The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  Her mother picked her up from school at twelve-thirty, and Nory asked right on the spot if she could go over to Kira’s house the next day. Nory’s mother and father discussed it. The difficulty was that they were going to drive to Wimpole, which was a Stately Home, the next day. ‘Couldn’t Kira come with us?’ Nory asked. Nory’s mother and father looked at each other and made their ‘I don’t see why not’ expressions. So Nory scrummaged around in her backpack and found Kira’s phone number on a little folded piece of paper in her pencil case. She called the number: ‘Hello, this is Eleanor, could I please speak to Kira?’ Then Kira came to the phone and Nory invited her to come with them to Wimpole. Nory heard Kira shout, ‘Can I go to Wimpole tomorrow afternoon?’ Then she heard, ‘Wimpole!’ Then, ‘WIMPOLE!’ Then, ‘With Nory.’ Then she heard, ‘A girl from school. Yes.’ Then after a second Kira came back on and said, ‘Yes, I can go, but my mother would like to talk to your mother to sort out the logistics.’ So it was all settled that Kira was coming over an hour before they left so they could play a little, as well. And Wimpole was a good place to go because Nory’s mother said it had a farm with a number of endangered species of cows and pigs and goats, which made it good for kids of all age groups. Nory was so happy to hear the good news that she cleaned up her room for Kira from the northeast corner to the southeast corner, like a hot butterknife. And what usually happened happened again as usual, which was that as she cleaned she began rearranging her dolls, and thinking of little events that could happen in their adventurous everlasting lives. So while Littleguy took a nap in a little clump on the couch she came down with two dolls and sat next to him and started to tell herself a story of Mariana. But she kept getting distracted by the idea that Kira was coming over, so she put it on the back of the stove.

  Kira’s mother dropped Kira off and Nory felt the surprise of ‘Wow, this is very strange to have Kira in my house,’ because of course she was used to seeing her at school. They were a tad-bit shy with each other for a few minutes, but then everything turned pleasantly chatty as can be, except for one very big hitch. Kira was being brought up, through her whole childhood, without any TV allowed in her house, so of course as soon as she came over to Nory’s house she was desperately craving a long juicy watch of TV. She knew precisely what was on, and she knew what she wanted to see. It was an American cartoon called Space KeBob 7.

  Space KeBob 7 was about a fifteen-year-old named Space KeBob with a huge skull that was built up using bone grafts. Six extra brains were stored inside his skull, which had little partitions in it sort of like the chambered nautilus, and he was able to connect up to each of the brains by unplugging a wire and connecting to the next brain, so that if he wanted to think like, for example, a wise old Native American man, he plugged into that plug and connected up to that brain, and if he wanted to think like a falcon, he connected up to a tiny little falcon brain. The six extra brains plus the boy’s personal brain he was born with equals seven, which was why ‘Space KeBob 7’ was the most logical name for the show. Nory wasn’t wild on seeing it, because she had seen plenty of the episodes and they usually had some sort of enormous space-dragon with a gargling voice. Also it didn’t make sense because if you were the bad guy it would be quite easy to take a little dab of modeling clay and press it into a couple of the boy’s brain plugs and Space KeBob 7 would immediately be Space KeBob 5, and a little more clay stuffed in a few more sockets, he’d be Space KeBob 3, then Space KeBob 2, and then he would be right back down to his own brain, with nothing else to rely on, and it wouldn’t be a popular show anymore and would just be a shy little slip of a cartoon about an average kid in space.

  But Kira was passionately interested in seeing it, since she almost never had an opportunity to, so they watched it from start to finish. Nory got very sleepy. She had woken up early that morning, and again gone right to the Art Room with Littleguy. Littleguy had seen some styrophone packing chips in a box and said, ‘They look like tato chips.’ So Nory stapled together a bag of pretend potato chips out of them that said:

  EVER LASTING

  CRISPS

  ** Now Even Freasher **

  Nory wasn’t allowed to eat the kind of Prawn chips that Pamela usually brought in for break except on special occasions because they had an artificial fragrance of sugar in them and Nory’s parents didn’t want her to possibly get brain damage from a chemical molecule that dressed up in a sweet disguise as if it was sugar when really there was nothing sugary about it, so that your brain didn’t know how to clean itself out after the feeling of sweetness was gone from your mind. Kira didn’t care for Prawn chips—but they really were wonderful because they dissolved on your tongue almost as if they were that kind of super-sour candy that foams up on your tongue.

