Mary Ruefle Drives Me to the Dentist by Kelly Luce
Kelly Luce has a nagging toothache. In her flash essay, “Mary Ruefle Drives Me to the Dentist,” Luce characterizes one of her favorite poets (and, simultaneously, her chauffeur to the dentist), Mary Ruefle, a characterization striking in its specificity and dedication to a quirkiness that writers often appreciate about one another.
From the beginning, Luce establishes the contrast between narrator and driver: “I think I know a shortcut. Mary knows only the long way around.” The details about Mary Ruefle are untraditional, inclined toward eccentricities. “Mary likes it very warm.” And “Mary thinks words are stones.” Mary’s “CD collection is strewn all over the backseat,” but “just discs no cases.” In her author’s note, Luce includes other details: “Mary didn’t have a cell phone or use email. She wrote on a typewriter.” But in the flash essay itself, Luce includes the most uncommon, and the most endearing.
Luce digs even deeper, indulging in the speculative and fanciful. As Mary Ruefle drives her to the dentist, Luce imagines a road trip replete with comfort: petting a horse, finding a woman with seven cats who’s listening to NPR and making a thousand pancakes. She believes that Mary Ruefle is the type of person to whom she can address soul-searching questions: “Mary, should we go back? Mary, should I leave my husband?” These sentences may seem as wandering as the road trip itself, but they in fact carefully piece together a mosaic both real and imaginary—who Mary Ruefle is to our narrator, and who she imagines her to be.
In her essay “On Characterization,” Michelle Wildgen suggests that “what a writer finds mysterious or confusing about someone can offer insights not only into the person being observed, but the observer herself….” Kelly Luce fantasizes about a day where she is not only headed somewhere other than toward a root canal, but toward a state of being like Mary Ruefle’s: in awe of the snow, with a gallon of maple syrup in her car’s trunk. —CRAFT
Peterborough, New Hampshire
We get lost and it’s my fault. I think I know a shortcut. Mary knows only the long way around. I have an appointment for a man to look into my mouth and tell me my options.
Mary likes it very warm. The wellness center she visits has a pool heated to ninety-four degrees. Once, they dimmed the lights and played Sigur Rós. This becomes my new definition of wellness. If you’d asked me last week, I’d have said that MacDowell is the end of the road, that beyond this heaven nothing exists. But it turns out you can turn left onto High Street.
We come to a crossroads. Weigh our options, left or right. A joke comes to me unbidden about Robert Frost and the road less traveled and I’m so embarrassed for myself.
People live out there. Horses stare. Big boulders rest beside barns like ancient pets. I wonder how Mary would describe such rocks. Does “cold old souls” sound corny, or is it sonically interesting? Mary, what do you think? Mary thinks words are stones. Mary likes when things intersect. One time, Mary and a friend were here and the day was so nice, too perfect to stay in and work, so they got in the car and got lost. They drove for hours and met a woman with seven cats on leashes. You must be sweltering, she says, turning down the fan.
Mary, should we go back? Mary, should I leave my husband? Mary, give me answers.
Mary notices a cloud. Mary will do whatever I want. She is happy to keep heading northeast on Middle Hancock Road. Her CD collection is strewn all over the backseat. Just discs no cases. I want to skip the dentist and walk into a field and lay both hands on a cold old boulder, pet a warm horse, then walk up to a farmhouse where someone sympathetic to artists is making pancakes. The pancake maker will be a dentist on her day off. She will have seven cats and she will be listening to NPR and mixing batter for a thousand pancakes. In my fantasy she will be out of maple syrup but Mary Ruefle will have a gallon from Vermont in her trunk, the way other people carry jumper cables.
Mary, I need a root canal. Mary, I need deliverance. Mary, remember when it snowed during dinner last week and you screamed? I would like to be more that way.
KELLY LUCE is the author of the story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail and the novel Pull Me Under, a Book of the Month Club selection and one of Elle’s Best Books of 2017. She is a three-time MacDowell fellow and has also received fellowships from Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, Ragdale, Art Omi, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Michener Center for Writers, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her digital short story “Between the Lines” (code lit) went viral in 2022. She serves as editor of The Commuter at Electric Literature. Find her on Instagram @kellynluce.
Featured image by Jake Blucker, courtesy of Unsplash.
