Smile

I’m sitting in an airplane to Kotzebue, Alaska. More than half of the passengers is comprised of Eskimo natives. Randomly, I wonder if Eskimo is a native group or if it comprises several native groups. Hey Google. 

We land. The older ones waiting for their bags don’t seem to have any teeth. Their lips are retreated like my grandpa’s whenever he took out his false choppers every night before bed. The younger ones seem to have teeth.  The beautiful Yupik (Inupiaq?) standing next to me in baggage claim is one mere grill away from being a model. She’s stunning. Except for her teeth. They’re all there. They’re just kind of angled in every direction. 

I don’t get to stand alongside and flirt with the luggage handler long enough to get her to smile. She was at the bottom of the disembarkation ladder greeting us and now she’s scrambling to find out what’s taking the bags so long. It’s official: Kotzebue, the last real populated village before the Arctic Circle really gets going, is teeming with lookers. 

A not-so random thought returns to me. It hasn’t burped up in years. The last time it did–shit, I don’t remember the last time it did. But it has to do with having nice teeth and my now ex-wife going around the world doing black market dentistry.

We talked about it, too. After about the second or third try at doing it the legal, opposite-of-black way. Application after application. Exam after exam. Even though she did all of that already back home. And fuck you too, TOEFEL. My ex-wife’s english was just fine!

“All these fucking American dentists want to do is pull teeth,” she’d say over and over.

“Fuck it, let’s do it illegally,” I said, “let’s go make beautiful Eskimo women in the Arctic Circle want to smile. Make some secret money.” I didn’t say it in exactly those words. 

In our black-market picture I was painting in my head, we’d travel and sex in all the continents. On top of being smart and a doctor and sweet with my grandpa, my ex was stupid gorgeous and had the stupidest curves of any woman I’ve ever been with before or since. Everything about her was my muse, but especially her butt. I would have happily forgone a life at sea in favor of being her dental assistant. With no formal training, I’d hand her this sharp thing, sanitize it later. Gladly. She’d maybe in the years that we’d globetrot together get around to teaching me how to numb with novocaine, then yank a tooth. Correction: repair a tooth. If I had to do it all over again, I swear I’d go into anesthesia. Knocking someone the hell out in order to cut in to and fix them, but without actually killing them, sounds like a pretty fine day at the office. I sure as hell couldn’t do the cutting. 

Of course we’d do all this black market stuff in order that a young and beautiful Eskimo who has not-so beautiful teeth for whatever reason (no insurance, no dentist, no priority given to teeth) would one day issue a confident smile loud like a Fourth of July report–boom! I suspect she’d have gotten so many requests to fix cleft lips in our travels that after a few botches my ex-wife might have gotten good at those too. She was a dentist in Mexico; how hard could a cleft lip be? Plus I’d have the whole anesthesia thing down. 

She didn’t. We didn’t. She’d try once more the right way and then wave the white flag. We’d raise a son together under the same roof until he was about the age of four. That’s when our marriage would collapse.

I think about texting her from Kotzebue. Entreat her to consider black market dentistry again. Tell her about all of these good looking Eskimos with not-so good looking teeth. We’re in unusually placid waters these days, thanks to our son who, without saying a word, tells us he needs his parents to rally around him right now. To just be nice to each other. To cut the shit for once.

Besides, she’s got something going on now where she has clients and one of them, a couple, has requested she give a speech at their wedding. A life coach of some kind, I’m guessing. My ex just never gave up. I suppose she’s got a few lessons to part with just based off that. 

My ex would have definitely found and fixed my enamel issues sooner than my dentist. I wouldn’t have to do all this composite nonsense on my lower row, still, thanks to grinding my teeth. Shit’s expensive. Our son on the other hand? He’s not been to the dentist since he had his braces taken out.

If you know what I mean.

-tmc