The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

‘Flushed it into the depths,’ Nory’s father said. ‘The worst part is I always feel I have to open up the toilet paper to look.’

  ‘Not to dwell,’ her mother said.

  That was their first adventure in Threll. Nory had some trouble sleeping for two nights, but then she got quickly over it. The only problem was that now she didn’t like going to the bathroom in the middle of the night because she sometimes worried that a second-cousin-once-removed of that big black spider was lurching under the seat. But gradually she got over that worry, too. It was a wooden toilet seat—the landlady said that she had bought it for five pounds at an auction from a Stately Home, and that the Duke of Tunaparts, or someone quite obscure like that, had sat on it every day of his life, which was not really a point to its favor.

  4. Littleguy Had a Sensible Fear of Owls

  Nory was a day student at Threll Junior School, where she used a medium-nib fountain pen with a kind of blue ink that you could make disappear completely from the page with a two-ended instrument called an ink-eradicator. Even when the ink had had a chance to dry for three weeks, the ink-eradicator still had the power to make it disappear. Threll School was started by a kind-looking person with a fur collar whose picture hung on the stairs going up to the dining hall. Pamela Shavers, who was a girl in Nory’s class, said he was called Prior Rowland because he lived prior to Henry the Eighth. The dining hall used to be the barn for the monk’s cows, another older kid said, but Nory couldn’t understand why the monks would have wanted to drag cows up and down stairs twice a day. Then her mother explained that they had built in a second floor when they shipped out the cows. There was still sometimes a slight barny smell about the place, though. The wood had twisting beams, like driftwood, but no Death Watch Beetles that Nory could see; of course she couldn’t possibly have heard them banging their heads since kids at lunch make tons and tons of noise.

  Prior Rowland began the school to honor the memory of Saint Rufina, something like two thousand years ago, or ‘early this morning,’ as Nory’s brother used to say. Littleguy he was called, although his name was really Frank Wood Winslow. To Littleguy ‘long ago’ and ‘early this morning’ meant pretty much the same thing, because his head was still basically a construction site, filled with diggers and dumpers driving around in mushy dirt, and it was hard for him to tell what were the real outlines of his ideas. He knew how to say ‘construction site,’ and ‘traction engine,’ and ‘coupling,’ and ‘level crossing,’ and ‘hundred-ton dump truck,’ and ‘articulated dump truck’ and ‘auger driller,’ because he loved those sorts of things. But he sometimes held up a very simple object, like a fork or a candle, and said, ‘I forgot the word for this.’ And he still called a pillow a pibble. But that was a normal thing to expect, Nory thought, because you have to spend your whole life learning more and more about how to draw a difference between one idea and another idea and how to keep them separated out rather than totally dredged together in a sludgy mass. For example, if you say that you’re doing something to the honor of someone’s memory, say to the honor of Saint Rufina’s memory, you don’t mean that you’re honoring the wonderful memory they might have, as in they can dash off the names of every kid in the class by heart, because they don’t have any memories at all, since they’re dead. And you don’t mean that they have wonderful happy memories of picnics and chicken sandwiches and feeding the ducks that you’re honoring, because they don’t have those, either. You can’t mummify a nice memory in someone’s head—no magic herbs will do it. And you don’t mean you’re honoring any particular other person’s memories of the person that is being honored, because the people who are honoring him may not even have known him or met him. Or her, in the case of Saint Rufina. You’re just simply honoring the basic idea that this person once lived her life and you’re trying to convince the world not to forget her. But any person who remembers her is going to die also, obviously, so you have to keep convincing people from scratch—‘Remember this person, remember this person, remember this person.’ It isn’t easy, but it may be satisfying work.

  Littleguy liked having Nory read books to him. However, she had to be careful about certain books. He was not frightened of spiders so much. But owls were a different bowl of fish! To him the nighttime was full of owls rustling and blinking their huge staring eyes. In Nory’s house, they couldn’t even say ‘owl,’ they had to spell it out. When Nory read Littleguy a book like The Country Noisy Book and they came to the page with an o-w-l sitting in a tree at nighttime, she would bustle to the next page. If she tried to casually cover the owl up with her hand, it never worked, because he knew it was under there. Sometimes Littleguy would try to be brave. ‘I like owls very much,’ he would say. ‘But I don’t like just that owl.’

