The Flipper

by Ania Payne

Whenever I visit my dentist’s office, Dr. Summers warns that my decaying right incisor could fall out at any moment, so I better start planning for an implant. His opening line for new patients is always, “Are you happy with your smile?” The question alone is enough to make anyone second-guess their answer – I thought so, but maybe not? Could my smile be better? Do you like it?

Dr. Summers’ own teeth are perfect and white, the stuff of politicians and news anchors, because who would trust a dentist with bad teeth? When he’s not trying to convince me to get the implant, he usually speaks in that absentminded way that doctors speak to patients, moving through routine questions about our jobs, our families, how long we’ve been in the area, and so on; questions that he can respond to with boilerplate answers, barely listening as he daydreams about rounds of golf or his next meal or sexy pharmaceutical representatives. But when he’s trying to convince me to get an implant, he’s present, animated. Dr. Summers paints a picture of me at my upcoming wedding, slicing into my three-tiered cake and smiling for photographs with a black hole gaping among my otherwise white teeth, because the tooth could fall out at any moment -- today, the day of the wedding, five years down the road; it’s hard to tell, but it will fall out someday, he always says.

Dr. Summers knows that it’s only a matter of time before I cave and do the procedure. I’ve revealed my vanity by letting him do other cosmetic procedures on me, such as “dental bonding” to fill in the small gaps between my teeth. Although my insurance doesn’t cover cosmetic procedures, Dr. Summers winked as he pitched the bonding procedure, saying he would tell insurance that it was a cavity filling instead of a gap filling.

“They’ll never have to know, and the chances of getting audited are slim. I’m coasting to retirement,” he’d said, and just like that I was walking out of his office without gaps between my front teeth, without spending a dime. I ask if he can wave his insurance fraud wand for the implant and he laughs, saying that’s out of his range, but maybe he could do some magic to get me a discount if I want veneers, which would just make my smile perfect. In the corner of the exam room, a potted spider plant wilts.

When I’ve finally saved up enough money in my health savings account to cover the procedure, I schedule the implant. I imagine a quick process – I’ll go in today with my rotten tooth and leave a few hours later, probably a bit sore and swollen, but I’ll have my new, titanium tooth. It will be expensive, but it will be fast. I’ve seen billboards for tooth implants all over interstates, casting shadows over nearby Lion’s Dens, advertising “65 smiles an hour” and “Full mouth implants in just one day!” I imagine weary long-haul truckers, exhausted after lugging Wayfair furniture or cattle across the country for fourteen hours, biting voraciously into the core of an apple without realizing that they’ve already eaten the apple’s flesh, then jolting awake as they feel their front tooth get ripped out from their gums and lodged into the apple’s core. Averting their eyes quickly back to the road, they glance up and see a billboard, as if dropped from the heavens, advertising a dentist’s office that offers one-day implants. Just call 1-888-IMPLANTS! They sigh with relief, knowing that they’ll be able to fix their smiles before heading home to their spouses at the end of the week.

Unfortunately for both me and the truckers, this is not the case. When I call Dr. Summers’ office to “schedule the implant,” the receptionist laughs and says, “Sure, honey. This is a year-long process, so I’ll write you up a treatment plan with all the appointments you’ll need for the next year and email it over.” Hardly twenty minutes later, the treatment plan arrives in my inbox, filled with indecipherable codes and foreign dental terminology -- grafting, anchoring, revealing, abutment. While the next few months of my life appear to be filled with appointments of varying procedures, the actual tooth won’t be inserted until nine months down the road. My husband, Josh, who is relieved to have made it through our wedding without my tooth falling out, secretly frets about the idea of me missing a front tooth, even though he reassures me that I’m beautiful with or without teeth. Josh tries to talk me out of doing the procedure by saying, “The tooth has stayed in for all these years, maybe it can last another 5? Another 10? You have such nice teeth, are you sure that you want to do this? I don’t see anything wrong with the tooth.” But after several years of listening to Dr. Summers paint horror stories about how my tooth could fall out while I’m teaching, eating at a restaurant, or sunbathing on vacation, I can’t take the suspense anymore. He’s convinced me that the inevitable is bound to happen, sooner or later, and why should I just wait for the tooth to fall out on its own while I’m lecturing, when I can be in control of the situation instead? 

