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.
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.
22. For Some Reason, People Were Bad to Pamela
In real life there were identical twins at her school. They didn’t have braces. At first Nory thought they might become her good friends. But it was hard to be friends with them, because you don’t want to talk to both of them at the same time, as if they’re one person, because they might not like that, so you talk to one, and then you have to instantly talk to the other, so that you don’t seem as if you’re ignoring her, which wouldn’t be polite. So you ask her a question, and then the other twin asks a question, and you answer that question, and you ask that twin a question about what activities she’s going to sign up for, table tennis or French knitting. So then that twin begins talking about activities. Then you have to ask the other twin about her activities. They do mostly the same thing, but not exactly the same thing. And sometimes you can’t keep track of which twin you asked what. Even if you didn’t want it to be, it was sort of like, ‘If I ask you one question, you ask me two questions.’ They seemed to have mostly the same friends, and really it didn’t matter which one you talked to because they were both equally as nice and equally as interesting, and they both looked pretty much the same, pretty much blond, that is, and sweet-smiling. So you felt just as comfortable talking to one as to the other.
But it didn’t turn out that Nory became friends with them. The twins had other friends from last year they relied on heavily. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, they were a bit irritable with Nory and fair-weather-friendish. Once they were even part of a whole gang-up of girls who were bad to Pamela Shavers. Pamela Shavers, for no reason at all, was selected to be that certain someone that everyone should laugh at and say quite sharp, mocking things to. She had skipped ahead one year, so she was in Year Six when really her age was Year Five, which is to say, fourth grade. So? What was bad about that? Pamela lost her prep book in the changing room and was rushing trying to find it and four other girls from one of the older classes started saying they’d used it as loo paper. Not very likely. The twins weren’t really a part of that group, though, they were just watching and laughing. Their older sister, though, was one who was saying things like ‘Are you sure you didn’t bake it in a pie in Kitchen Arts?’ Pamela was just on the edge of crying, saying ‘I’m going to miss my train!’ Nory couldn’t stand it and said: ‘Stop. You’re being horrible to her. Stop it, stop it, stop it.’