  Once Nory’s mother found Littleguy in the Art Room late at night trying to color over the yellow eyes of a scary owl with a red marker, because he didn’t like coming across it in his Winnie the Pooh magazine, which he had been flipping through before he fell asleep. Another time he told Nory that two very bad owls were wanting to look in his window, behind the curtain. When Nory heard that, with the frightened seriousness on his face, she also felt a little twizzle of fear down the back of her neck and places like that, because she especially did not like the idea of things waiting outside for her and staring in through blank, black windowpanes at night. The first and one of the few early, early things she remembered about her life was of running down a long hall and stopping at the edge of a window. Then bang: she thought she saw the ugliness of the Tweety Monster with its frown-eyed face, on the other side of the window, and she screamed ‘Mommeeeee!’ The Tweety Monster was just simply a monster version of Tweety-bird in a Sylvester and Tweety tape—Tweety turned into it when he drank a special potion. No reason to be scared of a casual little cartoon. But it was scary, and when Nory screamed and dashed away from the window Nory’s mother said gently, ‘I know, I know, but it’s just drawings. There’s no Tweety Monster out there, no bad thing, only the gentle night and the squirrels all fluffed up to keep from getting too cold, and the raccoons having a pleasant chew of garbage. Everything’s all right.’ Her mother’s eyes were the most soothing, nicest, softest, deepest eyes that any mother could ever have. They were, to be specific, blue. Sometimes instead of two owls Littleguy had a bad dream about two old, old trucks from the scrapyard with huge tires driving around the living room with their bright lights on. And yet in real life, Littleguy loved trucks more than anything, except trains. One time Littleguy even said he had a nightmare about sitting on the toilet and not having a book to read.

  That was one thing that Nory really thought was not quite fair about bad dreams, when they went ahead and took something you loved, like trucks, or mirrors, or your mother, or were proud of, like sitting in the bathroom all by yourself, and made them scary. If Nory had a library, she would not allow any Goosebumps books in the children’s department, because just the covers were frightening, never mind the dreadful insides, and kids weren’t even aware how frightened they were sometimes until later that evening. There was one book with a picture of an evil doll that she really thought was a bad idea. Why ruin the idea of something nice, like a doll, by making it so horribly scary that you couldn’t think about it and couldn’t trust it? Your dolls aren’t going to do anything bad to you. Your dolls should be trusted to be in your room with you in the middle of the night. Goosebumps books got kids much more scared than they ever wanted to be, or ever expected they would be, and they didn’t need that help anyway, since their own dreams would do a superb job of scaring their dits off just on their own. But still, Nory’s cousin Anthony and her friend Debbie loved reading Goosebumps books and couldn’t think of a funner thing to do. So not everyone had the same reaction.

  Nory especially disliked when she had teeth-dreams. Say, for example, a beautiful graceful fluffer-necked duck that was just sitting away the time in the reeds by a river, its feathers being fluttered by the wind, and when you came up to it in the dream
to hold out your hand to it to say hello and give it a piece of bread it would suddenly curl back its beaks and show huge fangy teeth. Or a horse with pointy teeth and bug-eyes with white rims would chase her. Or cows with pointed teeth. But those dreams were mostly ones she’d had long ago and gotten adjusted to. Another fairly old dream Nory had was of being chased through various shades of colors by a queen who was determined to cut off her arm for a punishment. Nory dashed away from her, but the Queen came chugging closer, with some of her men, and Nory realized she couldn’t escape. So she made them a compromise. She said to the Queen, ‘Okay, okay, don’t chop off my arm, you can chop off my head.’ That way, she wouldn’t experience the pain. The Queen said, ‘All right!’ And wham, the ax came circling. ‘Ah, how nice,’ Nory felt. She didn’t have to bow or anything. She didn’t even have to put a paper bag over her head.