  Finally Space KeBob 7 was over and Nory and Kira went up to Nory’s room and Nory showed Kira her dolls. Kira was polite about them, but not as interested as she might have been. She did like the little metal cars on the edge of the bathtub that changed color depending on whether they were dipped in cold water or hot water. So they played with the color-changing cars for a while. Kira didn’t seem to want to try to get a story going about them, though, the way Debbie probably would have.

  45. Nogl Erylalg

  Wimpole House was a long quease of a drive away. The farm was good. Some of the rare cows had huge heads and quite bulging eyes that looked as if they might plop out onto the hay. That might explain why they weren’t as successful as the kinds of cows farmers used now. One black cow nipped Littleguy’s finger when he was feeding it some green pellets and the finger turned red. Littleguy cried but then he bravely went on to feed the goats, which turned their heads to fit their horns under the bars of their cage—their lips were soft and speedy over your hand, taking the crumbles of food, and they stretched their necks out so far sometimes that they cut off their breathing a little against the bars and you heard them making choking noises, like a dog when he pulls at his collar. But because there were bars you didn’t feel nervous the way you could feel with the beady-eyed swans by the river.

  The house had a crunchy stone path going up to it. Crunchy paths were very important to this kind of fancy palace-house because then when you walked into the house the feeling of walking on a real floor or a real rug would feel unusually wealthy and very hush-hush. Also the gravel helped to clean off any dung or mud or other nonsense from your shoes, although there was much less anonymous dung nowadays than in the days of the wives of Henry the Eighth, for example.

  While they were walking up, a little girl bumped her head on a place under the stairs up to the house and cried without any exaggeration, for it had been quite a sharp bump. Nory’s father bought two children’s guidebooks, so Nory and Kira could both have one. The Wimpole children’s guidebook wasn’t quite up to the snuff of the Ickworth children’s guidebook, but what could you do? The main thing about the afternoon basically was that it was a totally different experience going around a Stately Home with Kira because Kira was infinitely competitive, so that if the guidebook said, ‘Can you find such and such a teeny little bell-pull they used to attract the servants?’ then Kira was off in a frantic dash and scrabble to find it before Nory did.

  Tables and paintings and chairs and hidden doors went flittering by from room to room that Nory couldn’t look at because she was trying to keep up with Kira. She didn’t want to race, but then again she also didn’t want to lose if Kira did want to race, and Kira definitely wanted to race. Not that they were running, either, just going as fast as they could while pretending to be very calm and smooth and angel-may-care. They came to a picture of a girl walking her dog. ‘Oh, what a lovely painting,’ said Kira, but Nory looked at her out of the corner of her eye because she wasn’t so completely sure Kira actually liked the painting all that much. Kira was just pleased to have gotten there first, possibly, since it was mentioned in the children’s guidebook and Kira was so competitive. Nory had wanted to arrive at the painting at least at the same time as Kira,
so that she could admire it without a feeling of having lost a race, because she was a fan-and-a-half of dogs in things like paintings and statues, mainly because she so very much wanted a dog of her own, craved for one, and couldn’t have one, and Kira did have one, a golden retriever, which was just exactly the kind of big, hairy, smelly dog that Nory desperately wanted and couldn’t have because, for one thing, the English government locks up every single dog that comes into England for six months to make sure it doesn’t have a plague.

  So, because Nory felt a trifle cross, she said, when they were both in front of the painting of the girl walking her dog: ‘Hmm. Her shoes aren’t perfect, and the dress could go higher up.’ Then she said, ‘Let alone the strange pink sleeve floating out behind her. Also, her hat could be improved. It looks like it’s about to jump the gun. The dog looks a bit vicious, too. He could be improved.’

