The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  ‘Oh, brother, you may cry.’ She saw a small tear drip across his face, which was wiped back by his shaking hand. He could not resist that tear, she knew, there was no way of helping it.

  ‘Oh, sister, I can walk,’ he said.

  ‘You will fall,’ she said, because he could only barely walk with his injuries, and tumble over himself. She brought him carefully to the hospital, with blood stained all over her white and now brown dress.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she cried, going in the revolving door. She walked slowly over to the desk, carrying her lovable brother. ‘Oh, no.’ She wiped her tears away and tried to fix her hair, which was horrible now. The curl was coming out, the one that was in the back. It hung almost straight down now. She was scared. Her hair always hung straight down when she was scared. Maybe it was the sweat that pulled it down by getting it wet, dripping. Her brother was horrified. The doctors took him.

  And for a while after that you never got to see her clean white prim dress or her nice hairdo, but you saw blood and mud and things like that on her dress. She became very poor, without the tiniest bit of money. She walked to a stone. In the stone, she carved her mother’s name, sadly. She couldn’t do it, but the stone was covered with mud, so she tried scratching a message in the mud. She walked along, four days she spent without her brother. Finally she went over to the hospital and picked him up. Fortunately he was better. Soon he was well enough to be picking berries and peeling oranges again, and they had lovely suppers together.

  She carried him wherever he went. And, the end.

  18. A Little About Raccoon

  The thing that had failed in Nory’s own life was that right now she didn’t have a best friend in England. And she honestly missed her best friend from America, Debbie, who hadn’t written back. Some kids are not so good about writing letters, though. Another sad and unfair thing was that Nory had only gotten a tinily short time to have Debbie as her best friend, since she’d only met her very recently, in about the past two years.

  The great thing that was important to know about Debbie was that she love, love, loved telling stories with her dolls. She had four stuffed kitten dolls that made a purring sound when you turned them at an angle, not quite identical in their faces but almost identical, and she had an extraordinary imagination that just went on and on and on to an endless limit. Nory and Debbie played the Samantha game together, which was an everlasting game, in which disaster after disaster happened to Samantha and everybody else who took place in it. One time Samantha was hanged by her foot on the lampshade because a dog named Fur was going to burn her. Fur was actually a very good dog, he was a puppet dog that Debbie loved most of all her animals and slept with. (Debbie loved her pandas, too, but her pandas were more of a collection.) But they had to have a bad creature in the story or it wouldn’t have the feeling of something failing, so they had the idea that he had been given a pill by this wandering bad person that made him bad for a short time. So the result was that he was being quite dreadful, temporarily, and wanted to kill the kitties and Samantha. That allowed him to be bad for the sake of the story but not overall bad for the sake of Debbie’s dear animal that she slept with. The four adventurous kitties figured out a way to save themselves by pretending there were only two kitties and getting the dog Fur to take a second pill that would make him go to sleep. When he woke he was his old warmhearted self again. Telling those stories with Debbie was so miracly much fun.

  Before she knew Debbie, Nory told her stories by herself. It was hard to remember how she began, but it appeared to her now that she might have begun with little snibbets of stories she told in different voices in the bath, or looking in the mirror, because those were some of the most important storytelling situations. She had a rubber raccoon that had hundreds of adventures in the bath. Obviously she couldn’t take Cooch herself because Cooch was (speaking of things you shouldn’t speak of) sewn: she was a cloth puppet and couldn’t get wet.

