Julia Koets
My mouth at fourteen was not the same as my mouth at twenty-five or thirty-eight. In middle school, the arch-wire of my retainer curved along the front of my teeth, the plastic baseplate rigid in the roof of my mouth. My braces, and then my retainer, made my words slippery, difficult to hold. My braces changed the way I showed joy or fear, made me press my lips together awkwardly when I smiled. I kept my teeth hidden like a secret. Unlike my nose, ears, and eyes, I cannot see my teeth in old photographs during those years I had braces. In this way, a record of the inside of my mouth for those years has been lost.
*
I remember a short story, but I do not remember its title. I do not remember where I was when I heard the story. Perhaps I attended a reading in a dimly lit bar. Snow potentially fell outside. I was in my late 20s, in graduate school.
I only remember one object from the story: a middle school girl’s dental retainer. Glitter embedded in the acrylic might shimmer, the roof of it bearing a ying-yang, a basketball, some symbol of what the girl loves.
The retainer in the story glistens in my memory the way so many retainers in the mouths of fourteen-year-olds at my high school in the Lowcountry in South Carolina in the mid-90’s glistened.
*
In the short story, a middle school boy finds the retainer of the girl he has a crush on. Maybe she has forgotten it after taking it out of her mouth to eat lunch, left it in its small plastic case on the cafeteria table at school. Or maybe the boy came over to her house after school to work on a class project together. It’s possible they’re writing a book report for their English class or conducting a science experiment with baking soda, food dye, and vinegar. Perhaps, after washing his hands in the hall bathroom, the one his crush shares with her younger brother, the boy sees her retainer glistening on the back of the porcelain sink like a crab shell, beautiful in its emptiness.
*
In my thirties, when cleaning out my bedroom in the house where I grew up, I found my old retainer in one of my desk drawers. Not in its electric-pink case, but loose amidst a deck of cards, a wallet-sized copy of my high school senior portrait, a note my high school boyfriend wrote me. Printed on the clear acrylic of the retainer, a tiger paw adorned the top, and a shiny metal wire curved to hold the position of my teeth from age thirteen to around age nineteen, when I mostly stopped wearing my retainer.
In high school, when my orthodontist handed me my newly-made retainer after he took my braces off, I saw the roof of my mouth for the first time. I had felt the shape of my mouth my whole life, of course, tracing my tongue against my palate, along my gumline and the backs of my teeth. But I’d never seen the shape before. Not from this vantage point. I’d never held the shape of my mouth in my hands. My middle school retainer is the only record of the shape of the inside of my mouth during those years that I can still see and touch.
I traced my fingers across my new retainer. While feeling and seeing the circumference of my top teeth, the high arch of my upper palate, the ridged lines on my hard palate, and the hump at the center of the roof of my mouth, I thought, how strange it is that I don’t know what other parts of my body look like. My stomach, my lungs, the small bones in my hands. When I was sixteen months old, I stepped off our back porch before my parents screened it in, and broke my arm, but I never saw the radiographs, and I’ve never had an MRI or a CT scan.
I looked at the shape of the roof of my mouth. The roof. As if my mouth was a house. At sixteen, there was so much my body housed that I’d never seen or spoken about.
*
In high school, I compared the shape of my friends’ retainers with mine. In this way, I compared the shape of my mouth with theirs. Seeing one friend’s retainer on her bathroom counter as I brushed my teeth before bed at a sleepover, I was suddenly aware that something might be wrong with my mouth. The shape of her retainer revealed that the roof of her mouth was much flatter than mine, a flatness like the shore at low tide, a flatness I would notice about other friends’ retainers, too. And there wasn’t an indention at the top of my friend’s retainer that signaled a protrusion in the roof of her mouth. I did not ask my parents or my dentist about the protrusion in my own palate or point it out to anyone for years. I kept it hidden, like I did the questions forming inside me about my sexuality. For years, I will not know the word for this protrusion—torus palatinus—“a bony prominence at the middle of the hard palate” that only about twenty to thirty percent of people have—just like I will not find the language to talk about my queerness until my mid-twenties. There is so much inside my body that for years I will not fully see, and when I do see it, I will not have the language to speak about it.
