How to Brush Teeth
If you’ve never brushed someone else’s teeth for them before, here’s how it goes: First, they have to pull their jaw open really wide because ideally you want to be able to put your index finger into their mouth alongside the brush to guide it carefully. Then, you lift up the top lip with your left hand and start scrubbing with the right. Always start at the back and work your way around beginning with the outside top because that’s the hardest to reach. Next is inside top then outside bottom and finally inside bottom. Piece of cake. I am sitting in an airport terminal, my mother’s head resting in my lap, staring up at a small grey bird that has built a nest in a rafter and thinking about my father’s teeth. I can picture them perfectly. The silvery, flat molars, the pointed incisors, all lined up neatly like toy soldiers. For someone his age, his teeth are quite extraordinary. All straight and perfectly healthy. It’s the rest of him that’s a mess. This morning we received a call from my sister who had received a call from a nurse who had said that my father’s lungs were failing and we should come home now if we “wanted to be there.”
He has been sick for a long time. For the past two years, he has lived at the Hamptons Center. (To clarify: I’m talking about the one in Southampton, which is a hospice, not the one in East Hampton, which is a squash club and spa.) He was diagnosed with early onset dementia when I was nine. Back then only his short term memory was affected and he could get around rather well, with a few slips.
Around this time I started to keep a journal of how many times a day he would ask the same question. I was an obsessive type kid that way, always making lists of things, words I liked, baby names, boys I had kissed, boys I intended to kiss. I once wrote down every time I heard someone hiccup for an entire year, which adds up to a lot when you are nine. On my dad’s chart I would put the question he had asked in a box on the left, usually a variation on “Where’s mom?” and then in an adjacent box would mark a tally for each repeated time. Most were somewhere between eight and eleven, but one of the fuller days had as many as twenty nine. I didn’t do this to be helpful. I never showed them to anyone. I knew they would make my mom sad. If anything, it gave me a kind of fucked up pleasure to know in a pen and paper way that there was something wrong with him.
Pretty soon, he would need more looking after. My mom would stay home a lot. She would start growing tomatoes in the house. Only a few at first, and then more until they began to spill out of the guest room and down the hall and the humidity clung to the walls. My dad would wander around while she worked, plucking the ripe ones off the vines and eating them.
In High School, my mom would pass him off to me in the afternoons so she could run errands and “get out of this fucking jungle.” I remember the look of fear that would flicker in his face when I first walked through the door and how he was starting to forget bigger things. I learned to walk more slowly. I learned to say “Hi daddy,” loud before coming into the house, to smile friendly.
I learned small tricks. Ways of reminding him that he knew me. Sometimes he would. Sometimes he would call me my sisters names. Sometimes he wouldn’t. We got along pretty well either way. I, fourteen and the babysitter, would make cereal with bananas for dinner. We would eat standing up in the kitchen. I would watch South Park with the volume on loud in the living room which my dad actually loved because he thought the voices were funny. He would imitate whatever character was speaking in little squeaks and growls. We would fall asleep watching.
*****
For the last year before I left, I would brush his teeth every night. It was something I had started doing when my mom would go away for the weekend and found that it was something we both liked. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t do it himself as that he wouldn’t do it himself because he’d rather do other things. Like hide bananas around the house or tape quarters to the door of the refrigerator.
As I said, when brushing someone’s teeth, there is a protocol and we both knew it backwards. It had become such a ritual, he barely seemed to notice I was there. At bedtime, I would find him perched on the stool in the bathroom, mouth agape, waiting. I didn’t even have to say Open Up! The perfect patient. I liked to imagine myself as a one of the little plover birds that clean the mouth of crocodiles. First: the floss. Now, to get the right angle basically requires you to be seated directly in front of the other person and close up. You have to kind of get in their face too because thats where the teeth are. And, with little else to do, they are more or less obliged to stare into your eyes while you brush. Sometimes, when the mood strikes, you can pull horrible faces and they have to try to keep their mouth open while laughing. Sometimes they manage it. Sometimes they don’t and they have to spit and you have to start over. Sometimes, if theres a spot in the back that really needs work, you will put your left hand on the back of their head while you scrub so the force of it doesn’t shake them around too much. But you don’t have to do this often. And, though I can’t say exactly what it was, it was always right after brushing that he became the most lucid and then he could have a sort of conversation. He would spit and smile into the mirror and I’d say something like:
“How are you feeling? Good?” and he’d say something like: “yup yup yup.”
