Marshmallow Head
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
I pulled my knee-highs up and my plaid skirt down, but my legs stayed cold as Popsicles. My lips were cracked, and my hair felt electric.
"There's a note in your lunch box for your teacher," Mom said. Pink sponge curlers bounced on her head. Before I stepped off the patio stairs, she locked the slider and shut the drapes behind me.
I tore through my lunch box behind an Oleander bush outside Happy Acres.
First, the carrot sticks had to go.
On top of my bologna-and-cheese sandwich lay a thick, licked-shut envelope addressed to Mr. Holmes in cursive. I shook it. Was it a book order? There were no coins. A permission slip for the Larson's Dairy field trip? PTA business?
Or maybe not.
I ate the Ding Dong and dawdled along Roberts Lane to Beardsley Elementary School. The envelope was on my mind; Lunchbox correspondence was never a good thing. I thought about digging a hole and burying it. I could throw it in a dumpster behind the 7-Eleven, but I wasn't tall enough to reach the lid. I could say Mr. Holmes was sick, and the substitute lost the envelope. There was no way around it. If I got caught lying, I'd spend two days in my tiny bedroom after a tearful confession, and that didn't thrill me.
After the Pledge of Allegiance, Mr. Holmes motioned me to his desk.
"What are you working on?" he snapped.
"Cat report," I said.
He scanned his grade book with squinty eyes and his bony fingertip.
"And your name is?" he asked, as if it lingered on his tongue. He never could tell me from a new kid, though it was almost November.
While classmates collected gold stars and won spelling bees, I faded into the back row. Mr. Holmes usually ignored me. He told Mom I was an underachiever with a short attention span and indecipherable handwriting. Mom simply called me lazy. As long as I stayed silent and blended in, Mr. Holmes hardly noticed me, leaving me alone.
I loved cats. I copied every word from the "C" World Book Encyclopedia onto binder paper and made reports. I learned about cat history, breeds, and ringworm. I drew the cat's digestive system and colored it with crayons. I memorized all 27 bones in a paw. When I finished one cat report, I started another.
Mr. Holmes sliced open the envelope with his fingernail. Inside was a short note, but it took him forever to read.
Did Mom want another teacher conference? Different spelling words? Maybe it was true I’d flunk 4th grade like Brother said I would!
"Go to the office after lunch," he smirked.
Only bad kids went to the office, mean kids or kids with lice.
"I sure hope you're flosser, kid. You're going to the dentist this afternoon."
Mr. Holmes flashed a big, yellow grin. He wadded Mom's note, shot for the trash basket, and missed.
I couldn’t focus after that. I felt limp inside; even cats didn't excite me. I stared out the window at the towering pine, replaying my last dental visit.
It wasn't the needle the size of a drinking straw wiggling inside my jaw or the red-faced nurse who held me down. It wasn't the rubber dental dam stretched over my face while the dentist worked on a filling. I threw up in the dentist's chair because Mom came into the room and yelled at me for being scared.
When the bell rang, we lined up at the door with our lunch boxes and meal tickets. Single file, we marched to the cafeteria. I wanted to bolt, to run fast and far, across the playground, through the clover field, and over the chain-link fence to anywhere but a dental office.
But there was nowhere to run. By the time the lunch bell rang, Mom’s VW bug was already idling in the parking lot, her silhouette blurred behind a haze of smoke. She sat in our VW bug, smoking a cigarette, blowing rings out the wing. Her hair was teased so high it grazed the padded ceiling. When she noticed me through her haze, she took a drag and squished her cigarette in the ashtray.
Before I snapped my seatbelt, she gave me a Dixie cup of water and a blue pill.
"Swallow it," she said.
"What is it?"
"It's Valium. It's going to make your dental appointment a whole lot easier on all of us," she said.
To me, the tiny pill loomed in my palm like a Sweet Tart. I'd swallowed larger things before, bubble gum, M&Ms, even a Good N'Plenty once, but never intentionally.
How did Brother swallow pills? When he got a headache, Mom gave him an Actifed from her pillbox. He'd work up a mouthful of spit, swallow the pill whole, and move on.
Not me.
I tucked the blue demon under my tongue and sipped water, just as Mom said, nervous that nothing was happening. I sipped again, searching for a sign. And again, until my cheeks were full.
"Just swallow the damn thing," Mom said, turning the ignition.
When the pill dissolved somewhere on North Chester, I swallowed a mouthful of bitterness.
The dentist's office was next to Hillcrest Shopping Center off Niles Street.
I floated through the doorway behind Mom and landed on a lobby chair like a feather. The putrid smell of burning teeth didn't bother me, nor did the whine of the drill down the hallway. Jointed paper skeletons danced on the walls, and crepe paper bats dangled from the ceiling. Growing out of the floor, gigantic birds of paradise nestled among Boston ferns. Highlights, Ranger Rick, and The Bible Storybooks fanned across the glass table like a psychedelic rainbow.
The Bible Storybooks were my favorite. Everything I knew about God I learned twice a year in a dental office.
I drifted down the hallway behind a pretty nurse to room number three. While the dentist talked with Mom in the lobby, I relaxed in the dental chair and closed my eyes.
The next thing I remember, the dentist turned off the big light. He lowered my chair and told me to spit.
"We're all done," he said. "That wasn't so bad, now, was it?"
I couldn't feel my lips.
The dentist gave me a dental hygiene kit shaped like a white tooth. Inside was a pink toothbrush embossed with his name and phone number in gold, a tiny Crest toothpaste tube, and a blister pack of plaque-disclosing tablets. They were useless. I could brush for hours, and my teeth still looked magenta.
The nurse said I could pick a prize from the Good Little Patient Box behind the front counter. Inside were the usual fluorescent harmonicas, bouncy balls, and a couple of green paratroopers wrapped in parachutes. Because Halloween was less than a week away, plastic black widow spiders covered the prizes.
I loathed black widows.
I scooted the arachnids aside and reached for the bottom of the box, hoping to find something new, like a glittered pencil or a gaudy ring. Spider legs tickled my hand.
"Hurry up! We don't have all day," Mom said. She took her Virginia Slims out of her purse and fumbled for her matches.
I couldn't make up my mind.
"Why don't you get one of these?" Mom dangled a black widow by its leg and peered at it over her glasses. "This would look great in my new terrarium."
Mom's terrarium was our old guppy tank. It developed a crack, so Mom flushed the guppies and filled the tank with house plants. She called it an ecosystem.
I took too long deciding, so Mom took a fistful of black widows and stuffed them into her purse.
On the way home, my face felt like a giant marshmallow. Mom said the numbness would wear off, but the numbness I felt towards Mom would linger for years.
