Object: My Mother’s Missing Teeth

FEATUREs:

• Washed with salt
• No cavities
• Lost in a fistfight?

I haven’t seen my mother in a while. We decide to meet on a corner of a street in Chinatown. When I get to the corner, I see her. She is wearing a white coat and the zipper is open even though it is cold and she is talking on a flip phone. She waves to me and smiles. I notice she is missing two teeth, but I don’t say anything about that. When I was a kid she told me she didn’t like the taste of toothpaste and that she preferred using salt. It had a rougher grain and did a better job, she said. My mother had straight and even teeth. She never liked sweets. “Never got a cavity my whole life,” she liked to brag. “I don’t know about dentists. I don’t get cavities, but when I visit I always come back with one. I swear, they put it in themselves!” We walk toward a restaurant and I pretend the teeth are not missing. It is the left canine tooth and the tooth behind that one. She is talking about her new job and I listen to her speech, to see if there are any words that sound different now, how she accommodates them with a hole in her mouth. But I hear nothing different. She used to work in a cake-making factory. Now she works in a factory that puts vegetables, mostly onions and ginger, into a net bag. She can’t keep track of how many she has packed and so I teach her how to use a calculator. She is amazed at the buttons. “It does so much thinking,” she says. When my mother laughs she covers her mouth, but as the afternoon wears on she forgets and the missing teeth are there. I like the missing teeth. They make everything she says funny. She tells me she had been working on a farm where they grow cannabis, but she got terrible headaches and had to quit. She says she thinks her roommate smokes weed. “He’s a young man,” she says. I wonder if this is a boyfriend or something, but she says he’s ugly and doesn’t live there anymore. He stole some money from the couple whose house they rent rooms in. I look at her missing teeth again. The thing I wonder now is if she lost her teeth in a fistfight. It’s the exact spot a right hook would land. She’s one of those people you would want on your side in a fistfight. The kind of person who, after having her teeth knocked out, would swallow...