  ‘Well!’ said Kira, with some chin in the air and some humphing in the voice. ‘I guess you don’t like that painting very much at all, do you?’

  ‘I like the ground quite a bit,’ said Nory, ‘and the light catching on the rocks. The bush is good, and the houses, there’s plenty I like, but it’s true—the whole middle part of the picture, including the girl and her hat, is not exactly my taste.’

  Kira went back to her guidebook. She was much, much better at the word-puzzles in the back than Nory was, because Kira was a wiz of a speller, and Nory was a speller from Mars, if not from the Big Dipper. Kira knew right on the spot that NGOL ERYLALG was a scramble of LONG GALLERY.

  46. Some Chandeliers

  On the stairs they passed by a painting of dead birds, which was called a still life because the birds are not moving or flying, but are just there, still as glass, which makes them easier to paint. ‘Still deads’ would be a more realistic name for them than ‘still lifes.’

  ‘Ulg, I think I just lost my appetite,’ said Kira.

  ‘Wouldn’t they go a little rotten while they were being painted?’ asked Nory. She was remembering something Mr. Blithrenner told them in History about the Aztecs, which was that once the priests were done with a sacrifice, they let the person’s brains rot in his chopped-off head. That was somewhat like what they did to Oliver Cromwell for chopping off the king’s head. They dug him up a few years after he was dead, then cut his head off of his by now totally disgusting body, and put it on a spike on a building so that any child passing by would point at it and say, ‘Mom, what is that strange black lump with teeth?’ Once again, nothing to be proud of.

  The people who figured out Ickworth House had a better idea of what you would want to pass by on the stairway every day and instead of a big painting of dead birds they put up a woman holding a fan. The real-life fan that was painted in the picture was attached to the wall above the fireplace in one of the rooms upstairs, so you could compare the painted fan and the real fan and see how good a job the painter had done. He had done a fine job. Some fans used to be made from chicken skin, though, so they would qualify as being still lifes, too.

  The Yellow Drawing Room of Wimpole House was quite reasonable, and it had a dome that was shaped like the Jasperium of the Cathedral, but with a chandelier hanging down from it that was slightly on the scrawny side. Ickworth had a humongous chandelier over the dining room table. A man there had explained that it used to be at a different house but it had suddenly plundered from the ceiling one day for some reason and they’d had to prune it down, like a huge bush that was run into by a tractor. They carefully saved all the good pieces, and threaded it with new string, and now you couldn’t possibly tell that it wasn’t the way it was meant to be when you looked at it, since it was an extravaganza of sparkles as it was. Kira found out from the children’s guidebook that it wasn’t actually a chandelier but a ‘gasolier,’ running on gas power.

  ‘Is it a diesel?’ Littleguy asked.

  Nory suddenly remembered the bathrooms at the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco where she had gone to lunch one day with her parents. Each stall of the bathroom had a chandelier above it. She told Kira about it.

  ‘Wow, your own personal chandelier,’ said Kira. ‘That’s pretty incredible.’

  Nory was quite content to have impressed her with a known fact about America.

  45. The Bad Sister and the Good Sister

  In the car home from Wimpole House, Kira licked Nory on her face, pretending to be one of the rare kinds of cow. Nory happened to be squeamish about being licked on the face and said, ‘Kira, stop.’

  ‘Let’s not have any saliva games in the car, please,’ called Nory’s father from the front seat.

  That made Kira stop, and instead she and Nory played a game in which you pass a little orange ball back and forth, and whoever has the ball has to tell the next part of the story. Kira started it off.

  ‘Once,’ she said, ‘there was a good girl and a bad girl. They were identical sisters. One day the bad girl decided to play a trick on the good girl. This trick was …’ And Kira passed the orange ball to Nory.

  ‘Oh dear, I’ve come unbuckled,’ said Nory, fixing her seatbelt. ‘Okay, the trick was for the bad girl to put her foot down on the girl’s dress in a very fancy party that she was going to suggest to her mom that they have. She was spoiled and knew as a matter of course that her mom would agree. If she stepped on her good sister’s dress, her good sister would be embarrassed in front of everyone and be very upset. And so …’ Nory passed the ball to Kira.

