Sputterpub's Blog

Annie saw the periodontist again a month ago. He poked and scraped, knocked and gouged, and then sat back and said, “Will you consider a nightguard?”

She felt sardonic. “Probably not,” she replied. “Why?”

“Your teeth show signs of the wear that comes from grinding.”

“We’ve been through this before,” she reminded him. “I used to grind. I remember the headaches. I taught myself not to do it any more. Those must be signs of old grinding.”

“Hmmm,” said the periodontist. He did a quarter spin on his stool, and then turned back to her with his metal hand mirror. Annie marveled at the little tool – it never fogged up – but not as much as she admired the above-chair light that didn’t blind her but always provided the illumination the dentist wanted. “Hold this,” he said as she expected.

She took the mirror handle in her right hand and positioned it in front of her mouth. The periodontist pointed to an area in her front lower right. “Now gnash your upper and lower teeth till they mesh,” he directed.

She complied. It took a second before she managed to make her teeth meet perfectly. Then she was arrested by what she saw. The only way to get her upper and lower front teeth to come together without a space was by moving her lower jaw to the left, like a camel chewing. She still couldn’t believe she was gnashing in her sleep, but she had to admit that significant wear had occurred. She left the periodontist’s office without a nightguard or a plan to acquire one, but with a definite impression.

Several hours later, at home, she thought she was relaxing. She sat on her favorite chair, TV on in front of her and iPad by her side, soft munchies and soda water within reach. Unconsciously she brought her right thumb to her mouth in order to remove a flap of hard skin. As she clamped her front teeth on that skin tag, as she prepared to tug sideways, her body remembered. She realized she had just put her jaw into the precise position she’d seen in the dental chair.

Epiphany! In a flash Annie realized that she wasn’t sleep-grinding. She was awake-grinding. She didn’t need a night guard. But she needed something.

It wasn’t rocket science. She sure wasn’t going to walk around publicly with gear in her mouth. The only course of action for Annie was to stop contorting her mouth. And the only way to stop contorting her mouth was to stop eating her own fingers. Really. She loved chewing her skin so much that she even considered using a cuticle nipper to trim and then (disgusting!) munching the removals. But she didn’t have the close vision necessary to use a nipper with precision. She was not going to don reading glasses and find good light to persist in her nasty habit. She was finally done.

As she got older Annie became self-conscious about the activity and its traces. Of course she tried to break the habit, and sometimes – in a vacation environment – she’d leave her hands alone long enough to see healing, to feel softening, to plan on a future with lovely unpicked fingertips. But then some stressor or good book would absorb her and before she understood what she was doing, she’d make inroads on the skin of her right thumb (it always started there). Another word for “inroad” is “invitation,” she came to realize. For soon after she injured her thumb with her teeth she created a fresh hard spot, that became impossible to ignore, that her index and middle fingers found. Then her teeth joined the party, and she had ragged flesh again.

She wondered if there was any nutritional value in her own skin. Was it protein? Carb? She figured it was a fat-free snack. Was there a calorie gain or loss? Did it cancel out? Did she remove with her teeth the exact value she ingested? She and some friends had used the Internet to learn that one couldn’t be sickened by eating one’s own shit, but she couldn’t find information about finger-munching. (No one was deliberately dining on excrement…that question came up during a discussion about bathroom contamination. They’d all heard about the perils of lidless toilets, paper towel dispensers, hand-dryers, and door handles; one could breathe germs or accidentally ingest excrement that got on one’s hands – and then came the question could one get sick from one’s own poop? and they read that the answer was “no” – one’s excrement matched one’s GI tract – so they wondered why the flushing paranoia extended to the homes of those living alone.)

Annie’s ultimate cure, as it turned out, had little to do with will power or determination. Her mouth started to rot. She was diagnosed with periodontal disease when she was 50, and it turned out to be chronic and severe. She had always followed dental protocol (she can still recite the words from the old Crest package, back when the brand bragged that it was the only paste approved by the American Dental Association). She saw the dentist once or twice a year and engaged in all recommended oral hygiene activities, but she had root proximity in her upper jaw and some components in her saliva that were like manna to the anaerobic bacteria that create plaque. She learned to endure painful deep professional cleaning, she used special toothpaste and brushes, she spent much time and more money wrestling her condition into almost remission (slowing its progression anyway), but her mouth grew ever more tender and her teeth felt loose even when still in bone. She stopped eating unsliced apples. She no longer enjoyed corn on the cob. It became uncomfortable for her to really go after a piece of thumb skin. She started noticing. She started stopping.

