False Teeth

My great-grandmother Leta had false teeth. When I was a young child, I thought they were perfect teeth—beautiful and incredibly white. Sometimes I noticed she would stretch her jaw, as if she had something in her teeth or it was stiff. When she did this, we also heard something that sounded like cracking of the knuckles. I didn’t know what that meant, but there was a time when my brother, sister and I all learned how to crack our knuckles, and I wanted to crack my jaw, too, like Grandma Eckman did.

I learned that she had dentures one morning when we stopped by my grandparents’ home. I don’t know where we were going, but my mother wanted to stop, and instead of waiting in the car with my siblings, I went inside with her. I needed to use the toilet. Grandma Eckman was spending a few days with them, as she was wont to do on occasion. She stayed in my teenaged aunt’s room, forcing my aunt to temporarily sleep on the pullout couch upstairs.

Briefly, my grandparents’ house was basically one story with a basement. On the first floor, there were several rooms: kitchen, dining room, living room, two bedrooms and a full bath. My grandparents occupied one of the bedrooms and my aunt (until shortly before my grandmother died) occupied the second. There was a full basement with a large family-style room with a built-in bar at one end, a large work/rec/laundry room with a pool table, and a fruit cellar. The upstairs was comprised mostly of a third bedroom and half-bath. My father and uncle shared that room—although there were only a few years from the time my uncle moved into the room and my dad married my mom and moved into his own home. At the top of the stairs was a large landing with a closet, desk and pullout bed.

Anyway, while my mother and Grandma Metzker were in the kitchen chatting, I made my way hastily into the bathroom, and when I finished, I turned to the sink to wash my hands. There in a clear glass were two sets of teeth soaking.  I was fascinated. They looked like a science experiment. I wasn’t a toucher, so I just looked at them and wished that I could show my sister. (She was the toucher.) I even twisted myself, so I could see around the glass.

They were teeth!

I must have been in there for some time, because I was startled when someone tapped on the door.

“Jerry, are you all right in there?”

“Just washing my hands,” I called. When I left the room, my grandmother was alone in the kitchen.

“Did you wash your hands?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Your mom is in the car waiting for you.”

I looked at her very hard. She wasn’t missing her teeth. And the ones in the glass couldn’t be my grandfather’s. He was at work.  They must have been Grandma Eckman’s. Just as I walked out the door, I saw that she had left her room and went into the bathroom.

“Grandma Eckman has false teeth,” I told my siblings after I was back in the car. “I saw them in a glass in the bathroom.”

My brother shrugged his shoulders. “So does Grandma Metzker,” he said.

I was stunned. I had just looked at her teeth, and they seemed normal.

“I saw them once when she was brushing them,” my brother explained. “She was in the bathroom with the door open.”

We were all a little stunned with the knowledge. I wondered how it happened and what it would be like to have false teeth.

* * * * * * * * * *

Leta lost her teeth slowly at first, a tooth pulled here and there, particularly on the bottom. First, she had a partial denture fitted for her lower teeth, so she could chew. She continued to have more teeth issues, and finally she agreed with the dentist to have the remainder of her them removed. She was 55 years old.

“This happens a lot to women with your background,” the dentist told her.

“What do you mean?” she asked, expecting that he would call into question her reputation.

“You know,” he explained nonchalantly, “working folks, not farmers, who don’t always get to eat the best foods in your childhood. The teeth just never get strong enough.”

She reluctantly agreed.

While losing her teeth did not necessarily make her feel old, she did feel that it was a kind of weakness. However, the constant discomfort of her quickly deteriorating teeth was affecting her greatly. Her teeth hurt constantly, and she had terrible halitosis.  So over the course of a few months, she had all of her teeth removed, a temporary denture so she could eat and talk, and then her own dentures made and installed. While the false teeth took some getting used to, she quickly adapted and as far as anyone she met from that point on knew, these were her normal teeth.