The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  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.’

  ‘Oh, oh, you’re friends with her?’ said one of the girls to Nory. ‘You don’t know better, you’re from America, you have no idea how squeegee your accent is.’

  ‘Yes, I am American, I have an American accent,’ said Nory. ‘Your accent, let me inform you, is dreadful. You bark like a sea lion.’

  People giggled a little at that and that made Nory well known and made the girl furious, but the important thing was that Pamela had a chance to look some more for her prep book, which she found.

  Another time Pamela lost her jacket, or maybe someone hid it. She was frantically looking, and nobody was willing to help. They just told her rude things. ‘Well, we don’t know where it is, we gave it to an old drooling man who came to the door who gave it away to Oxfam.’

  Pamela kept saying, ‘I have to catch my train!’ There was the same sound in her voice that seemed to Nory as if she certainly was going to cry, but she didn’t. It was just the quality that came into her voice when she was angry—although maybe there was some crying in it. (Nory’s own record was still perfect: she had not cried. Had not and would not.) Pamela couldn’t leave without her jacket on because Mrs. Derpath stood by the door, totally on the watch-out. She would nip you by the neck, throw you around, toss you back into the classroom, if you did not have your blue blazer on. So Pamela had to find that blazer. Nory helped her, she rummaged and scrummaged, she found it under a pile of backpacks, and she said, ‘Here, Pamela, here’s your jacket.’ But it was completely trampled over and disgusting. Kids had been practically been doing the Majarajah on it, stamping back and forth without noticing. Nory helped
her dust it off. ‘Thanks,’ said Pamela and she hurried away for her train. She ran in a crouching run, her backpack bouncing like a kangaroo, but her eyes looking down and a little forward on the sidewalk. It was not exactly the way a happy girl would run.

  Even Nory’s friend Kira, who was turning out to be a good friend in England, didn’t want Nory to be nice to Pamela. Pamela had been quite nice to Nory in one of the early days of school, when Nory had forgotten how to get back to the Junior School building from the dining hall, once again. Nory had an atrocious sense of direction—about as atrocious as her sense of spelling, she thought sometimes, and maybe the two things were connected, because knowing which way to turn was like when you were trying to spell ‘failure’ and you didn’t know if it was ‘faleyer’ or ‘fayelyor’ or something quite else. You didn’t know whether to go northeast or southwest at the choices of vowel. Her sense of direction was so horrible that she crashed her plane four times in I.T. They had stopped learning the home row of keys on the keyboard, and they were doing a Flight Imitator, or whatever it was called, and they were supposed to land a plane in the dark according to a map, and Nory simply could not read that map. Her plane shot up toward the stars, and the lights began going around, which meant she was in a death-spin, and she crashed. She crashed so many times that day she had a bad dream about it. So her sense of direction was not at all good. ‘You’re just a disaster, aren’t you?’ said the I.T. teacher, but he said it in a very comforting way that made Nory feel better, in the same kind voice he used when he said, ‘Good morning, ladies and jellyfish.’ So anyway, Nory lost her sense of direction and got turned around and wasn’t sure where she was headed, but Pamela, when Nory asked her for help that early time, wasn’t in the least bit surprised that she didn’t know the way back, and just treated it as a normal event and very nicely walked with her, having a nice indistinct conversation.

  Another time Daniella Harding wanted to scratch ‘D H’ on the back of her watch, to stand for Daniella Harding—she was a pillish girl in some ways, no question about that, although not always—and she borrowed Nory’s compass to use the point for scratching. Nory let her take it because it was flattering to be asked for something and to have it there in your pencil case, and of course, an hour later, the pencil in the compass was totally lost, gone, bye-bye. (Really the compass is called a ‘set of compasses’ and the things that stick out are called the ‘arms of the compass.’) And it was the only pencil Nory had just then, because somehow she’d lost the others, including even her mechanical pencil. That time, very nicely, Pamela let Nory borrow one of her pencils and helped her with some of her math. Nory was on the wrong track in her multiplication and was counting up all the numbers to the right of the decimal, including the numbers you add together to get the final number. Pamela showed her that it was much easier than that. You only had to count the number of numbers to the right of the decimal on the two numbers that you’re multiplying in order to get the answer.

  But even if Pamela had never once been nice to Nory, Nory probably would have said something, she thought, because Pamela had just as much a right as anyone else to go off to school every day and not have her day be made into a state of misery. Her parents were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to send her there, think about that. Pamela said that she hadn’t told her parents about any of it because she hadn’t found the time. Nory told her parents about it and they said that it was brave of Nory to defend Pamela. They thought Pamela ought to go right to the teacher. But Pamela didn’t want to.

  And the thing that was so impossible to figure out, was: Why was this happening? Pamela was never rude or interrupting, she wasn’t braggingly pleased with herself, she was perfectly nice to everybody. Was it some chance thing one day that made it happen that one kid decided to pick on her and then everyone else did? Or was it that there was something about the way she acted that made kids get up on the wrong side of the bed with her? Her face was a nice face—maybe a slight roundedness to it in the cheeks, and her teeth were a little bit out of whack in maybe a chipmunkish way. Or rather that was what two boys were saying one time: that she had a rat-faced look, which is a persistently rude and cruel thing to say, but those boys were known for being rude and insulting guttersnakes every chance they got. And her nose did have a pudginess about it. But Daniella’s nose had much more pudge to it and nobody took the time to fuss her out. Actually Daniella was one of the most popular kids!