Meanwhile, amid the regular trips to the dentist and periodontist, injected into their periodontal comments almost like a nonsequitor, her examiners would occasionally theorize that Annie was grinding her teeth in her sleep. The nightguard suggestion was made several times.

She resisted. In fact she refused. She was a light sleeper and she didn’t want to add any paraphernalia to the experience. She used to clench; for a period of almost a year in her mid-30s she had headaches that she ultimately attributed to jaw-clenching. She began then to do exercises to relax her jaw and neck. She knew how unattractive it looked, pressing her chin into her upper chest to stretch her neck, but she did it, at home. And she trained herself to keep her teeth apart while she slept, and to check her jaw position first-thing, whenever she woke. She still sometimes clenched, but she didn’t press her jaws together any more.

And it came to pass that Annie learned to leave her fingertips alone. She was 65. She had started snacking on her own skin before she was 12. A mere half century or so.

She wasn’t born with the habit. Like other babies, she arrived with ten fingertips and no teeth. And even after she cut some teeth and learned to use them, her fingertips were too soft to be satisfying. She munched on her nails.

Her mother tried to stop her. Of course. Annie’s mother was the fidgiest person Annie ever knew, but she wouldn’t allow it in her daughter. “Stop that,” she’d snap. “That looks ugly. If you keep doing it, your face will get stuck that way.” Or she would remove Annie’s hand from her mouth. Sometimes the removal was gentle. Mostly it was like a smack or a swat. Neither words nor motions worked.

Then Annie’s mother bought a substance that was supposed to deter any nailbiter. It came in a polish-type bottle but it wasn’t pretty. It was Crayola flesh-colored, with a bad smell when it was wet. The odor disappeared when the substance dried, but the stuff had a terrible taste, according to the words on its packaging. It might have worked if Annie’s mother had applied it carefully. But she was an impatient woman and she claimed to have no manual skill (her hobby was paint-by-number sets – “why I can’t even draw a circle!”), and she glopped the stuff onto Annie’s nails so clumsily that it dried in thick lumps. It was satisfying for Annie to pick off. Almost as good as biting her nails after the coating was gone.

In time Annie matured. She didn’t exactly give up her digital habit, but she exchanged it for an improved nibbling experience. She started noticing how ugly nailbiting appeared when others did it. There were several in her classroom, and she saw how they had to twist their fingertips to get the right angle, how they screwed up their lower faces to get the job done. And they were developing ugly fingers, with pillows of flesh around their short nails. She didn’t want to look like that.

Annie was an avid reader. She’d get into a story and then notice that she was nail-nibbling. She determined she’d keep her hands away from her mouth. She tried wearing gloves (that didn’t work because it felt too unnatural). Several times she put her hands under her butt to keep them away from her face. That didn’t work either. But the attempts had effect; Annie began to be able to sit without biting her fingernails.

For awhile. She couldn’t seem to totally quiet her hands. She soon found herself raking her index fingers against the sides of her thumbs. She’d make a rough spot and keep raking. Over time that activity roughened her thumb skin. Then there was more to rake at. Her middle fingers might get involved. Maybe even her ring fingers. It wasn’t long before the rough skin was bitable. Annie bit.

Promptly she acquired a taste for the callused skin. She nibbled, pulled, bit, tore. Sometimes she went too far, ripping a cuticle or otherwise drawing blood. Then she had to press and lick to avoid a stripe of scab. Unsightly. But if she didn’t bite deep, her habit wasn’t visible on her fingers. Unless her hands were soaked. She tended to hide her hands when she emerged from a swimming pool.

Dinah read once that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. She loved her friend, but Annie could have been a poster child for the epigram. She’d never had a plan. She’d never made a change that wasn’t thrust upon her by familiar or health conditions.

