The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  They went back to the museum on her birthday. Her parents asked, ‘Is it possible, you know, to get a model of that fan?’

  The museum people said, ‘Oh, well, I’m sure we can have a model made.’ The owner of the museum was really really nice.

  Her parents said, ‘Yes, but we don’t have much money.’

  And the museum man said, ‘Oh well, it’s only fifteen dollars.’

  Colander heard that and said, ‘Wait, I have fifteen dollars, I’ve been saving my allowance to get the real one, but now that you say it’s only fifteen dollars, I happen to have fifteen dollars!’

  ‘No, no, that was your allowance,’ her parents said.

  ‘No, I want to,’ Colander said, ‘I’ll get the money.’

  So she paid the museum the fifteen dollars.

  But her parents said, ‘No, no, no, little child, you shouldn’t be spending your own money, it’s your birthday present, we should get it for you as a birthday present.’

  ‘You can get me other things,’ said Colander, ‘but I’ll pay for this.’ Because she knew that her parents really didn’t have very very much money. She had tried to save up fifteen dollars for ages. She was only given about a nickel each time she completed her work, a nickel or two.

  Anyway, Colander forked him the fifteen dollars the next day, and he—the museum owner—said, ‘Oh thank you very much, but you should have this. I can see that this is well-earned money. You should have it. I’ll give the fan to you free as grass, for your good work.’

  Colander said, ‘Oh no, you shouldn’t. Keep it, keep it.’

  Finally, after a lot of persuading, the museum man got Colander to keep the fifteen dollars. So he was actually giving her this wonderful thing free. ‘I’ll give it as my own birthday present for you,’ he said. And so he had a duplicate fan made, in a factory in Bombay, and it was to some people even more beautiful than the first. It was so gorgeous you wouldn’t believe it.

  The museum owner was exceptionally rich. He was very, very rich. So this was nothing to him. ‘Pshaw. Oh, just a thousand dollars, pshaw.’ So he spent a ton of money making this one tiny little fan. He put it in a box, wrapped it up, very very nicely, and wrote ‘For Colander, from Mr. Harvonsay.’ And on her birthday Mr. Harvonsay looked in the phone book and found their address, and said, ‘Is this little Miss Colander’s house?’

  Colander said, ‘Yes it is.’

  So he gave her the little box.

  ‘Oh, great,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank you.’

  She opened all her parents’ presents, and they were excited to see what was in the little box wrapped so neatly, so her mother said, ‘Now open the little box.’

  Everything she’d gotten up till then was a fan to put in her collection. In the box from Mr. Harvonsay was the fan. Everyone gasped out loud, it was so superb. Then her parents said, ‘Oh, and one more present for you.’ In her room there was a glass case and little stands to put fans in. She had a whole little mini fan collection of her own.

  She was very happy, but the glass case had to be very low, or she’d have to tell her parents where to put everything in it, because she was short. Her parents were relatively short, but they weren’t as short as she was. And so, the end.

  11. Feeding the Swans

  As for the Bishop’s Palace garden, across the street from the Cathedral, it was definitely not owned by a Bishop in the Catholic Religion. Nory was a Catholic because her mother was a Catholic, and Nory’s mother was a Catholic because her father was a Catholic, and her father was a Catholic because his mother was a Catholic, or had been. They only went to church on rare times, but they said grace every single night. If it had been a Bishop in the Catholic Religion—which was one of the most popular religions of the world, though Christianity was probably slightly more popular—there wouldn’t be a huge garden hidden out of sight, because Catholic bishops would devote all their money to the church and pray the day away, and care for the poor, and wash the poor’s wounds with hot rags. No huge grand house, and no greedy high brick wall for a Catholic Bishop.

  The way you make bricks is by baking them like brownies in an oven, or pouring the mixture into thousands of small molds and drying the shapes in the sun if you don’t expect it to rain terribly much where you live. If it does rain and you haven’t baked your bricks, you may end up with drooping walls. The bricks that are used to build a brick oven must get so totally baked into brickness that they almost can’t bear it another minute, since they heat up, on one side, that is, every time they bake the bricks inside, hundreds of times over, like a drip of black cheese in the microwave.

