The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  23. Pot-stickers Are Not an Easy Thing to Make

  One boy, one of the three boys named Colin that Nory knew of—there was Colin Sharings, Colin Deat, and Colin Ryseman—started coming up to Nory after she was spending time with Pamela. He started saying, in a smeary little high voice, ‘Oh, ho, Pamela’s friend, oh? Pamela’s friend.’ Nory had saved up a little list of things that she could say back to this kind of person. Such as: ‘Calling all police, calling all police, there’s a grub in the classroom. Take it away, take it away.’ There were lots of grubs in the yard of the Trumpet Hill house. They were white little wigglers, not very attractive, and if somebody stepped on them, they went all red.

  If it was outside that Colin came up and said something unpleasant, then Nory could say that she had no idea that earthworms could talk.

  Nory tried the earthworm one out on him one afternoon. ‘My goodness, I simply had no idea earthworms could talk! Boy, did you prove me wrong.’ Colin kicked some leaves and said, ‘So you didn’t know earthworms could talk, Pamela’s friend? You don’t know very much, do you, Pamela’s friend?’ Then he walked drearily away, chin on parade. It was sort of a tie. It’s difficult because of the golden rule, you shouldn’t ever say anything that’s extremely rude, but you get angry, and you have to come up with comebacks that are not bad words, and not too insulting, not so insulting that it’s really mean to bring them up. So for example you couldn’t ever bring up Arthur’s problem with the cavity in his bicuspid, because that’s too true to make fun of. Colin Sharings had a pink mole on his ear, but you couldn’t make fun of that, either. You had to come up with whatever you’re going to say very quickly, too, because there you are, and there’s the person who’s said the rude thing to you, smirkingly looking pleased with himself, and the longer the rude thing is out on its own the more chance there is that people will laugh against you.

  The first time Colin came up and mocked her for being Pamela’s friend Nory wasn’t prepared for it. She just said, ‘Yes, I’m Pamela’s friend. Is there a problem?’ That worked quite well, except that Nory was standing with Kira when Colin said it, so Colin then said to Kira, because he was a fiend of badness, ‘And you like Pamela, too-hoo,’ using the grossest kind of mocking singing voice. Kira didn’t say anything, so Nory said, ‘No, as a matter of fact Kira doesn’t like Pamela. So that shows how much you know about the whole kitten caboodle.’

  But Pamela herself was nearby and probably heard Nory say that, and Nory worried afterward that that would hurt her feelings to have said that Kira didn’t like her to Colin. Pamela didn’t mention it next time they talked, though. After that crude awakening, Nory began saving up the comebacks so she wouldn’t get tricked into saying something she wouldn’t want to have said.

