With all the bruising, she looks a wreck, and for a while some neighbours suspect that Mark’s back on the scene, because Nora’s been beaten up.
Then after a few weeks the purple and blue fade to marbled olive, seeping to dull yellow. And then one day Nora looks nearly normal again. Her mouth is healed.
Dr van Toren takes the wax impression of the patient’s gums, and the dentures are fabricated to specification by the technician, methodically honed and buffed. Minor adjustments of tooth height and bite are made in the dentist’s surgery during Nora’s next appointment and, There. The teeth fit, as well as can be expected. Fixed up. The teeth become her.
Again, Nora looks like herself, comely, a ready smile with thirty-two serviceable teeth. Her full complement. Not snow white, which wouldn’t be credible, but reassuringly milky, just this side of cream. They are moulded of polymethyl methacrylate, a specialist acrylic plastic. Of course there is rubbing and discomfort, most of which diminishes as the gums harden, becoming accustomed to the new addition, though a few raw, ulcerated spots remain for always. And always the odd, clicking sensation of something extra, of talking with your mouth full.
In addition, she must become particularly vigilant about what she eats, which is quite a turn-up for the books, given that she’s spent her life watching out for food. How to get it. Enough of it.
But on the whole, she is, as they say, right as rain, though when she considers the pink, still toothless mouth of the baby, then she really wants to spit. And when she’s starting to forget, busy again with the inviting blankness of her crosswords, Nora chances on the word ‘prosthesis’. Reads 1. (Gram.) Addition of letter or syllable at beginning of word e.g. be- in beloved. 2. (Surg.) Making up of deficiencies (e.g. by false teeth or artificial limb). Part thus supplied. And she feels so stupid that a damn dictionary can make her cry, reduce her to tears. She cries and cries.
Every night, the young woman must remove her teeth like an old person and soak them in a sterilising solution, though never will she tolerate the glass on the bedside cabinet, the false teeth steeping, sleeping, next to her bed. Come bedtime, the teeth in their glass are banished to the medicine cabinet.
But despite this little, off-putting distance, and the lifelong fact that every morning she starts the day smelling like the chlorinated public swimming pool, her taste buds cringing, gradually she comes to accept.
Okay, for pity’s sake! The teeth are mine, all right, they are part of me.
Still, for some years she will try to hide the fact of the dentures from her small children, because she realises that they, like her, will be afraid of the person with the shrunken face. Yet with time the teeth become a familiar presence, even to the little girls. Their mom’s falsies. Like the cotton wool padding some women stick in their bras to give them bigger boosies. Over the years, the teeth become their mother’s, and it is only in wearing them that she is their mother and, to herself, a woman as becoming as once she was. Only people who know, know.
Name-calling
When her second labour begins, Mark’s off again somewheres, still hopelessly seeking his fortune. Nothing new there except a new baby which tips the scales at a hefty ten pounds and some change. A girl, again, but feisty this time, and a real devil to deliver.
This child is constantly hungry and she clamps to her mother with a gusto that goes beyond hearty, a warning clear enough for anyone to heed. The hospital staff cannot credit their ears. What newborn screams like that at its mother, shattering the hard-won quiet of the general ward? That’s some pair of lungs, god forbid, and the fed-up face on her!
I want more! this baby yells, regardless of the rebuking stares, its mouth a violent cavity opening into a deep maw. More! Gulping greedily – nipple, air, milk – until the plump chin is crusted with curds and her body, saturated for now, floats, farts, puttering into the swell of a choppy history.
Though Nora’s had it with history for the present. How it has no respect for privacy, ignores doors, closed or otherwise, rather like the extremes of Durban weather.
Just the week before, driven by that pregnant urge to tidy the nest, she’d been sorting through Mark’s musty clothes, the signs of his long absence taking up too much space in her heart. And wouldn’t you know it – in the pocket of his sports coat, there it is. The blasted love note that detonates the little she has. She slumps on the lino, letter in hand, her pregnant stomach swilling like a buoy in the wake of a bulk carrier, all the world’s flotsam bilging on the surge.
But she pulls herself together and recovers her equilibrium. She’s not finished by the blast, and nor does she lose a limb, though for that moment she feels torn apart. And likely looks it too, she hmphs, pushing the ragged hair from her face.
However, she’s not dead, for heaven’s sakes. Am I dead? she asks the woman in the mirror. I am not.
It would take much more than this to do her in, so yes, the written evidence being small enough and her own insight now hard won, her life remains intact.
Although she cannot deny how suddenly it hits her: that this is all you have, how history is all you get to live in, the hard times and missed places. A big box of small moving parts which is hard enough for anyone to carry, and certainly ought not to be handed out without warning. Would it help, she wonders, to have a label that says This is not a toy – it can kill you? Who knows, people do what they want, warning or none. Some days, though history can seem so terribly ordinary, a moment that begins before you even realise it, there comes the instant you know what you’re holding and you can’t put it down; then you can’t stop yourself from thinking that the point of it all is only to get you dead. Or at the very least to leave you crying, and falling apart.
Whatever it is, in the morning the carpet is darkened by a patch of wet that must be cleaned, and with all that’s happened in the house of the world, it’s not so hard to believe that this is blood.
When the father comes round again, chastened for the mo’ by another failed enterprise, he once again wriggles past his evasions and he and Nora kiss and almost make up. It’s then he meets his second daughter, by which time it’s way past the date to register her birth.
To correct his paternal lapse, Mark Murphy makes his way downtown to Home Affairs, and he is channelled into the appropriate line, where he must wait along with all the others who require certificates of birth, and death, identity books, and the various species of paper which will entitle them to pass into the public record.
The Murphys have decided to call the infant Jennie, and the father, inspired by fresh starts and new leaves, queues with unusual patience to enter this piece of very ordinary information in the requisite government register.
He stands inside, dreamily thinking. Looks at the big clock on the wall; the sparse, balding scalp of the man in front; the sign which says Oswald Pirow Building. Finds himself chuckling at the ridiculous thought of ‘Oswald’. Imagine! What a name! Not what he’d call any son of his . . . If he had a son, that is.
Still waiting, to pass the time he hums an old English country air that’s been enjoying a popular comeback. ‘I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair’, words and tune lilting in his head. For a moment, he almost begins to sing aloud, carried away by the catchy, silent soaring. Then he thinks of his sister Norma, the surprise of how the baby resembles her. Remembers the car accident in which Norma died, on her way back from a twenty-first bash with her boyfriend.
Mark, musing, waits so long in the tedious queue, so mindful of the pretty melody and the sad descant of his dead sister, that when he arrives at the counter and must provide his daughter’s chosen name, he gets flustered. He’s been far away, plus spelling was never his strong point. Many things have had to be spelt out for him, and even then . . .
So on the form he prints ‘Jeanné’. Steps back from the word a pace and slightly cocks his head. Looks at the man behind the counter who is studying him quizzically, on the verge of impatience.
Humh. Does that look . . . can that be right? Mark squints at his efforts,