The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  42. The Lady Chapel

  Littleguy called the morning the good-morning time, because that was what Nory had called the morning when she was Littleguy’s age, and Nory’s parents still did. Nory didn’t have the slightest memory of ever calling it that, though, because of how much you undoubtedly forget, she just knew about it from her grandmother telling it. One time their plane was cancelled and Nory and Nory’s mother and her grandmother were all in a hotel room near the airport. They got in bed very late and turned out the light. The two grownups had just finally closed their eyes and dozed away when Nory stood up in her crib and said brightly, ‘Dood morning!’ Little children say ‘dood’ instead of ‘good’ and ‘breaksiss’ instead of ‘breakfast’ because some sounds are not all that easy for them to make and sometimes they give up trying to teach their tongue to make, for instance, a ‘g’ sound and think to themselves, that’s dood enough for now. But later on they hear it so many times as ‘g’ they can’t help it and they finally say ‘good morning.’

  A little kid calls it the good-morning time because you don’t have the slightest idea of what time of day it is then, but you do know that at a certain particular time of day people always say ‘Good morning’ to you, so sensibly it’s not just plain morning time, but good-morning time.

  So in the next good-morning time Littleguy woke up very, very early, before Nory’s mother and father were up, and Nory and he closed the door to their mother and father’s bedroom and snuck into the Art Room together and closed that door. The Art Room was a true multipurpose room. It was actually a tiny extra kitchen in the upstairs of the house where there were markers, and a stapler, and Scotch tape and scissors and all kinds of supplies like that, including a sink where you could do water projects. You could play egg-beater games in there or make things with clay or just be by yourself and do anything. ‘Littleguy, what do you want to make?’ Nory whispered, because again today the idea of doing some kind of project was burning a hole in her pocket, and since Littleguy was there and wanted to be involved, well, she would make a project with Littleguy.

  ‘I want to make a auger driller,’ said Littleguy.

  So they made one, together, extremely early in the morning, out of an empty cracker box and a small empty Legos box and some paper rolled into a tube. They decorated it with drawings of all four of them, and put it in a shopping bag and when Nory’s parents got up they said, ‘Here’s something for you.’ When you give your parents a present and they are very appreciating of what you’ve done and say that it’s the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen, it can give you a undescribable feeling in your chest, a certain kind of opening feeling, as if your heart’s a clock in a furniture museum with little doors that open up and a clockwork princess twirls out for a short time. While Nory and Littleguy had been working on the auger driller Littleguy stopped once and said, ‘I’m sho happy!’ So she did get to do a project and it turned out well.

  But that day was a Saturday, which meant—because this was something that was very different between England and America, at least at this school—it meant, school in the morning. So, put on shirt and skirt and tie, tuck tie in skirt, brush hair and teeth, oatmeal, rush to school. While they were walking there, the swans came up hunching their shoulders in a threatening way, and Nory’s mother asked, ‘How’s Pamela doing?’

  ‘Not exactly perfect,’ Nory said, and told some of the details. Her mother said Nory should tell the teacher that these bad things were going on, but just not use Pamela’s name since Pamela didn’t want to be mentioned. She could just say, ‘I have a friend who keeps getting treated badly by other kids, and she doesn’t want me to bring her up to you, but I really think someone has to know about it at the school because it’s bad, and what should I do?’

  Nory said okay, maybe that was a solution. They got there almost on time, and first there was R.S., then history class. In R.S. they were given the assignment of designing a piece of stained glass for the Lady Chapel, in a drawing. Nory drew the Virgin Mary in a blue dress with puffy sleeves and the golden thing over her head, holding up two fingers, but the fingers were quite stubby because Nory did the drawing in a cartoony style, since when she did her very precise style she often made mistakes from trying to do it too perfectly, like the painters you see in the Fitzwilliam. When she used her realistic style a lot of times she got into trouble with the eyes, making one of them too bulging, or the nose too nostrilly. A cartoon style was a set style she knew how to do, and when she used it she was pretty sure that the face would turn out all right and have a loving look which you need for the Virgin Mary and not have one side that looked like an off-kilter monster face or hands that looked like chicken claws or something like that.

  There was a whole separate part of the Cathedral called the Lady Chapel that was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but it had only a tiny bit of stained glass in it. That’s why they talked about it in R.S.—what kinds of decoration would you want in a Lady Chapel? You could have the seasons of the year or other important nuns and lady saints, or do scenes from Mary’s life. Long ago it had been painted rich colors, but right now the Lady Chapel definitely had problems, in Nory’s opinion. It smelled very coldly of stone. Probably that was because the stone powder was always falling, since there were so many places that the stone was broken open, and over the years it kept falling from them, like pollen. It was a sad bare place, the exact opposite of what you would want in a church devoted to the Virgin Mary, since it was a place to honor the memory of the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, Mary, and her job had been to shelter the baby Lord Jesus in her cradling arms. As we know, the stone had been broken up very tiresomely by the people in Threll who got out their hammers and started breaking things in the churches because they had a sudden powerful brainwash and came to the decision that they were totally against the monks.