  Brick is a good word for bricks because it has the sound of the sharp, crunchy edge in it, pulling across. They were looking into Force and Friction in Nory’s science class at the Junior School, and finding out that a brick creates a ton of friction. Ricki Ticki Tavi, the mongoose who saved the little boy, got his name from the rick-ticking sounds he made. Near the end, when Ricki Ticki disappears down the hole with Nagaina, the Queen Cobra, with ‘his little white teeth clenched into her tail’—animals often had surprisingly white teeth—you’re supposed to think that he might be dead. Usually with a story there is a moment at which you’re supposed to think some person or animal has died or some other really sad failure has happened—and if you don’t know that that’s how stories are supposed to work you can become quite upset and have to run out of the room to escape the squeezing feeling in your chest, like at the end of Lady and the Tramp, when the movie tries its hardest to make you think the old dog who couldn’t smell very well anymore had gotten run over by a carriage-wheel and died.

  But the time of worrying that Rikki Tikki is dead didn’t last quite long enough, in Nory’s opinion. It could have lasted a little longer, and since they’re supposed to be having a terrible battle down in the hole you need some sign that something’s going on down there, like little faint struggling sounds, or every so often a whiffle of dirt flying out of the hole.

  The other small problem with the story—not that there are any real problems with the story, it’s a good story by a man who lived in Africa for many years, not an African American man but just a man who lived there, or somewhere like Africa—but it’s sad to think of such a likable mongoose eating holes in the baby cobra eggs. The baby cobras hadn’t killed anything or frightened anyone. They would when they hatched out, because that’s what cobra snakes are designed to do naturally. But a story should not have a small, tiny, curled-up barely alive animal be killed unless it has done a terrible thing, which it can’t have done because it hasn’t even uncurled itself from the egg. And the story isn’t about what cobras do naturally, anyway, since it has the cobras speaking. In real life they don’t speak, at least in English. A cobra couldn’t call itself ‘Nag’ or ‘Nagaina’ because the cobra’s tongue is so thin it couldn’t make an N sound. A cobra would probably just call itself ‘Lah,’ if anything.

  The swans on the river made a pretty frightening sound when Nory fed them. They came up out of the water and started walking toward her, shrugging up their wings, and no matter how many pieces of bread she threw their way, they kept coming towards her, because they wanted the bigger piece of bread in her hand. When Nory said, ‘Hold your horses, back up, back up!’ they opened their beaks and made a nasty sound, like a hissing cat. Their necks were like cobra necks, somewhat. Nory’s father was alarmed and didn’t want to feed them anymore and was shooing them away with his briefcase, but it wasn’t fair, Nory thought, that just because a bird was somewhat alarming he should not be fed, whereas the ducks, which weren’t alarming, should be fed. There was a group of ducks that were so cute, a mother and about fifteen babies, each with a dear fluff of brown on its head. They crossed the street, just like in Make Way for Ducklings, which was the first book Nory ever read. Nory gave them some crackers. A girl at the Junior School, Kira, who was turning out to be a nice friend, said that her parents didn’t let her feed the birds any bread, because it wasn’t what they would no
rmally eat if they were wild. Nory told her that she fed the birds sesame crackers, at least sometimes, and sesames are seeds and birds eat seeds. But both the ducks and the swans ate grass. There was a lot of grass-eating, which wasn’t very natural either, because there didn’t used to be so much grass in the world.

  There was a lot of attention paid to grass in England. Cows used to keep it short, long ago, but now they used lawn mowers, of course. Sometimes they mowed it very short in a crisscross, so that it looked like a plaid cloth. One large field below the cathedral near Nory’s school was totally bare earth, because they were putting in new grass. One day when she was walking home with her mother they saw five men walking in a row on this field. Each man had a big white plastic thing attached around his waist, like a drum in a marching band in a parade, and they reached into their drums and got handfuls of grass seed and threw it out over the brown field. Nory’s mother thought it was a beautiful sight, and it was. There were some interesting holes in one of the fields they used for sports at Junior School, but nobody seemed to know what was inside them. Not cobras and mongooses, but you never know. You don’t want to reach your hand down in there. Even if you poke a stick in, sharp teeth could suddenly grab the stick, which would be startling. In some fields, people might have been buried there long ago. For instance near the South Door of the Cathedral it was now all grass, but in the map of the way the Cathedral was during Prior Rowland’s lifetime it said ‘Monks Graves.’ Did they move the monks, or just forget about them?

