False Teeth

After the viewing, they took her new false teeth,inhumanly gleaming, out of her mouth, then slidher body in the oven and turned up the flame.They offered them to me as “a keepsake,a remembrance,” but I turned them down:all Ito remember was the old wrecked Acropolisof her shattered grin. She, whose soul had beentight-jawed, gap-toothed, a cavity-drilleddissenter, possessed in her new denturesthe permanent reminder of how all those yearsshe’d hidden her shamed smile. It was as ifthe porcelain grins of the ones she calledthe bosses, and hated with the purityof a blowtorch cutting steel, had become her grinmocking her from the water glass she soakedthem in at night, their perfect alignmentand corrected overbite become my littlenightmare, gnashing, tearing, hyperbolicin their appetite, as if they embodiedhunger stripped of any satisfaction,the anti-food of hunger hungeringto eat and eat never stopping, chewingthe void between each tooth to the leastnano of a nothing. Once, when I wentto see her and she still recalled her name,I saw her staring at those teeth, sayingsomething like gobble gobble gobble but mighthave been her mumbling nonsense syllableswhile those teeth faced her down, square and perfect,no jaw or skull to detract from their exactness,knowing nothing of all her years driving Jersey’sback country roads checking in on what shecalled God’s beloved crazies though she didn’tbelieve in God, nor did she see them as crazy—the social services lady who went houseto house and got Millie out of her locked room,took Charlie to a matinee where he pissed himselfand she had to clean him up in the Men’swhile the teenage ushers looked the other way.Once she drove me to an abandoned house wherea dentist had his surgery, the chair still there,kapok on the floor, even the little pedalhe pumped with his foot to drive the drill,windows broken, stained posters of dancinggleaming teeth as a hand without an armbrushes that smile to little sparklesleaping from too-pink gums. Just why or whatwe did fades into my looking intoher mouth, at the wildly spaced voids betweeneach tooth as she talked to another lady;but if you think I’m going to tell youwhat I saw, play the little boy smittenwith the flawed, go back and read again:I said nothing about her smile beinganything but a cause of shame, nothingabout a husband, a child, a female lover,though she lived with a woman named Joywho brought her anything but, haranguing herin old age to change and change againher paltry will. Instead, her dream of overcomingthe rich for the kingdom of the poorall those years she hid her teeth behind her handvanished in one instant of these new damned teeththat make everything taste like metal, as straightand even as these pretty boy newscastersshoving their perfect mugs into your face.