The Everlasting Story of Nory

20. A Report About the Teeth

The idea of designing people’s retainers was part of what first got Nory interested in teeth. Then she found out that the whole subject was more fascinating than you could ever predict. In Ms. Beryl’s class at the International Chinese Montessori School she did a report, ‘Teeth.’ One of the things she wrote about in the report was a two- or three-inch model of a tooth that was carved centuries ago to show the horrible pain of a toothache. There were different pictures on this large ivory tooth, sort of like the different pictures that are in stained glass. Stained glass was invented to tell stories in pictures because so few people could read back then. Now we have to read twenty-five books just to figure out what the stained glass is saying, so it’s the opposite of before, when you didn’t read but just looked around and thought, Ah, King Solomon, I see. Ivory was a good choice for the model tooth because ivory is the tooth of the elephant. The model showed people throwing skulls in a fire, probably to illustrate the horrible burning pain of a toothache, and a picture of something bad happening to a woman, some drastic tooth operation. It had a hinge. It was a box, which you opened up. ‘Maybe if you stored candy in it,’ Nory thought, ‘you would eat less candy because you would see this horrible carved picture of the skulls going into the fire and think, No, I won’t have that lemondrop, not just yet.’

Also in the report — which was probably the best thing she did in Ms. Beryl’s class by far — Nory drew a diagram of the layers of the tooth. For years she had thought, ‘There must be layers to the tooth, there must be, it can’t possibly be all the same substance.’ It worried her for a very long while, and then, presto, when she drew the diagram, copying from the encyclopedia, she was happy to discover that there were. She liked when things had layers — the earth has layers, the trunk of a tree has layers, the atmosphere has layers. A conker has layers, too. It has a green spiky outer layer and a very shiny wonderful layer which is the conker itself, which is like the finest, smoothest wood in a very precious table or the knob of a chair or something like that, in a great palace like Ickworth House, where the floorboards are curved. (They were somehow bent into curves with the help of steam engines, which pleased Littleguy.) And then inside that there’s the growing part of the conker, which is like the nerve of the tooth. Sometimes you can find a double-conker. ‘Conker’ is the English way of saying horse chestnut, and it’s a very good way because they can suddenly conk you on the head. After the sermon in the Cathedral at Harvest Festival they were all crossing the street and Nory spotted tons and tons and tons of freshly fallen conkers. She rushed over and started gathering them. They’re very rare in general because as soon as they come off the tree, people come over and get them. Everyone was really happy to find more conkers had fallen, just during the short time they were in the Cathedral. They sang a song in service that went: ‘Think of the world without any flowers, think of the world without any trees.’ Then it went, ‘The farmers spread the good things on the land, but it is God’s almighty hand, that waters them, but,’ then there was something Nory couldn’t remember, ‘but more to us as children, he gives our daily bread.’ The English way of singing was quite different from the Chinese way of singing. In the English way, you had to hold one note for a very long time, and you didn’t woggle the note so much. The English had extremely high singing voices and their songs were meant to be sung in an English accent, so when one child out of dozens was singing them in an American accent it didn’t always have a pleasant outcome.

Sometimes when they had sung the flower-gathering song in Chinese class Bernice would sing it with her retainer halfway out of her mouth, which was rude and disgusting, and it made the Chinese teacher furious. Bernice had to go on time-out once for doing that. (Timeout didn’t exist in England — they had detention, or DT, instead.) Bernice also talked baby talk with her retainer halfway out. Once she bit it so hard it broke and half of it went up into the part of her nose that connected to the back of her mouth and the doctor had to go in and pull it out, or it would have stayed there forever causing trouble. Debbie would never think of chewing her retainer in half — she was a very sweet girl in many ways. Her braces made her mouth wide and gave her that thinking look that was the most noticeable thing about her besides her hair. Of course her whole face was quite wide. Nory’s face was a smashed, squashed, shriveled little thing, she felt. It seemed shriveled partly because she spent her time with Debbie and other Asian kids, who are, you just have to say, the most beautiful type of kids in most ways. Nory would draw a self-portrait and be not perfectly content with it, thinking, ‘Well, it’s a bit of a squished head on the sides, but all right.’ And then she would look at her face in the mirror and think, ‘Well, no wonder I drew a squished head.’ Her parents said she was a beautiful child and sometimes she did think she looked pretty, but it was not polite to brag that out loud. It was quite all right for parents to tell a child she was beautiful, just as long as they didn’t tell her she was beautiful in front of other children. If they announced it in front of other children it would put the other children in an awkward position, because they would be just sitting there, odd man out.

One day at her new school, the Threll Junior School, Mrs. Thirm asked the class to write the first paragraph of a story with each child as the main character. Nory started off with: ‘Marielle was a young girl with brown hair and brown eyes who was forty-three inches tall.’ But she wasn’t entirely happy with this. What she had been tempted to write after the ‘who was’ was not that she was forty-three inches tall, but something similar to the scene in The Little Princess, where the girl is being shown around the school, and she acts as a ‘bright-eyed, smart, quiet little girl most of the time.’ It wasn’t exactly, persistently those words, but at least that was the feeling of the scene. And the girl who played the Little Princess in the movie looked a tiny bit like Nory. Nory really wanted to write that Marielle, who stood for her, was a ‘quiet little girl, most of the time, very quiet, and mysterious — or not really mysterious, but if you took a little bit away from the meaning of mysterious, or add a little more to the scene in The Little Princess, an almost mysterious girl.’ But she wrote none of that because even though Marielle was not her own name, it would be clear that she was writing about herself and it would be kind of bragging to say those things.