The Everlasting Story of Nory

by Nicholson Baker

  ‘But then decided no, she would not sing,’ said Kira, quite strongly. ‘Instead her mask and fake hair came off, and everyone knew who she was and she had to …’

  ‘Duck for apples!’ said Nory. ‘She ducked and ducked and ducked, but her face was so dirty and ugly from the beginning that it turned an awful red, and …’

  ‘No one would look at her and she was in disgrace,’ said Kira. ‘And she learned to be nicer. The …’

  ‘The Dog was important to the story, too,’ said Nory, because she didn’t want to say, ‘end,’ which Kira of course wanted her to say.

  ‘No, the end,’ said Kira.

  ‘The end!’ sang Nory. ‘The end—the end, the end, the end, oh way-ay-end! And then—and then—and then and then and then and then and THEN!’

  ‘Then that was the end,’ said Kira.

  Nory’s parents called out ‘Nice story’ from the front.

  ‘I have a story to tell!’ said Littleguy, waving his hands in his car seat. ‘It’s about two girls and it’s the story you telled. There are two good girls. One’s bad and one’s good. They cide to to something. The end.’

  ‘I like it, good,’ said Nory.

  ‘But it’s not the end,’ said Littleguy. ‘There’s something they had to make up, their momma said they can make marshmellons, they cide to make something, and it’s something they made. They made two engines, the Flying Scotsman and the Mallard. Steam engines! And there was something in the party. It was a double-decker jelly cake, a double-decker bus, to eat. Like a double-decker bus. When it went in the sun, it rolled out, it drived, when it was on the grass it drove!’

  ‘A double-decker jelly cake,’ said Nory, ‘Good story, Littleguy.’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ said Littleguy. ‘It’s a big digger, the scooper, scooper, it goes, kksssh, scooper, scooper, digger. And then there was a big thing there, a dumptruck, auger driller, a front loader.’

  ‘Yay, good story,’ said Nory.

  ‘Not quite yet,’ said Littleguy. ‘And there was something in the story, once upon a time, I have another story, I have another story too! Another story!’

  ‘Okay, just one more story,’ called Nory’s mother.

  ‘Once upon a time were two flat holes, and there was a big digger truck came over and ran over they, and got dirty dirt on they. They washed their feeties and eyes and toesies and they were all clean, the end.’

  They dropped Kira off at her house and the outing was over.

  46. Marks

  About a week later the Threll School stopped for a vacation. Nory and Pamela shook hands, as if to say, ‘We made it.’ Kira went with her family to a place nearby London, so they didn’t see each other. Guy Fawkes Day happened during the break. There was a huge enormous bondfire and life-size models of Guy Fawkes were thrown into the bondfire. Nory was expecting the models to be little voodoo dolls of Guy Fawkes, not huge floppy heavy dolls the size of people, but life-size was how they did it. Guy Fawkes was a strongly Catholic man who had snuck barrel after barrel of gunpowder down into the basement, and he was just about to blow up the king when he was caught. So they burnt Guy Fawkes in a bondfire and now they have fireworks to celebrate that. Guy Fawkes Day is much more important a holiday in England than Halloween. Possibly they first chopped off Guy Fawkes’s head then burned him in the bondfire, Nory wasn’t clear on that, but that would certainly have been Nory’s preference, because she was not attracted to the idea of being burned. In any case, he was severely punished, in a way the Aztecs would understand quite well. Nory burned her finger on a sparkler in the backyard after the fireworks were over, because the metal got remarkably hot. The skin turned white where it was singed but it felt better when she put an ice cube on it.