  But the other problem, which was a bigger problem, was that some of why Nory wanted to be friendly with Pamela was because she thought Pamela truly deserved to have some friends who stuck with her, and she knew that if she was friendly with her it might be just that tiny straw that broke the camel’s back of the habit that the kids had of ganging up on her. But Nory also had an idea that probably Pamela would never be a really close true friend, a dear friend, because they were quite different in certain ways. Other people were being bad to Pamela, and so Nory was feeling she ought to do her best to forfeit her obligation and be more of a friend than she would have been naturally, in real life, which made her feel a little artificial. When she walked back to the Junior School with Pamela they had all-right conversations but they weren’t the kind of conversations about things that she would have had with Debbie, where they talked about how much fun it was to put Barbie shoes on ‘My Little Pony’ horses and dress up their manes with flower petals. Debbie loved those ‘My Little Pony’ horses, and you had to admit, seeing them all set up in a row, they looked pretty fancy in high-heeled shoes, with their puffy manes. And it wasn’t the kind of wild-laughter conversations that Nory sometimes had with Kira or Janet or Tobi, at the Junior School, where somebody would keep trying to say something over and over and couldn’t because it was so heroriously funny they couldn’t finish the sentence. Pamela told Nory about everyone in her family. Very interesting: her uncles, her aunts, her cousins, her second cousins, what they did, what they looked like, what they watched on TV. Nory told Pamela about her family, but not in as much detail because it wasn’t as impressive a family, since she only had four first cousins and a lot of her great-aunts and people like that had already died. They both agreed that chutney was fairly disgusting, but when Nory said that the thing she liked least in the world, par none, was fried chicken, Pamela said she liked fried chicken and that her Dad went out and bought fried chicken from Captain Chicken USA at least once a week. (Captain Chicken was a place that was trying to trick you into thinking it was Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the same red letters, and figuring that, ‘Oh, you’re English, you won’t be able to draw a difference.’) Nory hurried on to explain that probably she disliked fried chicken for a particular reason, which was that she’d had it so much at her old school, the International Chinese Montessori School, where it was piled up in large foil pans and got cold and was extremely dark-meatedly greasy. Nory had eaten too much Chinese fried chicken in her life for her to be able to stand another drumstick. The rest of the food had been pretty good, though, she said. No jacket potatoes, of course, because the Chinese are basically less interested in potatoes than America and England is. The jacket potato is a European dish. One time, Nory told Pamela, her whole class at the International Chinese Montessori School learned to make pot-stickers, which are difficult because sometimes you make the wrapping small and there’s too much of the meat, or the filling, in the pot sticker, and sometimes you do too little filling. There are many problems and things that can go wrong. It’s really difficult, and you have to seal it with egg.

  Pamela asked what pot-stickers were, and Nory said they were a Chinese food filled with meat that can burn your mouth when you bite in on them. At her old school, they also learned to write in Chinese characters, Nory said.

  Pamela laughed and said, ‘In Chinese! You learned to write in Chinese?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nory, feeling a little proud of being able to do that fairly unusual thing. ‘We had to, because it was the International Chinese Montessori School. We spent half the day on Chinese, we did our multiplication tables in Chinese, lots of things. Would you like me to write something for you?’

  Pamela said okay, so Nory got a piece of paper out of her backpack and sat down on the sidewalk and wrote her the character for ‘hao.’ Hao was made up of two parts. Half of it was part of the character for mother, and half of it was part of ‘child,’ because the Chinese think that mother plus child equals good. It’s a good thing for a child to have a mother near her and a mother to have a child near her. So, sensibly, hao means good. In Chinese it looked like this:

  Nory gave the paper to Pamela. Pamela looked at it and nodded. She said, ‘How would you say six times seven in Chinese?’ Nory said ‘Liu cheng qi den yu si shi er. So six times seven is forty-two.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pamela.

  ‘If you know your numbers, it’s really easy,’ said Nory. ‘Would you like me to show you how the Chinese character for two could have turned into our American-English number 2, and how the Chinese three could have become our 3?’

  ‘Yes, but maybe another time,’ said Pamela, ‘because I think we have to go in.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Nory. ‘Well, bye.’

  ‘Bye,’ said Pamela.

  24. What You Do and Don’t Remember

  That afternoon Nory tried to reinstruct every tiny detail of the International Chinese School in her mind. Talking about it to Pamela showed her how much she was already forgetting. It was a lovely school, where the kids were nice, most of them. When she first started in Upper Elementary one of the kids, Carl, who should remain nameless, told her in detail how he was going to kill her by throwing her in a swimming pool filled with poisonous insects. Carl w
as a warped older boy who left after that year.