Annie had sent an email to Jeff two months earlier. That communication resulted in a lunch which ended with cocktails at Annie’s condo. She followed up with a telephone call. She invited him to continue what had been interrupted so long ago.

He was still solidly married. No one would accuse him of domestic happiness, but it appeared that he had signed on for the duration. However, he gracefully accepted her invitation. He began visiting Annie after work once or twice a week. He never initiated anything, including sex, but he was as accommodating as his caution and discretion allowed. They enjoyed daily telephone calls. According to Annie, they fell back in love.

Dinah was demi-disgusted.

It’s always trying to be around an infatuated person. Every lovesick adolescent is tiresome, and the condition grows more unattractive to witnesses as the participants age. To Dinah, Annie of late was silly, besotted, moony and most of all boring. She talked about Jeff like he was some sort of hero instead of a spineless adulterer. She seemed unable to stop herself from sharing his sweet talk or even his possessive or sexual declarations. It was a challenge for Dinah not to gag. Classic TMI.

But more than that, Dinah was struck by Annie’s attempts to rewrite her own opinions and potential. After Annie stopped doing married guys around 1980 and settled into her sad relationship with the alcoholic, she came down with both feet on marital cheating. She spoke with disdain about any adulterous situation, equally disapproving of married and unmarried participants. Somehow a few months ago that philosophy disappeared like it had never existed. It was swamped by a new conclusion: based on how happy Annie was in Jeff’s arms, she declared that she was put on this planet to love, that she was above all else a natural-born lover, and that her need for love overrode every other consideration.

Dinah heard Annie help herself to a glass of something before she mounted the stairs to the study. Her footsteps clacked on the hallway floor before she appeared in the doorway. She set her glass on the masonite pull-out at the left side of Dinah’s old oak desk, and she perched on the front of the rocking chair. After a few perfunctory social tropes she launched into a report about seeing Jeff the day before.

“That’s why I didn’t come by last night,” she explained. “I was too tired and relaxed after seeing him. I always feel so good after seeing him. In so many places.” Annie sat back then and made her mouth into a sort of leer. “He may not be a good husband,” she suggested, “but he’s the absolute best boyfriend.”

Dinah responded without words.

“And it’s the same for me,” Annie said. “I’m a really good girlfriend, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been a good wife.”

“What are you talking about?” Dinah blurted. “What makes you say that?”

Then it was Annie’s turn for wordless response.

“No really. What makes you say that?” Dinah swivelled in her wooden desk chair. “You would have made a great wife. You never wanted to work. You wanted to make a home for your man. You more than anyone I know would have enjoyed curling up at his slippered feet after he returned home, hearing about his day.”

“You think?”

“I know. But you saying that reminds me of a similar statement my brother has made more than once. He as much as says he wouldn’t have been a good father.”

“Mark? He would have been a great dad! I mean, look at the fabulous job he does uncle-ing. Is that a word?”

Dinah chuckled. “It probably should be. Anyway, I completely agree with you. It wasn’t his idea not to have children. I remember how he collected Dad-stories and mementos to pass on to his future kids. But now it’s like he’s trying to revise his past so his present is consistent with it or something.”

“Does he actually say he would have been a bad father?”

“No. That’s more Barb’s line, about herself. Like her relationship with her mother was so toxic she doesn’t want to take a chance on repeating it. Mark’s claim is not as jarring as that. He keeps saying that when he’s around an infant he has no desire to cuddle it, but he can’t resist picking up a puppy.”

“But most men don’t have baby love till they meet their own…”

“Tell me about it. That’s what I keep saying to him. But my words are not changing his.”

It wasn’t Annie’s subject so she changed it. She had other ideas on her mind. The two friends discussed new shoes and the elaborate plans for an old friend’s daughter’s wedding shower and the current state of another friend’s divorce trials (literally: the once-loving couple had now been in litigation for six years) and what shirts Annie wanted to buy for Jeff (that was the last conversational straw for Dinah). Then Annie betook herself home.

Dinah was about done with the day. She pulled the old train off the siding and discovered it no longer had much steam. She discovered a few fresh optimisms in herself, about her future, and she decided she’d like to meet her 2025 self.