When my orthodontist first gave me my retainer, he told me it was important I wear it to stop my teeth from shifting. “The pressure of braces dissolves the bones of your jaw,” he said, “allowing your teeth to move, and after you have your braces off, you have to give your body time. To rebuild the bone surrounding your newly oriented teeth.”
But I did not understand. I could not see the bones surrounding my teeth, just like I could not see my desire for the girl in my music class carving inlets inside me, like the tidal creeks cutting through the salt marshes of the Lowcountry. I wore my retainer sporadically until I did not wear it at all.
*
The reason I remember the girl’s retainer in the short story I heard a writer read aloud at a bar—and only the retainer—is not because the girl loses it or because the boy finds it. The image did not lodge itself into my memory because of where the girl misplaces her retainer or where the boy sees it either, though I’m sure the setting of the story reveals something important about the tension in the narrative, too.
I remember the image for years because of what the boy does with the girl’s retainer after he finds it: he puts his crush’s retainer inside his own mouth.
Several years ago, when I told a friend about the short story, she gagged.
I think about how we set our retainers down on classroom desks, on cafeteria trays, on a math assignment, on bathroom sinks, on bedside tables, how we pulled them in and out of our mouths for years, how I never remember cleaning mine.
Part of the reason I did not react with the same disgust that my friend did to the story is because what the boy does with his crush’s retainer reminded me of something I did in middle school.
“In sixth grade, I kept my crush’s dental filling,” I told her.
*
When T.’s filling fell out of his tooth, out of his mouth, and onto the table, no one saw it but me. A dull glimmer. A dark shine. A tin kernel. We were eleven or twelve, part of a group of middle school kids sitting in booths at Kramer’s Pharmacy, the first place, a few years earlier, I stole something on a dare.
“Take something,” my friend A. had said, a White Mystery Airhead tucked in the elastic waistband of her joggers, the plastic wrapper already beginning to melt against the heat of her skin. We’d biked the half mile from Sumter Avenue, our two houses only minutes apart by foot. Growing up in the South, we felt at home in the heat, the humidity holding our faces like our mothers’ hands. Later that year, we’d roll magnolia leaves as tightly as we could and sit low in the treehouse in my backyard and attempt to smoke them. When A. lights the end of a leaf with a lighter she’s stolen from her babysitter, I will move in closer.
“Here, put it to your mouth,” A. will say. The smoke will seem to fill every space inside my body.
Feeling the pressure of A.’s dare at Kramer’s, I picked up a piece of bubble gum from the 5-cents bucket and eased it into the pocket of my shorts. When the sun rushed through the back entrance to the pharmacy as we opened the door onto the blacktop, I waited. I waited until A. unlocked her ten-speed bike. I waited until we double-rode down the cracked sidewalk, my hands on her waist. I waited until A. pedaled hard past the white picket fences, the Timrod Library, Bethany Methodist. I waited until we crossed the narrow bridge at Pike Hole, named for the redfin pike children caught in the drainage creek. I waited to breathe in deep, to know we hadn’t been caught.
*
When I first heard the retainer story, I wondered if in the moment the boy puts the girl’s retainer into his mouth, he feels closer to her or further away. When I found my old retainer in the desk drawer in my childhood bedroom and put it in my mouth twenty years after I first wore it—after many years of not wearing it—I felt the way my teeth had shifted. Unable to fit the retainer on my teeth, I felt the way my body had changed over twenty years. I felt the distance between myself at eighteen and myself at thirty-five. I wondered if the boy in the story feels a distance from his crush, too. If he feels the way the shape of his mouth will never match the shape of his crush’s mouth. Or maybe this distance makes him want her more. I wonder if, when he puts her retainer in his mouth, he imagines it’s something akin to kissing her.
I use the present tense to write about the girl’s retainer in the story I heard in the bar because my middle school English teacher told us that’s the way we should write about stories. In this way, a story goes on and on in the present. This is what I have always liked about stories. The way they can change our relationship to time, to memory, to our own bodies. The way, when we tell a story about ourselves, we can go back to our bodies years earlier and we can look at the things we could not look at then.