  Nowadays if you walked up to any statue in the whole Mary Chapel you saw that there were very few heads on them, so it was almost impossible to enjoy looking at them, since they were just pathetic little carved stone dolls about the size of Samantha dolls except not quite as plump, that stopped at the shoulders with no expressions whatever. The most important part of a doll, or a sculpture, or a drawing is, by all means, the face, because all your senses come from your face, except for your sense of touch, and even that is included on your face, if you think about it, since your skin can feel, and even your teeth can feel although it’s not exactly touch when your teeth are very sensitive to the pain of having a huge ball of ice-cream in your mouth, but it’s not taste either and it’s not touch, it’s another sense that only your teeth have, maybe, that dentists study. Sometimes you can have the feeling that your face is the only part of your body. Some people think there’s another sense in your chest, though, in the oystery place around your heart, and maybe it would be possible for you to think with your heart.

  Littleguy was a good example of how important faces were in art, Nory thought, since he was just starting to make his first really good drawings of people. Before he had drawn two big circles and connected them with a line he called the driving bar to make the two wheels of a steam engine and he would very happily say, ‘That’s a steam engine!’ But now he was drawing the same two circles and the same line, but now they were the two eyes and the mouth and he would say, ‘That’s Juliana!’ Juliana was a girl who he was best-friends with in Palo Alto that he missed very much, even though he was going to school here in Threll, too. He was even drawing the legs now, the way little kids do, with the feet poking off in one direction and capturing the movement and not the other aspects that you learn later, like the knees.

  A sad thing to think about was all the little heads from all the little statues lying on the floor of the Mary Chapel at the end of the day, after the nitwitted men had finished slamming around with their hammers and gone away. Maybe then an old nun would have come in by a side door with a broom made of straw bundled up. Shaking her head sadly, she would have swept up all the little bumbling s
tone angel-heads very carefully into a cold little pile, like a pile of brussels sprouts, and maybe she would have scooped them into a velvet bag and taken them out into the Bishop’s garden and planted them. Each little head would grow into a rare tulip or a lily or a conker tree in the spring, probably a lily since the lily was Mary’s special plant, especially devoted to her. The passion-flower is a vine that was Jesus Christ’s plant because you can see a cross inside it if you look at it close up. Someday Nory thought in a hundred years someone would go around the Bishop’s garden with one of those wands with the little halos at the bottom that they use to find things underground—a sculpture-detector—and discover the heads and dig them up. They would wash them off very gently with certain chemicals they use to do that kind of work, and glue them back in place one by one, so carefully you couldn’t even be able to tell where they had been broken off, and the whole place wouldn’t seem so destroyed. UHU was the name of the glue people used most often in England, but they pronounced it as ‘You-hoo,’ not ‘Uh-huh.’

  If Nory grew up to be a stained-glass maker and not a dentist or a popup-book maker she would design each window in the Mary Chapel to tell the story not just of Mary’s life but of the digging of the stone for the Mary Chapel and the whole construction of it and the story of the people who came around one Thursday afternoon for no reason smashing the stained glass and the statues, and she would illustrate her own story of the woman who saved the heads and the flowering of the heads and the gluing back on of the heads with UHU. Then the place would be filled with the colors of the stained glass again and not seem cold at all. The idea of the heads growing up out of the ground wasn’t her own idea. It came from something they talked about in Classics class, the planting of an army out of teeth by Jason.

  Now it was almost all clear glass in the Lady Chapel, in little square pieces going all the way up each window, and near the bottom of each window it said a name, like ‘Lord Chinparm’ or ‘Lloyd’s Bank’ or ‘Tesco.’ Tesco was the name of one of the food stores in England. There was Tesco and Waitrose and Asda and Safeway. Safeway was exactly the same name as in America. It was a good name for a supermarket because it gave you the idea of very calm smooth aisles of food that were so wide that you would never have an accident with another shopping cart and would always be able to buy your groceries quickly and safely. Each window of the Mary Chapel had a name on it because that was who originally gave money to put up that piece of transparent stained glass, or rather unstained glass. So now it just said TESCO, plain and simple, with no picture of Mary, not of Adam and Eve, not of Solomon or the ark or Jonah or Jesus Christ going down into H-E-double-hockey-stick.

  So this is what happened to a visitor now. You went in and looked around, and thought, ‘Hmmm.’ You might not want to look at the headless sculptures, because you didn’t want to think about people doing that with hammers each by each, so you looked up at the glass, and then you saw LLOYDS BANK and you thought, ‘Oh, right, that reminds me, I need to get some money at the cash machine,’ and you turned around and walked out. Or you saw TESCO and you thought, ‘Oh, right, I need to get some brussels sprouts and some dwarf cauliflower for dinner,’ and you turned around and walked out. You didn’t necessarily think of how the Virgin Mary protected her son because she loved him. She would have died for him, as any mother would. That’s why she was so important! She would have died for her son just because she loved him so infinitely much, even if he hadn’t been Jesus Christ but just simply her own child—but the way the Catholic religion had adjusted the story a little was that it had her son dying up on the cross out of love for the world, to save it, as if it was his dear child. His own personal dying was a symbol for the kind of love that Lady Mary had for him. Long ago it would have been a much, much more Mary-Mother-of-Goddish sort of building when the stained glass was there, because the colors would be red and blue and you might feel you were in a humongous stone kangaroo pouch. There is such a thing as warm colors and cold colors, so that even if a place is cold in a temperature sort of sense it can be quite heartwarming. Though your heart is always fairly warm anyway because think how much exercise it’s getting.

