The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  Event Three.…TO BE CONTINUED.

  31. Oatmeal

  Nory liked writing ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ at the end of stories, and of course she could go right ahead and continue them. But she had very old stories that she’d written when she was seven and eight that had that in big letters at the end, and when she came across them stuffed in her desk in Palo Alto she thought, ‘Wow, I haven’t exactly done what I said I would do, have I?’ Basically, when she wrote ‘To Be Continued’ at the end of a story it almost always meant ‘To Never Be Continued,’ that is, ‘To Be Dropped Like a Hot Potato.’ This made her a little sad when she realized it. She had gotten the idea of ‘To Be Continued’ from the movie Back to the Future, which ends with those words in huge letters. Back to the Future was another movie where the second movie, Back to the Future II, was equally as good as Back to the Future I, like Neverending Story and Neverending Story II.

  So probably she wouldn’t write any more of the story of Ranrof, because by the time she got around to it she would have become a little older and she would think some of it was kiddish and she would be on to other unexceptional things. Also everyone had to read their stories aloud in class and when she she read hers some of the boys made low gurgles and snickers when she read the part about the girl throwing herself around the dog’s neck. They thought it was girlish and sweetsy-cue, which didn’t matter one bit because Nory liked the story. But it was true that after they gurgled she stopped working on it.

  Her mother came in while Nory was still dozily under the covers thinking of what project she should do that morning and she said it was time for Nory to hop to. A few minutes after that her father came popping in and said, ‘Let’s go, kiddo, let’s go, let’s go.’ So it was a school day, was it? Well well! How fair was that? Nory chatted to herself for not a very long time in the mirror, pretending to be surprised by her toothbrush flying in from the side, and trying out different surprised expressions. Then she tucked in all her dolls for the day, which took a good amount of time. She had only been able to take eleven dolls to England from America, not including Raccoon. By then her mother was calling out, ‘Urgent call for Nory!’ and her father was calling out, ‘Extreme two-minute warning!’ So she bustled on her school outfit and tied her tie and tucked the ends of it in her skirt, since they were always much too long to be becoming since basically the tie was too big for a child her age, and she went downstairs to have oatmeal.

  The bowl was hot enough to burn your fingers from the microwave but the cold milk cooled its heels. Nory’s father sometimes hummed to the sound of the microwave, because the microwave was extraordinarily loud, much louder than the one they had in America, which is named after Amerigo Raspucci, who made a map of America that was not terribly accurate because the technology that they had available in those times was not good, and the microwave sounded like the humming note of a bagpipe. He hummed a hymn that Nory liked from her school hymnbook, ‘And did those feet, in ancient times.’ Sometimes he hummed songs he made up, like ‘Snort-victims on parade, exchanging glances.’ But he had gotten into a very bad habit of also making a strange little humming sound when he put a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth. He said the warmness of the oatmeal made him simply have to make that strange noise, but Nory’s mother said she wasn’t very fond of hearing that sort of moaning at the breakfast table before there was time for the coffee to work, and once Nory had to say to both of them, ‘Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an argument.’ That was the way Nory got them to stop when they were going up the stages of having a fight, although it didn’t work every single time. However, they didn’t fight nearly as much as some of her friends’ parents.

  In America Nory ate cornflakes or frozen waffles with maple syrup. The cap of the syrup got congested with scrabs of dried syrup, which turned to pure sugar, so that you could barely get it on or off. But in England, no frozen waffles. In America Littleguy had Cheerios with bubanda, which was what he called banana. But here everyone ate oatmeal, everyone in her family, that is, and were quite content eating oatmeal in fact, and they quite happily sang hymns to the sound of the microwave while it cooked their breakfast. In the International Chinese Montessori School Nory wouldn’t have dreamed of having a hymnbook. Yet here she had a prep book, a hymnbook, a reading logbook, and six or seven subject notebooks each of a different color. Her favorite was the ‘English - Stories’ notebook because it was a soft blue color, and she had sort of gotten used to the idea that she had made a mess-up and written ‘Engish’ first and had to quietly sneak in the ‘l.’ That was the notebook where she wrote down her stories for Mrs. Thirm, for instance the one about a girl who finds a dog.

