Maxillofacial, Prosthodontial, Etc.
by D. E. Fredd

About the author

D. E. Fredd—lives in Townsend, Massachusetts. His fiction and poetry has appeared in several literary journals and reviews. He teaches writing and literature at New Hampshire Community Technical College.

    In childhood, she’d developed a front tooth gap a decent hockey goalie would have had trouble covering, and eye teeth that bordered on mini tusks. During high school, she thought about becoming a Moslem, which would allow her to wear a burka or chador. After the humiliation and ridicule of public schooling, she stayed close to home working part time for The Merry Maids, a house cleaning service. When she turned thirty, the family minister steered her towards a job in the photocopy room of Berman Associates, a real estate, insurance and law firm. Mrs. Berman, always on the lookout for another charitable cause, saw her, took pity and referred her to Tufts University where a team looked at her and decided it was a decent enough challenge to possibly rate a journal article. 

    Health insurance paid some; Tufts waived their fee as a favor to Howard Berman. Grace walked away with a new look.  A life coach, Rita Bauer, was tossed into the mix.  A divorcee with a teenager, she had just gotten her certificate from Bunker Hill Community College. She was a personal assistant and the “Boston bit on the side” to Dick Barnaby, Director of Human Resources at Berman Associates.

    Rita suggested a new hairstyle. I wasn’t that drastic a change, just pulling it away from her face more, adding highlights and feathering the back. Grace’s lifelong habit of keeping her hand over her mouth and her head down needed work, but Rita handled that fairly well. Unfortunately, all the time and money spent on her didn’t make her a princess.  To be kind, it brought her up to less than average. It was like going from zero to fifty-five on a multiple choice exam, a quantum leap but failing nonetheless.

    Grace lived with her aging parents in Arlington, a Boston suburb. When Rita called the house, Grace couldn’t really decide if it was genuine friendship or part of her life coaching duties to impress Dick. They went out for drinks a few times and took in a movie. Grace had an open invitation to call Rita day or night, but she never did, fearing the brush-off, which in her mind was always around the corner. 

    Her job in the copy center was fairly isolated. People dropped things off with a perfunctory “I need this by the end of the day.”  Mostly they used interoffice mail, adding several exclamation points to mark any urgency.  One day Dave Armbruster showed up to fix the drum on the Canon copier. He was forty and overweight. He had a bad hairpiece, revealed a hairy “plumber’s crack” and dingy boxer shorts when he knelt down to adjust the assembly belts. They chatted. Railroading was his avid interest.

Grace acted captivated. He wondered if she’d like to see the trolley museum up in Maine. She’d love to. When she got home that night, she called Rita without debating it first.  Major military campaigns have received less attention than the micro planning that went into the upcoming weekend.

    She drove to the Park and Ride lot off Route 3 in Lawrence and waited to be picked up. Dave showed up exactly on time. He was wearing an authentic conductor’s uniform circa 1925.  After it was exhausted as a topic of conversation, he let her examine his pocket watch and detailed its history for several exits on 495. 

    He was a weekend volunteer guide at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport. He would try to give her a tour, but he’d probably be busy answering tourists’ questions.  It was going to be hectic as Ed Larkin had called in sick so the staff was one short. 

    The only good news about the museum was that she did not have to pay. After ten, she rarely saw Dave. She wandered around looking at the array of old streetcars and trolleys.  They all looked alike. Out of desperation, she stood on the edges of some tours, making several trips around the circuit with different guides. Of all the volunteers, Dave was the worst.  He was wrapped up in his own little world, explaining minute differences between the various J. G. Brill cars of the late 1800s as well as the virtues of the Wason manufacturing plant. He spoke in a monotone as though talking to himself.  Another volunteer, a young college student, Jeff, had a sense of humor at least, punctuating his lectures with, “Are we bored yet?”