  Once at Christmastime when she was seven, Nory made a nativity scene using the miniature baby from Babysitter Barbie as the Baby Jesus and dressing one of her Barbies in a blue dress with a crown as the Virgin Mary and then arranging the Three Wise Barbies, one blond, one dark-haired, and one African-American, in front with pipe cleaners decorating their heads and show that they’d come from foreign lands. The Three Wise Barbies couldn’t kneel, so they had to kind of lie there near the gifts they brought, which were in little Polly Pocket suitcases. But that was sensible because in Roman days people very often ate dinner lying on the couch.

  43. A Talk with Mrs. Thirm

  So that was what Nory did in Religious Studies, drew the Virgin Mary. This made a little bit of a strange comparison with History, where they were still busy discussing the Aztecs and investigating the way the Aztecs sacrificed their people in order to feed the blood-red sunsets. There was a picture of them sacrificing in the textbook. First of all—and Nory thought that it was good of them to do this, at least—they made the person who was going to be sacrificed very drunk, so drunk he almost fell asleep waiting in line to be killed. Then they held both his legs—two people holding his legs and one person holding his arms. In other words, one person holding one leg, the other person holding the other leg. There was one person in the middle, on one side, who had a spear and a skull on his outfit. His hand was all red from killing people and he held a sword that was all red, and his sleeves were soaked with blood to the elbows. There was a wooden block that they had the person lie on. Blood was dripping down the stairs they had to walk up, slobbed all over the place, because what they did in order to sacrifice them was to cut their heart out while it was still beating.

  Nory thought that it was really nothing to be proud of, this type of behavior, nothing that should allow the Aztecs to have elaborate costumes and solid, proud faces. Of course it was a picture that was painted many years after the sacrifices happened, but still—they weren’t smiling, so they didn’t look totally wicked, neither did they look very very upset. And what they were doing was unspeakable. It was not just unspeakable. It was unsingable, it was unchattable, it was unsignlanguageable. It was way, way past the limit. However, maybe it was good to learn about at school because kids love gory things, especially boys and certain girls, like Bernice, and it wasn’t something especially made up to scare your living dits off, like Tales of the Crypt or Goosebumps, it was something that was a part of real-life history, which was why it was being taught in Mr. Blithrenner’s class. And, really, being sacrificed on a wooden block was not the worst way to die, if you had to die in some fancy way other than old age. There were three worst ways to die in this world. One was to be on one of those posts with a fire under you that trickles up your legs. The second was to be smuggled by surprise with a hand over your mouth. And the third was to drown.

  At break Nory discussed this with Kira, who pretty much agreed, except that she said that the absolute worst-of-all-worsts way was: being buried alive. Pamela came over and said there were some fresh conkers under the tree, and this time, quite amazingly, when Nory said, ‘Come on!’ to Kira, Kira came along. She didn’t play with Pamela, exactly, but Pamela and Kira both played with Nory, in a sort of separate way. Pamela said that she thought the worst way to die was probably to fall off a cliff onto needle-sharp rocks, and both Kira and Nory had to admit that, yes indeed, that was a pretty unattractive way to die, as well. So there was a tiny spark of Kira and Pamela maybe starting to get along. But meanwhile a few other kids came over for the conkers and Kira went over to them. So obviously she was still embarrassed to be with Pamela. And then, on the way to lunch, Kira asked Nory out of the clear blue sky if maybe Nory could come over to her house the next day and play, and Nory said she would check with her parents, because it couldn’t hurt to ask.

 
; Just before Nory left she had a horribly nervous moment of talking to Mrs. Thirm. She told her that there was a girl, a friend, who was having one bad experience after another with bullying. Not physically bullying so much as mental bullying. She told her about the time with the jacket and the time that day with the boys, and the girls not talking to Pamela and laughing at her, and a few other times, like the time one of the boys kept throwing Pamela’s duffel coat down and hanging his duffel coat on her peg. ‘This friend doesn’t want me to say her name,’ said Nory, ‘but she is quite, quite bothered that this is going on day and day out, and I was just wondering if you might have a recommendation on what to do about it.’

  ‘I suppose you mean Pamela,’ said Mrs. Thirm.

  ‘Well, I can’t exactly—I mean—she’s a friend,’ said Nory.

  ‘Thank you for mentioning it, Nory,’ said Mrs. Thirm. ‘We’ll keep an eye on it.’

  ‘Thank you, because it does really bother her,’ said Nory. She breathed the hugest blast of a sigh of relief because she had been worried all day about saying something to Mrs. Thirm about Pamela, and lo and behold it turned out that the teachers already knew about the situation. And fortunately Nory hadn’t had to give out Pamela’s name, although it was a close call.

  44. Six Extra Brains