On the first day of the treatment, Dr. Summers and technicians remove the dead tooth, which they all assure me will be a quick, painless process because of “how dead the tooth already is” and “how it’s just dangling there, begging to fall out.” On that same day, an old boyfriend from college requests to follow me on Instagram – I accept his request and learn that he’s now a dentist. How odd, I think as Dr. Summers reclines my chair and injects me with numbing fluid, that this person I haven’t spoken to in a decade finds me on Instagram on the first day of my implant treatment, and now he’s a dentist. After a quick scroll through his profile, I learn that his wife is also a dentist, and that they seem to be living a nice Catholic life with several children who play sports at their Catholic schools. I feel a small bit of joy learning that this old boyfriend who had dumped me years ago to get back together with his high school girlfriend did not become the cardiovascular surgeon that he hoped to be, and instead became a dentist, a career my friends in medical school all referred to as being for people who “couldn’t quite make the cut” (as if I, a lecturer of English, have any room for career gloating).  But then I’m jolted out of my moment of glee when Dr. Summers drops a sharp tool in my mouth, which I barely catch with my tongue.

“Good catch!” Stacy the technician remarks, and Dr. Summers just furrows his brow and continues pulling at my tooth. I start to wonder if I’ve picked the right dentist for this procedure, and what his grades were like in medical school.

“I’ve had an implant, too, honey,” Stacy says, as if noticing my trepidation, tapping her front tooth with her tongue. “See how real the tooth looks? You’re going to love your new tooth when you finally get it!” Stacy was probably a cheerleader in high school. She wears white tooth-shaped studs in her earlobes. I wonder if all of the people who work in this office, and their spouses and children, have had implants and veneers and bonding and whitening and other procedures that I haven’t even been pitched yet. I imagine their aging grandparents with state-of-the-art dentures, lifelike and youthful, unlike my grandparents’ yellowed dentures that floated around in coffee mugs on the bathroom counter, next to the hand soap.

I feel the incisor pop out as I’m staring at the ceiling, looking at odd remnants of what must have been a party thrown months or years ago – dusty, dangling decorations of cardboard pizza slices and donuts – reminding me of all the foods that I will now struggle to eat without this crucial tooth. Dr. Summers leans my chair upright and I use my tongue to feel the new gap in my mouth, like I used to do when I was seven. There is something infantilizing about getting a front tooth removed, as if losing a tooth indicates that you have fewer functional brain cells than other adults, or that you don’t understand proper teeth hygiene; surely, somehow, you brought this misery on yourself. But even though the idea of living without a tooth for many months is nauseating, I’m excited for the result – to finally have that tiny, dark tooth gone from my life, soon to be replaced with a beautiful implant. Even the temporary flipper tooth that I’ll be getting today is new and exciting. I’ve spent hours Googling “flipper tooth” and scrolling through photos of people smiling with their temporary flipper teeth in – So natural! Nobody knows it’s fake! So easy to eat in! the captions below the images read, and I imagine my own smile brighter and wider with my new flipper tooth as I flash carefree grins while biting into kale salads. 

I know something is wrong when Dr. Summers tries the flipper tooth in my mouth, frowns at it, adjusts it, whittles away at its contours, then tries it in my mouth again, whittles and tries again, and again, and then leaves the room. 

“Wait!” I call from my chair. “I’m not going to leave without a tooth, right? You’re going to make it fit, aren’t you? I’m spending a lot of money at this office!” On the TV screen in front of my chair, Chip and Joanna argue about paint colors for a sitting room. HGTV is the only station that is ever playing at the dentist’s office, as if the dentists think that watching couples have staged arguments about bathroom tiles and backsplashes is supposed to comfort patients. Or maybe comfort isn’t the point at all -- as we watch these reality show contestants turn fixer-uppers into fabulous homes, embark on no-demo renovations, or pursue self-made mansions, we see their lives improve drastically in an hour or less. With a bit of money and some time, their previously outdated or decrepit houses transform into chic, modern structures, the type of dwelling that you’d find a perfect sitcom family living in. The dentist’s office, with these HGTV rebirth stories playing on every TV in each examination room, is also a place of transformation – like these fixer uppers, we, too, can be a tad more beautiful, more youthful, and have a happier life, if we just invest in our teeth.