  Nory’s family liked being in Threll because it made them do things not too differently but a little differently. Here Nory had tons more religion in her life than in America, since they never went to church in America except on Christmas and Easter, and maybe one or two other times when her grandmother visited, since she liked to go. But here the whole Threll School had a service at Cathedral once a week, on Monday usually. There was a great joke Nory knew about Friday. What is the fish’s least favorite day? Fryday. That joke was probably invented in England, because England was a place that loved things swamped in hot grease. One day when they went out for breakfast and Nory’s father ordered bacon and eggs and the bacon came out all clenched up in a little shape like a lettuce, and he said ‘Jesus Christ, they deep-fat-fried it!’ That was the day Nory had the idea of making a doll that would have an egg she would cook in a pan. It was not good to take the Lord’s name in vain, or shoot the bird at anyone, for that manner, no matter what they do.

  Every night they all said grace. They also said grace in America, but in America Nory always said the same thing, meal after meal, which was: ‘Thank you, God, for this delicious dinner, bless the food on the table, Father, Son, Holy Ghost amen.’ Nory’s father didn’t believe in God but he said that he liked the idea that other people did, and Nory’s mother believed in the idea that God was the goodness in human beings but not that there necessarily was a certain particular god who knew everything everyone was thinking and worked us all like magnetic marionettes. But Nory really believed in God as a thoughtful and extremely supreme person, and Littleguy believed that God was the driver of a steam train and the devil drove a diesel. And they all liked saying grace because it was just a calm and holy thing to do before you start munching away at your first bite, no matter what you thought about religion.

  And here in England Nory was starting to say different graces, because she went to the Cathedral so much and had R.S., which is Religious Studies. ‘Thank you God for this delicious dinner, and bless the Pope and the Bishop and all the people in the church, and Mr. Pears, and all the people who are sick in their minds or their bodies, and everything else, Father, Son, Holy Ghost amen.’ Or, ‘Thank you dear Lord for this delicious dinner, and thank everyone who was worked so hard in their lives and is still working hard now, and bless our lord and your son who we cruelly murdered amongst ourselves, and bless the Pope and the Dean and the Bishop and the Archbishop and all the chaplains, and everyone else in the church, please forgive these humble words of prayer, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, amen.’ A different one every night, sometimes with little silent parts in the middle while Nory was thinking out what she wanted to say. And now Littleguy was coming in at the end saying, ‘Now me: Holy Ghost, everyone in the church, amen!’ When he said it he touched his chest in a dear way.

  Then Nory’s parents would nod and say ‘Thank you, very nice,’ and they would start eating. If before dinner they had been shouting at Nory to come right now to the table, the grace stopped any scolding of her by building a little wall between what had happened before dinner and what happened at dinner. No singing was allowed during the actual main part of the dinner but you could sing in between dinner and dessert, or if you had to demonstrate something you learned in drama class or something a kid did that you had to show by standing up, you could do that between dinner
and dessert, as well. For instance, Roger Sharpless and Nory had had a pretend fight in which he had pretended to swop her in the face and she had ducked so that each time his fist would clong into the wall. That sort of event happened in Tintin a fair amount. Roger and she had Tintin in common, and they also both liked 99 Flake. 99 Flake is a candybar that you can’t get all that easily in America. Actually 99 Flake is the name if you’re talking about the ice cream made with the candy bar, and Flake is the name if you’re just talking about the candybar.

  32. Don’t Forget Your Pencil Case

  But back to the morning after the dream about the rabbits and the corpse. After breakfast there was a catastrophe of a broken mug that was holding apple juice, which was Littleguy’s favorite drink. And Nory couldn’t find the pledge sheet for Readathon, which she was supposed to have brought in ages ago. So they spent a lot of time dabbling up apple juice and looking in piles of paper for the Readathon sheet. Finally her mother found it tucked in the phone book. The apple juice had hurdled itself amazingly far away from the main place that the cup smacked into the floor. It was like a solar flare of apple juice. So they drove instead of walking, so as not to be late, since Nory’s father had to go in to London anyway to look something up. Nory saw Pamela from the car hurrying up from the train station in her usual leaning-forward, staring-forward way. ‘Pamela! Pamela!’ Nory called out, but Pamela didn’t hear her, since they went past too fast for Nory to roll her window down, plus it was getting pretty cold these days for wide-open car windows.

