On evenings she didn’t have to work, Ruth locked her bedroom
door and masturbated to distract herself from the ache, rotating through
the collection of vintage Playboys she’d stolen from Todd.
Sometimes, she took breaks to read. She liked the short stories the most.
The magazines had belonged to Todd’s father, who was now dead.
That night, she pored over the 1978 Dolly Parton issue. On the cover, Dolly
wore a black one piece and bunny ears with a white, sequined bow tie. Her
face was bright and composed. This issue hadn’t been in Todd’s collection.
Ruth’s addition of it made her feel closer to him somehow. She’d found it
in her dentist’s lobby, wondering if it was destiny, if the magazine was
the other Todd’s, the dental assistant’s. The idea excited her. In bed, she
closed her eyes as the sun went down, soaking itself in the spongy hill of
Bernal Heights. She thought of the Todds as she took a final, sharp breath
before sleep.
#
Ruth left her desk clerk job at the Hilton an hour early, at six in the
morning rather than seven, complaining of a toothache. It was the fifth day
in a row that she felt the ache. When she’d asked her manager Mr. Paul if
she could leave early that morning, he waved her off with an air of
superiority and disappointment like a butler who had confused himself for a
king.
Once she left, Ruth walked aimlessly downtown, settling at a bench along
the water. The sun rose above the surreally hanging Bay Bridge like a yolk
drifting in a pan. The ache had begun in one deft swoop that week, leaving
her feeling ripe and exposed.
She arrived at Dr. Russell’s office at a quarter after eight and waited
fifteen minutes until she was scheduled to see him, trying to resist
pressing the tip of her tongue on the cap of her upper right molar. But she
couldn’t. Sliding her tongue off of the molar’s rocky edge to the slimy
floor of her gums was too tempting. Back and forth. Back and forth. She
pushed the tip of her tongue firmly against the molar. There was a brief
moment of relief followed by the sharp ache, worsened.
The lobby was filled with large, brown leather chairs and coffee tables
lined with Sports Illustrated and Good Housekeeping. Ruth
came across the 1978 Dolly Parton Playboy beneath a stack of
outdated issues of People. She eyed the lobby—it was empty, except
for the receptionist only a few feet away—and discreetly picked up the
issue.
Dolly was in her glory, confident and buxom. Ruth had always thought of her
as a tragic figure, decidedly disproportionate in the name of femininity,
but now she was in awe. How had she never noticed how vulnerable, yet
self-assured Dolly was? When the receptionist called Ruth’s name, she held
the magazine to her chest, stuffing it in her bag as the receptionist
walked towards her, saying, “Come this way.”
#
“This is a nice coat, Ruth.” Todd poked a corner of a wooden hanger into
the coat’s right sleeve. His back was towards her, but in a mirror next to
the coat hook, she could see him smile. Todd was almost boringly handsome,
young with a full head of dark hair, his teeth perfectly straight and
white. The only thing that saved him from being so good-looking as to be
plain was a large mole on his left cheek.
“Thanks,” she said. “It was the first coat I ever bought myself as a
teenager.” She could feel herself blushing. The coat was olive wool with a
gray and brown faux fur-lined hood. It looked brand new except for the torn
mint green lining. The coat was too big for her, the sleeves hanging past
her wrists and the hem almost reaching her knees, her shape lost in the
heavy wool. She had the coat throughout her and Todd’s relationship. Not
dental assistant Todd, but her Todd. Her first love, Todd. Even though she
was twenty-five now, sometimes she still felt like the eighteen-year-old
girl who met him freezing at the bus stop during her first year of college.
Her cousin had warned her before Ruth moved in that San Francisco was the
Eastest-feeling city in the West. She’d told her, she better bring a coat.
But this wasn’t cold, Ruth thought. It didn’t create the pause that took
hold of everything like the cold did in Pittsburgh. It was only in the
spring that Ruth felt she became fully conscious again. Perhaps that’s why
it had been so easy to fall in love with Todd. She spent the whole of that
winter in his bed, their naked bodies wrapped around each other under
flannel sheets. She had felt so warm.
