The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  So each kid in Ms. Fisker’s class had a different number of these shapes and math skills scrummaging around in their head, and Ms. Fisker had everything that they had in their heads in her head, at just the level that they had it, each of them, which was part of why she was such a good teacher. After Carl luckily left, Nory got used to the class and Ms. Fisker started to like her and told her things. The most amazing thing Ms. Fisker told her was that she was getting married and going to a different city. It was really amazing to think of Ms. Fisker, one of the proudest teachers, getting married, but she did. Of course, she had been married once before and had a son who was eighteen, but the class hadn’t really taken that in. They didn’t really know that very much. Ms. Fisker had a mischevious cat, and she would wake up, and the cat would prance around on her, and knock down her bottles. Her cat was a mischievous little thing. One time her son had had an operation on his knee and the cat jumped up on his leg and she said he almost went through the ceiling. If you were designing a teacher from scrap, you couldn’t design a teacher better than Ms. Fisker. But Ms. Fisker’s last day at the school was at the teacher-appreciation dinner at the end of the year. The main dish at the teacher-appreciation dinner was a huge fried pig. Its head was there on the big pan in the middle of the table. The head of a pig was not in Nory’s opinion a good menu choice for a teacher-appreciation dinner since there were a lot of younger kids who might be very bothered by the sight of that head, not to mention older kids such as Nory herself who might be revolted as well. You could see its closed eyes. To be polite, she ate a taste of the pig, but only a taste. And that was the last she saw of Ms. Fisker for quite a while.

  The teacher who came in place of Ms. Fisker was Ms. Beryl, who was good but totally different. She liked talking about herself a lot, whereas Ms. Fisker only told them a few careful things, such as about her cat in the morning. Ms. Beryl gave out extremely hard spelling lists with words like ‘dicotyledon’ and ‘pinnate’ and ‘microeconomics’ because she was probably more interested in the much older kids, the eleven-year-olds, and wanted them to be getting ready to go to college. It kind of slipped Ms. Beryl’s mind that the younger kids were still trying to get it into their heads how to spell ‘really’ and ‘tomorrow’ and ‘would’ and ‘unknown.’ Nory had a custom of spelling ‘tomorrow’ as ‘tomaro.’ The math suddenly turned into a jostle of cube roots and algebra kinds of things, with x’s and y’s and breaking things down into their factories, when Nory was still trudging away with her times tables. As her friend Bernice said, ‘When you wear a bra, you study algebra, not before.’

  So Nory got exceedingly distracted, looking at the days of the week on the wall calendar and thinking ‘SuMTWTHFRS, hmm, that could almost spell smothers with furs,’ and from time to time she got into a state of click-laughing with Bernice, who was an easy person to get into a state of click-laughing. They positively could not stop, even though they were almost on the edge of crying, begging each other with their eyes not to start out on another huge laugh, and Ms. Beryl would get furious. Click-laughing is just when you laugh so heroriously that you only make little tiny sounds at the back of your throat. It set Ms. Beryl on fire, and one time, she wrote a note in Nory’s booklet that said that Nory must make a more asserted effort on her concentration skills, because her constantly wanting to know what others were doing around her and her constantly being unable to resist distracting them from what they were working on by giggling was her FATAL FLAW. Ms. Beryl read her note to Nory’s mother and underlined FATAL FLAW three times while she read. Nory was standing a short distance away, pretending to be thinking over other things or nothing, but she heard it near and clear. On the other hand, she wasn’t exactly sure what a fatal flaw meant. But now that she had been going to Classics class at the Junior School and had learned about heroines like Achilles, she knew.

  The fatal flaw was quite similar in what it means to the last straw, and the last straw was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The last straw was NOT, REPEAT NOT the last straw in the machine at a restaurant that when it was taken meant the machine was empty and you would have to drink your milkshake sadly without a straw. Kids find out rather quickly that it is less fun to drink the normal way, with your mouth, because with a straw it’s as if you have magical powers and are telling telling the drink, ‘Kazam, kazaw, now climb the straw!’

  Nory suspected that the straw that broke that camel’s back was an unsensible idea anyway, because first of all, stop and think of that poor camel. How could it happen? Doesn’t he have something to say about the situation? Also, camels’ backs are pretty strong things. If you’ve ridden on them, you know that they can support at least two people, if not three. And if they are able to support two or three people, they should be able to support a lot, a lot, a lot of hay, because hay doesn’t weigh very much at all, and some people weigh quite a bit. One single straw might weigh a thousandth of a gram, so two straws would weigh two thousandths of a gram, and three straws three thousandths of a gram, and so on, and so on. If they got enough straws together to weigh a very large amount of pounds, a massive knob of straw or a rectangle of straw like the ones that are out in the middle of the fields you see when you drive for what seems like hours and hours to Stately Homes, the huge shape would plop off before they got it all strapped on. Just stuffing the last straw under the strap of rope that was tying it all together, ever so gently, would make the huge heaviness start to tilt, and the straps under the camel’s stomach would slip, which might give him an Indian burn, and the whole thing would thump to the side on the ground, unless they somehow had a machine that condensed every single bit of straw together into tiny blocks the size of sugar cubes that were so heavy you could barely lift them without a pulley and you put them all over the camel’s back somehow. But that would be quite unusual.