  ‘So the mother let them do it,’ said Kira, and gave the ball back to Nory.

  ‘Let them have a big garden party,’ said Nory, and passed the ball back to Kira.

  ‘Have a huge garden party,’ said Kira. ‘But there was one desperate problem, and that problem was …’

  ‘That it was raining on the day they were going to have the garden party,’ said Nory.

  ‘So they decided to have the party inside,’ said Kira. ‘But there was another problem as well. The bad little girl, whose name was …’

  ‘Kuselda,’ said Nory.

  ‘Kuselda,’ said Kira, ‘was feeling rather sick. And the party went like this.’

  ‘The first part was successful,’ said Nory. ‘The good little girl was fussed over, everyone was nice to her, she was superb. Everything went well, until the bad girl decided that she would stagger out and she would still carry out with her plan. She suggested a dance, saying, “Of course I have to be with my beloved sister.” And the sister said …’

  ‘The sister said, “All right,” ’ said Kira. ‘And they had the dance. But when Krusella was just about to do it, something else happened.’

  ‘What happened was,’ said Nory, ‘the bad girl felt horribly sick. She felt so sick and faint she was almost too weak to press down hard enough with her foot on the dress. And yet she still decided she would try. But the mother, thinking it wasn’t intentional, called out, “Careful Kruselda, don’t step on your sister’s dress, you’re about to.” ’

  ‘So Kruselda had to not carry out her plan that night,’ said Kira. ‘But will she carry it out later? Find the answer.’

  ‘She decided firmly she would,’ said Nory. ‘She had made a plan and she was going to carry it out. She was so angry that she didn’t get to do it all that night she couldn’t sleep, and she was so tired that …’

  ‘She couldn’t get up for a week,’ said Kira. ‘Her plan almost slipped out of her mind, but at the end of the week, constantly thinking about how she could get revenge, she decided to …’

  ‘Not only step on her good sister’s dress,’ said Nory, ‘but somehow make her good sister’s hair come out of place and fluff up, in such a way that the good sister wouldn’t know it happened, just before she went out, so she would look just dreadful, and it would be just as well as she stepped on her dress.’

  Kira whispered to Nory, ‘You still have to say when she would do this and how she would do this. Would she have another party, or what?’

  ‘But she didn’t know how to do car
ry out her plan,’ said Nory. ‘Then she finally thought of it. She’d have to …’

  ‘Have another party,’ said Kira. ‘But this time everyone was supposed to come all dressed up so you couldn’t guess who they were. If you guessed who a person was, the person had to …’

  ‘Duck for apples!’ said Nory. ‘And that would be pretty embarrassing at such a fancy wonderful party …’

  ‘Because you had to stick your head in the water,’ said Kira.

  ‘And because,’ said Nory, ‘the water would have food coloring in it, that made your face turn a awful color of pale green for a day, which would be extremely embarrassing, for this was a very rich and dignified family. So the bad girl asked her mom, who said sternly …’

  ‘ “Yes,” ’ said Kira.

  ‘The bad girl sang a carol at the first part,’ said Nory, ‘just to make herself more popular. A goose could have sang it better than she did. She sang it like a wild chicken.’

  ‘Then the dance was to begin,’ said Kira. ‘The two sisters, not knowing each other of course, because they had chosen different outfits deliberately and not telling each other what they were being and what they would look like, chose themselves. They danced with each other.’ And then Kira whispered her advice to Nory: ‘The bad girl has to fall.’

  ‘First their steps went quickly,’ said Nory, nodding. ‘The good girl, Emmerine, had swift lovely steps. But the bad girl, Kruselda’s steps were big and bulgy, slow and ugly steps. They danced on together for a long time, until Kruselda finally remembered what she was to do. She was just about to do it, but there was a corner of the rug that was flipped back. She tripped on the rug, fell on her chin, and made her nose be an awful shape, which looked so awful and swollen that no one wanted to look at her for the rest of the day, so she decided to sing …’