Ruth looked up at Todd from the dental chair.
“Let me adjust the headrest for you,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”
She felt the slender tips of his fingers linger on her shoulder. “Yes,” she
said. She closed her eyes.
“Would you like nitrous oxide, Ruth? I know I may have told you before, but
it’s free here.”
“Oh, yes please.”
He placed the rubber cup funneling the gas over her nose. She opened her
eyes to look at herself briefly in the full-length mirror in front of the
dental chair. She looked like a swine. Todd smiled and patted her shoulder.
“Dr. Russell will be just a moment.”
She stared at planes flying above her and wondered if dental offices had
done any tests, if the decorated ceiling tiles really calmed patients.
Anything to be somewhere else, she thought. A life lived anywhere else
besides the present has come to be our present, hasn’t it? Daydreams of
being outside the office. Wishing to be inside with a lover when you’re
finally outside in the sun. Imagining yourself in that war-torn country you
just read about, how horrible it must be. The closer we get to having it
all, she thought, the further we seem to be from everything that matters.
She was high.
Dr. Russell appeared, his tiny frame crowding her shoulder when he sat next
to her. He began with a joke as always. “You know, I went to an interesting
therapist last week.”
Todd sat on the other side of her, and from the corner of her eye, she
watched him smile. He knew how this one went.
“Oh yeah? What’d they say?” Ruth asked.
“She told me I was dog in a previous life.”
“Oh really? I could see that.”
“I know! I’m loyal…and fun.” He laughed. “She said my owner used to make
me wear a collar that was too tight and it left a welt on my neck.” He
moved his hand slowly to the edge of his shirt collar.
“Oh, yeah?” Ruth hated this part, waiting for the gag. Her ears were
ringing. She wanted him to shut up and find the rotten tooth he must have
missed when she came in earlier that month for a cleaning.
“Feel it. I swear,” he said, leaning towards her.
Ruth looked at Todd and silently pleaded with him to make it stop. He
smiled at her and mouthed “sorry” before she finally reached for Dr.
Russell’s collar.
“Feel it!”
Her hand inched forward until the tips of her fingers almost touched the
collar of his shirt. Dr. Russell jumped from his seat and barked. She could
hear the awkward laughter of everyone in the office.
Dr. Russell laughed while wiping tears from his eyes. “So you’re back
again? You must have missed me.”
#
She suffered through the next day. Day six of the ache. She felt it now in
her left and right molars. Her ears continued to ring. She wanted to take
the night off from work, but she’d only been in San Francisco three months
and had already used almost all of her sick days. The day before, Dr.
Russell told her he couldn’t find anything wrong with her teeth. There were
no cavities or signs of future decay. Her teeth were pristine.
“It’s remarkable, really. You’ve got the teeth of a candy virgin.” He asked
if she’d been stressed lately.
“Not any more than usual,” she said.
He suggested she might be grinding her teeth in her sleep. He saw no
physical signs of this, however. He asked if her sinuses were bothering
her.
“No, it’s my teeth! I promise you, it’s my teeth!” Dr. Russell’s normally
open, jovial face tightened with concern as though he were watching someone
fall from afar.
Ruth bought a mouthguard at the drugstore and wore it to bed. The next
morning, the ache was worse. She felt a sharpness in all four molars that
permeated her gums, sending the ache to her throat and chest. She thought,
yes, I am dying. She’d been taking too much of the Ibuprofen in her
cousin’s medicine cabinet, but she felt only a slight, fuzzy dulling of the
pain. In her cousin’s kitchen, she pulled a half-full bottle of whiskey
from atop the fridge and drank as much as she could stomach. During the
middle of her shift behind the front desk, she threw up on her feet in
front of Mr. Paul. Under his breath, he whispered, “If you don’t figure
your shit out soon, girl, you’re gone.”