  A number of kids ganged up on her in the very beginning of that year, which was just about the only time anything that an adult would call being bullied ever happened to her. It was distressing enough that she could connect it to what Pamela might be feeling. But then she tried to think, ‘Honestly, was it a terrible thing that that boy, Carl, said all that mean stuff to me, and other kids mocked me?’ In her memory it wasn’t so unbearably bad because it was a very very long time ago. But that might be because it hadn’t gone on and gone on. You remember things better that happen over and over again, like Stop, Drop, and Roll. Except when they happen so many times that you don’t notice them whatsoever. Some parts of Neverending Story, the movie, she remembered very well, like the stone giant, and the flying dog that the boy meets. There’s a girl in the movie who is a princess who is important in a way because she’s going to die, but she’s minor, actually: the heroine is the boy. Nory thought she must have seen The Neverending Story recently in an advertisement, maybe a preview before another movie that her mother rented for her, because parts of it she had in her mind very clearly and colorfully and parts of it were fogged in. At the beginning some bullies throw the boy into the garbage, and he comes back at the end and he throws them into the garbage, all three of them. And someone loses his horse, because it sinks into the swamp and dies. That could be in Neverending Story II. There was a story similar to that part in a booklet that Nory’s father bought for her at the Cathedral shop. A man asks another man if he’s seen a hat floating in a very muddy road. The other man says, ‘Golly, no, I haven’t, why?’ And the first man says, ‘Well, I suspect there may be a man sitting on a horse underneath the hat.’

  At the time they were mean to her, Nory had told Ms. Fisker about the boys in her class. Ms. Fisker was the upper elementary teacher who taught in English, in the afternoon. (Bai Lao Shi taught in Chinese, in the morning.) But Ms. Fisker said Nory had to learn how to handle the older boys and work matters out for herself. ‘Oh, Nory, I can see you’re developing a long tail, I can see it growing’—that’s what Ms. Fisker would say, because she was strongly not in favor of tattle tales. The rule was: ‘Don’t be a tattletale for little things, do be a tattletale for big things.’ Say if someone has broken someone’s thumb in the door. Something major. But Nory’s parents thought that Ms. Fisker probably should have ordered the older boys not to gang up on Nory. At some point the boys just stopped, though. And now it was just in her memory.

  When Carl said that he would kill her by tossing her in the swimming pool with the insects she just disgustedly said, ‘Carl, you’re fat.’

  Carl said, ‘Well, not as fat as your butt.’

  When Carl said that, Nory couldn’t help giggling. Then he pointed at her and said, ‘Haw, haw! You think it’s funny! Haw, haw! I made you laugh!’ So Carl won that battle face down, because it’s really dumb-seeming to giggle at times. Carl just hated Nory, for some reason. And Nory hated Carl.

  But a lot of what happened that year she couldn’t remember nearly as well as that bit. ‘That bit’ is how they would say it in England, and if you asked your friend to come over, they would say that you asked her to ‘come round.’ These days Nory couldn’t remember the order she had learned things at the ICMS or all the works she did—they called them ‘works,’ the little projects, like the number pyramid or a geography puzzle that they did. She couldn’t even remember all the kids in the class. She remembered one very nice girl named Steffie who left later on, who had a birthday party at her swimming pool where Nory had floundered into the deep end and had gotten about a gallon and a half of water in her lung and thrown up a tiny bit on the grass. She gave Steffie a pair of tiny glass slippers, wrapped up in probably the best wrapping paper she had ever drawn, with a picture of a girl in a rowboat near a willow tree on it. She still thought about those glass slippers. They were paperweights that a glassblower made, but they worked as real doll shoes. She wished she had those glass slippers, they were amazingly wonderful. But Steffie’s parents moved away to Lafayette and she started going to a different school. So that was the last birthday with Steffie.

  It disturbed Nory very much to think that all she was going to know about what happened in her life was not very much at all. You only can really remember the things that happened when you were an older child and the things that happened to you now—that is, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or late last week. You live your life always in the present. And even in the present, this day, dozens and hundreds of little tiny things happen, so many that by the end of the day you can’t make a list of them. You lose track of them unless something reminds you. Say someone says, ‘Remember when you dropped your ruler this morning?’ And you do remember. But then that is lost in the tangle.

