Free The Magician's Girl by Doris Grumbach Page A

He believed the disturbing action of a toothpick or a brush would only activate the solid wastes that had gathered to protect his gums against infection from the outside, and the valleys and peaks of his teeth against invasion and decay. While Liz was growing up and taken to the dentist every year by her attentive mother, she watched the slow disappearance of her father’s teeth. As he sat reading one of his pamphlets from International Publishers, she saw him poke into his mouth with his index finger, holding it in one place for long periods of time, moving it slightly, back and forth. He was open about what he was doing. ‘I make no bones about it’ was his way of transforming his dentulous act into a joke. A tooth having offended him by its weakness in its socket, he was engaged in wiggling it, in and out, around and around, one week accomplishing a small root crack, the next causing a piece to give way entirely. Then the crack, another long week of probe and shake, push and propel, until the final snap, and the tooth was out, spit into his hand, saved in an envelope marked ‘Marcus’s canines, bicuspids, molars and incisors.’ At each extraction he would exult to Muriel and Liz, ‘No expense. No pain. Even some pleasure in the process. Do-it-yourself patience and instinctive skill. That’s the secret.’ ‘No teeth is the secret,’ said Muriel. ‘Well, yes. But when they’re all gone, I will buy some fine, shapely, Sanforized new ones that I will clean in baking soda.’
    Liz came to regard Marcus’s dental cowardice as the highest form of bravery: a sacrifice of natural parts of the body in the interest of oral privacy. What could be more admirable? The ultimate defense, the preservation of one’s amateur rights over one’s provenance, against the professionals who are charged to do it, against the invaders. Both parents, she saw, had vowed eternal vigilance for their fears. They preserved their corporeal privacy, and had been courageous, altogether admirable and faithful, in the eyes of their child, to their intrepid tradition. Just once had her parents submitted themselves to violent extractions. Ever after, they erected effective barriers against any recurrence.
    When she traveled away from the well-known and trusted environs of Christopher Street, Liz went by subway or, preferably, on the El. At fourteen she was able to move around the caverns and the air of the city as easily as a farm child in his father’s barns. She knew all the subterranean passages of the IRT. Her usual journey was to Fifty-ninth Street, on the local from Sheridan Square to Fourteenth Street, then the express, which cut through the triple uptown aisles like a bullet to Forty-second Street, and then across the platform again to the local that took her to the street of the galleries. She made all these train changes without thought, her eyes often on a book she was reading.
    Or she took the El. She would walk across the Village to the Third Avenue station on the uptown side, for the excitement of riding the great, rumbling uplifted iron horse of a train, on her way, via a crosstown bus, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Depositing her nickel into the slot, she would push, on the side marked ENTRANCE , against one of the four heavy black arms of the even-sided metal cross, and gain entry, as hard going as if she had forced the door of a vault. No sliding under the turnstile, as she had done when she was younger; it was illegal to enter so, though she was still small at fourteen and could easily have avoided the eye of the man in his cage. Once through the turnstile, especially in winter, Liz often stood at the potbellied stove the change maker kept stoked with coal. It sat just inside the swinging doors to the platform, its long, crook-neck pipe reaching to the corrugated ceiling. Her hands on the small doors to the stove, she always studied the etched glass windows, a