In the basement, with the teeth

My landlord was an orthodontist whose office was on the ground floor of the building. One evening, I had to escort a ConEd guy into the basement so that he could fix the gas in my studio apartment.

To get to the basement, we had to walk through the orthodontist’s office and down another flight of extremely old stairs. The ConEd guy was very fat. I later told someone he weighed 400 pounds, and they said that wasn’t possible, so I’ll adjust it to 350, but it was more like 400.

This is relevant because once we were in the basement he had a hard time making his way around: It turned out that this basement also served as the storage room for the orthodontist’s office. The walls were lined with the plaster molds of patients’ teeth before and after braces — thousands of little white boxes of teeth molds, stacked up on dusty shelves in rows and rows extending far back into the basement and completely blocking the gas meter.

We walked in single file past the teeth. The ConEd guy actually knocked some of them over with his body. I moved all of the teeth away from the front of the gas meter, trying to keep them in order, then squeezed past the ConEd guy to let him do whatever he needed to do. While he was working, I walked around the basement, past the wall of teeth into a little nook.

Then I saw it.

There was a washer-dryer in the basement. It was gleaming in the dark. It did not appear to be broken: A box of Tide, from this era, was next to it. I opened the dryer. It was filled with scrubs, the kind my landlord and her assistants wore. It wasn’t broken. It was a working washer-dryer. I had not been told about it. I regularly dreamed of opening a closet in my studio and discovering a washing machine in it. (When I was living without a dishwasher, I’d had dreams about opening a kitchen cabinet and finding a dishwasher in it.) Now the dream had come true! There was a secret washer-dryer in my building! Unless I was still dreaming.

“There’s someone down here with us!” the ConEd guy suddenly shouted.

There wasn’t. He did really shout that, but it was because he got spooked, not because the basement was inhabited by the ghost of West 78th Street who, long ago, had had all her teeth pulled out one by one and spent her days floating among the rows of teeth molds, moaning, “Where are my teeth? Won’t you help me find my teeth?” There was no ghost. There was me, the ConEd guy, and, in real life, the washer-dryer that had been haunting my dreams.