  Nory’s father asked how things were going with Pamela.

  ‘Mezzo-mezzo,’ said Nory.

  ‘Are people treating her a little better?’

  ‘Not perfectly, no,’ said Nory.

  ‘Shouldn’t we talk to Mr. Pears about it?’

  ‘I think Pamela really doesn’t want that,’ said Nory. ‘Please not yet.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Nory’s father. ‘I’m very sorry you had that awful night last night.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Nory. ‘I was just agitated. Bye Littleguy! Bye! Love you!’

  ‘Bye Nory! Kisses and hugs! Now off to my school,’ said Littleguy.

  Nory was a tiny bit late when she got there, and the office, where you go to be ticked off when you’re late, had nobody in it, and Nory had a total brainwash and couldn’t find the list for her house, Lord Lamper. There were five houses in Junior School, Bledingsteale, Beaston, Morris-Sirrer, Lord Hivle, and Lord Lamper. The sheet for the Lord Lamper kids had slid under Morris-Sirrer, and Nory, spinning around trying to find it, went out of the office, back in, out, in, thinking, I’m going to be horribly late, until finally she saw Betty in the hall, who was always nice to her. Betty said, ‘The list is in the office.’ Which was not all that helpful, but what can you do? Then a woman who sometimes helped Nory with spelling sorted her out, as they say, and she went to the classroom, but on her way she saw Mrs. Thirm talking to Shelly Quettner. Mrs. Thirm gave her the nicest, nicest smile. Why in the world did Pamela not like Mrs. Thirm? Mrs. Thirm was a really nice housemistress. Shelly, who was not always the greatest of kids, called out, ‘Tutoring is in Mrs. Hant’s classroom today, I’ll show you where it is.’ Nory couldn’t resist that offer, even though, yes by all means she knew that there was maths tutoring and yes also knew where Mrs. Hant’s class was, because it’s always pleasanter to arrive at a slightly out of the ordinary classroom with someone you know, even with Shelly, who was the girl out of all the girls at that school probably who did the worst thing that anyone had done to Nory so far, which was when she told the class, ‘Nory fancies Jacob Lewes.’

  But that didn’t turn out to be so much of a bad thing anyway. A few weeks after Shelly had said that she had said ‘Nory bad-worded Belge Coleman.’ Using the most horrible bad word there is. Nory said, ‘I did not!’ She did not say, ‘At least, I don’t think I did.’ For a tiny second she thought about saying, ‘Well, maybe I did, but I don’t think I did,’ because you forget so many tons of things in your life and you don’t want to tell a lie about a thing you mistakenly forgot, but then she thought, ‘No, in this case, I know for sure,’ and she just said, ‘I did not!’ Only a few girls heard it, none of the boys, and basically nobody believed Shelly anyway, in this case, because think about it: Shelly was obviously the one who fancied Belge Coleman in real life and nobody else would stand a chance of fancying him because he was one of the two kids in the class who were kind of thought of by the whole class as pests. Belge Coleman that same day had plucked away Nory’s snack, which was a wonderful Flake, and said, ‘Oh, thank you,’ in a Vampire accent and squeezed it and squeezed it. Nory struggled it from his hand, and it fell on the ground. It was broken in half. The good thing was that Nory gave the other half to Kira, because it was broken in half so conveniently. But still, it wasn’t so nice of Belge Coleman and nobody if they knew could understand why Shelly would ever like someone as idiotic a nitwit as him, but she did, and Nory knew it because Shelly even told her straightaway, ‘Some days I go mad over boys.’ And she told her, ‘I really fancy Belge Coleman and I just go mad about him some days.’ Shelly was saying that Nory had horrible-bad-worded Belge Coleman because she was bothered that he was paying attention to Nory by stealing away the snack from her and using typical Vampire behavior. She was jealous, basically. The thing about Shelly was that she was from New Zealand and it could be that nine-year-olds were more teenagery in New Zealand. You could know very easily that Shelly was a jealous kind of person because her sidekick, Tessy Harding, one time told Nory a story about how she was showing off and Shelly climbed a tree and started throwing chairs at her! Nory was shocked that anyone would bully someone by throwing chairs at her, since that could really injure you if the chair fell on you a certain way, or even kill you, if, say, one of the legs of the chair hit you in the soft spot on the side of your head next to your eye, which was like an Achilles heel of your head. Later she found out that it was just cherries, that Shelly had thrown, not chairs. But still.

