The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  13. Close Calls with Crying

  A lot of Nory’s stories used to be about her most beloved stuffed animal, a puppet raccoon called Sarah Laura Maria, who was often being stolen away by a bad witch and helped by a good witch, stuff like that, but lately Nory had begun a whole set of stories about a girl named Mariana who has a very sad but in some ways good life. Coochie, which was Nory’s other name for Raccoon, still was in some stories of her own, too. Cooch had recently begun attending a boarding school as a day student in the dresser in the guest room of the house in Threll they were renting. Samantha and Linnea and Vera, other dolls, were going there as well, each in its own drawer. They were full boarders. There were quite a number of flying squirrels at the school, who would climb on the play-structure and fly off in great arches. Coochie tried to do it but she had eaten too many jacket potatoes for lunch and she fell down and got badly scraped and bruised. It wasn’t the sort of scrape you get when you scrape your knee on the Astroturf, which makes it completely red, it was more of a real cut. A girl in Nory’s class named Jessica—the one who said Nory had a ‘squeegee accent’ on one of the first days—fell on the Astroturf and got two red knees when they were playing hockey.

  ‘Oh, are you okay?’ Nory asked her.

  ‘If I were “okay,” would I be sitting down with tears pouring down my face?’ Jessica said.

  ‘No,’ said Nory. Almost all children were rude sometimes. Nory herself was quite rude from time to time. Once she had told a boy who had said her teeth were too big that his shoes were dusty. He had turned bright red and looked so hurt that she felt bad afterward.

  It wasn’t a good idea to stop any possibility of liking a person because of one single thing they did. Sometimes people forget themselves. Sometimes, though, what a child did was so bad, so severe, that you lost all your ability to keep up any friendly feelings toward them. Such a thing happened last year at International Chinese Montessori School, when Bernice wrote Nory a folded note that said ‘I’m sorry’ on the front, after they had an argument, and then inside it said, ‘Dear Eleanor, I’m sorry, but I am not going to live with you in a house when we grow up, I’m going to live with my first best friend.’ That was just the limit, that ‘first’—Nory couldn’t now detect one tiny scrabjib of friendship for Bernice in her heart when she thought of her. Her best friend now was Debbie, probably, who was shyer and nicer.

  Littleguy occasionally said rude things that could hurt your feelings, but he was two and usually it was a question of him just not understanding what he was saying. Once on Saturday afternoon for instance Nory tried to teach Littleguy how to play field hockey, after having spent some of her morning on Astroturf learning the basics. He hurt her feelings when he rejected a hockey stick she especially made for him out of a wooden pole, a toilet-paper tube taped on at an angle, and some green ribbon from her Samantha doll as decoration spiraled around. She had been rather pleased with this homemade stick.

  ‘Littleguy—so do you like it or do you hate it?’ she asked him, wanting to jostle him into saying a little thank-you.

  ‘I hate it,’ said Littleguy, but in a pleasant, good-natured way. ‘I want that stick,’ meaning Nory’s real stick.

  ‘That’s not the right way to talk to Nory,’ called out Nory’s father from inside. ‘She made that hockey stick especially for you and used a whole green Samantha ribbon and a toilet-paper tube to decorate it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Nory, I’m sorry, Nory,’ kind little Littleguy said, very nicely, looking up at her with his serious little mouth and hopeful eyes.

  Nory said, ‘Thank you, Littleguy.’ She loved the open feeling you got when someone said I’m sorry to you after you were mad or hurt-feelinged at them—the feeling of the scrumpled paper of the unhappiness going away from your chest. It made you almost burst with generousness toward them. ‘But it’s really my fault,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to you for asking the question confusingly in such a way that you couldn’t tell which way was the right way to answer for politeness.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Littleguy. ‘Do you want to see my gooseneck trailer? It’s had a bad mergency. It’s stuck in the mud.’

