TEETH
331
up tooth lore, began to think in tooth metaphors, and felt the root
tremble in her heart whenever Dr. Hobbie leaned over to pass a
steel shaft beneath her strong, white crowns. "There's a tribe called
the Ndembu in Rhodesia which has a tooth ceremony called the
Ihamba, ahhh. They pull out the premolar incisor and their troubles
are supposed to come out with it. Then they have a tooth dance."
"That's really something. Not much longer now. Good girl.
Where do you find such things out?"
She puffed her cheeks with the violet water and spat as daintily
as possible into the bowl's soft whirlpool. "Periodicals."
"Periodicals?"
"Magazines. That was in the ahhh
Rhodes-Livingstone Journal
last month." Into her mouth and out, a silvery tool. "Dahhhhh."
"Just a little bit more now. There we are, almost out. I envy
you book people. Myself, I can't . .. here we are," holding up an
enamel needle bloodied with nerved dentine. "That's the old trouble
maker. I think you're going to be all right for a while now."
"I might as well get everything cleaned up, Dr. Hobbie.
As
long as I'm making real progress. I'd miss my visit anyway."
With the hand that held the silver forceps in which her trouble–
maker lay, he brushed the soft tip of his beak back and forth, as if to
sniff out a proper response. "Might work a little on that back bite then
if you really want to go ahead and spend the money. It'll run you
thirteen, fourteen dollars." He opened the child's notebook in which
he entered all appointments and payments. "That'll be three-fifty
today, and we'll set you down for next Thursday. Four-fifteen, o.k.,
right after Mr. Givens. He's my other book patient."
Thursday, she came a few minutes early and sat on the kitchen
chair listening to Dr. Hobbie tell Mr. Givens that he had this fine
teacher from the University coming right in, he wanted Mr. Givens
to meet her.
At 4: 14 the door opened, you never had to wait, and a short,
good-looking Negro of forty, dressed in house painter's stained cover–
alls, was introduced to her by Dr. Hobbie and said he was very glad
to meet her, was she a Marxist like the other teachers up there at
the University? and to her "I'm afraid not," said he was disappointed,
he having been a Marxist for twenty years, the Manifester and the
Working Day being his favorite books of
all
time.