Dr. Summers returns to the exam room carrying what looks like a piece of Invisalign, a white, plastic tray with tooth cutouts, with a fake tooth stuck in the groove where my missing tooth would be.

“Here, try this,” he says, placing the Invisalign tray into my mouth. I try not to gag as the sharp plastic sides of the tray scrape the roof of my mouth and insides of cheeks, and I smile into the hand mirror that he hands me. Pools of blood-hued saliva gather in the clear tray, and its plastic sheen gives the top row of my teeth an odd, synthetic shininess.

“The flipper from the lab didn’t fit, so we had to rig this up. We’ll place an order for another flipper, but the lab can take about a month. In the meantime, wear this.”

“Oh, it looks great. So natural!” Stacy coos, always so chipper in her purple scrubs, even though I know the tray looks bulky and artificially glossy. When I ask if I can eat with this tray on, she laughs and says, “Honey, you can try. But I’d recommend that you don’t go to any dinner parties until you have your flipper tooth in.”

Later that evening, I try eating dinner with the Invisalign tray in. We’re having spaghetti, something soft, but as soon as I take my first bite, the tray falls out of my mouth. I put it back in and try taking a bite from another angle, but it falls out again and again.

“Just take it out,” Josh says. But I’m nervous about showing him my missing tooth. I stared at new toothless self in the mirror after I got home from the dentist’s that afternoon, and what I saw wasn’t cute. Somehow, a thirty year-old woman with a missing tooth doesn’t have the same charm as a seven year-old. When I texted a photo of me without the incisor to my family group chat, my mom responded, “You look like an Arkansas hick!” My dad responded, “Barely noticeable,” but that obviously wasn’t true. I could hardly recognize myself in the mirror. I was a botched remodel, a house that wasn’t quite able to get all its new appliances in on time.    

But with no other choice than to take my dinner to our un-airconditioned upstairs and eat toothless and alone, in the privacy of my yet-to-be-renovated office, I remove the Invisalign tray with the fake tooth and attempt a smile.

“It really doesn’t look that bad,” Josh says. “But how long did you say it will be until you get your permanent tooth?”

Over the next few months, I adjust to living without the incisor. The Invisalign tray gets looser with wear, to the point that it barely stays in, so I stop wearing it around the house and only put it in when I’m going somewhere. At some point, I think that Josh forgets what I look like with all my teeth, and he adjusts to “my new look.” I start to lean into this new identity, toothless me. One evening after a few glasses of wine, we pose for a selfie with an heirloom squash that we picked up from the farmers’ market, smiling with the Long Island Cheese gourd between us, the dark gap in my mouth obvious without the fake tooth, and send that photo to his family group text. We haven’t mentioned my tooth removal to his family yet, and we’re curious to see how they react to the photo.

“That’s a huge squash!” his sister says.

“What are you going to cook with that?” his mom asks.

The text conversation remains politely squash-focused, even though my missing tooth is obviously visible in the photo. We laugh about their southern niceness, certain that they’re wondering about my missing tooth, but too courteous to say anything about it. We start scheming up other instances where I could try the missing tooth trick – suddenly removing it while I’m out at a work dinner or taking it out after doing a kettlebell workout at the gym to see if any of the coaches notice and worry that I’ve hit myself in the face. Toothless me is a risk-taker, a prankster, much more outgoing than toothful me. But in reality, toothful me vetoes all these activities, and the only time that I go out in public without my fake tooth in is on accident.

A month later, I’ve finally gotten a flipper tooth that fits, and it’s the Cadillac of fake teeth compared to the Invisalign tray. It fits perfectly in the gap where my incisor would go, just a small piece, made perfectly for my mouth, clinging to the contours of my gums. For the most part, I can eat with it in (unless I’m having a particularly dangerous meal, like corn on the cob or chicken wings), but when I’m eating a meal alone, it’s easier to just take the flipper tooth out, because pieces of whatever I’m eating cling to it like a magnet.

One afternoon in the fall, I’m eating lunch in my office before teaching my one o’clock class. I’ve taken the flipper tooth out so that I can eat without clogging it, and I’m finishing up my kale, egg, quinoa, chickpea, and feta salad, reviewing my lesson plans. I get up to grab a book from my bookshelf and hear something crunch under my feet. I assume it’s a chip or a dried bug or something insignificant; the custodial staff haven’t vacuumed our offices all year, so anything could be lingering on these carpets. But when I move my foot, I gasp in horror. It’s the flipper tooth, shattered into pieces. I try to put it back together, but without any adhesive it just falls apart and lies limp in my hand.