  No letter from Debbie came in the mail during break, but something else did: Nory’s marks. At International Chinese Montessori School they didn’t have marks at all, just a special conference with Nory sitting there with her parents. The teachers always said this and that: ‘Eleanor, oh, yes: bright, nice girl, talks too much, though, and she has to work harder on her spelling.’ The principal, Xiao Zhang, translated for the Chinese teacher, since Nory’s parents didn’t understand Chinese. There was never a piece of paper with marks on it that said good or bad, the way there turned out to be at Threll school. Threll sent out a sheet of paper with a list of Nory’s different classes and a set of boxes for either Excellent, or Good, or Satisfactory, or Weak, or Poor. Nory got all checkmarks for Satisfactory, except for one Good, in History. No Excellents whatever. She was a little disappointed not to get a Good in Classics because she had liked that class more than all the others and listened like a demon when Mr. Pears read to them. But she was relieved because she had been very worried that she was going to get a Weak in French because the French was completely refusing to stick in her head. Her goal for the year, she decided, was never ever to get a Weak or a Poor. But still, she was a tiny bit sad about English, because she thought her story about the girl and the dog wasn’t just a drab old Satisfactory. It wasn’t just the minimum you had to do, it was actually somewhat above the bare necessities and was possibly in the Good category.

  But probably the objection for Mrs. Thirm was that Nory was supposed to write a shorter story that she would finish, and instead she’d written a longer one that ended with TO BE CONTINUED, and also of course her spelling was a disgrace-and-a-half, although Nory’s father said Nory spelled better than anyone did a thousand or two thousand years ago, because back then they had about eight different ways to spell every English word, and people just chose whichever way they felt like. They would say, ‘Today I think I’ll spell chair as chayer and tomorrow chayrre and the day after that, hmm, chaier might be nice, and the day after that I think it will be chere.’ Now it had to be chair every time, no matter what mood you were in.

  47. Three Forbidden Words

  One other reason Nory might have only gotten a Satisfactory and not a Good in English was that it turned out that Mrs. Thirm was not terribly fond of ‘nice’ and ‘then’ and ‘said.’ When they went back to school after break Mrs. Thirm told them that from then on they had to try whenever they could not to use ‘nice’ or ‘then’ or ‘said’ in their assignments, because they were extremely overused and she was tired of seeing them in their books. Nory felt a little discombobbledied at hearing that, because she used ‘nice’ and ‘then’ and ‘said’ quite often. There were only so many different ways you could say, ‘he laughed,’ ‘she giggled,’ ‘he answered,’ ‘they whispered,’ and so forth and so on, before you suddenly felt, ‘Okay, ladies and jellyfish, it’s time to go back to good old she said.’ And without ‘then’ Nory had to use ‘the following day’ or ‘the next thing that happened was’ or ‘later that week’ or ‘Three days passed,’ which were fine, but so was ‘then.’

  Also Mrs. Thirm turned out to not like rhymes in poems, and the poems Nory had written for her had a fair amount of rhymes. One of her poems was:

  I Went to a Poor Man’s House

  I went to a poor man’s House yes,

  The First thing I did was to Look at the poor man’s Dress

  yes,

  The second thing I did was to look at the Horrible big mess

  yes,

  The Third thing I Did was to stand up and confess yes

  ‘What a Horrible Big Mess’ yes.

  The Poor man looked down at the Horrible big mess yes

  And spoke up But did not confess but merely said ‘yes’!

  Another one was:

  Please Don’t Frighten Little Birdies Away

  Proud people walk through

  The little Birdies’ Feast.

  And make them fly away.

  And make it so they

  Can not come back to where

  They could have played

  All day So please don’t

  Frighten the little birdies

  Away.

  The poem she wrote most recently for Mrs. Thirm was:

  I a
m trapped in a waterfall

  And can hear the singing fishermen’s call,

  But through the waves and

  In a dark and gloomy cave,

  I am enjoying what the world gave.

  Basically all of Nory’s poems had rhymes in them somehow or other. And then Mrs. Thirm suddenly said: ‘I particularly don’t like poems that rhyme, but it’s just a matter of opinion.’ She told everyone, ‘It’s so difficult, there’s really no point.’ Nory raised her hand to suggest that one thing you could do would be to make a list of all the words that are rhyming words, which would make finding the rhymes a lot easier.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs. Thirm, ‘but it’s such a waste of time to make the list, and then you’re right back where you started, aren’t you?’ So Nory’s poems were not exactly the poems Mrs. Thirm would have naturally preferred. She was still perfectly nice about them, though. She didn’t gnaw her teeth and say ‘Not more disgusting rhymes!’ Teachers in England weren’t like teachers in America writing ‘Great Job!’ and ‘This is a gem of a story, Eleanor!’ and whatnot, and stamping cat-chasing-a-ball-of-yarn stamps around on the page—they just made a quiet checkmark to prove that they’d seen what you did and sometimes corrected the spelling in the margin. Once in a great while they wrote ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent prep.’ They weren’t as emotional.