She dragged herself through the next several days as the ache crawled
deeper inside of her. From her chest to her shoulders, to her elbows to her
forearms to the tips of her fingers, she ached. She imagined the ache
finally settling in her feet, paralyzing her. She could no longer look at
Todd’s Playboy collection, not even at Dolly. It was too
depressing. Her head hurt. Her hands felt tight and stiff. The thought of
anyone touching her made her want to scream.
When she could no longer sleep after getting home from an all-night shift,
she’d lay an arm over her eyes and attempt to recall every sickness she’d
ever experienced. Had she ever felt an ache like this? As a child, she’d
had terrible growing pains that would keep her up all night, feeling sore,
bored, and lonely all over. It made her wonder, if her body stopped
working, would she still exist?
#
Back at Dr. Russell’s office, Todd was quieter than usual. His eyes were
red and puffy. Ruth had been up all night crying because of the ache. It
looked like he had too. Maybe she was imagining it. Or maybe he was stoned
on nitrous. She always wondered what she’d do if she worked somewhere with
easy access to gas or pills. She’d never been good at moderation.
Dr. Russell took a look around her mouth, poking her gums and molars with gloved fingers. It was clearly a charade.
“Ruth, I’m sorry to say, but there’s nothing. It must be TMJ.” He’d
explained what this was to her before—a disorder with indeterminate causes,
creating pain in the jaw or aching pain in the face. But it was usually
temporary. He assured her the ache would, eventually, go away.
“For now, there’s not much I can do besides prescribe you something to
manage the pain.”
Ruth began to cry but pretended as though she wasn’t, saying calmly, “I
don’t understand how I’m supposed to live like this. It hurts all of the
time.” She wiped the tears from her face quickly.
“I’ll prescribe you the strongest thing I can,” Dr. Russell said. She’d
never seen him look so serious.
Todd looked away from her as she stood and thanked the doctor. He got up
and grabbed her coat, and for a moment, as he handed it to her, she
wondered why he didn’t ask her to stay. He could locate the source of her
pain, she thought. She felt pathetic.
At home, Ruth cried on her cousin’s expensive twill couch that only Ruth
ever used because her cousin worked so much, she was never home. Her cousin
was the most successful person in her family, earning more as a programmer
than anyone Ruth had ever known. She also happened to be her childhood best
friend, the only person in her family that she told everything. Her cousin
had offered her a place to stay for free, for as long as she needed, but
except for the occasional glass of wine at home, they barely saw one
another. The last thing Ruth wanted to do was complain, but between her
student loan payments and low-paying job, she was barely getting by. She
knew that, soon, she’d have to give up and move back home. She kept crying
until her stomach hurt, until she thought she might throw up, until the
sobs left her empty and elated, feeling more clarity than she had in
months. She left the apartment immediately and ran.
As she ran, she thought of one of last times she’d seen Todd. From afar, in
the backseat of her car in the empty mall parking lot, his dick moved
swiftly in and out of a Clinique counter girl. The Clinique girl’s eyes
were closed, her teeth clenched together in the same way Ruth’s did when
she felt pleasure bordering on pain, the ache of someone being so close
that it made you feel both fragile and strong.
When she’d discovered them, Ruth immediately looked behind and around
herself as if she was in a movie theater, wanting to see how everyone else
was reacting, asking silently, Can you believe this? She began to
walk away, then stopped. Where would she go? He was in her car. It was dark
and cold. He was supposed to pick her up and take her to Steak ‘n Shake for
fries and a milkshake after her closing shift at Pop Pop’s Pizza. She’d
closed ten minutes early. She walked back to her car and stared into the
window, waiting for Todd to notice before she knocked hesitantly on the
window.
He looked up. “Fuck!” he mouthed as he pulled out and fumbled to lock the
doors. His father had died only a month before. Aneurysm. He was fifty. But
in that moment, Ruth didn’t care. Todd was now a guy she could generalize.
A guy whose particulars, whose quirks and habits that constituted the
stupid, saintly love she had for him, were now being copied to a file in a
neat mental folder labeled with thick black marker: EVERY ASSHOLE I’VE EVER
DATED.