  Littleguy of course cried a hundred times a day—he had about eight different kinds of crying, several of them rather ear-gnashing—but Nory almost never cried because she had learned a few years earlier that it more or less ruins your reputation to cry, even if someone says something that makes you want to. It’s very embarrassing to cry. Boys especially will like you more if you don’t cry, and want to be your friend. Jessica cried when she fell on the Astroturf but it was a pretty bad fall, two knees at the same time. And she said the rude thing to Nory partly just because she was purely a rude girl some of the time, but partly because she was embarrassed, and she was very serious about boys, in almost a teenagery way, or not quite in a teenagery way but in a double-digit kind of way, and she probably worried that her enemy-friend, Daniella Harding, would tell Colin Deat that she had cried on the hockey field. Not as many people cried at this school as at Nory’s old school.

  There were two times this year so far Nory almost, almost cried. One was when Shelly Quettner found out that Nory kind of liked a boy by the name of Jacob Lewes. Nory told it to Daniella Harding, who turned out to be Shelly Quettner’s sidekick in the whole process. Shelly started saying to Daniella, ‘What did she say? What? What? What?’ And she squeezed it out of her. Or maybe Daniella wanted to tell her all along, it wasn’t so clear. Instantly Shelly Quettner was saying to the class, ‘Nory fancies Jacob Lewes!’

  Everybody said, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ Jacob Lewes immediately turned dead red and stared at his pencil case. Nory was red, too, but only in the places that she got red, which were on the sides of her cheeks, so that her blush turned into long sideburn-things. People said, ‘Well? Do you fancy him?’ Nory thought seriously about denying it, because honesty may be the best policy at times but it certainly does seem painful at other times. But it’s painful the other way, too, because if you say, ‘No, I certainly do not fancy Jacob Lewes, whatever for?’ then Jacob Lewes’s feelings might be a tiny bit hurt, even though he would also act very relieved to hear it, and also you then right away think, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have tolden a lie,’ and you have to say, ‘Well, actually, yes, I mispoke, I do fancy him.’ So you have twice as much pain as if you had just gone ahead and admitted it, because you have the pain of feeling the guilt of lying and the pain of admitting that you do fancy him.

  So Nory said, ‘Well, I do think he’s nice.’

  Julia Sollen said, ‘You’re blushing!’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ said Nory. ‘Any further questions?’ It was all quite terrible and there was a sliver of a moment when Nory thought, ‘This is so bad that I have a slight feeling in my lips of wanting to cry, should I cry?’

  Luckily one girl came up and said, ‘You know you should tell everybody that Shelly Quettner fancies Colin Deat,’ because that was what Shelly had told someone, and Nory thought about it and almost did it but then she thought, Do Unto Others. Nory’s conclusion was that Daniella Harding was definitely not going to get told any of her secrets anymore.

  It turned out that Nory didn’t really fancy Jacob Lewes so much as all that. First, he said tiresome things about how he hated Barbie dolls, which is what American boys do, and then especially after he started to make fun of Pamela Shavers. By the way, ‘fancy’ was the word they used for it in England, and it was an idiotic, dumb, stupid word, fancy, but not as horrible as if Shelly had said, ‘Nory loves Jacob Lewes.’ The good thing about experiencing that horribleness, though, was that because she’d already gone through the ‘Nory fancies Somebody’ business, she could talk to a boy like Roger Sharpless and nobody would think a thing of it. One time Nory was fighting around with Roger in a playing way and Roger got a little vicious and swopped her in the side of the face with a rolled-up geography booklet. He didn’t know it would hurt as much as it did, because when you roll up something like a magazine or a t
hin floppy book you think it will be kind of soft and springy, like a rolled-up piece of paper, but actually it can feel as hard as a metal pipe, just about. Nory said, laughing, ‘Roger, you’re going to give me a black eye, now.’ And she thought, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, they’re going to see my eye, it’s full of water.’ And then she remembered that one time at her old school she’d thought her eyes would look terribly full of water and she went into the bathroom to check and she found out that you couldn’t even tell unless you were really looking. So she thought, ‘No, I don’t think they’ll notice.’ And Roger didn’t seem worried at all. But he did nicely say he was sorry to have swopped her with his geography booklet.

  Those were the two times she almost cried so far, but didn’t.

