Teethdo not decay, after the heart ceases beating, a mass of connective tissue at their center, they are the final word, usefulin forensics if the rest is un- recognizable.
“You’d be such a beautiful girl,” the dentist said the first time I went to see her. “If only you’d fix your teeth.”
I’ve got gaps in my teeth, you see, a wide one right in front and others all along to the back of my mouth. My mother’s got them too, and her sister, and my sister, but mine are the most prominent. They’re not crooked or crowded or overlapping, but no matter—this ain’t no Julia Roberts smile. These teeth have spaces and spots of brown closer to the roots where the gums have receded. You can’t see them unless you’re up close, unless you’re peering into my mouth, but they’re there. Trust me.
The first time I went to the dentist I was ten years old. I had ten cavities. I told the doctor off, then sobbed the entire car ride home. I’ve had three times as many over the past three decades. Something to do with the enamel wearing down. My digestive failures. Anxiety. I’ve been grinding my teeth since I got them. These teeth are lived in.
At twelve I begged my mother for braces. But the dentist, a different dentist this time, wouldn’t comply. It would only be cosmetic, he said. He’d missed the point—but that was all my mother needed. We didn’t have the money anyway. Thus, the spaces between my teeth became a mark of my family’s poverty. I grew up in the woods of Arkansas, a small-town, southern white girl with bare feet and unkempt teeth. When I opened my mouth, I was sure that it exposed me as ignorant, the hillbilly stereotype, an object of derision. My teeth were the irrefutable sign of my difference.
And so, I learned to smile with my mouth closed. If I couldn’t fix it, I would hide it.
I am not my teeth, my imperfect teeth with spaces in between, not these faded yellows I fought so long to distance myself from
The diastema, the medical term for the front gap tooth, is considered a form of beauty in some cultures, such as Nigerian and Ghanaian culture, where women sometimes get cosmetic procedures to give them gaps between their front teeth. The United States, however, has struggled to embrace this, to leave behind the legacy of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—a gap-toothed threat, the gaping feminine. The gap-toothed smiles of kidnapped African women brought over as slaves were used to brand them with the sign of sexual promiscuity.
Gap tooth as tool of exploitation; gap tooth as deviation from the norm; gap tooth as form of deviance.
“You could fit a quarter between there,” a man on a bus in San Francisco once leered after I defended a friend when he asked them whether they were a boy or a girl. “A quarter, or something else.”
Studies have shown that those with “good teeth” are thought to be smarter than those without, than those with teeth like mine. Smarter, more educated, more respectable.
According to Dr. B, an orthodontist with a practice not far from my hometown, “Viewed from the slightest distance, the teeth should resemble a gleaming-white solid strip of plastic.” Absolute whiteness, absolute straightness, absolute uniformity—this is the definition of so-called perfect teeth.
these are the teeth of my mother, my sister, my mother’s sister, the women in my family
On the sixth season of America’s Next Top Model, Danielle Evans, a Black girl with a gap tooth from Southern Arkansas competed. “Do you really think you can be a CoverGirl with a gap in your mouth?” Tyra Banks asked her, holding a finger obscenely in between her front teeth after Evans agreed to narrow but refused to fully close her gap.
When she won despite her gap, I cried tears of happiness.
So call me what you want—Jack ‘o lantern, Cheshire cat, that sassy kid from Mad Magazine. Just don’t tell me my teeth should look like plastic, like some gleaming white piece of trash that will spend years in a landfill. No, thank you!
The thing is, these teeth, they’ve got character. They’re tough, like me, and a little bit different.
I thought for years that “perfect” teeth might make me feel normal, might help me to feel like I finally fit in, that thing I wanted so desperately. But fixing them—that is, closing the gaps—would have erased a part of who I am. I want to be who I am, to learn to feel in all the ways, to settle into this imperfect body—not to run away from it in the name of fixing what is not broken.
So too, the gaps between my teeth have stories to tell. They hold the body memories of moments that have made me smile wide and free, of belly laughter and the feel of my lover’s tongue tracing the map of my mouth as we kiss. In photographs from my early childhood, before I knew what ‘beauty’ was, before it was something I wanted, my gaps decorate my guileless grin, they speak of mischief and joy.
I’ve been thinking about my teeth a lot over the past few years during the pandemic, covered as they have been by the facemask that I’ve worn. I’ve often wondered if people who pass me by on the street, or those I meet for the first time, assume that I have so-called perfect teeth. They’re the default after all—every smile the same. Why would anyone think otherwise?
Still, it’s strange to imagine this, disconcerting somehow, and I long to tell them there is so much more. I suppose, like everyone, what it comes down to is that I just want to be seen—both within and beyond this physical body. See me, see these teeth, see the struggle I have waged against myself, the struggle waged against me, against anything, anyone marked as different. See me and know that I am but one star in a billion. And in the space between my teeth there is a universe.
And if I die tomorrow or a hundred years from now they may be all that’s left of me. alien hands may work them over, hold them close or beneath a microscope marvel at their strangeness, their pale gray lines, may use those lines to learn my name my secrets deep within my truest self my dna spiral of infinite beauty
