In the Chair
by Grace Keir
I fear the dentist because I do not like anything in my mouth that I cannot hold onto myself. A fork, a toothbrush, a sandwich, a cigarette — these are okay. For me, the fear is not about the sharp steel instruments, the mechanical whirring, the blood, or the pain. These discomforts are acceptable to me, given the situation of the dentist’s chair. I am a logical person. But I do not like my hands in my lap with my mouth open and all sorts of things going in and out of it. So I found a dentist, a kind and compliant man of sixty or so, who lets me hold onto his thick, hairy wrist while he scrapes at my gums and inspects my molars.
I found a psychologist, too. He tells me that my particular fear of the dentist is indicative of a suppressed childhood memory. He doesn’t say molestation, but I can tell he is thinking it. He says my dentist enables this suppression by allowing our routine to continue. He says just because I am holding the wrist does not mean I control the hand. So I fire the psychologist. There is no part of him I can hold onto while he goes into my head.
Grace Keir is a writer from New York based in Columbia, SC. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of South Carolina, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Cola Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “In the Chair”? I wrote “In the Chair” after my friend Fiona sent me a short nonfiction piece she’d written about getting a root canal. Fiona’s piece explored the medical debt that comes with treating a tooth problem. Another friend of mine has to take drugs for her anxiety before every routine cleaning. So I was thinking a lot about fear and teeth and the dentist and how weird and intimate and vulnerable it can be to lie in that chair. From those thoughts, this narrator and her own fears were born. As it happens, I was just told by me and Fiona’s dentist — we see the same guy — that I need a root canal, too.
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