My Two Front Teeth

In photographs from my childhood I am often sporting wide, toothy smiles. Guileless grins. It seems I was—despite the complications of divorce, alcoholism, and mental illness in my family—a happy kid. But by my teens I began to develop a sort of tight-lipped, toothless grin. I could feel myself consciously pulling my upper lip tight against my teeth, my tongue poking at the back of my fake, discolored front tooth.

When I attended summer camp in the early 1980s, there was no long journey north from some hot city. No slow drive down a narrow dirt road through a tunnel of tall pines. No tearful goodbye as my parents dropped me off with a duffle bag of jeans and T-shirts, swim trunks and a towel, then drove away. I was a local kid, a poor year-rounder in Maine. “Summer camp” meant my small town’s daily parks-and-rec program on the grounds of my elementary school, which was across the street from the dilapidated house my unstable mother rented with her alcoholic boyfriend. For me, there was only waking to an empty house, making myself breakfast, then crossing the road.

At camp, kids ranged freely around the school’s sandy playground and grass fields, occasionally participating in activities loosely organized by camp counselors who were, I understand now, basically kids themselves: most too young to vote, all too young to buy beer. They corralled us into the school’s small gymnasium when it rained. The summer I turned 10, the camp counselors cajoled us into a game of street hockey on the gym’s squeaky floor. I was not athletically gifted. I was chubby and uncoordinated, and I could not be counted on under pressure. Team sports were not my strength. So when I rushed behind an opponent in an excited tunnel-vision attempt to steal the orange rubber street hockey ball, I took a stick directly to the mouth. Immediately, I tasted sweet, metallic blood. I dropped my stick, brought both hands to my face and groaned. Mike, a handsome camp counselor whom all the boys thought cool and all the girls had a crush on, rushed over and put his hand on my shoulder.

“You’re okay, buddy, you’re okay,” he reassured me. “Just walk it off.” He clapped his hands together twice, like a football coach giving his players a pep talk. “Walk if off.” He clapped again.

I leaned forward and spat bloody shards of shattered tooth into my palm.

“Okaaaaay,” said Mike, backing away. “I’ll go call your mom.”

I slumped on a bench and waited, wondering how much trouble I was in.

Dr. Joseph Iriana’s dimly lit waiting room had dark wood paneling, a gurgling water feature, and a large aquarium thick with tropical fish and a little treasure chest that hiccupped bubbles. It looked less like a dentist’s office than the living room of a rakish 1980s television private eye. When Dr. Iriana leaned over my brightly lit, pulled-wide mouth during routine cleanings, he clicked his teeth the way those gag teeth chatter when you wind them up and set them down. It was unnerving. I always thought he was demonstrating what he wanted me to do, so I would begin to close my mouth, only to feel the hook of his index finger tug my cheek back open.