opened her mouth. Sure enough, the sharp tip of her left canine was gone. In its place, a sleek diagonal edge, making a squarish gap the size of two chocolate sprinkles between her teeth.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re not saying anything!” She jerked away from me. “If you would’ve just helped me—”
“If you would’ve just waited,” I snapped.
“You couldn’t have stopped to come and help me for two seconds? Was I supposed to wait all night?”
I crossed my arms. “Why would you think to try using your teeth?”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s not the point,” she said. “The point is you care more about your writing than me.”
My mouth dropped open. I shook my head, laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous!” She formed fists at her sides like a little kid. “You’d think for how obsessed you are with it, you’d finish the damn thing,” she muttered.
I scoffed. “So just because you’ve given up means I have to? You haven’t auditioned for anything in over a year, and now you spend your days stopping kids in tutus from picking their noses long enough to put both hands above their heads and twirl. You stopped trying, Clara. Maybe you don’t care enough.”
Except I said it all in my head. Because as I opened my mouth to speak, I felt the cold kitchen tile under my bare feet and remembered where I was standing. In a one bedroom apartment in Moscow, Idaho, hundreds of miles away from New York City—where Clara was from, where Clara had danced across stages all the way from Washington Heights to Chinatown. In the middle of nowhere, where I was going to school, where I was getting to write everyday, where Clara had climbed the three flights of stairs, dropped her bags, stood in the entryway with her hands on her hips, smiled, and said “well, it’s a little drab, but whatever’s whatever to be with you,” where she never threw it back in my face, not once.
I bit my tongue. “I’m sorry,” I said and held out my palm.
She met my gaze, read my mind the way only she could, and dropped the tooth in my hand.
I turned on the faucet.
