INCHOATE THOUGHTS
It has often been remarked that you can distinguish between
Americans and Britons as soon as they open their mouths—not by anything they
say, for they do not even have to speak, but by their teeth. I knew another
traveler I encountered in an obscure corner of the Andes was American as soon
as she smiled, so regular and white were her teeth. A woman of obviously
European heritage who shared my table in a crowded Tokyo café only had to bare
her misaligned and discolored teeth to reveal herself British. My own teeth are
the color of ivory—human, not plastic—and would doubtless have endured the
subtle correction of a brace had I enjoyed the benefits of an American rather
than a British middle-class upbringing. Yet which is more truly the harbinger
of our inevitable death and decay, yellow stumps or bleached perfection? The inimitable
Italian war correspondent and novelist Curzio Malaparte caught the irony of the
American dental condition perfectly in The
Skin (1952):
“Really?” exclaimed Mrs. Flat, flushing with pleasure and slowly
lowering her eyes until they rested upon me; and as her lips parted in a smile
of admiration I saw the flashing of her teeth, the white splendor of those
marvelous American teeth which are impervious to the years and which actually
seem unreal, they are so white, so even and so perfect. That smile dazzled me;
it made me lower my eyelids and shudder with fear. It was accompanied by that
terrible flashing of teeth which in America is the first happy augury of old
age, the last glittering gesture of farewell which every American makes to the
world of the living as he descends smiling into the grave.