  And the other main point was, a camel is a mammal and a mammal is a sensible animal. He’s not just going to freeze in place there. As soon as the load felt like it was getting uncontrollably heavy, he would fold his knees under him the way they do. He wouldn’t stand there and have a major injury. When camels get cross they do something about it. They squirt large amounts of spit from their mouths, for one thing. That happened to Captain Haddock in Tintin one time. He was tickling the camel under the chin, and then suddenly, pshooo, his head is gone and a huge splash of camel saliva is in its place. So if you are the one in charge of putting the last straw on the camel’s back, watch out for that risk. And also, if Nory was anywhere near by, watch out for Nory, too, because she had seen the camels at the zoo, which had hurt-looking gray places on their knees from having kneeled down on rough gravel all the time rather than soft sand, and she had cut her knee on a rock once while she was swimming, and then the cut had opened again and bled, leaving a bigger scar than she had expected, so she knew what it was like to have sore knees. She had enough empathy for camels that if she saw a camel in the desert that was being loaded up so much that its back might be broken she would walk out in front of the people who were doing it and she would just say, ‘Stop, there is a fatal flaw in what you’re doing. You’re going to hurt the camel.’

  Fatal flaw indeed! How dare Ms. Beryl say that? She was definitely a little chatty from time to time, but she had been chatty at every school she had ever been to, it was in her deepest nature to be chatty, and other kids were tons chattier, they actually shouted or threw things, and she was only eight at that time, eight going on nine. In Chinese class in the morning she did not have nearly so much of a problem with the ‘fatal flaw,’ but there too she sometimes did forget herself and talk a little to Bernice or Debbie. The Chinese teacher was much more strict, and a few times she got furious at Bernice and shouted in Chinese, because Bernice made fun of her sometimes by saying slangy things very softly in English that the teacher couldn’t understand, but Bai Lao Shi was much calmer than Ms. Beryl. Every morning the kids stood on the field next to the school and did Chinese exercises, shouting out the numbers—yi, er, san—w
hile Bai Lao Shi blew puffs on a silver whistle. Sometimes she held the whistle in her teeth. She had one silver tooth.

  26. A Bad Dream That Joe, the Baby-sitter’s Son, Once Had

  Nory’s parents were not completely happy about Ms. Beryl as a teacher, especially after she wrote them the note about the fatal flaw, and at the dinner table they had discussion after discussion after discussion about what they should do for the next year. The result of the discussions was they rented over their house, and presto, ‘We don’t mind if we do go to England!’ The good thing about being in England was that there were lots of teachers at the Threll Junior School, and each one had things they did well and things they did less well. So you never got that feeling of too much Ms. Beryl. Each morning Nory’s mother would take her and Littleguy to the school, Littleguy in his miniature uniform, which was very cute, and Nory in her jacket and tie and gray skirt and backpack, and each afternoon Nory’s father or mother would pick her up and take her to tea at the tea place near the cathedral, where she had peppermint tea and a piece of chocolate cake with a little dopple of whipped cream next to it, while Littleguy slept in his stroller if they were lucky. Sometimes they read and sometimes they talked about the subject of the day, whatever it was.

  Each person contributes something in this world. Some people make bricks, for example, and some make chocolate cakes. Some invent a new kind of powerful glue or maybe a marionette that works by magnets. Or they put the little ball bearings inside whistles that twirl around. Of course some people contribute more than others. Nory’s contribution was going to be that she would be a dentist and help people with their teeth. Nory’s mother’s contribution was teaching Nory and Littleguy about everything, and how it’s important to be honest and not hurt people’s feelings. Nory’s father’s contribution was writing books that help people go to sleep. The books that Nory read to help her go to sleep were: Garfield comics, Tintin books, and sometimes a chapter book like The Wreck of the Zanzibar, although there was a description in that book of a cow lying on his back with his feet and arms extended in the air, cold and dead because it had been drowned in the water, that was not too pleasant. When she was just dozing off she liked something cheerful, with hand-lettered words, in capitals, nothing scary. Tin tin was very popular in England, Garfield not quite as popular as in America. There was a Garfield cartoon in which Garfield has amnesia. He’s talking about how he’s upset that he’s lost his memory, and how John is upset, and Garfield lies back on the table and turns his head back and puts his hand over like he’s swimming backwards, just one hand, and he puts his finger up, and he takes a bit of the frosting of the cake off and says, ‘Well, I remember being hungry.’ Or no, maybe it was, ‘Do I remember being hungry?’

  You needed to give yourself the best chance of not having a bad dream by dozing off reading something cartoonish and happy, basically. But even then a bad dream can launch itself off in your head. It could just be something from a movie you saw. In Palo Alto, there was a girl in Girl Scouts whose mother was very big on letting kids see grownup scary movies. There was one movie about a mother who turns out to be evil, with yellow fangs and eyes with nothing but white. Nory had to be very careful not even to think about not thinking about that movie, because it could clamp onto her and she then would not be able to help thinking about it, and the only way to escape thinking about it would be to tempt herself by thinking up something even scarier, and the only way to escape from that was to think about sometime even scarier than that, until you were swamped with scariness and couldn’t escape until morning.