  12. Ladybugs, Butterflies, and a Hurt Thumb

  Nory used to not like the idea of burying people terribly much. Now she had come to gripes with it as a fact of life. When she was four she dictated a letter that her father typed out for her:

  To Whom it May Concern:

  Eleanor Winslow does not want to be buried under the ground.

  Sincerely,

  Eleanor Winslow.

  She scribbled a fake signature, since at the time she had not known how to write, and she put a stamp on the piece of paper and scribbled on the stamp and it looked official. When her hermit crab lost all its claws one by one, very forlornly, and died only a few weeks after they got her, Nory buried her with a grave marker that said:

  TO HERMIONE

  Soon Gone

  She wanted a dog or a rabbit or a kitten, anything warmblooded, except possibly a cow, but her parents said that they couldn’t have one for various reasons.

  The field at the school that Nory used for hockey had no holes at all, whatsoever, because it was made of Astroturf. There was lots of sand sprinkled in the Astroturf. Nobody knew why. If you were an animal, digging a hole, and you dug and dug and then dug up to the surface intending to make a South Door for your hole, and you came up under the Astroturf, you would be pretty unhappy about having done all that work for nothing. Maybe there were dead monks under there. Once Nory found a ladybug in the Astroturf and carried it to the edge, and set it on a leaf. That was on a fairly embarrassing day, the second time they played hockey, when Nory’s skirt fell off twice. Luckily hockey was all girls. And another girl had the same problem, too. While Nory was carrying the ladybug off the field, she was worried that it would fly off. If it flew off, it might just land in more Astroturf, where it couldn’t live.

  Nory said to it, very confidentially, ‘Don’t fly yet, Ladybug. Ladybug, if you try to fly, I’m going to have to confiscate your ability of flying. I can’t confiscate you, but I can cup my hand over you and confiscate your ability of flying.’ Confiscate was a word she’d learned from a boy who walked back with her from lunch one day. He said that it was a good thing she wasn’t in Five-K, because in Five-K the teacher was awful. If you write in pencil and you were supposed to write in pen, or do something of that level of badness, the teacher would confiscate your pencil and tell you she was going to give it back the next day, and then she never gave it back. The boy said he stole his pencil back. He said, ‘And rightly stole it!’ He opened up the teacher’s drawer and had to fumble through it to find his pencil because it was bursting at the gills with confiscated things.

  Ladybugs are very useful bugs because they eat aphids. Nory used to think, ‘Poor little aphids.’ But aphids eat the ladybugs’ eggs, so ladybugs have a right to hate them. It was something a little like Rikki Tikki Tavi and the snake. Nory’s mother said that when a gardener bought a whole jug of ladybugs they had to let them out at night so they don’t know where they are and settle down with those particular aphids as their enemy. Otherwise they might try to escape to the other aphids, which they know better and hate more, because those were the ones who actually ate their eggs. Human beings have an unusual amount of power over the lives of bugs. Kids kill thousands of bugs every day without dropping a hat. Once Nory was looking at a ladybug that was either dead or alive, she couldn’t tell, maybe playing dead or just relaxing or sunbathing or burnt in the sun. But then someone came walking along, not thinking about what she was doing, but just walking along, and she smashed the ladybug, without even seeing it. A green spread out. Insects have green blood. Now, if that had been a child who had been squushed, everyone would be tearing their hair out. Even if a small thing happens to a child, she remembers it and talks about it for a long time. Maybe insects’ blood is white or some other color, and only turns green when it is exposed to air. We think human blood is red but it’s blue just before it comes out of a cut. The very second it reaches the edge of the cut, it changes, in the twinkling of an eye, because of the air.

