The Peach Pip That Interrupted My Own Set

I have sung at more weddings than I can count. Three hundred, maybe four. For about twelve years now my weekends belong to other people's happiest days, and I have made my peace with the strange life of it, the loading in at four, the sound check nobody listens to, the first dance where I watch a couple sway and feel genuinely moved for strangers I will never see again. My face is part of the job. People are looking at me while they eat their starters. I smile for a living, really, as much as I sing for one.

Which is why what happened at the Steyn wedding was almost funny, in a way that was not funny at all at the time.

A bite between songs

We were between sets. The band was eating in a side room off the hall, the way we always do, grabbing whatever the caterers can spare before the dancing starts. There was a fruit platter. I took a slice of peach, or what I thought was a clean slice of peach, and I bit down, and there was a sound inside my own head like a small dry branch snapping, and a flash of something that was not quite pain yet but was clearly on its way.

A pip. A piece of peach pip, hard as a stone, right where my front teeth met. I ran my tongue over the spot and felt the edge, a rough diagonal where smooth enamel should have been. The corner of my top front tooth was gone.

I had forty-five minutes until the second set. The first dance. The father-daughter song the bride's dad had requested in a quiet voice three weeks earlier. And I was standing in a caterer's side room with a chipped front tooth, running my tongue over it like a child worrying a loose one, feeling the whole night tilt.

Smiling with my mouth closed

I got through it. Of course I got through it. The show does not stop for a tooth. But I sang that entire second set with a new and horrible self-consciousness, trying to shape words without fully opening my mouth, which if you have ever tried it is the enemy of singing. I kept my top lip doing a strange careful thing. In the photographs from that night, which the couple kindly sent me later, I am smiling in every one with my lips pressed together like a woman hiding a secret, because I was.

Nobody noticed. That is the thing I have to keep reminding people when I tell this story. Nobody at that wedding noticed a thing. The tooth was a catastrophe that existed entirely inside my own mouth and my own head. But a singer's confidence lives in the face, and mine had cracked along with the enamel.

The weeks of the closed-mouth smile

I let it go for longer than I should have. I told myself it was small. I told myself I would sort it out in the quiet season. But the quiet season is a myth in my line of work, there is always another booking, and meanwhile the closed-mouth smile was becoming a habit. I caught myself doing it in the queue at the shops. In photos with my own family. I started turning my head slightly in conversation so the light would not catch the chip, a small constant choreography of hiding that was exhausting in a way I did not clock until it stopped.

My sister finally called it out. We were having coffee and I said something funny, or thought I did, and she said, why do you laugh like that now, with your hand half up. I did not even know I was doing it. She made me show her the tooth. She said, go and get it fixed, you sing for money, your mouth is your instrument, this is like a guitarist ignoring a cracked neck.

She was right, and I hated that she was right, because getting it fixed meant admitting I cared about how I looked, and there is a vanity shame that comes with that, especially for a woman who likes to think she sings from somewhere deeper than her face.

Finding someone I trusted with the front of my face

I was fussy about who I let near it. This was not a filling at the back that only I would ever know about. This was the first thing three hundred guests a year would see. I asked around among the other singers and the MCs and the photographers, the people in my world whose faces are also their work, and a photographer I have worked with for years said she had gone to a Sandton dentist after knocking her own tooth on a lens cap, of all things, and that they had been careful with her in exactly the way I was describing wanting.

I am based in Johannesburg, so a practice in Sandton was easy enough to get to between bookings. What I needed was not just any competent Dentist in Sandton but someone who understood that the repair had to be invisible, that the whole point was for nobody to ever know, the way nobody at the Steyn wedding knew. I did not want a tooth that looked fixed. I wanted a tooth that looked like it had never been anything but mine.

The appointment I almost cancelled twice

I will admit I hovered over the cancel button more than once. Not from fear of pain. From a sillier place. From the feeling that I was being precious about a corner of a tooth when there are real problems in the world. But my sister's guitar-neck line kept coming back to me. You would not tell a guitarist to play a cracked instrument and be grateful it still made a sound.

The person who did the work turned out to specialise in exactly this, the quiet cosmetic repairs that are supposed to disappear, and I learned more from that chair about what a Cosmetic Dentist actually does than I ever expected to care about. It is not, it turns out, about making teeth whiter than a bathroom tile, which was my cartoon idea of it. It is closer to what a good framer or a good restorer does, matching a repair so precisely to what is already there that the eye slides right over it. They built the corner back up in layers, shaping and checking, shaping and checking, holding up a mirror now and then, and the person doing it was as fussy as I was, which is the only thing that would have satisfied me.

The first wedding after

The real test came the following Saturday. A big one, four hundred guests, a bride who had planned every second. I did the sound check. I ate nothing with a pip in it, I can promise you that, I have a whole new relationship with fruit platters now. And when the first dance came and the couple stepped onto the floor and I leaned into the microphone, I opened my mouth all the way, the way I used to before the peach, the way a person opens their mouth when they have forgotten to be afraid of it.

I did not think about my tooth once that whole night. Not once. And that, I have come to understand, is the entire point of the thing. The repair was good enough to be forgotten, and being able to forget it gave me back something I had not realised I had been carrying, a small tax on every smile for the better part of a year.

The couple sent me their photos a month later, the way they do. I am laughing in most of them, properly, mouth open, mid-note, hand nowhere near my face. My sister saw them and said nothing, which from my sister is the loudest praise there is.

I still cannot look at a peach without a flinch of memory. But I sing with my whole face again. And on the bad nights, the long load-outs, the drives home at one in the morning, I remind myself that the instrument is working, all of it, the voice and the face both, and that letting someone fix the small cracked corner of it was not vanity at all. It was just taking care of the thing I make my living with.