*
For weeks before seeing T.’s filling on the table of our booth at Kramer’s, I had admired his mouth. His teeth gleamed like a line of white pick-up trucks parked in Town Square. As a kid growing up in a small town in the South, I understood how the sun could make things more beautiful: the algae in the ponds at Azalea Park, the blacktop behind Summerville Elementary we painted a large map of the United States across, the aluminum bleachers at Doty Field on a Saturday morning as I stood in the outfield.
The girl next to me in the booth at Kramer’s dipped a fry into the puddle of ketchup on her plate. The boy next to T. licked his Riverdog Ripple, the florescent blue ice cream named after the local minor league baseball team named after the rats at the edge of the Ashley River. Rod, the soda jerk, mixed the soda flavors we wanted by hand.
At twelve years old, I’d never had a cavity, and consequently, I’d never had a filling, but I’d seen inside the mouths of my parents’ friends when they laughed: the bright darkness spilling into the crevices of their molar cusps. I imagined what it might be like to have something in my mouth that caught the sun like that. I pretended I’d had cavities, that my dentist drilled into my teeth and put metal fillings in the holes of multiple molars. At the long tables in our middle school cafeteria that sixth grade year, when my friends bit down on pieces of aluminum foil their parents wrapped their sandwiches with, I stole the expressions from my friends’ mouths. I pretended I felt a strange pain, a shock, a kind of pleasure my friends felt when they bit down on the aluminum and it reacted with their silver fillings. I wondered if this is what desire felt like.
*
The only surface I remember in the short story is the surface of the girl’s retainer, the fact that the boy sees it shimmering. Another way of stating this memory: the only surface I remember is the surface of that boy’s desire. Of his desire shimmering.
*
I put a paper napkin over T.’s filling and picked it up quickly. I scrunched the paper into a ball in the palm of my hand, like nothing existed inside it at all and wiped my mouth with the napkin, so no one would get suspicious, so no one knew what I’d taken. During those years and for years after, I will learn how to hide other things, too. I will keep my romantic feelings for women so hidden in my body that no one will know they exist at all. I will hide them so well that I will not be able to tell anyone about them. For years, I will see those feelings as a darkness instead of a shimmer.
I looked across the table at T. and wondered if he even knew he’d lost something, if he’d felt it, if he’d heard the filling break loose from inside his tooth when he bit into something hard—maybe a piece of gristle in his burger or a too-crispy fry. If he hadn’t already, I wondered when he’d realize the filling was missing, when he’d feel the loss, the hole in his tooth open, exposed.
As I walked home from Kramer’s, I pulled the napkin from my pocket, unwrapped it, and looked closely at T.’s filling. For months I’d wanted to kiss T., for the bottle to stop on me when he spun it at parties at friends’ houses, for him to kiss me in the dark when we were paired together and hiding in a ditch at the far end of Laurel Street Playground in a neighborhood night game of flashlight tag.
But, alongside those desires, the ones I could tell my friends, I also wanted things I knew I could not say aloud: how when I kissed a different boy later that same year, I spent more time thinking about a girl in my music class, the urgency of her laugh, the straightness of her teeth, the words she used in the notes she wrote me in a notebook we passed back and forth between us.
*
To write about stories in the present tense is to capture something about desire, too. The way desire can make you feel present in your body. In middle school and for years afterwards, I distanced myself from my body, from my desire. I tried to hide my D-cup breasts under loose-fitting shirts. I let my mom pick out all the clothes I owned. In truth, I paid as little attention to my body as I could. I was never dirty or sloppy, but I did not spend time looking at myself in the mirror like my friends did. I did not admire the flatness of my stomach, the curve of my hips. I didn’t want anyone to pay attention to my body because, while I could not name this fear then, I worried that if someone looked too closely at my body—if I looked too closely at my body—we would see what I kept hidden inside of it. The shine of my desire. The glint of my longing.
*
Years later, I think about how strange it was to take T.’s filling and to keep it. I wonder, like my friend did in hearing the retainer story, whether what I did was a violation of his privacy. Looking back, I think it was, but it was also something else.
Maybe I am making something beautiful that isn’t, the way a silver filling shines, but the reason I remember the retainer in the story is not because what the boy did was a violation of his crush’s privacy. I remember this part of the story because the boy’s desire to put the girl’s retainer into his own mouth reveals an aspect of desire that I recognize. How when we cannot or do not speak about our desire, when we cannot tell the person we desire how we feel, when we cannot tell the people closest to us who we love, we put that desire somewhere else: in a retainer, in a filling, in a story.
