I went to the dentist yesterday. My mother had told me she liked the hygienist, and I said, "Really, why?" And she said, “I don’t know, I like talking to her.” So I decided that I would try to like the hygienist, too, and would ask her about her family and not ask her to turn the television on, which had been the source of tension on previous visits. On previous visits I had looked up hopefully at the television hanging over me while she told me about how wonderful her neighborhood is, all the kids just run from house to house and everyone looks out for each other (a story I hear from time to time, and which I never believe, but which I always have to say How nice about), and then when she took a breath I had asked if she could turn the television on and then she had been offended and grown silent and searched for the changer and then she had pretended she didn’t know how to turn the television on, or, once it was on, how to change the channels. She had called someone else in to help. Then there had been nothing on I wanted to watch, anyway. Ellen was never on while I was at the dentist. Anyway, this visit I would try to enjoy the hygienist for who she was. I would try to know her a little. I wouldn’t treat her as a delivery system for pain and boredom which had to be circumvented or ignored or just gotten through.

Someone came to get me and lead me to the chair, the reclining smooth chair of horribleness, and I thought I was going to get another hygienist but I didn’t, which I actually deep down knew would be the outcome because they always bait and switch like that at this dentist. People dressed in scrubs take you to your seat, only to disappear into the depths of the office never to be seen again. I don’t want to know what they do back there. Although I may find out, since I have to have a partial crown in a month and a half. I didn’t know that at this point. The television shone above me, its screen gray, blank, opaque. They were watching soaps in the reception area, by the way. While I waited for the person to come lead me to my seat one of the characters had said, “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” I can’t decide if I like it better when, on a soap, someone says something that must have been said millions of times on a soap, or when someone says something that has probably only been said ten or twenty times on a soap, like, “But she didn’t know at that time that you were only pretending to be a nun.”

Are you following me? So now the real hygienist, the hygienist my mother likes as a hygienist and as a person, came in and said hello and I felt the very strong desire to leave the dentist’s office. As it always does, the sentence, “I don’t have to stay here, I’m a grown-up, they can’t make me,” jumped to the front of my consciousness as if there were two of me and one of me had just shouted that in the other me’s ear. I restrained myself, I put my magazine down in my lap and asked, nicely, “How’s everybody?” The hygienist was pleased to be asked, and we put off the business of picking plaque off my teeth while she answered my question and I asked follow-up questions and I found out a little bit about Hersheypark. And then we put those things in my mouth and the lead apron was draped over me and she kept talking while they X-rayed my mouth and then took the things out of my mouth and we chitchatted right up to the point where the cleaning began. I didn’t ask for the television to be put on.

Now she was cleaning my teeth, really cleaning them, and the room was silent, except for the music, the first song being “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain.” If you are having your teeth cleaned while this song comes on all you will hear is the word “pain.” Carly really lands on it. But then that was over and the teeth-cleaning continued and the hygienist was silent, working, and all I could do was stare up at the lights and watch my own mouth and tongue and teeth in the reflection on the metal frame that holds the lights and try, while I lay there, to increase my understanding of the universe.