The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  Mrs. Thirm said shutup, too. The first time she did she put her hand up to her mouth, and the class was in shock, thinking, ‘Wait just a tiny minute, teachers don’t say that.’ But now they’d gotten used to hearing it: ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ Not that often, though. At least the teachers didn’t say, ‘Shut your trap,’ which was something Nory sometimes said to other kids, even though she knew she shouldn’t. Sometimes she was noisy and interrupting in class, too, and then she felt guilty and when one of her parents picked her up at the end of the day she said, ‘I can’t have tea because I was not particularly good today. I talked a lot and laughed a lot and drew madly on my fingernail.’

  But Mr. Stone, the I.T. teacher, never said shutup. Nory one time called the little rectangle that was in the middle of the screen the Bermuda Rectangle, because inside it were five little green blobs that were islands and on one of the five islands was the little landing strip—and Mr. Stone liked that name for it and started calling it that, too, which made Nory feel proud. If you can imagine trying to land a huge airplane on a popsicle stick, that’s what it felt like to approach the Bermuda Rectangle. There was a ninety-percent guarantee that they would crash. Nory liked the old unit of I.T. better, when they were doing touch-typing, where if you make a mistake and typed a j for a k it just made a fly-buzzing sound and said ‘Try again.’ The next unit would be good, though: they were going to put on black hats with visors that plugged in and do Virgil Reality using the four new computers that were set up especially for multi-mediorite.

  Then all the fifth-year kids went to lunch. No jacket potato for Nory this time, sadly enough, because Nory’s mother was quite firm about how Nory had to have something meaty from time to time. Fortunately they didn’t have the ham on display as a possibility. ‘Oh, the ham,’ Nory thought, ‘the salty ham of last week.’ She wanted to make an ‘ulll’ sound in her throat when that ham sprang to mind. It was a flat round thing with a narrow border of fat almost all the way around it, a capital G shape of fat, and it was dead cold and pale red. Actually it started out hot but got cold later. Nory was going to put it away and not eat it after one tiny bite. One of the people serving the food had said, ‘Ham?’ and given Nory such a nice tender smile that Nory said, ‘Yes, please.’ She should definitely have said, ‘No, thank you.’ But she felt that the person serving the ham might have her feelings hurt, so she said, ‘Yes, please.’ Also there didn’t seem much like anything else she would like that day, so she got the flap of ham. But one taste and she was salted off her rocker. The music teacher came by and said, ‘You should eat more of that delicious ham, what a waste.’ Nory ate it and ate it. The teacher came by again and said, ‘You should eat a little more.’ So Nory ate a lot more, chewing endlessly, about two thousand and one chews of ham. Kira was whispering advice the whole time. ‘Hide some of it, Nory, hide it in here,’ she said, pointing to Nory’s pencil case. Nory said no way could she hide the ham in her pencil case, not after all she’d been through with that pencil case. Finally she finished most of it. Maybe it was Danish ham. Mr. Blithrenner told his class one day that he didn’t buy Danish ham these days because Danish people keep the young hams locked up in tiny lockers when they’re alive and don’t let them get any light or fresh air. Or rather, the young pigs. That was when he was talking about salting meats. The important thing people should know about the tip of finding the right direction to sail to shore by throwing the pig overboard is that you had to pull the pig back onto the ship very fast, because pigs have sharp what’s-known-as trotters and could injure their face by desperately swimming. Pigs can smell mushrooms underground very well, amazingly well, in fact, so maybe even way out on the ocean they are smelling the underground mushrooms and that’s why sailors can use them as compasses. Trotters are the things they trot on, sort of like hooves.

  Fingernails are our hooves. Littleguy had a problem with his fingernails when he was a tiny newborn child—he would wave his arms around so clutchingly that he would scratch his face with his fingernails. Nory’s mother and father had to be careful to cut his nails all the time so there wouldn’t be too much scratching, but, poor little man, he sometimes scratched himself anyway. Nory’s fingernails got to be a problem for her at the International Chinese Montessori school, an opposite sort of problem, because Bernice had a total habit of biting her nails until they were bare round nubs, and then nibbling off the skin of her tips of her fingers, too. Since Nory was best-friends with Bernice at that time, Nory began biting her nails as well, out of friendship, because when you’re friends you start doing many of the same things. Now that she wasn’t best-friends with Bernice anymore, presto, her nails were just their usual length, if not longer. Same thing with Kira. Kira had the habit of always jumping the last three steps of any stairs she went down, for instance the stairs in the dining hall, and now that Nory was becoming better and better friends with Kira, Nory had gotten in the habit of jumping down the last three steps, too, and she was starting to find she couldn’t stop jumping, just like with biting her nails: she got near the bottom of the stairs, and before she had time to think about it, she was in the air and landing. Nory’s mother had told her strongly to stop, because her landing made a huge thud of a noise at home, but usually she would forge ahead without thinking, and then have to call out, ‘Sorry, I forgot myself!’

