Edentate Explanations

My mother had dentures before she had babies. I didn’t realize this until I asked her once, when she was in her fifties, why she never openly smiled in any of the few pictures taken of her when she was young. In each of them she offers the same wide but tight-lipped smile, whether as a teenager in chestnut braids, a clear-eyed nursing school graduate, or a youthful missionary in Nigeria. “I had terrible teeth,” she told me. “That’s why I never really smiled. But I had them all out and replaced with dentures the year before I met your Dad.”

My father himself later confided to me that he had been startled to discover one morning, shortly after they were married, teeth floating in a glass beside their nuptial bed. “I practically jumped out of my skin,” he said. He swore he’d had no idea about her false teeth when he proposed, but he and she together hid the dentures from us unsuspecting kids until we were mostly in our early teens. As her firstborn and as a child whose own teeth were slow to come in, I sometimes now reconsider the photos of my mother and I in my infancy, the beaming, toothless baby on the lap of the beaming, secretly toothless new mom.

Before I knew how early she’d begun wearing dentures, I had liked to think that the sudden appearance of more radiant smiles had something to do with the appearance of my father, marriage, and motherhood in her thirties. I was sort of hoping that, when I asked her about the close-mouthed early pictures, her response would include a phrase along the lines of, “but then I met your father and things have been much happier since. Now I can really smile.”

But no. It was simply the case of a shy girl raised during the Great Depression by a widowed mother with nine other children, subsisting on a hardscrabble New England farm. Dental hygiene was the least of their worries, and by the time she went away to boarding school at fourteen, the quiet girl with the abundant head of hair and pretty eyes had already had more than a few carious teeth pulled, in lieu of actual dentistry. From there she just got shyer, until she had a fresh set of pearlies put in, and then she smiled. That was it.

Or was it? My mother used to chide me frequently for not smiling broadly enough in posed photos myself, especially once I was in my teens and thought that I looked cooler slightly surly. My teeth weren’t hardly handsome, but I was never shy about them. I just favored a tight-lipped smirk for a while. And then in my thirties, for no conscious reason, I started posing with open smiles. I could make up a story about why. It’s half a story already to imply that my adolescent punkishness was to blame for why I started grimacing in the first place. But is a post-hoc explanation, however plausible, anything anyone should trust? I’ve begun to doubt, especially now that I see you, at merely seven and with mostly baby teeth still brightening your laugh, already beginning to shut your mouth and smile your grandmother Harriet’s girlhood smile, your father’s adolescent smile.

The reason our memories get such a bad rap, I’m convinced, comes not from their hazy and creative view of the happened facts. It’s because we can’t bear to have done something, anything, any damn thing at all, without having a plausible-sounding causal explanation for why we did that. And once we’ve settled on our explanation, then, as needed, we begin to bend our facts.

I don’t know, really, why your grandmother and I started smiling those close-mouthed smiles that you’ve begun to smile. I never knew that I was even smiling that way until adults, including my mother, complained, and then I only knew that I didn’t want to smile the way that they wanted me to smile. I suspect you feel about the same. Maybe it was in our genes, and in our genes again to start smiling more broadly, apparently more happily, after our twenties had passed. Maybe, but that’s another speculative, post-hoc explanation, isn’t it?

You’ll make up your own stories to explain your own memories of course. We all do. But as much as I want to catch you grinning that big grin that you give me during silly play, I’m okay. We’ll brush your teeth properly in the meantime, and some day well into your young adulthood, I’ll wager, you’ll set those pearlies back out on display.