And inevitably one of the women (they were all divorced now, every single one of those couples, a 100-percent divorce rate among those early friends) would say, “But then there’s Mark.” This was always followed by resigned sighs, then several minutes of tipsy, joking-not-joking envy, and then finally a group PowerPoint-presentation-minus-slides detailing several Great Things About Mark. (He separates whites and colors! He took the kids to the doctor without her! He compliments her new haircut!) And later, after the friends had all left, Claire would look at him through their eyes, swept up in his star power, thrilled anew that she possessed him, and the night would inevitably end with them wrapped together in bed and him saying, “We should definitely have those people over more often.”
So he was great, yes. In all sorts of ways. But his fathering motto—“We can hope!”—had never been much help, and in fact was becoming increasingly useless with every passing year. It was, to Claire, once the wolves were at the door, nothing short of infuriating.
Would her mother have been useful then, after the honeymoon period of Evan whistling and baby Meredith beaming at, utterly entranced by, her whistling brother? Would her mother have had wisdom to impart? Her mother had always had an uncanny, sturdy sense of perspective—not a judgment that diminished you for what you were feeling, but just the right questions to rack the world into a clearer focus long enough for you to see your issue in its proper place.
Sometimes she tried to conjure up her mother and imagine what she would say—certainly she would not applaud Claire’s hysterical rage. But Claire did not have her mother’s gift for perspective, and so she couldn’t re-create what her mother would say—or at least not how she would say it—and bring herself any clarity or relief. Her mother had become a shadowy figure to her, by then almost a decade gone; the list of things her mother had missed was as long as the list of things she had not missed, and the listing was too sad, the conjuring not only unhelpful but also depressing, so Claire put those thoughts aside.
She had to focus on her children. She had to change the game. She had been spoiled by her own happiness, by Evan’s happiness, by the family’s happiness, allowed herself to believe that raising children would be more pleasure than pain. She had simply been going along, foolishly thinking she understood the rules. She and Mark had provided for the children. They had a lovely home and roomy van and a reliable second car. They watched movies and played games and sang songs, and her heart was full and she had imagined that this would suffice, but she had not counted on the world. How could she have forgotten about the world? Was she so stupid? So naive?
If she hoped to survive this—this motherhood (the word now felt just a tiny bit sinister when she heard it in her head)—she would have to change her tactics.
?
Two months after the “porker” incident, after everyone but her had forgotten it (or at the very least moved on from it), she walked into exam room 3 on a dreary Tuesday afternoon to find Logan Boone supine in the chair, the blue paper bib chained around his neck. She actually did a bit of a double-take. She had seen him so often swaggering down the sidewalk that this was the image of him that had burned itself into her mind, so much so that even in her little indulgent fantasies of confrontation it was always that school street sidewalk where she faced him down. He looked small in the chair—everyone did, flattened out like that, bug on its back—but even horizontal there were angles in his body that seemed consciously intended to illustrate his superiority.
“Everything looks okay,” the tech said, handing Claire the chart.
“I’ll just take a peek, then,” Claire said. This was the way it worked. For the standard checkup, the tech did 95 percent of the work, then Claire or Mark came in at the tail end to confirm that all was well. People expected to see the dentist, if only for a couple minutes at the end of the appointment. They’d paid a hundred bucks—or their insurance company had—and they needed face time with someone with a “Dr.” in front of his or her name.
Claire sat down on the stool beside Logan Boone, looked at her tray of instruments, and picked up the scaler.
“Open,” she said, and he did, without looking at her. She was certain Logan Boone had no idea who she was. His gums were bright pink from cleaning, his teeth smooth and well spaced. He’d already lost six of his baby teeth; Evan had only lost one.
She located the spot where the most recent baby tooth had vacated—it looked like only several days before—and poked the point of the scaler into his tender pink gum.
“Ayyyy,” Logan said, his face twisting.
“Be still,” she said. She readjusted herself on the stool. “There’s just a little something here.”
“Wha’?” Logan asked.
She twisted the point into the gum where the new adult tooth was forming and Logan gasped in pain. His eyes, for a moment, lost their hardness and there was fear in them. No, Claire thought, it went deeper than that—it was the pleading look: astonishment, confusion, betrayal. Claire often thought that it was precisely this expression that made so many dentists so miserable, a look regularly given to dentists but almost never to doctors, a frantic look born of pure pain and irrationality: Why are you doing this to me?
She saw it all the time, midprocedure, not only from children but from adults, people who understood full well the necessity of the work being done on them, being done to them. This, of course, what she was doing to Logan right now, was a different kind of necessity.
“Got it,” she said, looking Logan straight in the eye, just to see if she could. His eyes were thick with tears and his lips were quivering. You big baby, she thought. You pathetic, horrible crybaby. “Rinse out,” she said.
She slept better that night. The pit in her stomach subsided. There were things that could be done. Perhaps her children were defenseless, her boy just seven, her girl nearly three. But she was ready to enter a new phase of parenting. The joy was ending, and the battle beginning. At least she, the dentist, had some decent tools with which to fight for them.
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