  14. Fire Safety Tips

  Nory left Boston and moved to the Trumpet Hill house in Palo Alto when she was still one year old. So the only reason that she had any memories about Boston and its bricks was that they had been back to visit. That was before she had Cooch, her only daughter from her marriage to Sylvester the Cat, who later sailed away to Africa. It was before she knew almost anything, for instance that long ago sailors threw pigs overboard to see what direction they would swim, because whatever direction they swam in was land. Or that if a cat is bred without a tail he won’t be able to feel where he’s going to the bathroom, since the tail is their sense of where they’re going to the bathroom. Without a tail a cat will just go all over the place, not knowing, like dogs who leave their dog leisures here, there, and everywhere.

  Nory didn’t even know the word for elbow back then, when she was one. They had a video of her first learning ‘elbow’ in the yard, much later on. Really almost the only thing she kept with her from Boston was a tiny scar on her nose that she got in the bathtub when she picked up the plastic razor that her mother used to shave her legs and looked at it, and somehow, before she knew it, presto, she had cutten herself with it. Even that tiny scar was gone, almost. And now Littleguy knew the word ‘elbow.’ He said ‘Elbows help you jump!’ and he would then jump to demonstrate. He was right, elbows do help you jump, especially if you jumped the way he did, with a lot of arm motion to make it seem like a very high jump.

  Littleguy did not seem to know the word ‘ankle,’ however. Babies learn the words for their feet and toes and fingers quite early because they can hold them close to their faces, and they learn about their eyes and nose and mouth because they are on their faces, but for some reason they are never terribly interested in their ankles. The word is weaker in their mind. That might have something to do with the strange myth of dipping Achilles.

  It wasn’t Hercules who was dipped. Nory learned his proper name in another Classics class—Achilles. Achilles’s mother was unhappy that Achilles wasn’t completely immortal, so she dipped him head-first into the Watersticks. The Watersticks led from the Alive to the Unalive, in other words to the Dead. She held him by pinching hard on the back part of the foot, above his heel. ‘But wouldn’t that hurt the baby tremendously?’ Nory wondered to herself. ‘Wouldn’t there be a big chance of it falling right out of your hand?’

  She imagined a tiny naked baby hanging by one leg, terribly frightened, bright red in the face from screaming, kicking the other leg wildly. The cold water would make the poor thing gasp desperately and it would pour right up its nostrils, because they would be upside down. Water in your sinuses can be really painful. If the goddess really loved her baby, she would have gotten in the water herself and then gently lifted the baby by its waist from the shore, right side up, one hand on either side, and lowered him in, and where her hands were covering his skin, once he was almost floating, she could just let one hand go for a second, then close, then let the other hand go, then close. You have to be careful to hold up the head, too. The ankle was just not a practical or safe choice of place to hold a newborn child.

  But they were much less careful about things like safety in ancient times. Nowadays safety is a major concern but back then the sky was the limit with danger, really. Nory’s first school was called Small People, and one of the first things they learned at Small People was the safety tip ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll.’ That was what you were supposed to do when your clothes caught on fire. If you ran, the flames would flare up, and you would probably get a third-degree burn. A third-degree burn is when the skin is black and charred.

  ‘Should you hide from the fireman?’ the teacher asked.

  ‘No,’ said the kids.

  ‘If he has a big mask on, should you be frightened into thinking he’s a space alien?’ asked the teacher.

  ‘No,’ said the kids.

  ‘And what do you do if your clothes catch on fire?’ asked the teacher.

  ‘Stop, drop, and roll!’ the kids shouted.

  At first Nory was very happy to know that rhyme, but then she was taught it again at her next school, the Blackwood Early Focus School, where three firemen came by for a visit. That teacher was not in a good state of mind and shouted all the time, because the class was so wild. One kid spent every minute of his day rolling around on the floor, so there wasn’t much need to ask him to drop or roll. Stopping might be nice, though.

  Nory’s parents took her out of that school, which was a public school, when they noticed that Nory had learned to write one more letter in three months, G. One letter in three months was just not acceptable, they said. So they put her in the International Chinese Montessori School, and presto, the alphabet was in her brain in a jiffy and she was learning songs in Chinese about Sung O Kung, the ancient monkey.

