The case of the stolen dentures

Normally, I try to stay out of Momma’s family business. Her family, as you may have gathered by now, sometimes “ain’t right.”

But when your grandmother steals your aunt’s false teeth, someone needs to step in.

As she cuts my hair, Momma shares family gossip.

“Did you hear about Paul?” she asks, while trimming behind my ears.

“What’s that fool done now?” I knew something good was coming.

“Growing that dope right in his Mom’s greenhouse!”

“No!”

“Yes sir. To make things worse, them state police tore his Momma’s flower beds all up getting that evidence out of there!”

“Well, that wasn’t very nice of ‘em,” I replied.

“And did you hear about Susie?” But before I could answer, “Pregnant again! Three times in two years? That’s one busy heifer! Even the Good Lord rested one day a week!”

About every other month or so, Momma gets the urge to cut hair and you better get it while the getting’s good. It’s hard to beat a free haircut, what with prices these days, and let’s face it: if you don’t let your mother cut your hair on the front porch every once and a while, are you even truly Southern?

Mind you, a Momma haircut is not without its perils. She has no formal cosmetology training whatsoever. Depending on her level of medication, a haircut may vary from perfectly level to downright cattywampus. She will nip an ear occasionally. She might stop to clean out of your ears, despite your squirming, or rub on some foul-smelling anti-baldness ointment. Lord help you if she finds pimples that need popping.

Then there is the wait time. When Momma is in the haircutting mood, she tries to get everybody in one fell swoop. By the time I arrived, Daddy was in the chair wearing only his stretched-out, once-white underwear, two dogs are on the couch waiting their turn, an impatient potbellied pig is peeking in through the screen door, and a sheep is trying to climb up the porch steps. I try to get in between the half-naked old man and the livestock whenever I can.

Family gossip is nice, but then she gets to oversharing.

“Did I tell you about your Daddy? He tried one of them pecker pumps. You know, the long plastic things that look like a bicycle pump... well, it didn’t go too well.”

Lord, please save me. A strong, tickling sensation starts rising in the back of my throat, and I don’t think it’s a hairball from the haircut.

“Momma, I don’t need to hear..” but before I could protest further, she continues.

“That pump turned his tallywacker all purple and yellow and brown – I swear, it looked like a calico cat! I thought he was gonna pass out!”

You ever get one of them hot burps, and you don’t know if you need to spit or vomit?

This must be one of them overmedication days for Mom, I thought.

She continues trimming around my ears, and I know that just one laugh, one gag, one shake of the head in disbelief or disgust, and I’m looking like Vincent van Gogh with a bad haircut.

“Well, when it comes to romance your Daddy could take it or leave it, but I’m thinking about saving up to get him one of those penile implant things that’s built right in that sucker, with a remote control… except I’m keeping the remote in my pocketbook!”

Momma snickered, or cackled is more like it. Yep, clearly a medication issue.

I started sweating and feeling more nauseous, but by then she was trimming my bangs so I couldn’t bolt without losing an eye to the razor-sharp scissors hovering inches from my face. “Momma, I’m begging you…”

Fortunately, she quickly changed the subject because the half-naked calico man came back into the room.

“Did I tell you about your Aunt Sassy?”

Thank the God Lord, I thought. “What’s that crazy heifer up to now?”

Momma had four sisters: Sassy, Itsy, Bitsy, and Titsy. Titsy grew up to be the more well-endowed of the bunch, if you know what I mean, Itsy and Bitsy were the runts of the litter, and Sassy was the wild one in the family, always getting into mischief.

“Somebody stole her false teeth!”

“You got to be kidding me!”

“Don’t you tell nobody, but we think it was an inside job,” Momma hesitates, starts to say something else, then, “But I’ve done said too much already!”

Try as I might, I couldn’t get the old gal to spill any more information, but I had heard enough. What kind of person would steal an old woman’s teeth?

Aunt Sassy was always my favorite. While Itsy, Bitsy and Titsy all got married and moved away, Aunt Sassy stayed home to spend her golden years with her mother, my grandmother. We called her Mamie. Needless to say, while living together Mamie and Sassy quarreled constantly.