  The complete and total ban on ‘said’ and ‘then’ and ‘nice’ was hard for Nory, though, and it got harder. Poetry they didn’t do that much of in class, but they did unquestionably do a fair amount of story-writing, and Nory would sit writing her story and come to a place where she needed to say, ‘he said’ and she would spend five minutes trying to figure out a way not to say it, and by then the thing she had in mind to write next had disappeared in a chuff of steam, as Littleguy would say. Sometimes she would even write the ‘s’ of ‘said’ and then think, ‘Oh, I’m too tired, I just can’t possibly go through the effort of pulling the top off the ink eradicator at this moment,’ and so she would try to imagine a word that began with ‘s’ but wasn’t ‘said,’ like ‘he smiled’ or ‘he smirked’ or ‘he shouted.’ But then whatever it was that ‘he’ did changed his personality totally and he became this very unaturally smiley or smirky and shouting person that didn’t fit in with the story. Another thing you could do was change the comma to a period and change the ‘h’ into a capital ‘h’ and then go on with a new sentence about what he was doing. Say as an example you by mistake wrote:

  ‘Mmm, this coliflower looks delishous,’ he s

  You’re all the way to the ‘s’ of ‘said’ and suddenly you remember, ‘Oh no, I’ve done it again, Mrs. Thirm said no he said!’ Well, then just go around and around the comma with the point of your pen, turning it into a big and very circular and very confident period, and then just change the lower-case ‘h’ to a capital ‘H,’ which is easy to do since you just have to straighten out the rounded part of the ‘h’ and make the short part long—and then have him doing something casually beginning with ‘s.’ So it would become:

  ‘Mmm, this coliflower looks delishous.’ He spooned out a large amount for him self and breathed-in the steem.

  That was just an example. But that way of solving it also could cause confusion in the story because often it worked out that when you read it out loud to people you couldn’t tell who was talking and it sounded jerky. That was why it drove Nory totally bonkers to have the ban on ‘said.’

  As for ‘nice,’ well, yes, Nory did use ‘nice’ a lot, quite frankly. But ‘nice’ was a very, very important word for kids in fifth year, which is fourth grade in America, and it was important to the younger kids of Littleguy’s age as well, and kids in general, because if you think about a kid’s language, it can mean about eighty million different things. You can say a person is nice or a school is nice or a way of spending an afternoon is nice. It’s not as definite as ‘fun’—say a few things went wrong in your afternoon, so it wasn’t completely and frolickingly ‘fun’ but it was still a very ‘nice’ afternoon. Or say Littleguy made a drawing of the Lord of the Isles, a distinguished steam engine, and gave it to Nory as a present. So basically two little circles and a big circle and some driving bars. If you said, ‘Oh, Littleguy, that’s very kind of you,’ it could almost sound a little sarcastic, or too fancy, but if you said ‘Oh, Littleguy, that’s so nice of you,’ you were saying what you intended to say. If you said a person at school was very kind, you could just mean that they were very kind to you, and yet maybe you wouldn’t say they were very nice because for some reason you didn’t want to be with them because they had a different set of interests or maybe they were not very kind to some other person, like Pamela. And furthermost, it was the exact word that kids used, and Nory was writing conversation that kids had, so she would come to a point in the sentence where obviously the word that the child would tend to use was ‘nice’ and she would suddenly remember, ‘Alert, alert, no “nice” allowed’ and she would be ready to tear her hair out by the roots.