    She ate lunch by herself just after twelve at a hot dog stand. She managed to squirt yellow mustard from the barrel-like dispenser onto new linen slacks. She was hot, bored and had a monster of a headache. At one o’clock, Dave took a quick break and dragged her to the same hot dog stand, not listening when she said she wasn’t hungry and feeling ill. He bought three sausage grinders, wolfing down two before dashing back to escort another tour. She tried to give her meal away to a family with four kids, but they refused and eyed her with suspicion. 

    At three, she interrupted Dave and asked for the keys to the car so she could rest. He cautioned her not to play the radio because the battery was low. She longed for something to read, but his backseat was filled with model railroading magazines. His CDs were country and western songs related to trains. She dry swallowed two Vicodin tablets and closed her eyes.

    At quarter to six, he banged on the car window. He wondered why she was sitting in the driver’s seat. Had she disturbed his settings? He was feeling the effects of having eaten the sausages hurriedly and was not hungry.  She was starved to the point of being lightheaded. He offered her some Peanut M & M’s. On the drive home, he was feeling gassy and apologized for the smell. He pulled off at Exit 56 for a Dairy Queen in Andover, which he proclaimed made the best Blizzards. Ice cream might settle his stomach. He had a banana split. She settled for a small vanilla cone.

    By eight, they were back at the Park and Ride. He’d enjoyed her company. She said she had a nice time. There was an apology for the intestinal issues. Next weekend, if she was up to it, there was a real excursion train that ran from Wilton, New Hampshire up to Greenfield State Park. He knew the conductor so they’d get a discount and decent seats. She lied and said it was a friend’s birthday so she’d have to see. She’d call him mid-week. They exchanged numbers. He thought it interesting that they both lived with their parents and went down memory lane about his father’s love for railroading. As a little boy, they went on trips just like the one to Kennebunkport until three years ago when his dad had a severe stroke and passed. 

    He shook her hand at eight-thirty and wished her a safe trip home. He tooted his horn as he drove away. She didn’t notice the broken glass until she sat in it. The passenger side window had been smashed, and her stereo was gone, leaving a gaping hole in the dash. She got out, picked up as many of the big pieces as she could with a tissue and checked the rest of the car. Nothing else seemed to be missing. At least the car started and she could get home.

    She delayed calling Rita for two days. After she vented, Rita tried to make her see the positives and suggested a second chance. Again, Grace didn’t know if she was reading from Chapter seven in the Life Coach’s Handbook or just offering friendly advice. She called Dave. His seventy-something mother answered and yelled “Davy” as if her were a continent away. When he picked up, she knew his mother was still on the line. She told him she was free for the weekend.

    “So you’re hooked on trains,” he said as if he were sure it would happen. “I’ll stop by your place on Saturday around ten. We’ll take my car.” 

    She felt better afterwards. This was more like the dates she had read about or seen in the movies.

    He rang her doorbell at ten. He was dressed normally, a blue polo shirt and tan chinos and handed her a crudely wrapped present. It was a bright orange tee shirt commemorating the Trolley Museum’s sixty-fifth anniversary (Take ARide Back Into Yesteryear).

    “I picked it up last weekend but forgot to give it to you. They give me fifty per cent off gift shop stuff.”

    During the hour drive to New Hampshire, he consciously avoided train talk. It would have helped if she came up with a subject but, as much as she tried, she drew a tongue-tied blank. He spoke of copiers and how he’d gotten into the repair end of things. He asked how she liked her job. She said it was fine. He finally came back to trains and their role in settling the American West. Though she hated the subject, it was better than silence.

    Before the noon excursion left, they visited a local sandwich shop and ordered food for the layover at Greenfield State Park, a picnic of sorts. When the train pulled out, he donned an ill-fitting engineer’s cap studded with collectable pins. Once they were moving, he cornered the conductor and talked trains for a while. She enjoyed the scenic ride and the lunch at a park bench.

