Teeth

MONDAY 30th March Write about teeth, please!

She always had a thing about false teeth. There used to be a Saturday night horror feature in the 1970s that specialised in being creepy without any overt violence or gore. In one episode, some people had moved into a house that was haunted by the elderly couple who died there and would suddenly see on a chair in the living room, knitting and balls of wool and, worse, on the bedside table, a glass with false teeth left in it to soak. That last image has the power, almost forty years later, to turn her stomach.

Her grandparents were of a generation to get rid of their teeth and have false ones made early on in life – to get it out of the way. Not dissimilar to those women with a faulty gene who have their breasts removed in their twenties. She finds both ideas horrific but the loss of teeth marginally more so than the loss of breasts. Her own breasts have become strange to her – not having been touched for over three years now and just sort-of living in her bras and clothes in the same way unwanted ornaments sit on her shelves where they just happened to be put years ago. But her teeth in her mouth are busy, chewing, biting, being cleaned, taken to the dentist, paid for, touched by her tongue, looked at in the mirror. They are small and strong, slightly yellow and irregular, healthy, functional – much like the whole person she is.

She married a much older man and insensitively shared with him her horror of false teeth. He then had to confess that he wore ‘a plate’ – a term she didn’t know which conjured a surreal image but turned out to be a few teeth on a plastic dome with bits of wire that stayed in overnight and was rinsed under a running tap every morning.

She was always wary after that of putting her tongue in her husband’s mouth which seemed a bit ungrateful when he was so happily attentive to her breasts.