  Debbie she hadn’t been best-friends with for long enough for that to happen, or maybe Debbie just didn’t have any weird habits like that. Another habit Nory’s brain got into was writing a letter ‘e’ after words that of course had no ‘e’—like ‘had’ or ‘sad.’ Before she would be able to remember to tell herself ‘Stop, all systems stop, don’t curl the little curl,’ she would curl the curl. This was very maddening because she’d have to use the ink eradicator. ‘Said,’ however, was not spelled ‘sayed’ as she had been under the impression it was, until Mrs. Thirm wrote it on the markerboard, but with an ‘i.’

  One time just before she went to sleep, there was a bad thing that wouldn’t stop thinking itself. She started in a perfectly ordinary way going out in a rocket into the universe, and landed at the edge, on some grass, and kept on walking. She walked over the field with cows and squishy places, and came to the Great Wall that was at the far edge of the universe, and naturally she climbed that wall, and at the top, she saw another field with more cows, lighter brown this time, and grass that was a little different, too. She crossed that field, and came to a moat, and another Great Wall, climbed that wall, saw another field with more cows, black and white spotted cows this time, and she kept walking and climbing, climbing and walking, getting more and more bothered by the infinity of it. She looked behind her and there was a crowd of angry cows. They knew a way through the walls. Some of them had a look as if they were about to pull back their lips and show their teeth. Finally she went downstairs and found her mother and father talking in the kitchen in the quiet casual way that grownups talk after kids are in bed, and she said ‘A bad thing is in my head and I just can’t get it to stop. It’s like a bad screensaver.’ Nory’s mother took her back upstairs and put Cooch close to her cheek and told her not to worry, when you’re sleepy your brain sometimes repeats things for no reason. She said when she had trouble like that she sometimes thought about how she would furnish a dollhouse, going from room to room, because your brain needs a simple problem to give it something to work with. That helped enormously. She thought about the fake food in the cabinets of the dollhouse, the tiny boxes of oatmeal, with tiny packets inside, the tiny roast hams.

  But fortunately, no ham whatsoever today for lunch! Instead there was a wonderful piece of some kind of brown meat, totally soft, so that you could use it as a piece of bread and just wobble it all around. Nory said, ‘Jennifer, it’s really good, taste it,’ and when Jennifer bit into it she said, ‘Mmmmm, that is delicious.’ Jennifer was just a girl who was amazingly gifted at drawing horses. So it was a good lunch, and after that came after-lunch break, which Nory spent with Kira because she’d spent the
whole first break and some of lunch with Pamela and she thought it was hurting Kira, although, honestly, it wasn’t fair that Kira wouldn’t be with Nory when Nory was with Pamela. That break was when the bad thing happened. It was almost the worst thing that happened that whole day, except for a worse thing that happened later on. They were making a conker-pile, and Kira started saying—again—that whenever Nory was with Pamela it made her unpopular, which Nory was sick as a dog of hearing. Suddenly Nory wanted passionately to climb a tree, so she went over to the one that she’d been looking at that looked like the perfect tree-climbing tree, and started to try to climb it, even though a skirt and tie wasn’t the ideal outfit for doing that. She looked up, happily, and suddenly there was a discreet thud on her face. She thought, ‘Boy, quite a pinecone, oh dear.’ It felt hard, because things that are really light can feel really hard when they fall from a distance. ‘Oh, my, what a pinecone,’ Nory thought, ‘and what a lot of sap, too.’ And then she wiped with her finger and took a look at it. ‘This is not good looking sap,’ she thought. ‘This is not the kind of sap I’m used to. This is brown sap with a berry-skin in it.’ Then she realized what it was and said, ‘Kira! A disgusting bird took its leisure on me!’