  Nory said to Pamela, ‘Go to Mrs. Thirm, tell Mrs. Thirm.’ But Pamela said she’d gone to Mrs. Thirm last year about something and Mrs. Thirm had said to her that she’d done all kinds of things that she said she hadn’t done, so she couldn’t go to Mrs. Thirm. Nory said, ‘Well, then, go to Mr. Pears.’ Mr. Pears was the head of the Junior School and an extremely nice man. He was the one who read them about Hector. The problem with the story about Hector, however—or, not Hector, Achilles—the problem about Achilles, Nory felt, was that he was much more a likable heroine in the beginning, when he was a newborn infant. Later on, in the part about the battle, he takes a downturn and goes bad. The ending should have worked differently. He falls in love with somebody, and he kills hundreds of people, he drags a man around behind his wagon, and he sulks away the time in his tent and says he won’t fight anymore. It’s just not anywhere near as good. The better part is earlier when a person who was half deer and half human took care of him, and fed him with deerskin. No, the person couldn’t have been half a deer, because he wouldn’t be feeding him deerskin if he were a deer, that would be cannibalism. The person was half-oxen, half-human. This half-and-half creature fed him deerskin and cream. The deerskin was for good strength, and cream or sugar for good heart or health. Nory had not followed this part exactly, because she’d been inspired by it halfway through to have the idea of a detective story about a Batman ruler and a Barbie pencil. But Achilles was still good when he was having the cream and deerskin diet. He seemed like a much less good person when he got older.

  Pamela said, ‘Oh no, I can’t go to Mr. Pears, because he’ll go to Mrs. Thirm.’ So she just didn’t do anything. And it began to get gradually a little worse and a little worse, time by time. Kira kept saying to Nory, ‘Whatever you do, do not speak to Pamela.’ She said: ‘Every time you speak to Pamela it will make you less popular.’ She said, ‘Just spend your time with me.’ Nory liked Kira and was in the early part of a friendship when you are sort of under a person’s spell a little, basically. So for two days she did stay away from Pamela more than she had—not completely, because she sat next to her for one lunch, but she spent most of the time with Kira. But it pulled at her, what she was doing, because she knew she was not helping Pamela and maybe hurting her feelings. Nory told this to her parents. They said that when a group of people decide to not speak to a person and pretend they don’t exist it was called the Silent Treatment, and though it wasn’t physically bullying in the meaning of punching someone or screaming at them it was a quiet mental torture and awful. They wanted to tell someone at the school about it, but Nory said that Pamela didn’t want anyone to know about it. They said that the bad thing about bullying was that people who didn’t ever imagine that they would be doing mean things to a person, people like Kira, ended up doing mean things, because it spreads. And the person who’s being bullied gets kind of numb and bewildered and doesn’t know how to take action.

  So next break-time Nory sat on a wall side by side with Pamela. Kira was furious and stomped off. Nory found her later in the music room, with the headphones on, reading a book. Nory said, ‘Kira! I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I’ve been in a state about it. I looked in the changing room, I looked in the classroom, I looked under the tree, I looked in the bathroom, I didn’t even go to the bathroom because I was so busy looking for you. I even looked in the front field!’

  Kira said, ‘Oh, hm, yes.’ She was not apologetic in any way and just sat there like a bump on a rug.

  It hurt Nory’s friendliness toward Kira that Kira had
this character flaw of being very possessive and jealous and needing her all to herself. And the thing was, also, that Kira was generally in some ways a rough kind of punching friend—friendly punching. If Kira got mad at something, she would tighten up Nory’s tie so afterward for a little while Nory’s neck had a sweaty feeling from the itch of the collar. But when Nory went back to being friendly to Pamela, Kira began saying sharp sarcastic things, that were half-jokes, half not-jokes, like: ‘Nory, do you like torturing people?’ Nory was confused for a second because her parents had used that word and she thought Kira was talking about Pamela. She said, ‘Um—do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Kira. ‘But evidently you do, because that’s what dentists do.’

  ‘Kira!’ said Nory, laughing, but not feeling particularly good. Her feelings were still hurt later when she thought about it. She could have said, still jokingly, but meaning what she was saying, ‘How dare you insult the poor dentists, who are just trying to help. It’s your fault. You got your own cavities. You should have brushed your teeth. Then the dentist would only have to put good old paste inside of your mouth, spread it around, and Mr. Thirsty would suck out all the saliva that gathered into a little puddle in your lower mouth.’ Nory liked the feeling of Mr. Thirsty thirsting out the saliva, the hollow bubbling sound he made. Mr. Thirsty was just a name dentists gave to a certain little bended piece of suction tube, to make it seem friendlier to kids. And it worked. If you you kept it in too long, you might completely dry out your mouth, which would be an interesting experiment. Probably a dental researcher has tried it. Nory used to try to dry her tongue completely by sticking it out for a long time. If you lie there on your bed with your tongue out for long enough it will get so totally dry that it glues itself to your mouth when you pull it back in. But it’s probably not good to do that too much. In one of her books about Egypt there was a horrible picture of a mummy curled up on its side with its tongue sticking out. They’d found the tongue in five pieces, dried up of course, and they’d carefully glued it back together. It was black and completely disgusting.