“Planning another trip abroad?” she would ask, as if “abroad” were some special place that only she and the Muttlers knew about. As if she had been abroad herself more than once in her life, which I could guarantee she had not. And their office had weird new furniture, shiny and with sharp angles. Like all the regular stuff the rest of us had was not good enough for the Muttlers. It made me nervous. I knew everyone in town from the ground up, but here he was coming from nowhere, and with an accent, no less. And who knows what had happened to Tracy while she was over there? But my mother liked Dr. Muttler a lot. I think she thought his accent made him exotic, and she had always loved foreign languages in general. I thought he sounded like what a horse would sound like if it could talk.
During my visit with Dr. Muttler, he made a few noises like he did not approve of my teeth, or maybe even me in general. A little tut-tut sound here, a little tsk-tsk sound there. I always felt like he was pressing up against me. His wife, on the other hand, seemed scared to be near me. He left me in the chair for a while and then Tracy came in and took some X-rays. She looked older than she was, like being married automatically aged you. Or maybe it was just being married to a German. Her teeth were filed down, too, and there was gray hair coming in around her face. She had a sharp little figure though. The Bottomses were always an athletic bunch. After a few minutes, Dr. Muttler came back in with my mother. He was holding the X-rays. He put them up on a lighted board and pointed to a couple of teeth. He told us I would need to have my wisdom teeth taken out. Immediately, like the next week. He asked my mother if she felt comfortable with me getting anesthetic shot into my system. How does she do with needles? is what he said. She would have to sign some paperwork. All these things had to happen at once. Everything was changing, that was how I felt. My mother touched Dr. Muttler’s big German forearm and laughed about something. Every man in the world was suddenly funnier than my father, who was now not funny at all. It was a mess.
The morning of my next appointment with Dr. Muttler, my mother decided to cut my hair. We had been having a bad day already. “I have a million meetings I’m missing today,” she said to nobody in particular as she handed Jenny a glass of orange juice at the kitchen table. My father had already left for work, his good-looking head ducked down as he kissed Jenny and me goodbye, his white pharmacist’s coat loose around his body, no farewell to his wife, not even a silent wave goodbye. Looking back now, that must have been the summer he lost all the weight. He never gained it back, and ever since he had been getting thinner every year.
As soon as he was gone she started in on us, as if she was carrying on her own fight with him through us. “It’s like no one cares that I have a job,” she said. And we did not. We did not care how many meetings she missed, and we did not care that she wanted her own career. Jenny wanted her home to take care of her, and I wanted to have fun that summer. And now it was the last few weeks of summer, and I was going to have these teeth removed and my cheeks were going to swell up and I was not going to be able to leave the house. That meant Jenny had to stay home, too. The last moments of freedom before I started high school and Jenny started kindergarten, and our mother was worried about a meeting in a faraway office with people we had never met but assumed we would not like. Mysterious people who kept her late, away from us, and away from our father.
“I think I have a fever,” I said.
“Right,” said my mother.
“I’m serious.” I put the back of my hand to my head. “I feel warm.”
Jenny put her hand to her head, too. “I have a fever, too,” she said.
“And also I feel like I’m going to hurl everywhere,” I said.
My mother sat down at the kitchen table and stretched one tiny leg over another, and then put her palms together and then rubbed her index fingers together. She had always reminded me of a cricket when she did that, only no chirping.
“We will not play any games today,” she said.
“I want to play a game,” said Jenny. “I like games.”
“I cannot help it if I am sick,” I said.
My mother put her index fingers to her chin and studied me for a moment. “You still need that haircut,” she said. She looked at the clock. “I think we have enough time.”
“I do not want to cut my hair,” I said.
“You’re getting your hair cut, that much I know, Catherine. It’s either now when I have the time or later when I don’t. If someone were cutting my hair, I’d want them to have the time to do it right.”