And she wondered a little more about her Mark’s and Annie’s self-derogatory interpretations. She even tried to run some for herself. Could she say she would have been a bad stay-at-home mom? Could she figure she would have performed less well if she’d tried to make a living at art?

She couldn’t say or think those opinions. But Dinah was pretty sure that either of those alternative courses would have been boring.

She thought about Dinah-2005. She tried to summon up an image of her. She glimpsed someone who had strands of still-dark hair around her face. A body ten pounds lighter than Dinah in 2015, housing a mind more unhappy with her own shape than now.

Dinah-2005 assumed that she had started down the slope toward old age and that the slide was going to be constant. She misplaced a noun then, here and there, and noticed that she sometimes forgot what she was about to say, and she worried she was treading the path toward dementia, like her father, even though he gave no sign of losing it till he was 77. Dinah-2005 didn’t know then that the slide isn’t constant. Her face wrinkles hadn’t deepened as much as she feared they would in the decade since. Her word/idea loss didn’t worsen. She now understood that aging included a number of plateaus.

Back in 2005 Dinah certainly knew her retriever was sick, old and not going to last much longer. But she didn’t know that the dog’s death would be so much more civilized than her father’s. She didn’t anticipate how sensible would be that vet-administered shot, after a tranquilizer, in a comfortable room, her arms around her dying pet. She had no idea how dreadful it would be to watch her father’s body starve to death in a hospital bed, where she provided similar brow kisses and passionate words of assurance but felt disconnected from the process and cold amid the hospital protocols. She wouldn’t have guessed before going through those deaths that her dog grief would be sharper than the bereavement she suffered when she lost a dear parent who had actually departed six years earlier, and she knows now that the real estate changes were as much triggered by the emptiness in the post-dog house as by the desire to provide better housing for and better visits with her daughter’s family.

Dinah-2015 then tried to inhabit Dinah-2005. She sat back in her desk chair, closed her eyes, and dreamed backwards. That 55 year-old phantom was harder to catch than memories of elementary school. But after a few minutes she managed to engender a specter of her old self.

The specter was ill. Wasn’t 2005 the winter of the nonstop cold? Wasn’t that when she thought she’d never feel vibrant and energetic again? She happened to chat with a doctor client and honestly answered his “how are you?” in January. He asked her a few questions and prescribed penicillin. She balked, then as now leery of white market drugs. “Why should I take an antibiotic for a cold?” He told her it wasn’t for the cold. He explained that her immune system was so busy fighting the cold that various opportunistic bacteria were having a heyday in her. He said the penicillin would give her body a break and let it dump the cold virus. That made so much sense she filled the prescription.

But she wasn’t sure that was 2005. She remembered sitting at her office desk for that call, and the furniture arrangement was more like 1999, or 1995. She wasn’t feeling any thrill of accomplishment about her ability to recall ten years ago. She thought that she probably felt old then, and somewhat hopeless.

Anyway, next she made a try at imagining ten years hence. Her son will or will not become a father in the next decade. Her grandkids will be 19, 17, 15. But that’s about them: who and how will Dinah be? She’ll probably stop working and that will mean changes in how she spends her days. Her teeth will probably continue to give her problems; she forecasts consequential changes in diet.

Her train of thought was then interrupted – shunted to a long siding – by a rap at her door.

She started to get up when she heard the open/close sounds and knew it had to be Annie. Dinah’s kids no longer lived nearby, but her best friend did. Annie had a key and a custom of dropping by almost every evening. She had given up her day job a decade ago when her father passed and she inherited enough to live on; she had lots of time on her hands and enough loneliness that her visits were near-daily.

She also had enough loneliness to re-up with her old married lover. They went back 35 years, to the late 1970s when they were young and pretty. Even then Jeff had been married, solidly if not happily. Annie was single then (still is, but back then everyone including she thought it was just a temporary condition before husband, home and babies). She was good-looking and classically vivacious; she enjoyed a few drinks after work and lapped up the attention of the ambient men.

