Flossing

Mom flosses me every night with my limbs starfished across the kitchen counter and my head hanging off the edge. She kneels over me with a spool of minted thread and works the string between my teeth. She says nothing used to come out of there, just berry skins and basil, and I would pop my mouth closed like a little coin purse. Nowadays, cheap rhinestones and cigarettes leap from my gums, and she wipes her hands on an old blue bath towel that’s growing green. Then she sends me to my room where I dream of having a cartoon smile, unbroken upper and lower strips of white for teeth.

For lunch, Mom packs me sliced fruit soaked in salt water so that it doesn’t brown, so that even when cut open for hours it looks fresh. It is just as pristine when I bring it home uneaten. Other kids buy lunch from the cafeteria: cheeseburgers frilled with greens, red-drowned spaghetti, juicy slices of pizza. Julia says it’s gross but I eat her crusts at the end of lunch hour, covering my face in leftover salt and oil. Those nights, the floss gets so greasy and orange that it barely stays wound around Mom’s fingers. She knots it around her thumbs so that it doesn’t slip away, and by the end the tips are purpled like sausages, which makes me so embarrassed for her, losing her grip and killing herself over it.

Julia and I collect little trophies from the classrooms: protractors and staplers and the history teacher’s glasses and the art teacher’s aprons. She hides them in her dad’s car and I pocket them in my mouth. Julia gives me the principal’s mousepad that Mom flosses from between my canines; I grab for it as she tries to toss it over her shoulder. I am almost as tall as her now, but what scares her back is my blood-lined gums.

Mom always says we need to be extra careful because girls in our family are born with only one set of teeth. That others have the option of a fresh start when their adult teeth push the baby teeth out of their cradles, but our family sold that right in order to board a ship and come here. “If girls here don’t like what they have, they pull out the tooth and start over,” she whispers to me while she flosses, a staple flecking her cheek. “But we only have one chance.”

That’s also why she won’t show me her teeth. “We had no floss when I was young,” she says. “They’re full of junk.” She covers her mouth with both hands when she laughs or smiles or shouts. Every time she tells the boat story, our family is at sea for longer and longer, and by now we’re adrift for years between basement apartments and restaurant attics before Mom says, “Finally, I had you.” I imagine Mom at the stern of a ship trying to work a bottle cap from between her molars with her tongue, fingers tight on the gunwale, ocean spray brining her lips.

“Do I floss?” says Julia, draining a can of Coca-Cola in one breath. “I mean, when the dentist makes me.” She crushes the can and hiss-laughs when the aluminum cuts her. I lick the blood off her palm and it’s thick, rich, the flavor of someone brave. I study the veins in the pale of our wrists and suspect that they look the same.

On weekends Mom hard-boils eggs or heats a bowl of fish congee for us to share. I can hardly sit through our sterile breakfast before running down the street to 7-Eleven where Julia is waiting in the car, M&M bags wedged between seat cushions, the school gym’s Exit sign lopsided in the rear window. This week she shows me how to slip bracelets into my bra at Claire’s and how to dine-and-dash, and my mouth grows heavy with jewels.

Mom buys extra boxes of floss now, bulk packs that should last years but that we go through in days, because she lashes me to the passenger seat when she picks me up after school, so I don’t run away, so that she can wiggle matchsticks of salted pear between my lips and floss me again before bed. My teeth snap at her fingers but I swear I am just trying to ask a question.

Over spring break, Julia and I are running from the mall cops, and I trip over a seam in the asphalt, knocking out my top right incisor. Mom finds me in the kitchen holding a towel-wrapped ice pack to my mouth. “Let me see,” she says, and moans when I show her the gap, and then the forlorn bloody pebble in my hand. She puts the lost tooth in milk and binds me to the kitchen counter.

That night, gently exploring the jellied wound with my tongue, I discover a needle of enamel poking through my gum. I wriggle free of the floss and wake Mom, whose cheeks are still lacquered with tears.

“New tooth,” I say, something golden ballooning in my chest. She presses her lips tighter and peers inside, but even she can’t miss the whitish nub barely crowning.

“It’s not possible,” she says, her eyes unfocused.

“You were lying, you’re always lying to me,” I scream. “I’m not like you!” She crumples to the counter and lets me run to my room unclean.

I wake up later that night to a light in the kitchen. Gums itching, head pounding, I discover Mom kneeling on the linoleum, a tangle of floss in her hands. “Come here,” she says, and this time she lies down, arms and legs spanning the counter as if she’s floating in water. She drops her jaw and tilts her head back, and I gasp at all the colors.