Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Everybody said, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ Jacob Lewes immediately turned dead red and stared at his pencil case. Nory was red, too, but only in the places that she got red, which were on the sides of her cheeks, so that her blush turned into long sideburn-things. People said, ‘Well? Do you fancy him?’ Nory thought seriously about denying it, because honesty may be the best policy at times but it certainly does seem painful at other times. But it’s painful the other way, too, because if you say, ‘No, I certainly do not fancy Jacob Lewes, whatever for?’ then Jacob Lewes’s feelings might be a tiny bit hurt, even though he would also act very relieved to hear it, and also you then right away think, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have tolden a lie,’ and you have to say, ‘Well, actually, yes, I mispoke, I do fancy him.’ So you have twice as much pain as if you had just gone ahead and admitted it, because you have the pain of feeling the guilt of lying and the pain of admitting that you do fancy him.

So Nory said, ‘Well, I do think he’s nice.’

Julia Sollen said, ‘You’re blushing!’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said Nory. ‘Any further questions?’ It was all quite terrible and there was a sliver of a moment when Nory thought, ‘This is so bad that I have a slight feeling in my lips of wanting to cry, should I cry?’

Luckily one girl came up and said, ‘You know you should tell everybody that Shelly Quettner fancies Colin Deat,’ because that was what Shelly had told someone, and Nory thought about it and almost did it but then she thought, Do Unto Others. Nory’s conclusion was that Daniella Harding was definitely not going to get told any of her secrets anymore.

It turned out that Nory didn’t really fancy Jacob Lewes so much as all that. First, he said tiresome things about how he hated Barbie dolls, which is what American boys do, and then especially after he started to make fun of Pamela Shavers. By the way, ‘fancy’ was the word they used for it in England, and it was an idiotic, dumb, stupid word, fancy , but not as horrible as if Shelly had said, ‘Nory loves Jacob Lewes.’ The good thing about experiencing that horribleness, though, was that because she’d already gone through the ‘Nory fancies Somebody’ business, she could talk to a boy like Roger Sharpless and nobody would think a thing of it. One time Nory was fighting around with Roger in a playing way and Roger got a little vicious and swopped her in the side of the face with a rolled-up geography booklet. He didn’t know it would hurt as much as it did, because when you roll up something like a magazine or a thin floppy book you think it will be kind of soft and springy, like a rolled-up piece of paper, but actually it can feel as hard as a metal pipe, just about. Nory said, laughing, ‘Roger, you’re going to give me a black eye, now.’ And she thought, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, they’re going to see my eye, it’s full of water.’ And then she remembered that one time at her old school she’d thought her eyes would look terribly full of water and she went into the bathroom to check and she found out that you couldn’t even tell unless you were really looking. So she thought, ‘No, I don’t think they’ll notice.’ And Roger didn’t seem worried at all. But he did nicely say he was sorry to have swopped her with his geography booklet.

Those were the two times she almost cried so far, but didn’t.

Nory left Boston and moved to the Trumpet Hill house in Palo Alto when she was still one year old. So the only reason that she had any memories about Boston and its bricks was that they had been back to visit. That was before she had Cooch, her only daughter from her marriage to Sylvester the Cat, who later sailed away to Africa. It was before she knew almost anything, for instance that long ago sailors threw pigs overboard to see what direction they would swim, because whatever direction they swam in was land. Or that if a cat is bred without a tail he won’t be able to feel where he’s going to the bathroom, since the tail is their sense of where they’re going to the bathroom. Without a tail a cat will just go all over the place, not knowing, like dogs who leave their dog leisures here, there, and everywhere.

Nory didn’t even know the word for elbow back then, when she was one. They had a video of her first learning ‘elbow’ in the yard, much later on. Really almost the only thing she kept with her from Boston was a tiny scar on her nose that she got in the bathtub when she picked up the plastic razor that her mother used to shave her legs and looked at it, and somehow, before she knew it, presto, she had cutten herself with it. Even that tiny scar was gone, almost. And now Littleguy knew the word ‘elbow.’ He said ‘Elbows help you jump!’ and he would then jump to demonstrate. He was right, elbows do help you jump, especially if you jumped the way he did, with a lot of arm motion to make it seem like a very high jump.

Littleguy did not seem to know the word ‘ankle,’ however. Babies learn the words for their feet and toes and fingers quite early because they can hold them close to their faces, and they learn about their eyes and nose and mouth because they are on their faces, but for some reason they are never terribly interested in their ankles. The word is weaker in their mind. That might have something to do with the strange myth of dipping Achilles.

It wasn’t Hercules who was dipped. Nory learned his proper name in another Classics class — Achilles. Achilles’s mother was unhappy that Achilles wasn’t completely immortal, so she dipped him head-first into the Watersticks. The Watersticks led from the Alive to the Unalive, in other words to the Dead. She held him by pinching hard on the back part of the foot, above his heel. ‘But wouldn’t that hurt the baby tremendously?’ Nory wondered to herself. ‘Wouldn’t there be a big chance of it falling right out of your hand?’

She imagined a tiny naked baby hanging by one leg, terribly frightened, bright red in the face from screaming, kicking the other leg wildly. The cold water would make the poor thing gasp desperately and it would pour right up its nostrils, because they would be upside down. Water in your sinuses can be really painful. If the goddess really loved her baby, she would have gotten in the water herself and then gently lifted the baby by its waist from the shore, right side up, one hand on either side, and lowered him in, and where her hands were covering his skin, once he was almost floating, she could just let one hand go for a second, then close, then let the other hand go, then close. You have to be careful to hold up the head, too. The ankle was just not a practical or safe choice of place to hold a newborn child.

But they were much less careful about things like safety in ancient times. Nowadays safety is a major concern but back then the sky was the limit with danger, really. Nory’s first school was called Small People, and one of the first things they learned at Small People was the safety tip ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll.’ That was what you were supposed to do when your clothes caught on fire. If you ran, the flames would flare up, and you would probably get a third-degree burn. A third-degree burn is when the skin is black and charred.

‘Should you hide from the fireman?’ the teacher asked.

‘No,’ said the kids.

‘If he has a big mask on, should you be frightened into thinking he’s a space alien?’ asked the teacher.

‘No,’ said the kids.

‘And what do you do if your clothes catch on fire?’ asked the teacher.

‘Stop, drop, and roll!’ the kids shouted.

At first Nory was very happy to know that rhyme, but then she was taught it again at her next school, the Blackwood Early Focus School, where three firemen came by for a visit. That teacher was not in a good state of mind and shouted all the time, because the class was so wild. One kid spent every minute of his day rolling around on the floor, so there wasn’t much need to ask him to drop or roll. Stopping might be nice, though.