  Kira came running over and looked at her. ‘Oh, Nory,’ she said. ‘Oh, dear. Oh, yuck. Come on inside.’ Nory held her face out so that the rest of the bird leisure wouldn’t drip on her jacket and Kira led her to the bathroom. They spent quite a good amount of time cleaning up.

  ‘Smell my hand, does it smell okay?’ said Nory.

  Kira smelled it. ‘It just smells like soap.’ Then she thought for a moment. ‘Wait, let me sniff it again.’ She sniffed it again. ‘You’re fine, just soap.’

  They were a tiny bit late for French class, but when they explained to the teacher what had happened, she said, ‘Fine, fine.’ The French teacher was a young, short-haired, dark-haired, short-bodied, stylish-dressed person. She had a wonderful way of saying ‘superb’ and she said it a lot, probably too much for some people’s taste.

  37. Pig Bladders

  Then there was drama class, where they were doing sword fighting. Sword fighting is useful to know because you never know when you might be in a play in which there was sword fighting. Although that was as if a student said, ‘I.T. is useful because you never know when you might need to spend the morning taxiing all over the airport in an airplane.’ The drama teacher warned them again that you have to be very very careful with sword fighting, because even though the swords aren’t sharp, they’re heavy. And they were heavy, they weighed about five hundred grams, Nory thought. The teacher told a story about going to see a play by Shakespeare where a man had a rib broken by a wooden sword because he was supposed to take three steps one way and he forgot and took three steps in the opposite way by mistake and wound up in exactly the wrong place. A wooden sword plunged through a curtain, for some reason in the play, and slammed right into his ribcage and he had to go out on a stretcher, not as an actor but sincerely as an injured person. Shakespeare was famous for writing plays. Boy were they ever plays, and boy were they ever long. Nory’s aunt and uncle took her to a Shakespeare play outside in a park one time, Romeo and Juliet. It might have been very interesting for a twelve-year-old, but for an eight-year-old, which was how old she had been when she went, it was impossible to understand, too long, and extremely boring. Thank goodness for the Inman Toffees that Nory’s aunt brought along—Nory ate quite a number of them and thought about what it was like to chew them. Sometimes you think when the candy sticks to your teeth that maybe your teeth will be plucked right out, but they’re stuck into the gums pretty strongly.

  Shakespeare’s name was probably William R. Blistersnoo but he thought he needed a preferable name in order to be famous, and since there was tons of stabbing and spearing of people with swords in his plays he thought, ‘Let’s see, William Swordjab, no. William Fight? No. William Killeveryone? No. William Stabmyself? No. Aha! William Shakespeare! Yes, that will be just the thing.’ In Shakespeare’s plays what they would do, according to the drama teacher at the Junior School, is they would have an outfit on and they would sew a pig’s bladder in a little tiny place under the outfit that would have a little mark on it so that the person knew right where to stab. The guy would go king!—stabbing lightly right at that particular spot, and blood would instantly coosh out from the pig’s bladder.

  ‘But wouldn’t they run out of pigs quite quickly?’ Nory thought to herself. ‘And therefore run out of pig’s bladders, and therefore could not do another play?’ Shakespeare would have to go on stage before the play and say, ‘As you may know, we cannot do any of the blood we were going to do tonight, because we have run out of our lovely pig’s bladders. We checked in the cupboard this morning, but due to good business, and a number of highly gruesome plays, we have run out. Please enjoy the show. You can have your ticket refunded if you would rather not see the show without blood, since early next week we will have more fresh pig’s bladders shipped to us. We are also going to be getting some big, fat, juicy cow bladders in stock that we will be using for some extremely disgusting effects in a play I will be finishing soon. So please, dear friends, sit back, and enjoy the show.’ And say if somebody was in too much of a rush and forgot to empty out the urine and pour in the blood? In the big swordfight Shakespeare would stab the guy. ‘Die like a filthy scoundrel, you midget!’ And then, pssshooo, oh dear, that blood’s a bit on the yellow side, hm. ‘Oh, yellow blood, is it?’ Shakespeare would say. ‘You monstrous, yellow-blooded confendio master! Hah-hah! Return to your imperial distinctive land!’ Hack, chop. And a little later he would take a smug giggle and walk off the screen.

