The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  ‘Thank you,’ Nory said. She was in a state of triumph, pleased out of her gourd, and she hopped up and down and told everyone who was nearby her, ‘I got my first Good Result, I got my first Good Result!’

  ‘Really?’ said Shelly Quettner. ‘What for?’

  ‘For being kind to Pamela,’ Nory said. But then she thought, ‘Oops,’ because it didn’t feel quite right to tell. On the other hand, she wanted to tell everyone, because it proved without a doubt that if you went against the bad things that kids were doing a good thing could unexpectedly happen to you when you least expect it. She ran over to Kira.

  ‘Kira, I got a Good Result for being nice to Pamela!’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Kira.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Nory. ‘If you don’t believe me, look at this.’

  Kira looked at the paper and got angry and said, ‘It’s not as good a Good Result as if you’d got one for a particular subject. Many people get those.’

  ‘No,’ said Nory. ‘Mr. Pears said that this was his favorite kind of Good Result. He seemed to think it was somewhat unusual. You’re jealous.’

  ‘I am not!’ said Kira.

  ‘You most certainly are!’ said Nory.

  ‘I most certainly am not!’ said Kira.

  ‘Okay, I’ll take your word for it, Kira,’ said Nory. ‘You’re not jealous.’

  Later Roger Sharpless came over. Usually what he did was to pretend to kick Nory in the shins, so that Nory could get back at him by pretending to kick him: onk, conk, onk, conk. Or they would do a strange kind of punching in which they would punch at each other’s fists and then say, ‘Ow!’ and walk around making a huge production of their injured hand, flapping it around, even though it wasn’t injured the least bit. But this time Roger just said: ‘I think you ought to know that Pamela is unhappy because Shelly Quettner told her that the reason you’ve been being nice to her is that you’ve been trying to get a Good Result, and according to Shelly you’ve finally got what you wanted.’

  Nory turned as red as a piece of origami paper. ‘That’s not true!’ she said. ‘Yes, I did get a Good Result, but I didn’t plan on it, I didn’t even know you could get a Good Result for something like that!’

  ‘I told Shelly she was a nitwit,’ said Roger. ‘But you should have a word with Pamela.’

  Nory tried to find Pamela but she couldn’t find her anywhere. The next day she sat with her at lunch but Pamela was quiet. ‘What Shelly said is totally, totally not true,’ said Nory.

  ‘You have been very nice to me,’ said Pamela.

  ‘But do you believe me?’ Nory asked.

  ‘Believe you about what?’

  ‘That it’s totally untrue?’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Pamela, ‘but I’d prefer to talk about something else.’

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ Nory asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Pamela.

  ‘Well, what’s your favorite color?’ Nory asked.

  ‘Turquoise,’ said Pamela.

  ‘Ah yes, turquoise, good.’ Nory pretended to note it down in an imaginary notebook. ‘And what’s your favorite vegetable?’

  ‘Spinach.’

  ‘Spinach, ah yes, very interesting.’ Then there was a long silence. Finally Nory said, ‘Okay, what’s your favorite piece of potato chip on this plate?’

  ‘That bit,’ said Pamela, and ate it.

  ‘That was chip number 1306B, yes, yes. I have that noted down. Now, what’s your favorite water molecule?’

  ‘What do you mean what’s my favorite water molecule?’ said Pamela. ‘What’s your favorite water molecule?’

  Nory put her eye close to Pamela’s glass of water and peered in. She said, ‘It’s a difficult case, but I believe my very favorite is that particular one there, sort of near the top. See it? A little to the side of the tiny air bubble. That one. What’s yours?’

  Pamela poked her finger straight into Nory’s glass of water. ‘That one,’ she said.

  Nory laughed. ‘Which one?’ said Nory.

  Pamela pulled her finger out of the water and flicked it so that a drop or two splashed on Nory’s face. ‘That one,’ she said.

  ‘Ah yes, that one,’ said Nory.