Sassy smoked Marlboro cigarettes and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon or Old Milwaukee beer, and when the nieces and nephews would come around, she’d tell us about her adventurous love life, or ask about ours. But the poor woman always had bad teeth, and it took her years to save up and get that custom-deluxe full set of dentures.

***********

The whole affair troubled me, and it was hot on my mind when the family got together for Thanksgiving that year. Sure enough, there was Aunt Sassy, looking at her plate of food all sad, lips puckered, face drawn up.

Strangely, Mamie didn’t even wait to say Grace but starting chomping on a turkey drumstick, gnawing on some short ribs, eating sweet corn right off the cob.

I leaned over and turned to Momma, “When did Mamie get new teeth? I thought she lost hers a while back.”

“You hush your mouth and stay out of it!” she hissed. “Nobody is supposed to know what’s going on.”

At the opposite end of the table, glaring at her mother, looking mad as hell, sat Aunt Sassy, just gumming some cornbread and eating a little dressing and mashed potatoes here and there.

Normally, I try to stay out of Momma’s family business. Her family, as you may have gathered by now, sometimes “ain’t right.”

But when your grandmother steals your aunt’s false teeth, someone needs to step in.

“Momma, you need to do something,” I insisted.

***********

For months, the sordid family scandal bothered me greatly. I finally got the whole sad story out of Momma. Mamie had lost her teeth, and she found Sassy’s laying around the house one day, so she tried them on. Maybe she thought they were hers, maybe she didn’t care. But they fit perfectly, better than hers, so she kept them.

Momma and her sisters kept it all a secret, as much as possible for a gossiping bunch of bats. Even when I offered to take up a collection, or pay for some new teeth myself – for one of the old women, it didn’t matter which one! – they told me in no uncertain terms to butt out. This was grown folks business.

To make matters worse, for months, anytime you asked Aunt Sassy what she wanted for Christmas, or her birthday, or Mother’s Day, she would get this fiery look and only say, “I want my damn teeth back!”

Family. What can you do?

***********

Mamie died the following Spring, right around Mother’s Day. Thanks for the condolences, but we all knew it was coming, and she had gotten mean as a stomped-on rattlesnake by then anyway, cussing and biting people at the nursing home with those ill-gotten new teeth.

The family gathered at the Fairdale Mortuary, and it was good to see everyone. That’s the thing about death: it’s a tragic thing, but you get to see relatives you hadn’t seen in years, and you even forget you don’t like some of them, at least for a little while. And someone always has a drink and a story or fond memory to share in the parking lot outside the funeral home.

Some people call it visitation. We call it a “setting up,” as in sitting up with the dead, like they used to do in the old days. They had Mamie laid out looking right nice and elegant in the casket the sisters picked out, wearing her favorite dress, her hair all teased up in a tight ball with White Rain hairspray, a little bit of makeup and lipstick. The family lingered about, as friends and strangers trickled in to pay their respects.

I waited a while, until the crowd thinned out, before I went over close to the coffin. I normally hold it together pretty good at these things, but if I did break down I didn’t want too many witnesses seeing me cry – but wait a minute! Something was wrong.

I leaned over and looked closely. There was something weird looking about Mamie, something oddly shaped about her face, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. I squinted closer, looked harder, and then I saw it.

Our grandmother didn’t have a tooth in her head!

I caught Aunt Sassy just as she was heading out the side door at an unusually fast past such an older lady. She flashed me a pearly white smile and a wink, then she was gone. I didn’t try to stop her.

No one saw her for quite a while after that. Her sisters said she was in mourning, “not taking it well.” I figured she was at a steakhouse or rib joint somewhere, making up for lost time, beer and cigarette in hand.

I guess she got her Mother’s Day wish after all.

***********

We lost Aunt Sassy just a couple years after Mamie went. That one hit hard. They say only the good die young, right? But why do you always miss the bad ones so much?  

We laid her to rest just a few feet from Mamie, right on the hill in the White Oak Cemetery where all our people go. Family legend has it that the ground rolls and shakes up there from time to time, because those two stubborn, lunatic women are still butting heads and going at it about those false teeth.

But I think that’s just what Momma tells everyone when she’s cutting hair and runs out of gossip.