The Dentist

“Some of this belongs to the dentist.” Their landlady gestured toward the piles of overflowing boxes and bags. The basement was littered with the jetsam of someone halfway moved out. A box of clay pigeons sat atop a case of Coors Light. Three bottles of mouthwash waited in the corner. “He may be back to get his stuff sometime. And he’s pretty cute, too.” They glanced at the abandoned piles, signs of a life scattered and a hurriedly vacated house. Men were never as cute as old ladies made them out to be.

Soon their affairs intermingled with the remains of the mysterious dentist, who never ended up materializing. They absently piled their students’ ungraded work atop stacks of American Dental Association binders. The house became a bizarre melee of teaching-dental paraphernalia. A box of trial-sized floss became a footstool. Oral Pharmacology for the Dental Hygienist became a coaster.

It was puzzling. What did he wear, this dentist, since all of his clothing seemed to be piled in their basement next to the water heater? What sort of young man would leave behind a perfectly good case of cheap beer? Or a pair of rubber waders? When money dwindled they used his bottles of mouthwash. They half-wondered about who he was, where he went, when and if he’d return for his things, if he actually was decent looking, and why he flew the coop so quickly and without his library of well-worn dental school study materials. They half-wondered, but since his things were fixtures in the house they never paid too much attention. It made some sense that he’d cut the fat before moving out. The men they knew were impatient and slovenly. And really, why would he want to travel with all that junk if he could just leave it in their little yellow rented house, a free storage unit?

They moved around the corner in December because the little old landlady was gouging them for rent. Student teaching ended and they threw most of the children’s drawings away (except for the really good ones). They packed up everything – not a trace of their lives in the yellow house remained, except for a broken dining room chair and some hairballs in the drain.

The things he left smacked of bachelorhood and academia, and left the mystery unsolved for the next pair of college tenants to wonder about. Perhaps if they had more than half-wondered they may have tried to dig a little. It would have been exciting to find a love letter – there was that condom wrapper they found under the bed – or some telling photograph or an incriminating piece of mail. Maybe they would have pieced together a few artifacts that wove a short string of story about who this person was. If they had truly considered that he was out there being real someplace and they knew nothing, it would have seemed tragic.

Occasionally one would be driving alone on a sunny winter day and her hunched, bundled shadow against the passenger side window would remind her of the way those rubber waders squatted on the basement floor. Every time the other went for a dental checkup and saw anything trial-sized the memory weakly and ambiguously resurfaced. The remains of The Dentist were again abandoned, and it was never tragic.