  The moral of the dream was: Better to be dead than armless in agony. It wasn’t a perfect moral, though, Nory thought afterward, even for a dream—which isn’t too surprising since it’s too much to expect of your dreams that they would end up giving off good morals—but really, you can learn to do almost everything you would need to do without arms: play cards with your toes, and that kind of thing. You might hesitate for a moment if your dentist wanted to work on your mouth holding the tools in his toes, true. That might not be the world’s most raging success.

  5. A Slight Problem After Lunch

  At least if Nory had a bad dream she could go into her parents’ room and poke at them gently until they woke up enough to comfort her back down. Not every kid had that kind of luck. Some of the kids at Threll School were there all day and all night, twenty-four hours a week. Roger Sharpless was a very short boy with an intelligent face like a detective who cried on the first day in the Cathedral during service during the first week. ‘Why are you crying?’ Nory asked, in a whisper. ‘Sometimes I cry during the day,’ he whispered back. Afterward, when they were walking to the Junior School building, he said that he missed his parents horribly. He said that the sight of the little white pillow on his bed in his room reminded him of his old room and that made him cry, because think about it, going away from everything you know, your rugs, your windows, your parents, your driveway, your exact look of street, can be quite a shock to a nine-year-old. He also told her a fact that he said he would never forget in his whole life, because he had gotten it wrong on a test one time: the Greeks wrote by making marks on wax. Nory felt that it was kind of him to tell her, because now she would never forget it either.

  The day after that she had a much less good experience. She dropped her tray in the dining hall when it was full of fresh food. Kira, one of her new sort-of friends, said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, somebody else will get it.’ But Nory didn’t feel right about leaving the mess in a lavish plop on the floor and walking on. The jacket potato did not look its best. An older girl scooped down to help her, and finally a woman came by with a mop. But by then all the other kids from her class had gone off and were eating merrily along, chew chew chew, getting far ahead of her. Not only that, but the line had gotten very long, because a whole conjugation of older boys had come in. She didn’t want to cut in, so she went to the back and waited all over again. The line was so long it even went down a few steps of the stairs, which gave her a chance to look at Prior Rowland’s fur collar.

  Finally she got a new tray of food, and she sat anonymously down. People in her class were leaving to go back to the Junior School building. One after another they were going. Nory had her eye on them the whole time, except when she was looking down at her plate. She thought, ‘Ah, but she’s still there, so it’s okay.’ And then when that girl left, she said to herself, ‘Ah, well, she’s still there, so when worse goes to worse, I can go back with her.’ The problem was that the Junior School was far away from the dining hall, across two streets, and Nory had an awful if not atrocious sense of direction and knew she would never find it by herself. So she ate and ate and finished up and whammed out the door of the dining hall, hurrying to be with a girl who was in her class. Dorette was her name. Dorette said, ‘Sorry I can’t talk, I’m meeting a friend.’

  Nory said, ‘Oh, okay.’ The other girl came up. It was a girl Nory didn’t like very much because she had said that Nory had a ‘squeegee’ accent on one of the first days of school. Nory stood a little way behind and started following them as they went around the buildings toward the old gate.

  Dorette turned and said, ‘Go away. Why are you following us?’

  ‘Because I don’t know the way home,’ said Nory.

  ‘Home? Home?’ the girls said.

  ‘I mean, the way back to the class,’ said Nory.

  ‘Oh, go on, you know the way,’ the two girls said. ‘You lead us, and we’ll follow.’