“I love the taste”
“What? The toothpaste?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Can I have more?”
“Um, no.”
“Oh.”
“Ya.”
“Do you want some water?”
“No. I like having the taste in my mouth.”
“Okay. Well, Are you tired?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yup, yup, yup.”
“Do you want to go to bed?”
“Yup, yup, yup.”
“Goodnight. I love you.”
“Yup Yup Yup.”
He liked to say things three times. Rhythms were important to him and he would make them with everything. Fingers, fists, forks, but more creative things too. He found that opening and closing the freezer while stamping his feet produced a satisfying beat something like a march. This was a big one. We had to get the freezer door fixed a few times. He learned he could position the dog in front of the water cooler and then shake a toy in front of him to hear the gong sound of his tail hitting into it as it wagged. Our house became a kind of wild instrument for his songs. The nurses call him “a tapper.”
Together we would tap little songs on the sink with our fingernails and it was in these moments that he’d really look at you, stare even. Not like he did usually, as if from behind glass. And he was responsive. If you messed up the beat he would scoff and give you a very questioning sidelong glance. You could make a face like you were sizing him up. You could poke his arms and he would lift them up and flex his muscles which were big and strong and young because he was big and strong and young even though you forgot that a lot.
His illness had made him seem soft, softer than he had been before, like a bruise. And the weirdest part was how it was almost impossible to remember him having been another way. Like how impossible to imagine what English sounds like to someone who doesn't speak it. Something, once familiar, can’t be made unfamiliar again. The feeling is difficult and cloying and strange, like trying to push melted butter back into shape.
*****
I left home before he did but not by much. He was moved out of our house into a small, badly lit room with loud neighbors who had lost their minds and the joke goes like: the same thing had happened to me. When I was home for the holidays I would go to the hospital and sit with him for hours. His was a wing far in the back that didn’t get many visitors but the staff knew me well. They knew my birthday and my boyfriend and eventually they gave me the access code for the service door so I wouldn’t have to sign in and out. Mostly, my visits were uneventful. I would bring him bananas and he always would eat the whole bunch in a row which was kind of gross but he seemed hungry and I thought he deserved to do gross stuff if he wanted to. I always called him “daddy,” when I was with him, both because that was just what he was called and because I really wanted him to know that I wasn’t a nurse.
His room, bright and charmless with a small bolted window, had photos of me and my sisters on the walls. There were photos of his sculptures and of our house. There was a watercolor portrait of my mother but younger. There were tomato plants in pots in the corner. There were take-out menus on the windowsill for the nights when we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave. These were always the same. I would stay late. I would say I had lost track of time. The nurses would bring in a cot but it was never opened. I would fold myself into that tight, curved space between his torso and the bed railing, our thumbs wrapped together. I would arrange the pillows so my head was lined up with his shoulder and I could rest my head on him I liked which I did like. We would lie like this and I would talk to him. I would talk even though he didn’t like to talk back. I would tell him about an idea I had for a restaurant on a barge that you can only get to by swimming or boat. I would tell him about a movie I saw where a guy trained his dog to do his laundry. I would tell him about my sister being a real dick all the time and didn’t he remember how she used to throw tantrums at the airport. One time, when I was talking too much and he wanted to sleep, he pulled off his socks, balled them up, and tried to stick them in my mouth to muffle the noise. This was “goodnight” and it made both of us laugh and it made me feel like everything was going to be the same for a little while longer. But it wouldn't be. Soon he stopped flexing his muscles when I poked his arms. They were as thin now as mine. In the morning, someone would come in to brush his teeth. She would wear gloves. She would not hold the back of his head when they scrubbed.
*****
After, I wondered if the woman I saw brushing his teeth was the same one who called my sister. Probably not, but maybe. I also re-watched all of South Park. I tried to imitate the voices and mostly couldn’t. At the time, I thought that this was a meaningful thing to do but I guess no one ever really knows with these things. We do the things that occur to us to do and not the other things. He taught me that.
I don’t want to say that it’s hard because it’s not. But sometimes that’s just what you say when there isn’t a really clear way of describing it. Like in school when people ask how you’re doing you just say “it’s been hard” even though a lot of the time it is actually soft, liquid even.