  54. End of Term

  The day before the last full day before the End of Term, everybody in the school was told to pack up everything in their backpacks and kits and take it all home. Every book, every notebook, every pen, every pencil case, every netball outfit and pair of shoes—home. The next day, the science teacher passed out strange dull little pencils, since of course their pens were no longer available, and told them to spend the class finding as many words as they could in scientific and cathedral. This was the kind of thing that Nory was never good at, and in ‘scientific’ she only found words like ‘in’ and ‘it’ and ‘sit.’ For ‘cathedral’ Roger Sharpless gave her the very useful hint of starting at the end and going backwards, and she luckily found ‘lard’ right off the bat, which was a more important word in England than in America, and ‘death.’ Roger said afterward that you could easily have gotten ‘teach’ from the word, too, but her brain unfortunately didn’t work that way. During break Nory and Roger were pretending to chop off each other’s heads with their bare hands when a boy came up and blurted out, ‘You like Pamela, don’t you?’

  ‘My, you are slow,’ said Nory. ‘I’ve already answered that question about four separate times.’

  ‘Of course Nory likes Pamela,’ said Roger to the boy. ‘Pamela is a hundred times nicer than you are. You are a sorry bowl of soup.’

  The boy made a delighted expression and skipped off. Soon after that, when Nory was walking to I.T., a few people came up and smirked wildly at Nory. They said, ‘You fancy Roger Sharpless! You fancy Roger Sharpless!’

  Nory thought of saying ‘I certainly do not!’ But she didn’t want to lie. So she said, ‘Well, I do like him, yes.’

  When they were gone Nory was quite relieved to remember to herself, ‘I’ve got this secret that’s burning a hole in my pocket and I need to talk about it with someone, and I can’t talk about it with Shelly or even Kira, but I can with Pamela, because she’s a friend and she can be trusted with the situation.’ So later she went ahead and told Pamela, ‘You know what? I used to fancy Jacob Lewes, because I’m attracted to boys who are my height or taller than me and highly intelligent and a tiny bit mean and kind of ugly in a particular way. But now, guess what? I fancy Roger Sharpless.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Roger Sharpless is beautiful,’ said Pamela. ‘I fancy him too.’

  ‘No way!’ said Nory. ‘I’m quite shocked!’

  ‘Just kidding,’ said Pamela. ‘I think.’

  On the very last day of term, all they had was house meetings and then Cathedral. Then each kid was supposed to meet their parents. Nory gave cards to Mr. Blithrenner and Mr. Stone and Mrs. Hoadley and Mrs. Hant and all her teachers, and to Mrs. Thirm she gave chocolates that she and Littleguy had made the night before. They made the chocolates by melting down a big chocolate bar and pouring it into little plastic molds. One of the molds had turned out to be of an owl. ‘But not a scary owl,’ Littleguy said, when he saw what it was. ‘A chocolate owl. A chocolate owl is not a scary owl.’

  In return Mrs. Thirm gave all the kids in class chocolates each, or caramel candies each, from a box, whichever they wanted. Someone said, ‘Let’s say thanks to Mrs. Thirm!’ Everyone shouted, ‘Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!’ Then everyone put their chairs up on the tables for the last, last, last time that term, and while Nory was lining up the little metal sliders on the legs of her chair on the tabletop so that it was perfectly straight, since that was how it would sit, in just that precise position, until she came back after Christmas, she had a strange feeling of never wanting that term of school to be over but wanting it to go on and on to an endless limit. She slipped Pamela a little present of a pop-up card, homemade, which had a cutout of herself and Pamela in their s
chool clothes standing on top of a little volcano, and she made it so the volcano leaned forward a slight extent when the card opened, which you can do fairly easily by cutting two little slices in the folded-over edge so that the place where you cut can be folded outward the opposite way as a little ledge for something to be attached to. The Pamela pop-up and the Nory pop-up each had one flexible arm that waved back and forth when you pulled the two louvers at the bottom that ran all the way up the back of the card as two strips of paper and sometimes got completely out of whack. They both were saying, ‘We made it!’ and a bird was tucked conveniently halfway in a pocket of paper that was shaped as a cloud.

  A little while later Nory remembered something Mr. Pears quite sternly said about not enough people saying thank you personally to the parents who organized the party before the fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, so she personally said, ‘Thank you for the chocolate,’ to Mrs. Thirm. But she said it quietly, while Mrs. Thirm’s back was turned, because sometimes it makes you shy to say thank you in person before anyone else has cleared the path by saying thank you. Shelly Quettner heard her say it and spun around and said much more loudly, ‘Thank you for the chocolate, Mrs. Thirm!’ Mrs. Thirm turned and smiled at Shelly and said, ‘You’re welcome.’ But that was quite all right because it isn’t the giving, it’s the thought that counts. ‘On the other hand, if the other person doesn’t know that you’ve thought the thought, how can it count?’ Nory wondered.