  Sarah Laura Maria Raccoon was one when Nory found her, abandoned by her parents lying cold and numb by the road. She and Sylvester had adopted her, and then it turned out that Cooch was their own lost child. A witch had taken away their own child long before. The witch came pouring up from the steam of a grilled cheese sandwich one day, an ugly thing, and stole their dear Coochie away, and their hearts were broken, or ‘juken down’ as Littleguy would say, since that’s how he pronounced broken down. Heartjuken for many long years they lived in their small cottage, until one day they found an older Raccoon cold and abandoned by the road. ‘We must adopt her, she looks so much like our own long lost Sarah Laura Maria,’ they said. When she revived a little she told them what had happened, that she had been living a perfect life with her two parents when a wicked witch came along and took her, but fortunately she escaped by throwing salt in the witch’s eye and dashing out of the witch’s boat and jumping overboard, where the mermaids took her to their castle and cared for her and tried to teach her as best they could to be a mermaid raccoon. She had grown very thin when she was with the witch but she grew plumper now, feeding on sea salads. And sometimes—if by chance someone in a boat threw it overboard—a good old potato. She did her best and she wore long flowing dresses made of the finest kinds of seaweed found near Africa, but she was a land-raccoon in her heart and finally she thanked the mermaids with many hugs and waves and swam ashore. There the husband and wife, out on a walk on the beach, found her.

  ‘Darling, do you notice how much this Raccoon looks like our own dear child?’ the mother asked.

  ‘Yes, yes I do,’ said the husband. ‘I wonder if she’ll want to play with some of the toys that our dear little child used to play with.’ Sadly he went upstairs and got down the box of things. There was a Fisher Price Main Street, with a set of five letters that you could put into a mailbox, and a set of foam numbers that fit together, and many other things.

  ‘I had just that toy,’ said Cooch. ‘And just that toy.’

  ‘You did?’ said the parents, in amazement. ‘Could she be …?’ they wondered. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Sarah Laura Maria,’ she said.

  ‘But that is the name of our own daughter, who was stolen away by a witch many years ago!’ said the mother and father.

  ‘I was stolen away by a witch, too,’ Coochie told them shyly.

  ‘You’re our daughter! Oh, come here, oh my!’ And they hugged her and kissed her and were overjoyed forevermore.

  19. A Chinese Monk

  So Nory did tell stories like that before she met Debbie, to herself, but Debbie was a wonderful friend because she was willing to let the story go where it preferred to go, and she could think up disasters for Samantha that Nory couldn’t conveniently think up by herself. Debbie had a very wide, wide face, and long black hair that was shiny and perfect, because her parents were Chinese and Filipino, although she spoke only American, plus the Mandarin Chinese they learned in the International Chinese Montessori School, which was also called ICMS. Neither of them could speak Cantonese, which was a totally different bowl offish from Mandarin. When the two of them were drawing something together, though, they would sing a song in Mandarin that their Chinese teacher taught them, called ‘Namoowami tofo.’ The song went something like

  Xie er po, mao er po,

  Shen shang de jia sha po.

  What it meant was basically, ‘His shoes are broken, his hat is broken.’ Or rather, that was the translation that the teacher gave them. The problem was that their teacher hardly knew a giblet of English. Nory’s translation to herself was, ‘Shoes are torn, hat is torn, his whole outfit is torn.’ The song was about a crazy monk. The best part was just a sound, ‘Namoowami tofo,’ which was the prayer to the Buddha that the monk used to do his magic. He was born from the Buddha. His name was Ji Gong. He was very free, even though he was a monk.

  Nory still sang the song quite often, because some Chinese songs are so great that how can you not sing them? But she was at the point of forgetting a lot of the Chinese character
s she used to know, such as

  which means ‘wood,’ or

  which means ‘spill.’ She never wrote Chinese now. Nobody in her class now at Threll Junior School was Chinese, even though there were some Chinese kids in the Senior School, and so there was nobody who even understood what a Chinese character was, and what pin yin was, and how you had to memorize the order of the strokes.

  Her parents originally thought they might get a Chinese tutor for her in Threll, but Nory had school on Saturday mornings here, and plenty of homework, and that left her only one day off. If a Chinese tutor came on Sunday, Nory wouldn’t be exhausted so much as thinking, ‘Oh, my poor scrabjib of a weekend!’ When would they have time to drive to a castle or a palace, which is what they did every weekend? At Oxburgh Hall, high up in the tower where the princess stayed and sewed, they saw a little brick place where the Catholic priest would have to stuff himself when the government inspectors came sniffing.