  After drama there was Sciences. They looked through microscopes at different kinds of line—pencil line, crayon line, colored pencil line, medium-nib fountain pen line, and one other line. Biro line, they call it. A Biro is just a normal kind of everyday pen that you would use next to the phone to write out a phone message. In class they used an eraser on the lines to see what happens when you erase. The amazing thing was that the pencil left big gaps of white paper in its line, sort of the way an eraser will jump in a rubbery way in little tiny bounces if you pull it lightly over the paper, and the eraser left twisted shapes like something an insect would leave behind. One kid, Peter Wilton, was still in a state from drama class and was fidgeting all over the place. He was obviously in a Shakespeare mood of wanting to chop something up, and so he looked down at his desk and thought, ‘Here’s something.’ He had a whole nice beautiful green pen in front of him. He sawed a quarter of it off, using his ruler, and then another quarter, and then a whole half of it. Nory shouldn’t have smiled but it was quite cute, this tiny shrub of a pen, just enough for the cartridge to fit in, which he tried to write with. Then he got carried away and took the cartridge and sawed that in half. Now that was not a brilliant idea. As you can imagine, the cartridge went plume, everywhere. He said, ‘Mrs. Hoadley, my pen leaked.’ But Jessica—who was sitting right next to him and rather exasperated by this point since it’s very hard to look in a microscope even when things are calm and peaceful because your head moves and you push the thing the wrong direction and lose what you’re looking at, or the light gets boffled up—so Jessica had lost her patience and she said to the teacher, ‘Yes, it leaked because, ahem, he was sawing it into a-tiny a-little a-pieces.’ The science teacher got steamingly angry when she got the picture and breathed through her nose in a furious way after everything she said. She said, ‘Peter, that is unacceptable behavior, bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup.’

  ‘May I go wash my hands?’ he asked.

  ‘No, you may never wash your hands,’ said the teacher. ‘Your hands will stay blotched for the rest of your life.’

  Which was a little joke by Mrs. Hoadley, although in fact she didn’t let him wash his hands. But it was really nice to see the pencil lines and to think how many adventures happen to a pencil line while you’re just writing a simple word.

&n
bsp; 38. More Things That Happened to Pamela

  The next thing in the order of the day was that they were supposed to go to music class, and that’s what Nory was in the process of doing, but she went by a place near the auditorium where there were some wooden boxes, because she took the wrong turn in the hall, and she found some boys crowding around saying ‘Feeding time, Pamela.’ Pamela was shoved back behind one of the boxes and she was hiding there. It was just after the sixth year kids’ drama class. Nory couldn’t understand exactly what was happening except that Pamela couldn’t come out and wouldn’t come out, and the boys were saying stuff about ‘Eat,’ and saying ‘Are you hungry, Pamela?’ One of them said: ‘Feed the monster.’

  Nory said, ‘Let Pamela out! Stop it, let her out!’ But they wouldn’t. Then the French teacher walked by and the boys went into a quick flutter. They said, ’Sssh, don’t let her see.

  ‘Pamela, please come on out,’ said Nory, while the teacher could hear, so she would notice the situation. The boys were all pretending to be doing something else. The teacher said, ‘Pamela? Are you there? Come out.’ So Pamela did. Nory said, ‘Hi, Pamela, come on, let’s get our stuff.’ Nory got her hurried away and waved to the French teacher who waved back. The French teacher probably didn’t know much of what was going on, but that was good because Pamela did not want any teachers to know, because then they would have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and then she would have to have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and she thought Mrs. Thirm thought she’d done all those bad things last year.

  Nory said, ‘Pamela, you’ve got to go to Mr. Pears, because Mr. Pears is very nice. You’ve got to complaint to him. If you don’t complaint to him nothing will get better. It’ll just keep getting worse.’ But Pamela said she couldn’t find the time to complaint to him. The problem was that if you get bullied for a certain amount of time, you start thinking that it’s average to be bullied and you end up stopping being able to fight back for yourself. It’s like having a cold for so long that you start thinking its normal to have a stuffed-up nose. Nory didn’t want to say that to Pamela because it wasn’t the perfect thing to say. Pamela had the sound of almost-but-not-quite-crying in her voice when she said, ‘I have to get my stuff,’ and she went off.