Once clothed, Todd and the Clinique girl morosely unlocked the doors and climbed out of the back as
Ruth crawled into the driver’s seat, the keys still in the ignition. She
heard Todd outside of the car, “I thought you weren’t done for another
twenty minutes! I’m sorry, Ruth!” The car smelled like the Clinique
girl—dank and floral—but it also smelled of him, like peppermint soap and
sweat.
She began to cry.
Before driving away, Ruth watched the Clinique girl amble away in her white
heels, looking aimlessly around the empty parking lot. She didn’t feel
angry. She felt sorry for her, although in that moment, she was uncertain
why. When she got home, she became infuriated with herself for not being
infuriated with him, for feeling nothing but sharp despair.
She fell asleep that night thinking of the Clinique girl, wandering away in
her bright white heels, and she felt a warm sadness because she realized
she was also ambling, uncertain of herself and scared, waiting to be chased
after, waiting to be told who she was or could be by someone else, like
every woman Ruth had ever known and never wanted to become. A month later,
she had quit her dead-end job and moved across the country.
She ran until she was out of breath, walking as fast as she could until she
reached the small hardware store below Bernal Heights. Everyone appeared to
her as blobs as she walked the aisles purposefully. She left with an X-Acto
knife and needle nose pliers.
At home, she set her tools in front of her on the kitchen table.
Momentarily, she wondered if she was losing her mind, but not for long
enough to care. The ache outweighed anything else. She filled a pot with
water and waited for it to boil. She placed the instruments in the boiling
water, then she poured herself a glass of wine. If it didn’t go well, her
cousin would find her, eventually, on one of her stops home from whatever
startup job she had that month. She downed the glass of wine, filled
another, then another.
In the bathroom, Ruth brushed her teeth and pulled hydrogen peroxide from
the cupboard. She looked for cotton balls, but there were none. She’d
overlooked this. How could she proceed? She left the apartment again
quickly. The warmth of her skin and the cool breeze made her feel as though
she were dreaming, as if everything before this moment were more real than
anything else she would ever experience.
In the drugstore, she tried to stop thinking of Todd, how loving him did
nothing but hurt her. But she knew that wasn’t totally the truth, that
nothing was ever wholly anything. It was with this thought that Ruth picked
up a bag of cotton balls and walked down the aisle towards the register,
only to see Todd, the dental assistant, positioned squarely in front of the
section marked “Pain Reliever.” She froze in the middle of the aisle, the
cotton balls held tightly to her chest.
#
They made their way through hellos and blushing and small talk. Then they
pushed themselves through the crowded Mission streets to bar stools with
beers in their hands. She wanted to ask him about Dolly, about the 1978
issue she’d found, but she knew asking might ruin the magic of her
discovery, so she didn’t. How they ended up at her cousin’s empty apartment
with their clothes off, she could not totally say. She was still within the
dream of the ache. How the pain didn’t fully consume her for a few hours,
she could only guess was from the thrill of her anticipation, of imagining
her mouth on his, of the lightness she felt when he smiled with those
bright white teeth, the mole on his cheek moving with his every expression.
In bed, she traced a scar, unaware of its origin, on the nape of his neck
with her cheek pressed against his warm back. She could feel his heart
beating, slow and reliant.
“My dog died. He was really old, but still.” He told her this when she
asked why he seemed so upset the last time she saw him. She thought he’d
tell her about some girl or boy that she’d feel embarrassingly jealous of,
but it was a dog who’d broken his heart.
As she felt the ache return, Ruth told him all about the other Todd, how
surreal it was, how it was beginning to feel more like a story once told to
her. She wondered, had she ever really known him? What did that even mean?
The file containing everything she loved about him in her head became more
difficult to locate every day. Dental assistant Todd knew what she meant.
Already, he felt like someone else from this new kind of hurt he was
feeling.
As she fell asleep next to him, she ran her tongue over her right molar,
where the ache first took root. In the kitchen, she watched herself
standing in front of her instruments, exactly where she’d left them.
Confidently, she picked them up, carrying the sharp ends in her hands.