  So that was just the fact of it: Chinese was going to grow faint in her mind. She hadn’t known all the characters in the world, anyway. Four years was how long it took her to learn Chinese, as much of it as she knew, which wasn’t all that much compared to what an adult or an older child would know, so she thought that in French it might take her about two years to learn it, because it wasn’t as difficult as Chinese. But still, French was nice and hard—nice and hard. Dix was a very meaningful word. ‘It already means ten, in a sensible way,’ Nory thought. When she first heard ‘dix,’ she thought, ‘Oh, puff, that’s not like ten.’ But very soon it meant ten in quite a sensible way. And Je was actually quite a better word for ‘I’ than ‘I.’ No language was easy. It was a bad mistake to think so. English was about the most blusteringly hard language you could get. Verbally Chinese was much easier than English.

  Certain languages from Africa weren’t as complicated in some ways, though, Nory thought. They didn’t do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, drrrrrr, their numbers didn’t go for infinity. They went one, two, three—and then ‘many.’ For instance: ‘There were many people at the store.’ Well? Does that mean four, or does that mean twenty-five? Their next-door-neighbor in Palo Alto, who spent a whole year in Africa, in Bombay, told Nory that about the numbers. Nory told it to Debbie, who said it couldn’t be true, because how could they have phone numbers or know how much things cost? Say you went to see The Little Mermaid with your family in Bombay, and the person said, through the little hole in the glass, ‘Two adults and two children? That will be many dollars, please.’ Or hickles, or gumbobs, or whatever Bombayan dollars are called. Many dollars? How many dollars?

  Nory had to agree that her friend Debbie had a worthwhile point. Debbie was very smart and talented at a lot of things, including the piano. She was an all-around wonderful friend, the kind of friend you think finally just has to be your best friend, because there is no other choice but to have her be your best friend. Especially when Bernice said she was going to live in a house with her ‘real’ best friend, which was rude and mean. Bernice had a two-color retainer with a picture of a silver mermaid on it. Debbie had silver writing in her retainer that said ‘Debbie.’ When Debbie got her retainer, it left Nory as the last girl in the class not to have a retainer. That was one reason she thought, long ago, when people started getting their retainers one after another after another, ‘I know! I’ll be an orthodontist, and design people’s retainers for them.’ She would design one with the image of a big teethy smile on it. If Littleguy needed one, she’d do one with a steam train. You could think of the teeth as a train chuffing around the jaw.

  In England it would be almost impossible to be a professional orthodontist, because almost nobody in school had retainers to speak of, or rather ‘false palates,’ as they were known by the select few. Probably the reason nobody had them was exactly because of that awful, queasy-making name, false palates. You might as well call them ‘bladder-stones’ and get it over with.

  20. A Report About the Teeth

  The idea of designing people’s retainers was part of what first got Nory interested in teeth. Then she found out that the whole subject was more fascinating than you could ever predict. In Ms. Beryl’s class at the International Chinese Montessori School she did a report, ‘Teeth.’ One of the things she wrote about in the report was a two- or three-inch model of a tooth that was carved centuries ago to show the horrible pain of a toothache. There were different pictures on this large ivory tooth, sort of like the different pictures that are in stained glass. Stained glass was invented to tell stories in pictures because so few people could read back then. Now we have to read twenty-five books just to figure out what the stained glass is saying, so it’s the opposite of before, when you didn’t read but just looked around and thought, Ah, King Solomon, I see. Ivory was a good choice for the model tooth because ivory is the tooth of the elephant. The model showed people throwing skulls in a fire, probably to illustrate the horrible burning pain of a toothache, and a picture of something bad happening to a woman, some drastic tooth operation. It had a hinge. It was a box, which you opened up. ‘Maybe if you stored candy in it,’ Nory thought, ‘you would eat less candy because you would see this horrible carved picture of the skulls going into the fire and think, No, I won’t have that lemondrop, not just yet.’