    On the way back from Wilton, they stopped at a seafood place in Central Massachusetts he knew about. He was polite, opening car and restaurant doors and telling her to order whatever she wanted, even lobster; the meal was on him.

    They got back to her house around ten. Her parents went to bed by nine at the latest, but had left the porch light on. She didn’t know if she should invite him in, but he needed to use the bathroom before he headed down to

Brockton. While he used the facilities, she looked at the living room from a visitor’s perspective. It was shabby.  There was nothing young or colorful about it. Her parents had been in a “we’re going to die soon” mode for the last decade so they hadn’t purchased anything new for a long time. 

    When he came back into the living room, he asked about the photos on the mantel. Her parents’ wedding picture and various shots of them at memorable occasions during the last fifty years lined the space. He sat down on the

Couch, which had a faint mothball smell to it. She wondered if he might like a soda. He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table. In the harsh florescent light, she could see that the heat of the day’s events made his hairpiece look like roadkill. It was askew, possibly loosened from the tight-fitting engineer’s cap. He commented on the kitchen appliances. He’d never heard of an Elgin stove. “Was that a Sears brand a while back?”

    She suggested a return to the living room. The light was softer. His hair, bulk and tendency to sweat would be less prominent. He sat sideways on the couch, facing her.

    “It’s funny there’s no pictures of you. Not even growing up or graduating. That’s all my mother has in our living room.”

    “I wasn’t very photogenic when I was younger, bad teeth.” She paused for a moment knowing it was probably a mistake but she forged on. “I had some operations. They had to break my jaw to line it up. It took two years. I lost thirty pounds, and thought I was addicted to pain killers.”  She smiled as if modeling the handiwork.

    He seemed surprised that anyone would undergo such hardship just for bad teeth. He’d had a root canal, which wasn’t as bad as everyone told him; they put a fake cap on it afterwards. He opened his mouth and pulled the cheek aside, inviting inspection. 

    She saw he had no idea what terrible things she’d been through in life. She got up, disappeared into her bedroom and came back with a slim photo album. “You’re the only person beside my parents and my friend Rita who’s seen

these.”

    The pictures were horrifying. There were “before” shots of the inside of her mouth, which looked like cemetery tombstones teenagers had just vandalized. Then the surgery pictures, her bruised yellow face twice its normal size, eyes blackened slits. Other photos were of her comatose in the recovery room, legs splayed, tubes and lines going in, catheters coming out. He handed the binder back to her and was still for a moment. 

    “You’re okay now, right.” He was looking towards the far end of the room.

    “I get headaches and can’t eat foods that require heavy duty chewing, but I go out in public now.”

    He rocked back on the couch, used forward momentum to get up, thanking her for the soda as he did. He’d best be going. In the hallway, she took a bold step and asked him if there were any train events coming up. He said he

didn’t know. They hugged awkwardly. She extolled the wonderful afternoon and evening time for the tenth time.  He nodded.

    When his car started, she flicked off the porch light, and went back into the meagerly lit living room. The album of her medical ordeal was on the couch where he’d been sitting. She remembered Rita talking about her first husband. She forced him to attend Lamaze classes and browbeat him to be with her in the delivery room. She made him watch as she gave birth to their daughter. After the baby came home and she had healed enough, their sex life wasn’t the same. A year later, he told her he’d found someone else. It wasn’t her fault. He just couldn’t think of her as a sexy anymore because of all the blood and gore he’d seen in the hospital. 

    She knew that Dave, he of the chain store toupee, sausage flatulence and railroad obsession would never call her. She wanted him to. She wanted to have sex, go to restaurants and concerts. She wanted to tell people at work they spent the weekend on the Cape gorging on clams and sun. She wanted him to get down on one knee and propose.  She would refuse. They would break up, get back together then split for good because she would let it all hang out about his stupid hair and geeky, microcosmic railroad life.

But that would never happen now.  She got up and went into her bedroom of the last thirty-five years. The binder left on the coffee table, awaiting the next gentleman caller.