  Sometimes a movie isn’t frightening at all, except for in one pacific spot, when you don’t dream of expecting it, like that very good movie about a kid who’s being flown over Canada in a plane, but the man who’s flying him has a heart attack, so they crash, and the heroine has to survive by himself in the wild until he’s rescued. All that is just fine. But nobody warned Nory that there was a scene in the movie in which the kid has to swim out to the plane, which is in the middle of the pond, to get something he needs, and dive under the water, and the dead man’s horrible light purple staring face suddenly floats into the picture, with fear-music. Oh! It should say on the box, THIS MOVIE IS REALLY GOOD EXCEPT FOR ONE SCENE THAT WILL SCARE YOU OUT OF YOUR SHOES FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO KEEP FROM THINKING ABOUT IT. (ALSO ONE SCENE THAT IS DISGUSTING BECAUSE YOU SEE HIM EAT A GRUB.) The movie came back to her much less often nowadays, though. When you spend time in another country like England, there is so much new stuff coming pouring in that it even changes your nightmares. There was another movie about a boy who goes on a dogsled race. Everything’s going along just fine, until for some reason the movie gets it into its head to have a corpse slide down on a dogsled at night. The corpse hits a bump and sits up, and there’s his blank dead face, sheet-white, staring backwards at you.

  Probably one thing that some kids do is that they watch the particular movie over and over until they go kind of numb and it doesn’t scare them, because you’re not supposed to be scared. Your brain toughens up, like the knees of the camels. But you have to stop at a point being tough, because there is definitely such a thing as being much too tough. There are other things you can do to help the situation, though. If you have a bad dream, and you wake up really frightened, and it’s still dark, don’t just lie there unhappy. You can finish the dream off in a good way. You tell yourself, ‘This is my dream, it came from my own brain, I control it, and I have a chance now that I’m awake to make a few small, shall we say, adjustments to it.’ Nory told this tip to Joe, who was Ruth the baby-sitter’s son, when Joe told her a bad nightmare he’d had. Joe was Ethiopian, from the country of Africa, where he spoke a completely different African-American language, or rather African-African language, and he had learned to speak English quite well in only one short year in Palo Alto. His bad dream was that he and his dad were walking along, when a man jumped down from a tree and said ‘Mfoya, mfoya!’—something like that—which means, ‘Dead, dead!’ The man pointed to some bones. Joe’s dad thought the man was just Joe’s friend, or just being kind of friendly. Then when his dad turned away the man bit Joe deep in the neck. Joe said ‘Gah!’ His dad turned around in surprise, and then he and the man fought, and his dad finally killed the guy by strangling him and hitting his head on a rock. But the guy’s wife came out and she was very very angry. They were carnibels, or they seemed to be, anyway. The guy’s wife ate Joe, finished him up, tooth and nail. So in the end Joe was only bones in the grass by the roadside.

  Nory said to Joe, ‘Okay, that’s scary, I admit, but now you can finish it. Try this. Your dad sees your bones and thinks, “Gosh, I have to act fast, I have to get Joe to a hospital.” He puts the bones in a bag and goes off. “Please could you help him get better?” your dad asks.’

  Joe said: ‘At the hospital they’re going to say, “Sure, we’ll do it, but you have to give us two thousand dollars.” ’

  ‘Right,’ said Nory, ‘and your father just won the lottery, so he pulls out his wallet and he says, “This is your lucky day!” ’

  ‘And they put me in a machine that sticks all my parts back on me, arms, legs, a built-in heart, a built-in liver,’ said Joe. ‘And I wake up and I see my dad, and I say, “Dad? Dad? What happened?” ’

  27. Nory’s Museum

  That was back at the Palo Alto house, while Nory’s parents were out for dinner and Ruth was there babysitting. Later on that night, Nory asked Joe if they had fake food in Africa, fake Japanese food, the beautiful kind that was in the window of Japanese restaurants, and he said they didn’t. Japan wasn’t important in Africa. Nory asked Joe if he liked fake Japanese food. He said he did. Nory told him her idea for a museum of fake food from all different lands. She would take very beautiful china plates, and place the food on them. It would be a small one-room museum, full of glass cupboards. She would go to all the Japanese restaurants, and call all the toy stores. There would be a children’s area and a gift s
hop. And she would sell fake foods, for good prices, if she had duplicates, because thousands of toy stores would be sending her fake food at the same time. There would mostly be fruits and vegetables, and Japanese food, such as the one of seaweed shaped in a cornucopia, with rice tucked into it and crabmeat sprinkled over the rice. The children’s area would have plastic plates, but beautifully painted also. ‘Does that sound like a good idea for a museum?’ Nory asked.

  ‘Sure, yeah,’ said Joe. He said a lady came into his school to do a nutrition demonstration, and she had tons of fake food. The chocolate chip cookie looked so real, Joe thought it was real at first. The meat was cool also, he said. It was red, but you could see light coming through it.