The Everlasting Story of Nory

21. What You Might Have to Do, Though

The time when Nory most thought about how she looked was, of course, when she looked in the mirror, which was just before bed when she was brushing her teeth. They made a mistake, Nory thought, in advertisements when they showed a long, long stretch of toothpaste starting at the very tip of the toothbrush and going to the other end of the bristles, because that’s really not the amount you should have. It’s way too much. If you put that much on, it burns your whole mouth, since there are a lot of nerves in the gums, so what happens is that you are desperate to want to spit it out immediately, without brushing your teeth at all. Then you could claim, ‘Oh, yes, I brushed my teeth’ without really brushing them. Or you do it very quickly and you do a really, really bad job. That was what was so important about the idea of a pea-sized gob.

And always while she brushed she made a toothful smile, because you almost have to, which put her in the mind of pretending to be another person. That was one way she would start telling stories: she would talk to the twin toothbrusher in the mirror, and then she would play a game that there were twins, asking each other questions, and then triplets. She would act out each one’s personality, and something sad would have happened to one of them. One time she played a mirror game in which there were five duplicates of her. That was back in America. Each person had strange bracesy things in their mouths that were made shaped like candy, and flavored like candy. So each twin would come on and describe how great her braces were. ‘Hi! These are raspberry-flavored braces! They’re astonishingly good braces!’ ‘Mine are apple-cinammon! They’re superb!’ And so on. They would take turns advertising their braces. And then they would get into a conversation, and that would lead to a story about some trouble one of the twins was having. Then Nory’s mother and father would call upstairs, ‘Nory? Are you in your night-costume?’ Nory would shout back, ‘Oops! Sorry! I was dawdling, I’m afraid!’

Nory wanted to work for an advertising campaign, like her grandfather, while she was trying to get her certificate of dentistry, because she loved advertising campaigns. She wanted a Ph.D., though, most of all. Nory’s mother told her about Ph.D.s, and she was determined on getting one. She positively had to have that Ph.D., because for one thing it makes you feel smart to have one and it’s something that basically all people get. She was not going to be kept away from getting one just because she would have to get some strange badge of dentistry. So she would probably need to be something more, like a dental surgeon or a dental botanist, who does research into why teeth grow or get cavities, in order to need to get that Ph.D. But she would still have to go to a dentistry school. That surely would still be a necessity.

Nory wouldn’t mind working with a corpse if it meant dentistry. Doctors have to operate on corpses, she had heard, and if you’re going to be a dental surgeon, you definitely might have to use a corpse, because dead people have teeth, too, don’t they? If you’re going to pull the teeth from anyone, it might as well be from a corpse. The school could make a huge plastic figure, like a voodoo doll, and have the students pull teeth from that, but it would be very expensive and you’d have to create all those parts of the body from scratch out of clay or better yet FIMO. The teeth would have to snap in and out somehow. Why not use a dead person, since they’re available? Nory wouldn’t mind doing it, because she wanted to be a dentist so much. On the other hand, she did get quite disgusted by doing math. Math, math, math. One pencil lead used up, then another, then another. Then you’re out of pencil leads and you have to use a regular pencil. Sharpen, sharpen, sharpen. Whole huge erasers used up madly erasing things you did wrong. Her National Trust eraser had no corners left now. It was a pathetic egg of an eraser. The idea of all that math she would have to do in order to be a dentist gave her an extremely carsick feeling.

But: ‘Don’t count your bad lucks before they happen.’ That was a saying that she had made up. It was kind of like ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,’ except the opposite.