  Now, some things you can just accept that you’re not going to have the slightest chance of remembering. It would be nice, but you know that it would be basically impossible. For instance, being in your mother’s womb, as it’s called. Some people thought babies could remember that. Nory one morning asked Littleguy if he could remember being tucked away in Mommy’s belly, long ago, and he said, ‘Yes. It had all things there, in she’s tummy. It had things that were called steam trains. It was filled with they. Filled with steam trains, City of Truro, Lord of the Isles, the Mallard. Pictures with steam trains, and toy ones, and jumping things, all. Filled, filled with they.’ Well, of course there weren’t toy trains in Nory’s mother’s womb, unless maybe he was remembering the small intestine chuffing around. Maybe he was remembering a freight train of food being digested going around and around him. But probably not.

  Still, Nory thought it would be nice if you could think back at least to the age of three. It shouldn’t be impossible. Three was older than Littleguy, and Littleguy could understand an amazing number of things. But Nory couldn’t go back that far, really, except for a few scribs and scrabs. She remembered being eight, and back into being seven, and she went pretty much back to five, and then—it teetered a little bit. She only remembered her fourth birthday party, a Mermaid party, because she had watched the tape of it a number of times on TV.

  One thing, though, she made a point of remembering and passing on to her older self. Every year that she got a year older she said to her parents, ‘Remember when I was five, I said I was five going on six? Remember when I was six I said six going on seven? When I was seven I’d be going seven on eight? Then going eight on nine? Well, now I’m going nine on ten.’ So each year the list of years got a little longer, but she remembered the earlier times that way, by saying the list over. Being thirteen would be very nice, because you’re in your teens when you’re thirteen, and you don’t have to read a big sign that says, ‘Children under the age of twelve cannot attend to this.’ Another thing she made sure to bring along every year with her for a long time was the memory that there were many many little amounts of money that she hadn’t paid back to her parents. Little collections of change she had found in the car and thought could be hers but maybe not, or times her parents had bought her a doll outfit or something when she told them she would reimburse them later when they got home from her own money, or gifts she bought other people with her own money, but borrowing it from her parents since she’d forgotten her purse. She would skip a week, not thinking of it, then still remember it and bring it into the next week, then skip a week, then bring it over. Finally she couldn’t keep the amount in her head because it had been added onto and subtracted from so much, and it began to pull at her, and she thought, ‘I know, I’ll pay them a hundred dollars when I grow up, and that will surely make up for anything I borrowed along the way.’ Then she didn’t have to keep track of that.

  25. The Last Straw

  Ms. Fisker was a very good teacher with a humongously good memory. She could keep in the front-runners of her brain what each child knew and what they hadn’t learned yet. And she could persistently keep the whole class quiet and doing their own work, privately. That�
�s something you almost had to do as a teacher in a Montessori school because each kid is at a different level, learning some different scribbet of a thing, and there are lots of different ages of kids in a class. So for instance in Nory’s class there were kids who were seven and kids who were eleven. Some were doing ‘six plus five’ kinds of things, some were doing ‘numbers of seconds it takes a flicker of light to spark to the earth divided by the speed of light’ kinds of things, and Ms. Fisker had to be totally on her toes about that. Some were learning how to break up words into syllables and some were learning that a noun was a large black triangle and a verb, which is an action, was a large red circle, and the reason why is because it’s a red rolling ball, moving. And a proper noun was a long purple triangle, if Nory wasn’t mistaken, and the the articles, like ‘an,’ ‘a,’ and ‘the,’ were either a short light blue or a short dark blue triangle. The adjectives were either short light blue or short dark blue, depending on what the articles were. The adverb is a smaller orange circle. Each of these things had to be learned, one by one, by coloring in the shapes over the sentences, and some kids were at the black-triangle stage and some were at the small-orange-circle stage. And there were keyholes and green half-moons, and on and on—Nory had never learned grammar out that far. Nobody at the Junior School knew about these grammar shapes because they were specially designed as part of the Montessori system, so all that time she had spent thinking about why a black triangle was like a noun, because it had a wide base and just sat there steadily being whatever noun it was, was just time that could have gone ‘poof’ away, as far as her teachers now were concerned. But she liked knowing that a red circle stood for a verb because it rolled. You could use it for other things you learned later, for instance you could say to yourself, ‘Mass is a blue triangle, energy is a red circle.’