  Actually Nory wouldn’t be ready to tear her hair out by the roots because it was almost impossible to tear out your hair, from Nory’s point of view, either by the roots or by the bare tips, because you would pull on one big grab of hair, but only some of that would come out, since you never have quite as much of a grip on the whole thing. And besides you can’t have the willpower to pull hard enough to make it all come ripping out like a plot of grass. You could of course cut your hair so that it looks like it’s been teared out if you want to be included in a chapter in one of those books that include all the amazing, but luckily untrue, things in the world. That would be ‘tearing your hair’ to some extent. But the only time Nory ever pulled even one hair out was not when she was going crazy over something like having to not use ‘nice’ in her prep, but when she was thinking very very carefully about something, and as she was thinking she would anonymously take a tiny piece of hair in her fingers and pull at it ever so very slightly, testing how much pulling it could take. Sometimes possibly one hair would finally go poink and come out but that was it, nothing drastic.

  48. Another Bad Thing That Happened to Pamela

  Thomas Mottle’s hair was cut straight as a pin in back, so that when he walked it moved with a bobbing motion. He was a chorister, like Roger Sharpless, and he looked like such a pearl of a boy, but really inside he was the kiss of the devil, basically. And one day, which wasn’t the finest of days anyway, Thomas Mottle did something to Pamela that made Nory want to tear out some of his hair, it made her so steamingly angry. It began as a good day because Nory and Kira got into a state of herorious giggling by pretending to worship Nory’s almighty ink eradicator, after Nory got it to balance upright on the table. Actually Nory laughed before Kira noticed, but quite quickly they were laughing the exact same amount, and the funny thing was that Kira hadn’t seen Nory do the thing that was actually funny, she only heard Mrs. Thirm say ‘Nory, what may I ask are you doing?’ Nory had been bowing her head in worship before the ink eradicator and then she and Kira starting saying, ‘No, no, no, no, you can only worship one god,’ so they pretended to attack it and punch it without their hands touching it, because they didn’t want to knock it over.

  That was extremely fun, as you can imagine, but then the bad part of the day was that Mrs. Thirm gave them a Mental Maths test in which Nory got one answer right out of fifteen. Mrs. Thirm was saying the multiplication problems aloud very fast in a way Nory didn’t understand, since English people say double-naught or triple-three sometimes when they mean ‘zero zero’ or ‘oh oh’ or ‘three three three’—let alone when they say ‘M-I-double-S-I-double-P-I’ for the spelling of Mississippi, which always tempted Nory to want to write a letter d for ‘double’ or a number two, depending on whether it was numbers or letters, that is. Mrs. Thirm was doing something similar, but not exactly that, and Nory couldn’t conceivably figure out what in the Blue Blazers Mrs. Thirm was asking the class to do—so bingo, one right answer out of fifteen in Mental Maths
, which is not a very good record. So that made it not the finest of days. And then after lunch along came Thomas Mottle.

  The bothering of Pamela was continuing steadily anyway, and getting worse. It had progressed to the stage of barking Pamela’s shins. But the kids who did it were clever kickers and never did anything when a teacher would catch sight. ‘Barking your shin’ is what it was called because it’s as if the bark came off. In other words, the skin was scraped. Pamela told Nory about it but she only saw it with her own eyes a few times, because they didn’t do it when Nory was there.

  Then that afternoon Nory watched Thomas Mottle sneak up behind Pamela and kick her very viciously in the back of the leg and then try to dash off. He was probably thinking he would disappear as quick as lightning, which is what the boys would normally do. Naturally Pamela fell down and her books splattered out on the path. She turned bright red this time, and she cried a little, too. Nory was a ways away with some other kids so she only saw it off from a distance, and she was on her way over to help Pamela, when one eighth of a second after Thomas kicked, Mrs. Hoadley, the science teacher, appeared from out of somewhere, and stepped up to the plate. Thomas Mottle saw her and completely changed. He was a different child. Very purely and simply he helped Pamela up and picked up her books, one by one. By the time Nory got there she heard Mrs. Hoadley saying, ‘Thank you very much, Thomas.’ That was they way they acted, these blasted bullies—not just kicking someone in the shins, but then as soon as the teacher was on the spot, pretending to be sweet as pie, nicely helping the person.