On being long in the tooth
A short story on the strange comfort of knowing the drill.
So here we are in 2025, ready or not. More reading, more time for thought, and more intentional writing have steadied me so far for what will come this year, in addition to a few excellent meals and conversations with friends and a lot of needed (if disappointing, results-wise) escapism via the College Football Playoff.
(I have also managed to pair most of my socks while doing battle with a hellish, shape-shifting flu that has lasted seven days … and counting. Find your wins where you can.1)
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m taking a little hiatus from my Substack routine this month. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing bits of other work here periodically for paid subscribers, beginning with a short story (my first, really) that was published in December.
So here’s a little backstory for what follows: I wrote this in 2022, in a writing accountability group. We met online weekly for an hour or two and wrote in mostly silence. It was weird, but also weirdly productive. You have no idea what’s rambling through your subconscious until someone prompts you to wax poetic about the Sit ‘n Spin you had when you were 4 or a beloved blue t-shirt you have not worn for years but cannot part with.
The piece I’m sharing with you here—about a dentist who doesn’t know he’s hard of hearing, his long-suffering hygienist, and the patient who regards them as family—came about following a week when I had finally discovered, at age 49, that I was old.
Old for real this time, not simply in my imagination.
Before I was actually old, I used to think and feel I was old all the time. I used to think that, despite my prodigious naiveté and very small stature, I perhaps had been born a little old. Even the sentences I wrote when I was young felt archaeological to me, like they were dug out from some place in time I’d never been. It’s probably why I trusted those words more than I trusted myself in the wild. They walked around the page like they’d been here before, while I often walked around my real life in circles.
What’s more, when I was 26, I often whined to all of the 23-year-olds in my graduate school program about my advanced age. To repeat: I was 26. Some days, near the end of our most stressful quarter, swapping my apartment for a nice room at a senior center off Lake Shore Drive sounded like an attractive plan. Particularly if the place offered a daily breakfast buffet.
What I wouldn’t give to have this decrepit twentysomething’s knees now—and her under-plucked eyebrows:
She was all right, that kid. She was figuring it out. But I don’t envy much about her except that she lived in Chicago, the city that stole my heart and still hasn’t returned it.
I will admit that I experienced a low-level freak-out the day I realized I was actually old three years ago. In the span of one week, I had seen three new doctors who were almost half my age and heard that a fourth—who had ushered me through multiple life stages—was retiring. Soon, it seemed the entire medical field would be populated with individuals who grew up believing, like my children, that Danny DeVito was a meme and not a real person. It was jarring to recognize that I had stepped onto the back nine of middle age when I wasn’t looking, and that I couldn’t come up with something better than a golf metaphor to describe it.
I really was the grown-up now.
I couldn’t be an authority, much less the authority, on my own life, could I? Didn’t I once have people for that? Or at least a baby book?
It was quite a lot to think about, and I didn’t want to.
Instead, like a child who sleeps with the lights on, I spent the hour with my writing group that day avoiding the calls from my own mortality and dashing off this light and humorous stream-of-consciousness story.
We keep the lights on when we’re scared for a reason, of course. We look for joy when we’re not ready for the sorrow. Writing “Long in the Tooth” allowed me to focus on the most levitating bits of my archives at a time when I was Going Through It. It was a survival strategy—like pretending you’re old when you’re only 26—that allowed me eventually to climb off the Sit ‘n Spin and wobble into the cobwebbed recesses of my mind for direction. There, beneath the tenderness of old blue t-shirts, were the bones of my courage to keep going. They just needed a good troweling and dusting off.
Whatever it is you’re searching for (for me, it was and always has been a sense of belonging), the quiet, unrelenting dig for new understanding is the thing that helps you get there. The past and the future work in concert, and there is no need to envy either.