  And then one day a fireman came in with some blankets and had two kids hold a blanket low to the floor. The blanket stood for the thick, thick smoke that you were supposed to crawl under. Crawling was fun but it also gave you a panicky feeling because you could imagine being in a room and unable to know where the window was because the smoke was so thick, except for a tiny layer just above the floor. How would you possibly know where the windows were? You’d need to tape a card with an arrow on it pointing up at the window, so you’d know that there’s where you’d need to take a breath and plunge up into the hot smoke and smash out the window with a pillow. ‘And what do you do if your clothes catch on fire?’ asked the fireman.

  ‘Stop, drop, and roll!’ shouted the kids.

  That and don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, don’t talk to strangers, and the rainforest is burning to the ground, were the things that it seemed like every kid was taught over and over and over, to an endless limit. You got told them so many times, on TV ads as well—wasn’t there anything else in the world that kids should know? For instance other safety things, like: Be careful when you play with your little brother because his head is quite hard and it could break your nose. Or, don’t run in fancy black shoes because their soles are nine times out of ten extremely slippery. Or, don’t try to pull down a wooden Chinese-checker set from a shelf above your head because it can fall straight on your toe and make the toenail turn dark purple and almost completely fall right off. Or, don’t chew too wildly or you might bite your tongue, which really hurts.

  Or what about things that were not about safety at all, such as for instance salting meat, or about the three layers of the tooth, the inner layer, the middle layer, and the outer layer, called the crown, or the three layers of the coffin in Egyptian times, the layer of gold, the layer of silver, and the layer of something else, like bronze? Everybody’s gotten the idea that when somebody died, the Egyptians mummified them. Well, does that mean everybody got to be mummified, or does that mean ten out of a hundred? Why not spend some period of time answering that kind of question, rather than endlessly ‘Stop, drop, and roll’?

  Long ago they used to preserve meat by stuffing it into a barrel with tons and tons of salt. The salt was so salty that the germs that are dedicated to making meat go bad couldn’t do what they were planning to do, because of the gagging taste, and the meat just sat there, month after month, getting saltier by the minute. The history teacher at Threll Junior
School told that very interesting thing to the class, and when a boy began talking loudly and interrupting, the teacher said, ‘Be quiet, or I’ll stuff you in a barrel of salt.’ The boy turned bright red. Another time the teacher, Mr. Blithrenner, said to Roger Sharpless, ‘Roger, if you put your finger any deeper into your nose it’ll come out your ear.’

  Nory hated added salt, but she loved Parmesan cheese, and when she was littler she used to pour out a big pile of Parmesan cheese on her plate and dab it up with her finger, if nobody was looking. Her cheeks got bright red when they had spaghetti because of a reaction to the cheese crumbs on them, not because she was embarrassed to eat cheese. She had no embarrassment whatever about eating cheese. Pamela Shavers said Parmesan cheese had lots of salt naturally in it. Crisps were naturally quite salty, as well. Once two bothersome boys found an empty package of crisps in a bin, or trash can, and they went up to Pamela Shavers and said, ‘Oh, Pamela, would you care for a bag of crisps?’ Pamela took the bag and squeezed it and when it went flat they laughed.

  But there was something different than Parmesan cheese about pure salt sprinkled around on food—the wicked little crystals—as opposed to mixed into food, that Nory really wasn’t such a fan of. Also sugar sprinkled in with vegetables—if she didn’t know that there was added sugar in a pan of carrots, then it was fine, but if she knew, then she couldn’t bear to think about it. Nowadays Littleguy was a tremendous fan of any kind of sprinkleable cheese. He and Nory had their own individual miniature cheese dispensers, labeled ‘E’ for ‘Eleanor’ and ‘F’ for Frank. Littleguy ate the cheese by pouring out a little hill of it on his plate when their parents were talking about something like the history of table manners and not paying any attention, and then he licked his spoon so that it was sticky and rolled it in the cheese so that the little scribbages of the cheese stuck to the spoon.