Longtime readers may remember Dentist Chick, but here’s the short version for those too lazy to remember and/or click the link: a girl I went to high school with started working at my dentist’s office, and she was into me, big-time. To a shrine-in-the-closet degree that would creep me out if she weren’t so fucking hot. I flirted with the idea of asking her out, knowing full well it wouldn’t be much more than a one- or two-night stand, and then I found out she had a kid. That made things difficult for me because, well… I have what the therapeutic community calls “rescuer tendencies,” and usually a single mother with a dead-end job has the sort of emotional baggage that attracts me.
It’s difficult, though, because every six months, I have this woman throwing herself at me, desperately wishing I’d just fucking ask her out already. And she’s really fucking hot. Do you realize what a rarity this is in the curmudgeonly world of Stan? Tragically, it’s not as rare as you’d think, but it’s always unwanted attention that leaves me feeling awkward, and the end result is hilarious alienation of the other party.
Not so with Dentist Chick, however. It’s a little easier because we have an infrequent, business-oriented relationship. She can flirt with me all she wants, but eventually she has to get back to the billing and scheduling, and that’s my cue to run out the door before I either demand sex or try to offer protection against memories of her abusive stepfather. Yeah, it’s weird being me.
Things went awry when I started experiencing a comically debilitating cold sensitivity on a lower front tooth. It was one of those things where a light breeze would cause extensive, blinding pain. I let it ride for a couple of weeks before calling the dentist, because I’m just that kind of guy. Guess who answered the phone?
“[Dentist’s] office, this is [Dentist Chick],” she said.
What the hell do I do with that? Do I go into suave ladies’ man mode and drop my name right off the bat, or do I keep pretending this is strictly a formal relationship?
I opted for the latter: “I need to make an appointment to see the dentist.”
I explained the symptoms, and she found an appointment that week and asked for my name.
“I, uh… It’s Stan,” I said sheepishly.
“Oh, hey!” she said gleefully, shedding her professional air. “How are you?”
“I’m awesome, except for this tooth.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Yeah. So, I’ll…see you tomorrow?”
“I get off at four.” (My appointment was at 5:30.)
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“Well, I hope you feel better.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
And that was pretty much it.
I went in for the appointment, and the dentist had a hard time identifying which tooth was the source of the sensitivity. X-rays showed my teeth were as good as a fucked-up set of chompers can be — nothing glaringly diseased. He sent me to an endodontist for clarification, which was a bizarre experience in and of itself, but the end result was narrowing down the correct tooth but no root cause (no pun intended, I swear). The endodontist shrugged that I should probably ride it out. In his expert opinion, if it got better, it’d go away altogether. If it got worse, I could just as easily have a root canal in two weeks as I could that day. He seemed cranky that he couldn’t identify a cause, being that this was his wheelhouse.
So I let it ride. This was three weeks ago. Last week, I took a vacation to see my sister and her adorable baby. By the time I went out there, not much had changed except I’d gotten better at avoiding cold liquids and foods, which made it seem like the sensitivity was going away. Not so, as my many forgetful cold-water tooth-brushings attested. I decided, if it wasn’t gone by the time I got home, I’d call for the root canal. I dreaded the cost more than the procedure, so I really wanted to put it off if at all possible.
But I got back home, and holy fuck was it ever not going away. I called the dentist and scheduled the root canal (this time, Dentist Chick did not answer).
I went in for the root canal today, and there was Dentist Chick, eagerly greeting me like a faithful lapdog I want to have sex with.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Stan,” she said warmly. “Come on back.”
At which point confusion overpowered me. I shit you not, the four or five times I’d seen her at the dentist’s office, she’d been sitting behind the big desk with all the computers and files. I’d never seen her do anything beyond reception, scheduling, and billing. Was she giving me some sort of personal touch (so to speak…?) because we went to school together? Or —
She showed me to the chair and started prepping little matchsticks with that goopy numbing agent they apply before jabbing you full of lidocaine. “I hope you like the taste of artificial raspberries,” she joked. It was actually pretty funny — she was blowing my plans not to try to sleep with her by being witty. I was still confused. Did she have training? Had she volunteered to assist because she knew me? Was this a random assignation? I NEED ANSWERS!
She gave answers. I swear to you, she talked like she was setting up exposition in the early scenes of a horribly written screenplay. She said things like (actual quote), “We used to listen to [radio station] every day when I worked in physical therapy for four years.” Ladling on as much personal information as she possibly could…to what end? Just being friendly?
Eventually she said, “I told you I have a three-year-old, right?”
Now, we’ve been Facebook friends for awhile, but I didn’t want to let on too much. Her profile itself doesn’t say anything about the kid, but she has tons of pictures of him — all of which I waded through, looking for ones of her in bikinis and hot Halloween costumes. (No, female readers, I am not a despicable alien creature. I’m just a guy.) I took a beat before saying, “No, you didn’t. That’s awesome!” Too much enthusiasm, Stan! Come on, break it down!
She saw my enthusiasm and raised me: “I have a recent picture of him. I just brought them to work today.” Coincidence? Probably. But what about her literal sprint across the busy dental office to grab a picture to show me? I could tell the luster had sort of worn off the kid himself — she referred to him as a “vampire” and made numerous jokes about his pallid skin and creepy teeth after I cheerfully lied about how cute he is — so this felt like it was about her bringing me into her life. It really did feel like she wanted to jam every moment of the last 10 years into the few minutes we waited for my jaw to go numb.
Then things got even weirder. She asked me about a beloved teacher we shared in high school. I told her the last I’d heard, he and his wife retired to upstate New York (where he grew up). That had passed about 10 minutes earlier, but when the dentist returned to test the numbness, she pointedly brought up the teacher again, expressing surprise about his retirement plans, and then even-more-pointedly explained our shared past to the hilarious disinterested dentist.
What was this dance? Why did I feel like the only way to make it stop was to ask her out? Why did I spend the rest of the time plotting how to ask her out without humiliating myself as a result of the numbed-up jaw? (The end result: I need to return next week for him to fill the root canal, for some reason, but it’s a boon for me. The procedure requires much less numbness, which will allow me to slide in for a quick ask-out with minimal embarrassment. That’s right: the war room has planned a new campaign.) All this, despite the fact that I know the kid thing spells bad news, I know I can’t do one-night stands without dragging them out for months, I know I’m not really in a good financial or emotional place to start anything resembling a relationship, and I suspect she’s already invested more in this not-yet-in-existence relationship than I ever will.
What is my obsession with careening toward failure, knowing it’s coming but still making that retarded headlong leap in its direction? Look at me, right here: I am stating emphatically that I know this is a disaster waiting to happen, probably the worst thing for both of us right now, yet I’m still scheming and intending to go for it. Such is the power of the penis.
One of my friends got a short story published in a little horror magazine. It’s from the point of view of a little girl who’s a little too sheltered and innocent to realize how fucked up her mother is. Gradually, as the story unfolds, you realize the mother is fucked up beyond all hope, and that this little girl is not a girl at all: in infancy, the mother heated a skillet until it was red-hot and burned off her “tail,” an act she planned to repeat on the girl’s new sister. For those who aren’t into subtlety, the tail was…A PENIS.
I wish I had that a mother like that.
Posted by Stan on March 25, 2010 8:47 PM