  So Nory started tenderly walking in front of them down the street, not vastly sure she was pointing in the right direction. There was a road curving up a hill that didn’t look familiar. There were no crosswalks. She turned around and noticed that the girls weren’t behind her. She started to feel scattered and scared. Then the two girls jumped out from behind a bush with red berries and laughed. She started following them again, and they told her to go away. Fortunately just at that point a teacher came out from a door in the building and the two girls said, all nicey-nicey, ‘Hello Mr. So-and-so.’ They began chatting with him. Nory was worried that they would tell the teacher that she had been following them and she would get in trouble, but they didn’t. So she could sneak along, pace by pace, some distance behind, from bush to bush. That was how she was able to get back. Later that day, on the playground, another girl said, ‘Hah-hah, you were sent back, you were sent back.’ Nory had no idea what the girl was talking about, so she said, ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘For dropping your tray,’ the girl said. Nory said, ‘I was not. I went to the end of the line because you shouldn’t cut in. And I’m from America. We don’t say sent back in America to mean what you mean. We don’t say bin in America, we say trashcan. We don’t say crayons when we’re talking about colored pencils, we skip to the case and say colored pencils. Got it?’

  The girl made a rabbit-nibbling face and shuffled off to Buffalo.

  In history class that day, the teacher was talking about the Crusades, and he suddenly said, in the weirdest cowboy accent you ever heard, ‘And they went in, shootin’ and hollerin’ and plunderin’ up tarnation, by golly.’ Then he said to Nory, ‘I’m sorry. I should have asked your permission first. Do you mind if I make fun of the way Americans talk?’

  Nory said, ‘If you think that’s the way Americans talk, go right ahead.’

  The teacher said, ‘Thank you. And I give you permission to call us limeys whenever you like.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Nory. ‘But why would I want to say that?’

  ‘In the States, that’s what you call us, is it not?’ said the teacher.

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t think so,’ said Nory. ‘What are limeys?’

  ‘Ah, they’re an ancient seafaring people who eat limes on shipboard to keep their teeth from falling out,’ said Mr. Blithrenner.

  6. Be Careful About Fluoride

  Besides History, there was I.T., which were the initials of Information Technology, where they were learning the middle row of letters on the keys of the Acorn computers. And there was French, and Geography, and Music, and Netball, and Hockey, and other classes, too. There were a surprising amount of teachers at Threll School all together. Even the headmaster of the Junior School was the teacher of a class called Classics. He started off one class by reading in a deep, roly-poling voice about the trickles of blood of the Trojans mixing with the muddy water that collected in pools at the base of the walls of the ruined city. It turned out to be the story of Hercules. Or, not Hercules precisely, but someone with a name quite a bit like Hercules, although it wasn’t Hector either. Anyway, whoever he was, he was dipped in magical waters when he was a baby except for where he was held by his ankle
.

  A few days after that, the headmaster spoke to the whole Junior School in Hendall Hall, which was the place the whole school got together, except when they went to Cathedral once a week. He told them about a painter who had not believed in himself and had been so hungry that he had squeezed tubes of oil paint into his mouth. The paint had lead in it, and it affected his brain in a negative way, and soon enough he gruesomely shot himself in the chest. Now his paintings were worth millions of dollars, which would probably be billions of yen.

  Kids want to eat lead because it tastes sweet, Nory knew, which is also why they want to eat toothpaste. You’re only supposed to put a pea-sized amount of toothpaste on your toothbrush but many kids put more. Nory thought that what they should make is a tube of toothpaste that squirts out green until you’ve squirted out just the right amount, and if you try to squeeze more out after that, the color turns red, meaning stop: Green light, red light. If you eat too much toothpaste, the fluoride in it will turn your teeth gray, but there was a kid at the Junior School who had a bad cavity or some sort of medical thing gone wrong in one of his pointy side teeth, one of the bicuspids maybe, that made it completely gray ‘from smokebox to buffer,’ as Littleguy would say. You only saw it when his mouth made a malicious laugh, as in ‘Hah-hah-hah, hah-hah-hah, I’m going to revenge myself on you for that!’ If that boy, who was really a fairly nice boy, had had a sweet tooth and eaten tube after tube of toothpaste, that same tooth would be just as gray as it was now, but he wouldn’t have the cavity to worry about, and the rest of his teeth would match the color exactly so it would blend in and wouldn’t be so noticeable. Nory’s own teeth were sometimes a little yellow, she thought, but then she went on a rampage brushing them individually one by one and got them to look pretty white. They looked white in photographs, anyway, which made her happy.