The Tooth I Hid for Fourteen Years, and the Boy Who Made Me Fix It

The morning Sanele put his hand in mine

I am sixty-two years old and until this year I had been smiling with my mouth half closed for so long that I had forgotten I was doing it. You get used to a thing. You teach your face a new habit and after a while the habit becomes the only face you own. Somewhere around my forties a back tooth on the left side went soft and then went altogether, and I decided the gap was my private business and nobody else's. I live in Durban, in a flat in Overport with the bus noise coming up off the road, and for fourteen years that gap and I kept each other's secrets.

Then my daughter Thandi took work on the ships. Big cruise liners, months at a time, a good wage sent home and a voice on the phone that crackles from somewhere near Italy. She left me her son. Sanele was four when he came to stay properly, and he is six now, and he is the reason I am writing any of this down at all, because a child changes the arithmetic of your whole life. Suddenly it was not just me and my quiet gap. It was school lunches and bath time and a small warm body that climbs into my bed when the thunder comes in off the sea.

The morning this story really begins, we were sitting in a waiting room and he put his hand in mine. His whole hand disappeared inside mine and he squeezed, and he looked up at me with those enormous frightened eyes, and I realised I was more scared than he was. That is the thing nobody warns you about being a gogo raising a little one. You have to be the brave one even when your own knees are water.

How I ended up in that chair myself

I should go back a little. Before Sanele's visit there was mine, because the whole business started in my own mouth.

My gums had been talking to me for a long time and I had been pretending not to hear. There was blood in the basin when I brushed. There was a soreness along the bottom row, a looseness that frightened me in a way I would not admit even to myself. I told myself it was age. I told myself everyone's mouth goes soft eventually and you simply learn to chew on the good side. But one night I bit into a slice of pawpaw, soft sweet pawpaw that should trouble no one, and the pain went up through my jaw like a wire, and I sat at my kitchen table at eleven at night and finally said out loud to the empty room, enough.

My neighbour Fikile, who knows everything about everybody, told me I did not want an ordinary check-up for this, I wanted a gum person, a periodontist, and she said it the way she says the names of specialists, with great importance, as though the longer the word the more serious she is being. I wrote it on the back of an electricity slip and I carried that slip in my handbag for three weeks before I was brave enough to telephone.

The surgery smelled the way all of them smell. That clean sharp smell that sits at the very top of your nose and makes your stomach drop before anyone has touched you. I sat in the chair and I was embarrassed in a way I had not been embarrassed in years, because here was a stranger looking right into the private place I had hidden from everyone, the gap, the soreness, the fourteen years of neglect laid open under a bright light. I wanted to apologise. I think I actually did apologise, as if my mouth were a messy house and I had not had time to tidy before a guest arrived.

Nobody scolded me. That surprised me most. I had braced for a telling-off like a schoolgirl and instead there was just quiet, careful attention, and a plan, and a sense that the thing could be dealt with step by step rather than all at once.

The boy and the thing he dreaded

Now, Sanele. His own trouble came from a sweet tooth and a stubborn streak, a bad combination in a small person. One of his back baby teeth had gone dark and he had started eating only on one side, exactly the way I did, and when I saw him doing my own trick I felt something cold go through me. I was teaching him my bad habits without saying a single word. Children copy what you do, not what you tell them.

I knew a grown person's rooms would frighten him, so I asked around for a kids dentist, somewhere used to small ones and their big fears. The week before the visit was a campaign. I did not lie to him, because Thandi and I agreed long ago that we do not lie to the boy, but I did dress the truth in its Sunday clothes. I told him the chair goes up and down like a ride. I told him there would be a special light. I let him practice opening his mouth wide as a hippo in the bathroom mirror, and he roared, and we laughed, and for a moment he forgot to be afraid.

The fear came back in the waiting room, of course it did. That is when he put his hand in mine. There was a fish tank bubbling in the corner and a basket of toys that had seen better days, and a little girl crying softly somewhere down the passage, which did nothing for either of us. He asked me, in that small voice, whether it would hurt, and I did the hardest thing a grandmother does. I did not promise him it wouldn't. I told him I would be right there and I would not let go of his hand, and that was a promise I could actually keep. When they called his name he looked at me and I nodded and we walked in together, my hand swallowing his, both of us pretending to be braver than we were. He was so good. He cried a little at the end but he was so good, and in the car afterwards he was proud of himself in a way that made my chest ache.

Vanity is not only a young woman's sin

Here is the part I am almost ashamed to write. All through those months of looking after his small fear, I was quietly nursing a large vanity of my own.

Once my gums were settled and strong again, the specialist raised the matter of the old gap, the one I had kept secret for fourteen years. He spoke about dental implants as a way to fill the empty space properly, and I heard myself say I would think about it, in the polite voice you use when you mean no. I told myself I was too old. I told myself who looks at a woman of sixty-two, who cares what the back of my smile looks like, it is vanity and vanity is for the young.

But I kept thinking about Thandi coming home from the ships. I kept thinking about standing at the airport arrivals with Sanele on my hip, and how I wanted to smile at my daughter with my whole face and not the careful half-smile I had worn for fourteen years. I wanted to laugh properly at Christmas. I wanted, if I am honest, to be a whole person again and not a woman managing a gap.

So I did it. It took time and it took patience and it was not nothing, but one ordinary Durban afternoon I walked out with the space filled, and I sat in my car in the parking lot and I looked in the little mirror and I cried. Not from pain. From something closer to grief, grief for all the years I had spent hiding, and underneath the grief a small fierce gladness. Sixty-two is not too old to stop hiding. There is a quiet dignity in fixing a thing late, in deciding that the time left is still worth showing up for with your whole face.

What the boy taught the gogo

Sanele does not know any of this. To him I am just Gogo, the one who makes the morning porridge too hot and sings the wrong words to his songs on purpose to make him groan. He does not know that his small hand in mine in that waiting room was the thing that finally shamed me, gently, into tending to myself.

But I know. I know that I spent fourteen years teaching my face to hide, and that a frightened six-year-old, without meaning to, taught it to open again. We go together for our check-ups now, the two of us, and he holds my hand in the waiting room and I hold his, and neither of us is quite sure who is being brave for whom. That is how it should be, I think. The old look after the young and the young, without even knowing it, look after the old. And when Thandi comes home off the ships, I am going to be standing at that airport smiling with everything I have.