330
RICHARD STERN
In her entire life, there were very few times she'd gone out
with
half-decent men. She'd come to think that perhaps it didn't matter,
that she could make it without a man.
If
only people would stop
pressuring her. Thousands of small pressures: salesgirls calling her
Mrs. when she bought her father's birthday shirts; people being
introduced to her at parties; being the extra girl and getting tied up
with the miserable extra man, more miserable when he saw her;
the hundreds and hundreds of seH-pitying hours in her two rooms,
Jack Paar jabbering maniacally on the twelve-inch screen while
she shared him with
Middlemarch,
its pages stained with the peanut
butter she sometimes supposed was more faithful to her than any
person on earth.
She had yens, God knows, though not as many as two-bit
Freudians would think. She'd even had a little experience, a summer
at Truro where her six feet and impressive learning had substituted
for a movie star's chest and model's face. There'd even been a
marriage proposal, from a Wyoming historian at the American
Historical meetings in '58. It turned out that he wanted introductions
to the scholarly Big Chiefs at Chicago. At least, though, it was on
the books, her chance at the middle-class nirvana.
As
Hobbie's big-beaked, sandy face, a good-hearted parrot's,
leaned over her open mouth, even that first day, Miss Wilmott felt
a kind of root tremble in her heart. A sweet man, a poor troubled
fellow. Not a cretin either, though naive and uncultured. In dentistry,
he was actually a scholar, full of the history of instruments, surgical
procedures, technical advances. He spent weekends reading the
journals, and while Dr. Grant was in A.D.A. executive sessions, he
listened to papers. He was so enamored of his profession that she
began to pick up toothy tidbits for him, things she'd come upon in her
ubiquitous browsing in the stacks.
"Ever read ahhh Poe's Ber-ahhh-niece?"
"Nope. Spit out, Miss Wilmott."
Then, after rinsing with the sweet, violet water, "It's about a
man so insanely fond of teeth that he breaks open his former fiancee's
grave ahhh, pulls out all her teeth ahhh and keeps them in a box."
"Oh, my Lord," eyes furry with astonishment. "And I thought
I liked teeth. Little wider there, Miss Double-V."
Miss Wilmott read the
Britannica
on Teeth and Dentistry, soaked