  Everyone streamed up the path toward the Cathedral and Nory looked at them walking. Each kid had their own particular personality, good or bad or mezzo mezzo, and each personality, no matter what it was, was interesting in some way. Sometimes a kid lost their personality for Nory when all they seemed to want to do was to be cruel to Pamela—then they just became a dull, boring idiot, shuffling through the day—but just lately some kids were getting more preoccupied in other things and losing interest in being cruel to Pamela, to a certain extent, though not totally. Maybe a little bit of the reason was because they saw that Nory was persistently going to be Pamela’s friend, and so they began to notice that it wasn’t necessarily the absolute end of the world to be Pamela’s friend as well or at least not be her vicious enemy.

  Inside, since it was a very bright cold day, the green light blasted in through the Jasperium and onto quite a few kids, including Nory. She didn’t exactly think God’s thoughts, but she thought: ‘Frankly, I love school.’ ‘Love’ was one of the most important of all the words that seemed to be spelled wrong on purpose, just to confuse you. It should be spelled ‘lov’ because the rule is that an e makes things long, and there is no long l or long o or long v. For example, it’s not ‘I loave school,’ it’s ‘I lov school.’ But however it was spelled, it was true. The best thing about school was that there were so many teachers teaching different things, so that you learned about how to get stabbed in drama, or about the Aztecs, or the Virgin Mary, or how to type or how to not cry when your plane crashes six times in a row, or about Achilles being dipped into the water, or the friction in a brick, or any amount of things, and there were so many hundreds of kids, and each kid was given quite a bit of responsibility. They were treated as if they were hundreds and hundreds of adults pouring in to work at a factory, wearing a jacket and tie, with that level of independence. You walked to and from Cathedral and to and from lunch, and during break you could choose to go to the art room or the library or back to your classroom or stay outside, whatever you wanted, and you would run into all of the people you knew, and each time you saw someone you had a particular thought, like ‘Ah yes, Colin, who is always asking to borrow my eraser,’ or ‘Ah, Kira, how are you? Haven’t seen you in a while!’

  A sad thing was that Kira and Nory had stopped being very, very good friends because of Pamela. But it wasn’t really Kira’s fault or Pamela’s fault. It was the fault of all the people who had decided not to like Pamela. If they hadn’t been at the Junior School, then there would have been no problem. Of course you could say that there wouldn’t have been much of a Junior School, either, since almost everyone was part of the meanness from time to time. But now that some of the kids had decided that they liked Pamela better, or weren’t going to bother to hate her, presto, Kira was liking Nory better again.

  While Nory was by the South Door of the Cathedral waiting for her parents to pick her up, Pamela came by to give her a note. She didn’t want to leave but she had to because her parents said they had to go or they would miss their train. The note said, ‘Dear Nory, Thanks for being my best friend, Love Pamela.’ And it had her phone number on it, for once. So things were working out rather well. Not to mention that for the first time in a very long time Nory had a wonderful loose tooth. If she bent it past a certain position, she could feel the sharp edge of it that was usually hidden under the gums, and there was a distinct salty taste of blood in her mouth.

  The End.

  BOOKS BY NICHOLSON BAKER

  “It’s hard to find an analogue for Baker’s combination of intellectual playfulness and lyricism. The music of Erik Satie comes to mind. Also peanut butter and bacon sandwiches—something weird and wonderful about which you can only say, ‘Try it. You’ll like it.’ ”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  THE FERMATA

  Outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish, The Fermata is a graphic, but good-natured peep deep into the ethical interstices of time, testosterone, and the furtive male imagination.

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  THE MEZZANINE

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  ROOM TEMPERATURE

  Nicholson Baker transforms a young father’s feeding-time reverie with a newborn baby into a dazzling catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.

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  U AND I

  Baker constructs a splendid edifice that is at once a tribute to John Updike and a disarmingly, often hilariously frank self-examination—a work that lays bare both the pettiest and the most exalted transactions between writers and their readers.

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  VOX

  Vox remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous, It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.

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