The nosy stewardess had to apologize. I could hear her conversation with Terry, as her supervisor stood, tapping her shoe, her face mottled with disapproval of the blonde trainee she was overseeing. Hearing Terry put in a request for an expensive beer, which he would have gotten free in first class anyway, I removed my attention from the scene going on behind me to study my young bride.
Her eyes were shining. She wasn’t the least bit upset from what had occurred during my absence. She was watching the other passengers, while pretending to be interested in the movies she was flipping through on the screen in front of her.
“Are we going to watch a romantic, science fiction, or mystery movie,” I asked.
That turned her luscious lips in my direction. Penelope forgot she’d been watching the woman three seats over who had her laptop on the tray and was pounding away as if she were writing a book.
My young wife sighed. “It’s too late to watch anything, I think?” she said with that cute question mark she always inserted when she was unsure of a statement.
“You can’t sleep yet. You’d miss dinner.”
“The TV dinner?” she asked, curling her lips so that her perfectly shaped and extraordinarily white teeth exposed themselves.
Teeth were something I always noticed. Earlier centuries had not been kind to teeth. Most peoples’ teeth had blackened by the time they were thirty. Most smiles were full of wiggling teeth, and there were many empty spots where reddish gums displayed the careless habits of a pre-toothbrush realm. And bad breath was not just from a diet of onions and garlic, crunched raw to prevent the many diseases of that time period, but from a mouth that stank of uncleanness, with as potent a vile odor as that from their unwashed bodies.
Crooked teeth were also rampant. Andrew’s short-term wife had the teeth of a piranha. He’d loved her anyway, but it was a fact that teeth were something to be fond of and to take care of with great diligence. Andrew had tried to get his wife to clean her teeth with chewed off twigs and charcoal powder, but she resisted, telling him it was unnatural.
Luckily the Pooka genes had given me flawless teeth, and even Andrew, whose teeth had been yellow and slightly uneven, although his black skin had not shown it as starkly as a white person’s would have — when I’d given him the bite, his body grew healthier, his teeth whitened, and his eyes, which had been slightly feeble, were suddenly a marvel for the time.
But I was discussing teeth and how when Penelope smiled at me, full toothed with happiness, I marveled at the display. Of course, now, my sweet darling would never suffer from cavities, never need a dentist, and never have to endure a root canal like poor Arnold, one of the businessmen I’d invited to my wedding, who had just been forced to endure something so painful he was still grimacing and holding his jaw.