A Dentist's Secretary

Behind the desk and inside her mind

The next patient's leather jacket squeaks as he clicks his pen open and leans on the beige desk to fill out the form. The rubbing sound of the leather material makes me grit my teeth; for me, it's the equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

His hair brushes across his cheek and down to his shoulders. His pen scrapes frantically across the paper.

The tinny guitar and gravelly voices ooze out of the speaker as the radio serenades us with a perky oldies tune, and it smells like the floral spray the doctor used earlier to rid the office of the heavy smell of cigarettes from his last patient. Just the bottled smell of flowers is enough to make me sneeze.

"Whoops, wrong box," the patient says. He curls his hair behind his ear as he points with his other hand at the box marked "date of birth" on the form.

He clicks his pen shut. "Is it alright if I cross it out and rewrite it in the right place?"

The harsh fluorescent lights make his skin look yellowish and his brown hair shine. I assure him that it is fine for him to correct his mistake and that it is not necessary to fill out a new form, all the while wondering if the dentist will accept the form now with cross marks on it.

He smiles and proceeds to continue before he realizes his pen is still closed. He quickly clicks it open, and the scrawling of his pen and the squeaking of his leather jacket resume their symphony while I wait patiently for him to finish. His teeth are white and shiny. I guess that he is only here for a cleaning. But I don't know what lurks in the back of his mouth. What cavities might be forming there that I just cannot see.

The silence between us sits like a balloon waiting to be popped. I wonder if his leather jacket keeps him warm. I wonder the last time he cut his hair is. I start to imagine his motorcycle parked outside, but logic reminds me that there is no way he has ridden a motorcycle in this snowy weather and that I am all too quick to stereotype this complete stranger. So I imagine that his motorcycle is parked, safe and dry, in his garage.

I wonder if I should comment on the weather, the classic source of conventional small talk, its effect is something we all have in common. It is probably something my mother would do if she were in my place. She can talk up a telephone pole if she needs to. 

He shifts his weight on the desk, and rolls up his sleeve, revealing a string of tattoos on his left arm. His jacket squeaks as he does so, making my ears ring. I remain silent.

We all know the weather anyway. It's December. It's cold outside. There's no reason to bring it up.

I am irritated with my silence, just as I am irritated by the rubbing and squeaking of his jacket, yet it is a different kind of irritation. The frustration toward his jacket is irrational. The sound makes my teeth smash together, a habit the dentist would not condone, but for no other reason than the way my ears react to the noise. Once the noise stops, so to does my teeth gritting. But my silence, on the other hand, holds great depths of irritation pointed inward, and whose solution is more convoluted and harder to attain. I am not my mother, who can easily start conversations and open doors to new relationships with complete strangers. I long to be someone like her though, someone for whom conversation came freely and easily, like the warm breath of spring far on the horizon.

Part of me wants to talk about the weather, would find great joy in chatting about the relentless snow and the air as thin as ice, yet the rest of me would find no pleasure in such mindless banter. So little pleasure in fact that this unreasonable part of me causes my mouth to go dry and my lips to clamp shut. My teeth form steel gates around my tongue, preventing it from forming any word or two about the cold December we are currently experiencing.

I wonder how I have managed as a receptionist so far. I know the job brings me no great joy, and I know that my ambition in life does not include any outstanding careers as an antisocial secretary, yet I feel as if I must make the best of my situation, and do the best job I can do because my ambitions include not sitting behind this desk, but in the operatory, with a mask over my face and a patient to look up my nose.

One day I will have graduated from desk-sitting, and appointment-making, and squeaky-jacket-listening, to the busy practice of dentistry. However, until then, I perfect my skills here and force my tongue to function. I inhale through my nose and open my mouth:

"Cold outside, isn't it?"