  So Shelly wasn’t a complete and utter delight as a person, but never mind, Nory was happy to go with her to maths tutoring. Shelly said, ‘Wait, I just have to go get something.’ Nory said quickly, not to interrupt her with Mrs. Thirm, ‘Okay, I’ll meet you right here.’ Shelly came back and they started going to the class and suddenly Shelly said, ‘Your pencil case! You need your pencil case!’

  Nory froze and said, ‘Oh, gosh, my pencil case! You mean, we need our pencil case.’ Because Shelly seemed to be totally empty, nothing on her. But no, Shelly said that hers was already in the class. So Nory said ‘Wait for me here, all right?’ And Shelly said okay. Then Nory rushed to the other classroom to get her pencil case but when she was leaving Mrs. Copleston said, ‘Nory, where are you going? You’re supposed to be in here.’

  Nory said, ‘Oh, right, okay,’ and sat down.

  Then Mrs. Copleston looked at her book and said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re right, go to Mrs. Hant’s class, my mistake.’

  So Nory went partway to Mrs. Hant’s class. Then she remembered she was supposed to be meeting Shelly. So she went where Shelly had been. But Shelly was gone by this time. So she went to Mrs. Hant’s class. Mrs. Hant hadn’t gotten there yet and Shelly wasn’t there. ‘Is this Mrs. Hant’s tutoring class?’ Nory asked.

  ‘Yes, you’re not supposed to be in here,’ said one of the kids.

  ‘Yes, I believe I am,’ said Nory. Then she looked around and realized that true, she had her pencil case but in her brainwash she’d forgotten her notebook, so she popped up and said, ‘Oh no, I forgot something!’

  ‘You’re an Americayan,’ people started saying in an exaggerated accent.

  Nory said, ‘Yes, and I’m glad of it, but first, excuse me, I have to get something,’ and she shot out the door. In the hall Mrs. Thirm said, ‘Are you getting things sorted out?’ Nory said she was just going back for her notebook.

  ‘And then you’ll be going to Mrs. Copleston’s class?’ said Mrs. Thirm.
/>   Nory said, ‘Ah, no, I think I’m supposed to be in Mrs. Hant’s class.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, you’re right,’ said Mrs. Thirm, waving. ‘And I believe I’m your last port of call today.’

  When Nory got back to Mrs. Hant’s class, Mrs. Hant was there. ‘She’s not supposed to be here,’ said one of the kids.

  ‘Are you sure you’re supposed to be in here?’ said Mrs. Hant.

  ‘I’m not completely positive, but I think so,’ said Nory.

  But then Mrs. Hant said, ‘Ah, yes, I see, you’ll be spending the class with me, yes.’ So finally Nory was in the right class with the pencil case and the notebook. And then Shelly came storming in and sat down. So everything was settled, and they did maths for ages and ages of time. And then it was over and they went to English class.

  English class was devoted to Readathon because the school wanted the kids to read as many books as possible for Leukemia, and that night was the end of the time period for the Readathon. Kira was in Nory’s English class and she was a passionate reader. Every spare second, Kira was there nonstop, reading, reading, whistling through book after book. Her father had pledged twenty pounds per book, she said, and she wasn’t like Shelly Quettner or Bernice from last year where when they tell you something you never know what’s true and what isn’t. Shelly Quettner brought in a book about simultaneous human combustion that had a picture of a bloody piece of leg where a man had blown up for no reason, and she expected everyone to believe that it had happened, and everybody did, for a while, until they began thinking about how simple it would be to fake it. But when Kira said something had happened, it had happened. Nothing bothered her while she read, she just read like a hot butterknife, totally emerged in the page, because she wanted to have read more books for Readathon than anyone else in fifth year, and she had a good chance of doing it, too. She never talked about what she read, she just read. Nory couldn’t read that fast and when she read one book like The Wreck of the Zanzibar in a day she had a staring wobbling sensation as if she’d been playing too long with the screensavers on the computer.