On August 14th, I got in a bike accident. It was two days before R. and I were set to drive everything we’d brought down to DC back up to New Haven and then fly from NYC to the Azores. In other words: we had ahead of us packing up a house, then a six-hour drive, a couple hours of sleep, three hours on trains, and a six-hour flight.
I didn’t think, right away, about that. The first few thoughts I had were: oh shit, oh fuck, oh my god, oh shit, then, are my front teeth gone?
The accident happened because I swerved to go around a car stopped in the bike lane and ended up steering directly into an old tram track. My wheel got caught in the divot and when I tried to turn, the bike flipped. When I flew off, I landed hard. The pavement sliced open my rear brake line, leaving a splayed-out web of steel cable, and turned the front of my bike the wrong way. A man on the street, in an orange safety vest, ran into the road to help me carry my bike to the sidewalk and told another man, who I think he was working with, to get my phone out of the road. Are you going to stay there all day? the nice man yelled at the driver of the car that had been stopped in the bike lane, and then he grabbed a napkin from the woman in that car to give me. I stuck it in my bleeding mouth. I asked him if my teeth were gone, and he said, Let me show you a picture. I was laughing, I couldn’t stop laughing in the shock of everything. He said, You’re OK, baby, you’re alive, or something like that.
R. came to collect me and we went to an emergency room. We were at the ER from 6 PM the day of the accident to 6 AM the morning after. They took some X-rays and did a CT scan and then they did another CT scan with contrast, tests which added up to maybe twenty-five minutes of total time in dark rooms with taciturn men who asked So what happened to you? and then told me to rotate my hand, hold my breath. One of the techs commented on my last name, asked where it came from, then commented skeptically, Well you don’t look Czech. I shrugged and said, Yeah, it’s from my dad’s side, because you can’t respond more stridently to microaggressions when someone is in charge of your medical care and it is 3 AM, you’re bleeding from wounds no one ever offered to bandage, and you’re so very tired. Most of the time was waiting, listening to people in horrible pain coughing and shifting around in their seats while the Hallmark channel played on two TVs. A man, hand in his pants, convulsing and groaning, might have been jerking off but then he screamed, My wrist is broken! Can I get some help? (Then again, you have two wrists, so…) A German woman with a leg injury sat with her husband and two young sons, sleeping as the night went on. They tried to give her Oxy and she said, No narcotics please. They gave me Oxy and I put it in my pocket when the nurse turned around because I was afraid if I said I didn’t want to take such a strong painkiller he would think I was an uncooperative patient. I wanted to leave but they told me I would not find out what the doctor thought of the scans, if there was anything seriously wrong, if I left. So I stayed. We ordered Taco Bell I could not eat. The moment they discharged me I ate part of a cold soft potato taco with the corner of my mouth, on the way to the street where the accident happened, where R. and I had left our bikes locked to a pole.
There are some scars now. Parts of two teeth chipped off, my lip was cut, and I had an ugly bruise from under my nose to my chin, plus an amoebic multicolored bruise on my hip and belly that pulsed with pain whenever I laughed hard for about a week.
I joked a lot about how much it looked like someone had beat me up. I joked a lot about the whole thing but it sucked, I was self-conscious whenever I went outside. I took a short walk my last day in DC, a ten-minute walk. My route: from the bougie cafe where I’d go ritually most days of the summer in order to get an iced latte and baked treat (especially their particularly excellent blackberry pecan financier) back to the house we were subletting from a kindly political science professor. The neighborhood was teeming with nice academics and government types and the nannies of color who watched their kids. I passed a bunch of Europeans with backpacks on and felt like everyone was looking at me, their expressions inscrutable: pity, revulsion, or something of both? There are whole neighborhoods within which you are protected from thinking about the possibility and existence of misfortune, Siddhartha’s palace pre-awakening. I felt now, in one of those places, like an aberration.
Rich people in rich countries have such good teeth. It hurts to try and keep up. My dentist in East Rock, pre-accident: Well, your top teeth are OK, and those are your moneymakers. Maybe when you have a job, get your bottom teeth fixed. (Crowding.) There’s an article out in The Cut about how young people with OK teeth are getting veneers. The name “veneer” seems like a misnomer for what it is: shaving the enamel of your teeth down and putting a whole, new, porcelain thing that a ceramicist makes for you onto the whittled-down husk that is your natural tooth.
I didn’t get veneers. I paid $1600 so a dentist who could see me the day after the accident could put two fillings in the two teeth. She said matter-of-factly that the fillings might fall out later, and it was always possible I might need a root canal in the future, though it didn’t look like I needed one now. She said, You’ll want to avoid eating hard foods indefinitely. Indefinitely? I asked. Yeah, don’t go biting any apples. I cried a lot, not over the apples, but over the way I had looked before, the things that hadn’t scared me. I miss a country of yellowed crowded teeth where I have never lived.
On Tuesday I took my bike to the co-op and learned what to do from volunteers, threaded in a steel cable, cut it and capped it, adjusted my brakes. I went on a short bike ride — to and from a pickup soccer game — for the first time since the accident. I could see the potholes in the street with such clarity, as if they were vibrating. When an SUV made a right turn and I saw R., in front of me, brake to avoid it, I screamed out loud, Did that Explorer just make that right turn on you, hoping the driver heard me, hoping they felt ashamed. Anger is a secondary emotion, where had I heard that before. As in: I was terrified but it was impossible to ride my bike and simultaneously be thinking every second about how I could fall off and be hurt, so instead I was angry, I was pedaling hard with my bitch face on, spoiling for a fight. Not quite freedom but a cousin to it, what I needed to make it down the block.