The Twins Came to Live With Me, and So Did Their Toothache

Two Small Suitcases and One Big Question

The twins arrived at my house in Pretoria East on a Sunday afternoon in February, each carrying a small blue suitcase and a plastic bag of toys. Their mother, my daughter Palesa, had taken a contract job on a cruise ship for eighteen months, the kind of money she could not say no to, and their father has not been part of the picture for a long time. So it was me. I was sixty-three, retired from twenty-eight years as a school secretary, and I had assumed my days of packing lunchboxes were finished.

Lerato and Lesedi are seven. They are identical to strangers and completely different to anyone who spends five minutes with them. Lerato talks from the moment she opens her eyes. Lesedi watches, and keeps his feelings somewhere behind his ribs where you have to go looking for them.

The first weeks were chaos. I had forgotten how many socks children need. I had forgotten that a seven-year-old can go from perfectly fine to sobbing on the floor about a crayon in the space of one sentence. I had forgotten how tired a body gets. But we found a rhythm, mostly built around the school run and a firm bedtime and a lot of pap with mince.

The Note in the Homework Book

In April a note came home in Lesedi's homework book. His teacher wrote that he had been holding his jaw in class and had not eaten his lunch for three days. She wondered, politely, whether he might have a toothache.

I was mortified. Three days, and I had not noticed. When I asked him at supper, he shrugged and said it was "only a bit sore", and when I made him open his mouth under the kitchen light, I saw a back tooth that had gone grey with a dark hole in it. He had not said a word. That is Lesedi.

Palesa, on a crackly WhatsApp call from somewhere near Madeira, cried and apologised. She said they had not been to a dentist since before Covid because money had been tight. I told her to stop apologising and enjoy her boat, and then I sat on the edge of the bath after the call and felt very old.

The Waiting Room With the Fish Tank

I asked the other gogos at the school gate, which is the best information network in South Africa, and two of them mentioned the same practice. I phoned and asked for a kids dentist, because I remembered how my own children had screamed in the chair of a grumpy old man in Arcadia in the eighties, and I did not want that for Lesedi.

The waiting room had a fish tank. Lesedi stood in front of it for twenty minutes without blinking, which for him is a kind of joy. Lerato came along "for support", which meant she told the receptionist our entire family history.

The dentist was a young woman who sat on a low stool so she was at Lesedi's height and asked him what the fish were called. He told her they did not have names. She suggested he name one. He chose "Captain". By the time she asked to look in his mouth, he opened it like he was showing her something interesting.

The tooth was a baby tooth, which was a relief, and it needed to come out. She explained everything to him first, in plain words, and let him hold the little mirror. He did not cry. Lerato cried, in the waiting room, from sympathy. They both got stickers.

The Question She Asked Me on the Way Out

As we were leaving, while I was paying, the dentist came to the front desk and said something I did not expect. She said she had noticed me pressing my tongue to my gum on the left side while we were in the room, and she wondered whether I was having trouble myself.

I laughed it off. I said I was fine. Then I drove home and stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a long time.

The truth was that my gums had been bleeding when I brushed for over two years. Since my husband, Thabo, passed. One of my bottom teeth on the left had started to feel loose, like a fence post after rain. I had told myself it was age. I had told myself I had more important things to worry about, first grief, then the funeral costs, then the house, and now two seven-year-olds. Every time I tasted blood in the basin I spat and rinsed and decided to think about it later.

Later Arrived

It was Lerato who pushed me in the end. She saw me spitting blood one morning and asked, with her usual volume, whether I was dying. I said no. She said, "Then why don't you go to the fish tank dentist?" and I could not think of an answer that would satisfy a seven-year-old.

So I went. The general dentist I saw looked carefully and then said that what was happening was in the gums and the bone rather than the teeth themselves, and that I should see a periodontist, which is a specialist in exactly that. I had never heard the word. I went home and wrote it on the fridge whiteboard under the twins' spelling words, and Lesedi read it out loud that evening and asked if it was a dinosaur.

The specialist did not lecture me, which I had been dreading. She explained what gum disease does, slowly and without making me feel stupid, and she told me that grief and stress do real things to the body, including the mouth. That sentence undid me a little. I had not thought of my gums as part of mourning Thabo. But of course they were. Everything was.

The Tooth I Could Not Save

There were several months of treatment. Deep cleaning, more appointments than I would have liked, a new way of brushing that I had to practise like a child, and a little brush for between the teeth that the twins found hilarious and wanted to borrow.

The loose tooth could not be saved. I was sadder about that than I expected to be. It was only a tooth. But it had been in my mouth since I was about the twins' age, and losing it felt like losing a small, faithful thing.

When we talked about what to do with the gap, I asked about dental implants, mostly because a woman at church had one and could eat corn on the cob again. The specialist was honest that it was a process, that my gums had to be healthy first, and that it would take time. It took most of a year. I had more patience for it than I would have had at forty, I think, because the twins had taught me that most important things happen slowly and then all at once.

The Corn Party

The implant was finished in December, two weeks before Palesa came home.

To celebrate, I made the twins a promise that we would have a corn party, all three of us, on the stoep. I boiled six mealies, buttered them, salted them, and we sat in a row on the step eating them in the evening heat, with butter running down our chins. Lerato kept score of who finished first. Lesedi ate his very slowly, watching me. When I had finished mine down to the cob, he said, quietly, "Your tooth works, Gogo."

Palesa arrived on the twentieth, thinner and browner and full of stories. The twins showed her Lesedi's gap where the baby tooth had been, which by then had a new tooth coming through, and Lerato told her, at length, about the fish tank and Captain.

They went home with her in January. The house is quiet now. I keep the little between-the-teeth brushes in a cup on the basin, three of them, though only one of us lives here. I cannot quite bring myself to throw the small ones away.