Because it is fall 2021 and our university has a mask mandate due to Covid-19, I’m saved by my mask. I throw my mask on and walk across campus, waving hello to people who have no idea that behind my N-95, I’m missing a tooth. If anyone were to ask why I was wearing my mask outside, walking across the quad, I could just say that I was being extra cautious about potential infections, and they would press their lips together and nod slowly, as academics do. Inside the classroom, though, I tell my students about how I stepped on my flipper tooth at lunch and am extra thankful for the presence of masks today. It’s a small, close class of twelve creative nonfiction students, and they respond by telling me their own dental horror stories. One girl tells us about how her mom has had to have thirteen teeth replaced. A guy talks about all the root canals he’s gotten over his twenty years. Another guy says that dentists aren’t real doctors, they’re just trying to scam you and make money so that they can buy Lamborghinis, so he doesn’t go to the dentist.

It's a combination of vanity and a fear of health problems that has kept me loyally attending dentist appointments and saying yes to the procedures that they recommend.  I’ve been dealing with this pair of dead incisors since I first got braces in the fifth grade. At the time, my orthodontist, Dr. Moore, thought the right incisor was salvageable, so he created a strategy to push all my teeth slightly to the right, to cover the hole where my missing left incisor would have been. But later, I had to get dental surgery and an anchor installed through my gums to pull down the adult right incisor. The surgery turned out to be botched, though, and the anchor fell out, so I had to return to the surgeon for a redo. Two months later, the surgeon lost his license when an investigation revealed that he’d been addicted to the oxycodone he was prescribing his patients. 

In college, I started getting root canals and I was pitched the upsell to ‘bleach’ the dead incisor, to make it look white and lifelike. But these upsells always came with the warning that whatever temporary procedure I was saying ‘yes’ to wouldn’t last forever; eventually, this dead tooth would fall out.

In a way, visiting the dentist’s office, reading their old People magazines, sipping water out of their cone-like cups, listening to Celine Dion over their speakers, watching the Rainbowfish and Goldfish and Betta fish swim around aimlessly in their tanks, and reclining in the examination chair feels like coming home after a long day at work. The dentist has been a constant in my life, from childhood, through college, to adulthood. The dentist is always there, adjusting my teeth and prescribing procedures for this or that, promising some new me at the end of the process.

When I finally make it to the end of the implant treatment after a year of waiting, going into Dr. Summers’ office to have my final crown installed feels like the closing of a chapter. After Dr. Summers and Stacy finish the installation, they pass me the hand mirror and congratulate themselves on what a good job they did and how natural the tooth looks. And the new crown does look great. I feel beautiful with my new titanium tooth, which is finally in a normal adult-tooth size that matches the color and shape of the rest of my teeth. Stacy and Dr. Summers admire it from multiple angles, then call the other dentists in the office to come admire it, too.

“So natural!” one dentist exclaims. “It looks just like the rest of her teeth!”

“Wow, look at her smile now!” another dentist says. On the TV in the background, a family bickers over the best furniture style for their son’s bedroom, rustic farmhouse or modern.

The dentists all peer into my mouth, remarking on how perfect my teeth are now – a feeling I had never experienced at the dentist’s office before. This must be how Chip and Joanna feel at the end of every episode, I think. The remodel worked! The fixer upper is now fabulous!

Later that evening at dinner with friends, I smile longer and more often than usual, to show off the new tooth. The plastic flipper tooth had started to yellow from coffee and wine, but my new permanent crown blends in seamlessly with the rest of my teeth. I smile for five seconds longer than usual at my friends’ jokes all night, showing off my new tooth and my five thousand dollar smile, waiting for someone to notice the upgraded me. But nobody does. 

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Ania Payne lives in Manhattan, Kansas, with her husband, Great Dane, Husky, 2 tiger cats, and 2 backyard chickens. She teaches in the English Department at Kansas State University and has an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of the chapbook Karma Animalia. She has previously been published in The Sonder Review, Punctuate, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, Whiskey Island, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.