Chapter 4: Another Dream Gums the Dust

My husband is missing his front teeth. I just think it's important to make that disclosure before proceeding with today's entry. Specifically, he broke his front teeth while diving into a pool as a kid, and now has some sort of synthetic caps where the real pearly whites used to be.

There. Now we can talk about the dental issues next door. I think it's creepy -- yes, creepy -- to let your teeth go to pot, to not keep a clean and well-stocked mouthful. Maybe a missing tooth from the side near the molars, or an odd gap here or there, adds interest and character in an Iggy Pop sort of way, if you're into that sort of thing (anyone?). But when I start seeing gaping gaps of two or three or five absent teeth, I'm troubled. As noted in Chapter 2, Ambrosia is missing her eyeteeth. Now Meddow has gone and kicked out her daddy's bridge.

Poor Meddow. She's just going through that stage -- the hitting, pushing, flailing, kicking stage that seems to be the trademark of all kids teetering around their third year of life -- but her rage issues seem a bit mightier than the norm, seeing as how Ambrosia keeps bragging that Meddow has taken to cussing out cars on the road, her dolls, her brothers, anything that crosses her in the slightest way. (Yes, I did say bragging.) Well, apparently Meddow got so worked up the other day that she swung a play baseball bat at Steve's face and knocked out his bridge. Steve has a bridge because he knocked out a goodly portion of his teeth in a motorcycle accident some years back. Ambrosia tells me that his Harley D pals nearly left him for dead on the roadside. They'd all been drinking and, my God, who wants to risk getting a DUI just to help a buddy from -- oh, I don't know-- let's say bleeding to death in a pile of Midwest cow manure, his broken arms and legs all akimbo, his mullet-framed face embedded with gravel. Steve is alive today, and living next door to me, only because someone in the drunken departing group looked back and saw Steve writhe a little; he decided maybe Steve wasn't dead after all, and the rest, as they say, is history. But I digress. The important point is that Meddow's daddy got his teeth back in show condition post haste.

Why is it that some people, like Steve, can't stand to be missing teeth for two days, but other people, like Ambrosia, can spend year after year mindlessly tonguing the gap in their own sets? And how do people from the opposite ends of that spectrum end up together, as a couple? It boggles my mind.

This whole fiasco got Ambrosia revisiting an old fantasy of hers: having all her teeth pulled and replacing them with dentures. She's 33, folks. "I don't know," she tells me, exhaling smoke toward her feet (at which point, by the way, I notice she has no big toenails). "I was dating a guy a while back, and he came to bed one night after we -- you know -- and he looked like this." She curls her chalky lips around her teeth. He'd taken out his dentures, and it was the first time she knew he was toothless. That memory, for a time, was the only thing holding Ambrosia back from her own dental fantasy. So, she mentioned to Steve over the weekend that she's thinking about "starting fresh" and going with dentures. He was disgusted. I believe his exact words, according to her, were, "That's fuckin' nasty." So, for now at least, Ambrosia's dream of perfect teeth is dead in the water.

P.S. Would have been much nicer if Steve, who you'd think would have some dental empathy by now, had just shown Ambrosia this site: http://www.doctorspiller.com/DenturesYesOrNo.htm