  Also in the report—which was probably the best thing she did in Ms. Beryl’s class by far—Nory drew a diagram of the layers of the tooth. For years she had thought, ‘There must be layers to the tooth, there must be, it can’t possibly be all the same substance.’ It worried her for a very long while, and then, presto, when she drew the diagram, copying from the encyclopedia, she was happy to discover that there were. She liked when things had layers—the earth has layers, the trunk of a tree has layers, the atmosphere has layers. A conker has layers, too. It has a green spiky outer layer and a very shiny wonderful layer which is the conker itself, which is like the finest, smoothest wood in a very precious table or the knob of a chair or something like that, in a great palace like Ickworth House, where the floorboards are curved. (They were somehow bent into curves with the help of steam engines, which pleased Littleguy.) And then inside that there’s the growing part of the conker, which is like the nerve of the tooth. Sometimes you can find a double-conker. ‘Conker’ is the English way of saying horse chestnut, and it’s a very good way because they can suddenly conk you on the head. After the sermon in the Cathedral at Harvest Festival they were all crossing the street and Nory spotted tons and tons and tons of freshly fallen conkers. She rushed over and started gathering them. They’re very rare in general because as soon as they come off the tree, people come over and get them. Everyone was really happy to find more conkers had fallen, just during the short time they were in the Cathedral. They sang a song in service that went: ‘Think of the world without any flowers, think of the world without any trees.’ Then it went, ‘The farmers spread the good things on the land, but it is God’s almighty hand, that waters them, but,’ then there was something Nory couldn’t remember, ‘but more to us as children, he gives our daily bread.’ The English way of singing was quite different from the Chinese way of singing. In the English way, you had to hold one note for a very long time, and you didn’t woggle the note so much. The English had extremely high singing voices and their songs were meant to be sung in an English accent, so when one child out of dozens was singing them in an American accent it didn’t always have a pleasant outcome.

  Sometimes when they had sung the flower-gathering song in Chinese class Bernice would sing it with her retainer halfway out of her mouth, which was rude and disgusting, and it made the Chinese teacher furious. Bernice had to go on time-out once for doing that. (Timeout didn’t exist in England—they had detention, or DT, instead.) Bernice also talked baby talk with her retainer halfway out. Once she bit it so hard it broke and half of it went up into the part of her nose that connected to the back of her mouth and the doctor had to go in and pull it out, or it would have stayed there forever causing trouble. De
bbie would never think of chewing her retainer in half—she was a very sweet girl in many ways. Her braces made her mouth wide and gave her that thinking look that was the most noticeable thing about her besides her hair. Of course her whole face was quite wide. Nory’s face was a smashed, squashed, shriveled little thing, she felt. It seemed shriveled partly because she spent her time with Debbie and other Asian kids, who are, you just have to say, the most beautiful type of kids in most ways. Nory would draw a self-portrait and be not perfectly content with it, thinking, ‘Well, it’s a bit of a squished head on the sides, but all right.’ And then she would look at her face in the mirror and think, ‘Well, no wonder I drew a squished head.’ Her parents said she was a beautiful child and sometimes she did think she looked pretty, but it was not polite to brag that out loud. It was quite all right for parents to tell a child she was beautiful, just as long as they didn’t tell her she was beautiful in front of other children. If they announced it in front of other children it would put the other children in an awkward position, because they would be just sitting there, odd man out.

  One day at her new school, the Threll Junior School, Mrs. Thirm asked the class to write the first paragraph of a story with each child as the main character. Nory started off with: ‘Marielle was a young girl with brown hair and brown eyes who was forty-three inches tall.’ But she wasn’t entirely happy with this. What she had been tempted to write after the ‘who was’ was not that she was forty-three inches tall, but something similar to the scene in The Little Princess, where the girl is being shown around the school, and she acts as a ‘bright-eyed, smart, quiet little girl most of the time.’ It wasn’t exactly, persistently those words, but at least that was the feeling of the scene. And the girl who played the Little Princess in the movie looked a tiny bit like Nory. Nory really wanted to write that Marielle, who stood for her, was a ‘quiet little girl, most of the time, very quiet, and mysterious—or not really mysterious, but if you took a little bit away from the meaning of mysterious, or add a little more to the scene in The Little Princess, an almost mysterious girl.’ But she wrote none of that because even though Marielle was not her own name, it would be clear that she was writing about herself and it would be kind of bragging to say those things.