Rotten Teeth: A Brother Meyse

Everyone knows from my sister Laura’s book Rotten Teeth, a prize-winning children’s book in which all the characters’ names are changed except mine.  In the windows of shops what sell them, the books stand out and look beautiful.  So people buy.  They read this book, they enjoy, they laugh, and then they think they know who I am and the rest of my family because they think it is all true.  Everyone else in the story gets a new fictional name, but me I am her brother Norman.  And so the book sits on library shelves for many years and in people’s houses and they see on the cover and inside illustrations which make me look like an idiot with a tall pointy head, and I am the villain who makes his sister go to school with a stupid project in the science fair.  I am famous.  Hooray!  But an idiot?  So maybe you think like everybody else that the picture of me is true and accurate.  How should I know?  But let me tell you, just like in my own stories, everything Laura tells you is not strictly speaking 100% absolutely true.  It’s by her, like from me, a fictional story, a meysele.  What do you want me to say?  That was already a half century ago.

However, since I only come to America very seldom these days and can’t run around to tap people on the shoulders to show them, Look, is this head pointy?  Am I an idiot who makes little girls go into their father’s dental rooms and take out teeth from a big glass jar where he keeps them to give away to students who need examples of all the crazy way a tooth can grow?  What can I do except tell you my side from the inside of the story, or at least my version of what isn’t any way a real historical truth.  For myself, my father helped me make one year—I am seven years older than my sister, so whenever it was she was too small for such projects—a big tooth about a foot high made out of grey modelling clay: it had crown and roots, and cut away and painted you could see inside blood, nerves, and other organic stuff.  Together we painted it, that is, my father let me stand and watch but not touch, so it would be accurate and beautiful, and maybe I would win.  Win-shwin, with a little stupid model of a tooth?  In the class competition someone (or her father) glued together chicken bones after the family ate all the meat that year and made a skeleton; and another person also in my class drew a map of the world and made with clay mountains in proportionate sizes and plateaus and prairies with fuzzy green cloth stuck on for trees and grass and other growing things.  How could I win?

Nu, a few years later, when I was too old for science projects and models made by someone else, it was Laura’s turn to enter the competition in her class, third grade, with Mrs. Swann, which was not only her name but a description of how she looked.  She used to waddle around the room and out into the hall way, with all her cygnets behind her in a line, boys and girls, all known throughout the school as Swan’s Gang.  Now wouldn’t that make a better story and a picture than one about me and a project with rotten teeth?

Anyway, instead of asking my father-the-dentist to make, Laura came asking to me.  A big brother is supposed to know everything.  So what could I say when she asked?  I remembered that in the little alcove my father used for mixing up his dental pastes, for storing things, and for keeping little bits of gold and silver from teeth he removed to sell for money at the annual Stamp Fair, he also had a big jar, like I just said, of interesting teeth he extracted—one even came out through a patient’s nose where it had grow up and sidewise into.  Why don’t you pick out something special from the jar, I suggested.  A suggestion, not an order, and certainly not an offer to make the project for her.  But it was a scientific suggestion, right?  Not something meant to humiliate her.  Not a crazy whim that lolled around in my head for months or years waiting an occasion to pop out.  She went into the front part of the house where the office was and right through to the alcove where his bottle of teeth lived, with me standing next to her, at a time when my father-the-dentist was eating lunch in the kitchen as he always did between appointments or when a patient was late, and even though he was sitting down rather than standing as usual, it gave us a few extra minutes to do what had to be done.  He was eating a chicken sandwich, boiled chicken with lots of ketchup, it should have a flavour.  Those were the days before the colonel’s fried chicken with all kinds of spices and herbs and salt made people eat too much and get fat. 

So Laura stood in front of the big glass jar and looked.  There were a few dozen teeth.  They were bobbing around in some liquid, maybe formaldehyde.  Big ones and little ones, long curly roots and strange coloured crowns.  Two together like Siamese Twins.  All kinds, to repeat for emphasis.  A Cabinet of Curiosities like in the olden times.  Laura stared and stared.  Nu, I said, so make by you a pick.  I don’t know which one, she said.  Any, I said, but hurry up or Mr. Interesting will catch us.  Sometimes we called our father Mr Interesting because he was always interested in things we were doing or thinking that we didn’t want him to know.  Sometimes we called him The Articulatory Gentleman because he liked to give us special lectures (“impart knowledge”) or tell jokes in his special way (“I have an amusing anecdote to tell you”).  He was a real scientist who wanted to know about everything and wished he had been a teacher so he could impart words of wisdom to hundreds of eager school children.

OK, she said, and she pointed at a very large, many-rooted, dark blue and red tooth, near the middle of the jar.  I stuck my hand in and squooshed around until I took it out.  Here, I said, a project.  Then we ran out of the office back into the back of the house where we lived, and instead of going into the kitchen, where my father was still chomping away on his sandwich, we raced upstairs. 

All the rest you know from Laura’s book.  Go look and compare the details.  Then you can decide whose version is better, or if not better closer to the truth.