My own dentist of almost 25 years officially closed his practice late last year, about a month before this piece was published in County Lines: a Literary Journal, from the Carolina Piedmont Writer’s Guild. The timing was a coincidence, but the affection you’ll find within is thoroughly intentional. Bit by bit, this sterile office’s decidedly unsterile personalities made me a better storyteller over the years and helped me write like I’d been here before.
Anyway. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. — B
Long in the Tooth
by Beth McNichol
“Don’t expect him to hear anything,” my hygienist, Sharon, says. “He’s 74. He can’t hear a thing. I’m the one retiring after today, but he’s the one who’s old. You’ll need to talk very loudly if you do speak to him. So, don’t ask him any questions if you don’t have to. Try not to speak at all.”
I say, “OK.”
“Yesterday, a woman asked him three questions, and he gave her three different answers that had nothing to do with the question. She went to the front desk after and said, ‘One of you is going to have to take the bullet and tell that man he needs hearing aids.’ And all the receptionists cracked up because they understood what she was saying. He wouldn’t have understood—because, like I said, he can’t hear anything—but they knew what she meant. So, don’t ask him any questions—unless you’re going to shout them. And even then, just … don’t.”
I say, “What if I have a question about my teeth?”
I know that she knows that I won’t have a question about my teeth, that in the 20 years Sharon has been rooting around in my mouth, I have never asked her boss a question about my teeth. I only ask my dentist questions about his life, as in, “What’s new?” because that’s all it takes. Suddenly he’s telling you about the time he chased a tractor four miles down a dirt road so he could ask the guy driving it, Merle, if he could marry his daughter. This drives Sharon crazy because the dentist goes on and on, embellishing and improvising, and then her patients pile up, and she gets home late. And then her neighbors, who once tried to extort her for medical supplies—Sharon’s stories are pretty good, too—will have blocked her driveway, which will absolutely send her into orbit and cause a flare in the residual neck pain from the three car accidents she’s had in the past 10 years.
And I get it, I do. Sharon’s husband climbs and cuts down tall trees for a living, which means he is always broken somewhere, and between her sore neck and his pulled muscles, a lot is happening.
A lot is happening.
Her son is on his second job since dropping out of college, and this one has something to do with craft beer and miniature golf, but what he really wants to do is just marry his girlfriend—and he should, too, because he’s never going to find a better girl than that, with all she puts up with. And oh, how Sharon misses her daddy, who made the best pulled pork: smoky, tangy, sweet like his hugs.
She misses him so much that sometimes I want to cry.
Sharon needs to keep the trains running. She needs to get home. She needs to start her retirement. So much depends on me not asking any questions.
But the thing is …
The thing is, I love the dentist’s stories.
Like the one he told me about the stray cat who got hit by a train when he was a kid, how he watched his dad sew up its injuries and sock its tail right back on, how they nursed it back to health in their basement, how it looked like it wasn’t going to make it, how his dad said it would be dead by the morning, and how the cat was actually strutting around their ping-pong table the next day.
“Hand to God, it was strutting around.”
How, when the dentist came home from college, that cat was still strutting around the neighborhood 10 years later. “Hand to God.”
Stories like that.
“Well,” Sharon says to me, flapping her arms at her side and looking down her nose at me through her hot-pink readers, “just try not to have any questions about your teeth.”
I say, “OK.”
Today is the last day I get to lie to Sharon about how often I floss, and I am sad about this, sad that I must learn how to lie to a new hygienist. Her hair has thinned, and she has let it go white, and though she doesn’t seem less energetic than normal, she is somehow both more manic and more exhausted than I have ever seen her. She had aged over the last six months, maybe when I wasn’t looking. Maybe when I was busy aging myself.
“Do you want waxed or unwaxed floss?”
I say, “Waxed. I suppose I prefer waxed.”
