A Salvage Operation by Sue Repko
Warning: This piece mentions suicide. If you are in crisis or need to talk to someone, please call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
I am in a dentist’s chair in July, watching a plane make two parallel lines across a clear blue New England sky, as that racy heart-feeling from local anesthesia kicks in. Does the pilot have any idea of the purity of those lines against that blue? Today my dentist will remove a long-ago filling from a now-cracked tooth—#19 in the Universal Number System, I am told—and insert a temporary crown on it.
Soon enough, I am under a spotlight, wearing sunglasses, clenching my fists and contracting my neck muscles, then telling myself to relax, all while keeping my mouth wide open and trying not to fixate on the bits of mercury amalgam from the 1970s ricocheting around my mouth, worrying if I can get mercury poisoning from swallowing them, and remembering my childhood dentist. Let us call him Dr. Cameron. It is his handicraft, more than four decades old, that is being undone. Even before today, I have, at times, lingered on the memory of him; this is not my first failed filling or my first crown.
He passed away in the late 1990s, yet his work is living on in many mouths many miles from that cozy office in a converted brick townhouse in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. I wonder if Dr. Cameron ever thought about the longevity of what he did. Of course, the first thing that always comes to mind about Dr. Cameron is how he died, which is a terrible thing that I wish I could change—not my thinking about his suffering, but the suffering itself. I do not want to think about the gun. So, I turn my thoughts to Highlights magazine and the way I had eagerly tried to find all the items on the “Hidden Pictures” page, desperate to complete it and maybe even get to another issue before being called into Dr. Cameron’s windowless, beige treatment room.
Dr. Cameron was a good-looking, affable man and a childhood friend of my father, which did not erase the fact that a verdict awaited whenever I climbed into his chair. Nothing good about Dr. Cameron mitigated the pain of the scraping of plaque and the drilling for fillings in those days before fluoride was put into our town’s water.
One time my older sister D— and I had back-to-back appointments. She may have been eleven or twelve. It was early winter, the sky gray and threatening, the air biting. When Dad came to pick us up, I pushed my way into the front seat of the Country Squire, and D— slid into the back, declaring, “I told Dr. Cameron I hated him. I hate him!”
Dad turned sharply, a dark rage causing his eyes to bug out and his lips to disappear into a thin line. “You go back in there and apologize,” he yelled. “Now!”
I recognized the humiliation washing over her face. She returned a few minutes later, weeping, shaking. Her truth had exploded from her mouth and a swift revision thrust upon her.
“I don’t ever want to hear that again. Ever!” Dad said, leaving out the “or else.” He hit us with his own hand-crafted paddle when we were “bad,” which was another way of saying “just being kids.” I sank back into my seat, looking straight ahead, silent.
My dentist pauses. I am allowed to rinse, then settle back in. The plane is long gone. Only the white lines remain, their dissipation already underway, their integrity doomed.
As an adult, in the car on the way to a family Christmas party, I once asked my father about Dr. Cameron’s death. He summed up the precipitating chain of events as he knew it—an affair, divorce, regret—ending with, “I sold him the shotgun.” He paused, lodging me in that gap with a kind of horror rising. He had said it with a tinge of—was that pride? As I was about to ask whether he had sold it to him when he had been in crisis, he cut me off and clarified. “Years earlier. Not when he was depressed.”
Dr. Cameron’s father had taught my father to fish and to hunt and had given him his first job at Van Buskirk’s Hardware Store downtown. When my father was still a teenager, the men there entrusted him with firearms and began to teach him gunsmithing, which he would do until the end of his life at 89. He himself had unintentionally shot and killed a neighbor while repairing a handgun in an illegal gun shop in our backyard when he was forty-five. I was twelve.
I carry this history—these partial histories—in my mouth. Some days I wish I could crack open all their sentences, jagged and shot through with toxins, spit out all their words, fill the holes with innocence, and have nothing left to say.
My dentist is done. I’ll have to come back in a week for the permanent crown. She swings the overhead light out of the way and the hygienist removes the sunglasses from my face. Now there is only a remnant of the white trail left by the plane, ever-widening gaps in its mist, but still visible, still felt.
Artist’s Statement
I have been thinking about legacy lately. The pandemic, climate crises, and political instability across the globe have made me think more deeply about what any of us might be able to leave behind, what might survive. In “A Salvage Operation,” I started out with the strangeness—to me, anyway—of how long I had been walking around with fillings from childhood, no longer holding up, and the sad fate of our family dentist. As with most things I’ve written in recent years, the story wanted to veer back to my father and the current of violence that ran through my childhood—part of my father’s legacy. And the telling of stories part of mine, I hope.
Sue Repko is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has been named notable three times in The Best American Essays and won a Maine Literary Award for Short Nonfiction. Some of her essays have appeared in The Independent, The Common, Hazlitt, Hippocampus, The Southeast Review, Aquifer, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.