Homemade Teeth
originally posted: first week of July 2001
Brought to you by Annabelle and Her Amazing Squash Blossom Necklace. Part IV? V? of the Boonville Chronicles.
While Mother Media and I were in Boonville last week, Granny INSISTED that we visit her friend Annabelle. Annabelle is about Granny's age, i.e. nearly 90, and lives alone in a stately brick house perched high on a hill. Her home overlooks, on the downhill side, several others and, like Aunt Mary FUTS, she owns most of them. She was, and still is to some extent, an impressive matriarch, in vocabulary at least. (A favorite phrase, uttered when discussing cranky tenants on her property: "I told them they could just go stuh-raight to hey-ull!") Mother Media and her sister, my Aunt Eva, were not looking forward to the visit. But Granny had called ahead to say we were coming, so we had to stop by.
The front door opened on an inflated munchkin wearing the largest, heaviest turquoise-and-silver squash blossom necklace I have ever seen -- and I used to sell these to gullible tourists at Wall Drug. It hung all the way to her waist, which to be fair is not a long distance as Annabelle stands about as tall as my shoulder. (Her shellac-black hair, glittering with dozens of bobby pins, reaches nose height.) But the size of the thing! The silver conchos comprising the necklace were the size of silver dollars -- the old, big kind, not the new quarter-sized gold ones. And the horseshoe-shaped pendant at the bottom was the size of a real horseshoe. Any of the bubblegum-wad-sized chunks of turquoise inlaid in the silver could easily have slain Goliath. They were rivaled in size only by the turquoise stones on her fingers, two or three of them each as broad as a laborer's thumbnail. (There was a real 3-carat diamond, too.) This was my introduction to Annabelle.
As we stepped into her front room, we were drawn up short by . . . dolls. Dolls everywhere. On chairs, end tables, shelves, the TV (one of three I counted in our brief visit, and that was just the downstairs), the hearth, the floor, stacked and piled on top of each other several layers thick . . . dolls. Annabelle collects dolls. From fine china and bisque to antique kewpies to a generations' worth of Barbies to discount-store disembodied heads . . . dolls. And they were all sitting out there, staring at us. There's just a single Annabelle-wide path leading from one room to the next, bounded on each side by legions of dolls and drifts of the scrap fabric she uses to sew or crochet clothes for them. All 550+ of them. She's glued fake (?) jewels to the fingers of some to represent rings, and many of them also wear real necklaces that may or may not be valuable. She's very into Indian stuff especially -- Navajo, Hopi and Zuni from the looks of things -- and has ornamented several Indian dolls' headbands with clip-on turquoise earrings. Annabelle can tell you what coat's lining, whose prom dress or which of her old scarves gave up its life to be reincarnated as a doll's dress. And she did.
The creepiest part, though, was the teeth. Some of Annabelle's dolls have teeth, and not just the painted-in kind, either. Several of these angelic little faces were sporting what appeared to be rotting milk teeth. Seeing Eva examining a miniature set of choppers, Annabelle explained that she makes her own. She'll squeeze out a little caulk, the kind you'd use to fill gaps around window frames, and let it dry a bit. Then she rolls it into a thin string and lets it dry further. Finally she snips off a bit of the string, by now a dirty grey color, and glues it in the doll's mouth, then uses a toothpick to draw in the interdental spaces. Voila! Homemade teeth.
We only stayed about 20 minutes at Annabelle's house and never sat down, since there's only room for one person to sit in any given room and the rest of the furniture is covered with dolls. As we left, Mom cautioned that this is what happens to people who don't have children to occupy their attention. Media Sensation is currently child-free and very, very afraid.