“Well,” George admitted comfortably, “we were definitely a wee-wee or pee-pee and poop family. But here’s a story you’d like, I think. We were all sitting down together, eating dinner—my mother’s big on meal-togetherness. My dad always began by asking us what we had learned in school that day, or from the newspaper, or if we had any questions. I must have been a bit older than you, maybe six or so, and Todd, my older brother, was seven.
“I said that one of the boys at school told me babies are made when a man and a woman stand on opposite sides of a room and then the man holds his penis out and runs at the woman yelling ‘Charge.’ And my dad, very seriously, said, ‘No, George, that’s not usually the way it’s done, although it does sound like a compelling idea. Would you like me to explain how and where babies come from?’
“Well, by now I was really embarrassed, and I told him no, not right then, maybe later, but Todd said that, yes, he really wanted to know, that he had a lot of theories about it but was interested in the truth.”
“The truth,” said Lizzie, giggling. “So were you there when your dad explained it to your brother?”
“No, I didn’t want to be there,” George said. “I waited another year or two before I got my own sex-ed talk. What about you?”
“When I was six, Lydia gave me a book called From Egg to Chick. That was her way of eliminating any chance of a discussion. I think maybe one of her grad students told her about it. I must have lost it or something. I’d love to know now what it really said.”
“When you got older, did you think that’s why girls were sometimes called chicks?” George asked.
“I did! How’d you know that?”
“A wild guess,” George said. They smiled at each other.
*?George Calls His Mother?*
George called his mother. “Hey, Mom,” he began.
“Georgie,” she answered, her voice delighted. “Drill any producing wells recently?” She chuckled; chortled, really. He felt the reality of her, warm and loving and so solidly there, although there were almost a thousand miles between them.
Her joking question referred to one of a number of possibly apocryphal stories she’d recounted over and over when George and Todd were children, stories of her own experiences as a kid going to Dr. Ted Gratz, her family’s dentist in Montreal. He was, Elaine said, probably the nicest man she’d ever known, hands down, although this was not always a good thing. He was so nice that he was unable to turn anyone away who needed him, so making an appointment for a cleaning, say, was pretty useless, because when you arrived at the office, it would already be filled with people waiting patiently to see him too, whether they had an appointment or not. Here she’d pause and say with a wink and a smile, “Do you get it: they were waiting ‘patiently’?” When Todd and George nodded that, yes, they got it, they got it, Ma, they always got it, every single time she retold the story, she went on. “And then there were those who weren’t waiting patiently, so that there were always muffled and sometimes not-so-quiet cries of pain echoing throughout the waiting room. But we got used to that sort of thing. We’d pack lunches and get ready to spend the whole day there.
“Occasionally,” Elaine went on, “there would be people kneeling on the floor, praying to God to deal with their aching tooth before the dentist could get his hands on it.”
Evidently Dr. Gratz was also unable to keep any staff for very long. “Despite his niceness?” George asked Elaine once.
“Probably because of it,” she said, an answer that George didn’t understand until he became a dentist himself. This meant that while Novocain injections were taking effect, or X-rays were developing, Dr. Gratz would grab a broom and energetically sweep the floor. Or answer the phone, or whatever else needed to be done, depending on which employee had quit or hadn’t shown up that day.
There was never any privacy in Dr. Gratz’s dental offices: his was a booming voice and he never tried to modulate it to hide what he was saying to his patients. “You call those teeth?” Elaine once heard him say, admonishing the poor patient in the adjoining room. “They look like cigarette butts to me.” This, Elaine added to her sons, was the major reason she never smoked and wanted them to swear they’d never take up smoking either. Plus, the cigarette-butts comment was also an incentive to brush morning and night. Sometimes at noon too.
But the neatest thing about Dr. Gratz, she told them, was that he always inscribed the silver fillings he used with “Ted drilled here” and the date. This just had to be something Elaine invented, George felt. How could someone do that, write so small? But wasn’t it true that there was a whole industry of people who wrote on tiny grains of rice?
“Let me see your teeth,” he demanded of his mother when he was seven and she’d finished telling him the story for the bazillionth time. “Oh, Georgie, I’m happy to, but I’m afraid it won’t do any good to look at my teeth, because all those old silver fillings that Dr. Gratz did have been replaced with composite ones.”
“Let me see,” he repeated, and she obediently opened her mouth and allowed him to peer in. “There’s a silver one,” he told her, “way in the back.”
“Oh, that one,” she replied quickly. “I didn’t have that filling done until after Dr. Gratz had retired and I was in college. That was done by this young guy, Dr. Sidlowski. He didn’t ascribe to the inscribing that Dr. Gratz did.”
George was still suspicious but couldn’t think of what to ask next.
“Oh,” Elaine would continue, nostalgic, “those were the days when going to the dentist was a real test of courage. And the spit-sinks. Did I ever tell you two boys about the spit-sinks?”
“Yeah, Ma, you did,” Todd would say, already way past boredom into desperation to get away.
“You did, but tell us again,” George amended his brother’s statement.
“Well, these days, the dentist drills or the hygienist cleans, and they spritz water in your mouth and then they use a suction tube, so you can never see what they’re vacuuming up. In the olden days, when I was a child in Montreal,” she’d say dreamily, “Dr. Gratz would work for a while, drilling away, and then he’d stop, thank goodness, and say, ‘Spit now.’”
“Why’d he stop drilling then?” George asked.
“His hand got tired,” Todd responded before Elaine could.
“Oh, I imagine that he felt you needed to have a rest from opening your mouth so much,” Elaine speculated. “You’d take a sip of water from this teeny tiny paper cup and then you’d spit, and out would come bits of tooth, and blood, and sometimes pieces of popcorn. And there was water running around the sides of the sink, so you’d see all that stuff be washed away. Dr. Gratz’s spit-sink was green, I remember. Those spit-sinks certainly made you feel brave. Now I feel as though I’m missing out on the best part of going to the dentist.”
George, at nine, already suspected he wanted to be a dentist, although not at all like Dr. Gratz, and his mother’s stories always gave him much to ponder. “Why were there pieces of popcorn in your teeth? Didn’t you floss enough?”
“Georgie, you ask the best questions. It’s because they didn’t have floss when I was a little girl. Dr. Mordecai Floss hadn’t invented it yet.”