I have lived in three different homes in two different cities and have had two children since Sharon began cleaning my teeth. The first time I recognized that I was both a person and a mother was the day I got in my car two weeks after giving birth to my first child and drove to the dentist like some crazy woman with free will. It was the strangest feeling. I was untethered. I told Sharon and the dentist that I felt like a Power Ranger. I felt like I had just developed a life-changing invention. I felt like I could finally crack 600 on the math portion of the SAT. I had brought a child into the world successfully, and now I was out in that same world, seeing other people who, I was certain, had never understood until then how incredible my power was. I mean, they could see it finally, right? That I could be two people at once? A person who gets her teeth cleaned … and a person who is someone’s mother?
What a world, I had told Sharon and the dentist. What a world.
“I’ll tell you one thing I’m not going to miss. I’m not going to miss fighting with him about getting time off,” Sharon says. “Everyone else in this office has had their vacation time increased, but not me, oh no, not once in 25 years. I’m not going to miss that at all. I mean, the amount of time that girlfriend-turned-office manager-turned-wife of his spent trying to spruce up this office—and look! Look how this cabinet with my tools is falling apart! Look at all the trim falling off the ceiling!”
The girlfriend who became his office manager who became his wife —oh, that was a tough era around this place, let me tell you—is no longer his office manager but is still his second wife. Then the dentist’s son finished school and joined his father’s practice, and not a moment too soon, because Sharon was tired of the dentist being too cheap to hire a second dentist so she could keep the trains running.
And then the son came in and digitized everything and made the patients fill out history forms that were seven pages long, and he brought in some flashy scanners and lights and monitors that green-screened our molars with better molars. He also created a website.
The son made me a crown. And somehow the crown turned into a root canal, and it was the first time I ever asked what, exactly, was going on inside my mouth. The son quit his father’s practice soon after, which means the trains are backed up again. And though I wish the son well, I wasn’t sorry to see him go. He never told any stories. He hadn’t lived any yet.
“He was just nicer,” Sharon said with a sigh when he left. “But he could not stand working for his father. Who can blame him?”
I would hear all these tales about my dentist through the years from Sharon, the two of us conspiratorially discussing him like gossiping teenagers waiting for chemistry class to begin. I tried to stifle my laughter while she scraped calculus off my molars or grabbed hold of my tongue with a piece of gauze, wrangling it up, down, right, and left like it was a piece of origami paper. And then the dentist would walk into the room to check my teeth, and he’d smile broadly, and I’d smile broadly and innocently and pretend I didn’t know about all the vacations he took when he should have been seeing patients on Thursday afternoons. I played it cool because, let’s face it, the man oversees the veneers that beautify my chipped front teeth.
He is, in fact, an excellent dentist.
But I also never let on what I know about his stingy office management and questionable trip-taking because, hand to God, I genuinely like him, if not his prodigious nose hairs and whiskers. I like Sharon, too. I understand my role. Listening to Sharon’s stories about the dentist is like being thrown into the middle of a junior high school relationship that is going through a rough patch.
A 25-year rough patch.
And now it’s coming to an end.
“I’m going to go tell him we’re ready,” Sharon says after polishing my teeth. “Are you ready? Let me go see if I can find him somewhere. Remember: Don’t ask him any questions. But if you do, speak loudly.”
I say, “OK.”
From down the hallway, I hear his purring baritone. And then he sweeps around the corner and into my vision, smiles like a Cheshire cat, and says, “Well, hey there! Good to see you! What’s new?”
And I say, loudly, “Oh, not much! I hear you are losing a hygienist today, though. I hear Sharon is leaving you.”
And he purrs, “Yeah, they really are. Trains are just the best way to travel. Hand to God.”
“Yes,” I say, nodding. “They really are.” I grin at Sharon, who winks and hands me a free toothbrush for the last time. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
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PSA: If your needle-averse, barely-legal-adult child tells you she doesn’t have to get her annual flu shot anymore, put a lock on the cereal cabinet and hide her Dr. Pepper supply until she does—and do not look back.
Great storytellers like you deserve a special place in Heaven! I imagine our dear late friend and master storyteller Sam’s holding court there now-with your former dentist’s formerly stray and tail-less cat on his lap. 😊