  They were watching a pianist one night, Nory’s mother, Nory’s father, and Nory, because when Nory called her friend Kira, Kira said ‘You’ve got to watch this great piano contest.’ Littleguy was playing with James the Red Engine. One of the people in the contest played the piano so hard he got a red spot on the back of his thumb. He was from Yugoslaw. Nory saw it and said, ‘He’s hurt himself.’

  ‘Oh, I think it’s just a shadow,’ said Nory’s father.

  But it wasn’t. There were little spots of blood on the piano keys. Then the next person had to play. Think of him sitting down and seeing ladybugs of blood all over the piano. He can’t wipe them off because the wiping would make an ugly sound and the judges might remember the ugly sound very well, since it was the very first thing he played, and give him a bad result. His eye would be distracted by the blood and he would make more mistakes, maybe. Or he might think, ‘Hah hah! I won’t bleed, no sir!’ It was sad to think of the people in the contest who practiced so hard their whole lives long and still eventfully lost.

  That little thing, a bleeding thumb, was a big thing for a person. For an insect or some other small creature it would be minor. One time Nory scrumpled up a leaf to put it on the compost pile in Palo Alto. She didn’t know that there was a snail on the other side of the leaf. So she accidentally crunched the snail, and she got snail slime all over her hand. It was awful. She hadn’t meant to scrumple the snail. From then on, whenever she picked up a leaf, she turned it over to see if anything was on the other side. Very often there was. Another time she caught a butterfly and was trying to put it in ajar with some grass blades. Its body was in the jar, but its head was accidentally outside, and she didn’t know that, while she was turning the lid of the jar. She looked over and there was its head outside the jar. She snatched the lid away and the head was still partly attached. The butterfly flew away. But she felt the guilt of the idea of having done that pull at her horribly.

  Nory’s father said that feeling guilty was useful because when you felt it you had a piece of useful knowledge: you knew that you didn’t want to do that thing, whatever it was, that made you feel guilty, so the guiltiness was a way of teaching yourself what you ought to do in the future. In some cases that was true but Nory felt horribly guilty about having scrumpled the snail and screwed the lid on the butterfly’s head even though she hadn’t meant to.

  But the guiltiness did stay in her mind and make her act differently. For instance, three kids found a butterfly on a tree nea
r the dining hall at Threll School one time, near the beginning of term. They were trying to make it fly, but it wasn’t cooperating. One of the girls wanted to put it in her backpack. Immediately, Nory thought, ‘If it goes in there, with all the heavy books and notebooks, it will end up like one of the cookies that I put in my backpack that is now just a dust of crumbs. It will be the death of that butterfly.’ So she said to the girl, ‘Here, take my pencil case and put the butterfly in there.’ The girl carelessly took it and put the butterfly in. That meant that Nory was totally without a pencil case. The pencil case had pencils, including a Barbie pencil, her medium nib pen, her ink eradicator, her National Trust eraser, ruler, protractors, everything. She had to borrow pens from kids, and at first they were nice about it, but after a few days they were really mean about it and said, ‘Are you going to beg for a pen again? I’ll tell you right now you can’t have one.’

  Of course one of the reasons she’d given the girl her pencil case was not just to protect the butterfly, but probably more because she wanted the girl to be impressed by her generous act of handing over the pencil case. Finally her mother said, ‘You must get that pencil case back from that girl or you will have to buy another pencil case out of your own allowance.’ So Nory asked the girl for the pencil case back and got it at the end of the day, feeling huge relief.

  Another story about a pencil case was a more horrible one. Daniella Harding said, and Nory wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth, but she said that she got the pointy end of a protractor stuck through her cheek. Kira asked, ‘Did you scream?’ Daniella said that she’d had to go to the san. She got a little scar on her face. But Nory had had a friend at the International Chinese Montessori School in Palo Alto who was always making things up, and ever since then she was not so quick to believe everything every kid told her, especially if they told the story a certain way. She could have gotten the scar from poking herself with a pencil. Or it just could have been a simple fall-down-and-scrape-your-face.