After I took T.’s filling I never considered giving it back to him. I knew I couldn’t. To give the filling back would be to admit I’d taken it. To give it back would be to show him how many things I kept secret. Years later, when I found T.’s filling in a small cigar box I’d glued shells on when I was five years old, I saw a record of something in myself at twelve: my fear, the distance I kept from my body. I saw how good I was at keeping secrets.
If a story goes on and on in the present, it can also change our relationship to loss. For years, I kept my fears about desire inside the house of my mouth. For so long, I kept my desire for women a secret. Sometimes when I look back on myself from years earlier, I can only see the things I lost: the relationships I had with women in secret, the years I could have been more present in my body.
But I can hold this fear in my hands now. And in seeing my fear from this perspective, I wonder if taking T.’s filling off the table captures something else about desire, too. I wonder if to desire someone is to notice the evidence of loss in their body, and, instead of wanting to fix it or fill it, you want to pick it up, to acknowledge that it’s there, to see it glint.
Craft Essay
I started the first draft of “My Mouth is a House” with an image: a tooth filling that fell out of my crush’s mouth when we were eleven or twelve years old. I often get ideas for essays by paying attention to the images that have stuck with me over the years. I don’t know why I’ve remembered one specific image out of all the other images I’ve encountered, but I write to figure that out. Inevitably, the images I remember are connected to things I’ve had difficulty talking about at certain periods of my life, like desire, sexuality, or loss.
Once I started thinking about the tooth filling, I tried to remember as much as I could about the memory itself. Part of that process involved writing the memory in scene, remembering the old pharmacy where my friends and I often went after school to buy candy or a coke. The pharmacy is no longer there, so I can’t physically go back there, but once I started writing the scene, more images came back to me.
You can see me trying to make sense of an early draft of the essay at the top of the page. After writing a few scenes, I was trying to figure out what ideas or questions were connected to this memory at the pharmacy: the things I kept secret in childhood, what I didn’t talk about for many years, my crushes on girls. As I’m writing an essay, I read back over the draft and see what tensions are there. For instance, when I wrote about the roof of the mouth, I thought about how, if the mouth has a roof, it could be considered a kind of house. That association was helpful for me to think about because then I thought about what my body housed, what I had kept in my body that I hadn’t fully seen or spoken about when I was younger.
Because I started to think about the image of the mouth and the mouth as a house, I started thinking about what I had kept hidden in my mouth, how I didn’t talk about certain things, like the questions I started having about my own sexuality in middle school. This is what I love about writing nonfiction. One image from one afternoon I spent at the old pharmacy in the town where I grew up can lead me to larger questions about love, the body, and secrets.
You can see me trying to make sense of an early draft of the essay at the top of the page. After writing a few scenes, I was trying to figure out what ideas or questions were connected to this memory at the pharmacy: the things I kept secret in childhood, what I didn’t talk about for many years, my crushes on girls. As I’m writing an essay, I read back over the draft and see what tensions are there. For instance, when I wrote about the roof of the mouth, I thought about how, if the mouth has a roof, it could be considered a kind of house. That association was helpful for me to think about because then I thought about what my body housed, what I had kept in my body that I hadn’t fully seen or spoken about when I was younger.
Because I started to think about the image of the mouth and the mouth as a house, I started thinking about what I had kept hidden in my mouth, how I didn’t talk about certain things, like the questions I started having about my own sexuality in middle school. This is what I love about writing nonfiction. One image from one afternoon I spent at the old pharmacy in the town where I grew up can lead me to larger questions about love, the body, and secrets.
Ultimately, this process taught me the importance of balance in writing. While I began by catering heavily to an audience, I realized that focusing too much on others’ expectations was silencing my voice. The small comments I wrote to myself within the draft—a reminder to breathe, to take my time, to acknowledge the difficulty—became a lifeline. They allowed me to reconnect with the essay as a space for healing rather than just a product for others. While this piece may never feel “complete,” it is a milestone in my growth as a survivor and a writer.
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