Their early affair lasted about a year. Jeff then went back to commuting home after work, and Annie turned to other guys and a lingering relationship with a depressive alcoholic Catholic from Chicago. Days grew into weeks that amounted to months that became years and decades.

Mark dropped Dinah off after a full day. They worked in what had been their father’s office, so they spent almost as much time together as married folks. In fact, they’d been taken for a couple a number of times, by people who noticed them on the streets or in local restaurants, and they’d been commended for appearing to be one of the happiest pairs around. “You two are always laughing,” was a typical comment, sometimes followed by a statement like “You obviously enjoy one another. You’re like my model of marital happiness.”

The speaker was always surprised and then pleased/relieved to learn that Mark and Dinah are siblings. The statement might be “Oh, that explains it!” The thought was likely “Whew – now I feel better about my own home scene.”

They were like a platonic couple. They spent weekdays together, traveled on business, and didn’t mind socializing away from work, with each other and their extended family. So they heard each other’s stories a lot.

Like at lunch. They were dining alone so it’s not like Mark repeated himself because it would be new words for a guest’s ears. Once again he said it was just as well that he’d never had kids. This time Dinah didn’t argue with him. She didn’t agree with him either. She just shifted the subject back to the work issue that had sent them to a lunch with wine in the first place.

It wasn’t till sometime after he dropped her at her condo, transporting her with the food items they picked up after work instead of leaving her to her usual bus, that his retro-assessment recurred to her. She’d been thinking lately about the nature of ego and self-knowledge.

That started with a recent news item about how people consider their future selves. Dinah heard that some neuroscientists applied sensors to subjects’ heads and then showed the subjects pictures of loved ones and of people they didn’t know. The screens revealed that one part of the brain fired when looking at a familiar face, and another section was activated when gazing at a stranger.

Then the neuroscientists asked the subjects to envision themselves, ten years in the future. The stranger portion of their brains went to work.

Dinah was stunned. It made her realize that she’d never considered her future self. Like anyone else she’d had childhood aspirations about love, marriage, career, fame. Like most others she had a bucket list, and maybe that meant thinking about how she’d act in awhile. But she’d never asked herself how her future self was likely to be.

She had a couple of qualities rare among her peers. When her friends said “Well, you never know what you’d do if confronted with a challenge like so-and-so’s,” Dinah disagreed. She had a solid personality and a good idea of exactly what she’d do. That made her think she might be more able than many to forecast her future self. And she kept a journal regularly enough that she could do spot research about her past. She wondered if examining the self of ten years ago might lend perspective on the self to come.

So in spring of 2015, Dinah embarked on an investigation into Dinah-2025. She started one evening with the notes she found about 2005.

She’d been 55 then. Single for 15 years, her kids were launched and she was alone with a medically challenged dog. Her daughter was pregnant for most of the year.

That was the spring when Dinah fell on her ass on the brick walkway to her house. She didn’t know it then, but the impact would result in the herniated disk between L3 and L4 that presented itself the following year, and eliminated high-impact exercise from her life.

It was the summer when she first sought cosmetic dermatology. She’d seen the doctor before, about a few bumps that required removal and once about a cyst at the back of a knee, but ten years ago was when she had her first Botox injection (in the approved location, between her brows), bought her first miracle cream, subscribed to her first program of clinically-approved exfoliants. Why, she even attempted her own before-and-during shots, but a decade ago was a little before the explosion of smart phones and selfies, and Dinah wasn’t good enough with her digital SLR to capture the subtle improvements, if any, on her face.

It was that autumn when her fledgling nonprofit, in partnership with a bigger organization, cut the ribbon on the one inclusive housing project they were able to complete. Dinah had been involved in the project from before the beginning, and she was one of the speakers at the grand opening. She prepared a five-minute talk and even rehearsed it in front of her home mirror. As it turned out, she rocked. Hers was the speech best received. That experience made her conscious of being “on” when she was in public; she started paying more attention to how she walked and to her facial expressions.

And that was the winter when her first grandchild was born. Dinah promptly grew a heart chamber for Abby, and swore that she would never love another as much as she adored this grandbaby (she would be just as astounded two and then five years later, when Abby’s siblings arrived, and each of them immediately excavated a new room in Dinah).