Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Nory’s parents took her out of that school, which was a public school, when they noticed that Nory had learned to write one more letter in three months, G. One letter in three months was just not acceptable, they said. So they put her in the International Chinese Montessori School, and presto, the alphabet was in her brain in a jiffy and she was learning songs in Chinese about Sung O Kung, the ancient monkey.

And then one day a fireman came in with some blankets and had two kids hold a blanket low to the floor. The blanket stood for the thick, thick smoke that you were supposed to crawl under. Crawling was fun but it also gave you a panicky feeling because you could imagine being in a room and unable to know where the window was because the smoke was so thick, except for a tiny layer just above the floor. How would you possibly know where the windows were? You’d need to tape a card with an arrow on it pointing up at the window, so you’d know that there’s where you’d need to take a breath and plunge up into the hot smoke and smash out the window with a pillow. ‘And what do you do if your clothes catch on fire?’ asked the fireman.

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

That and don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, don’t talk to strangers, and the rainforest is burning to the ground, were the things that it seemed like every kid was taught over and over and over, to an endless limit. You got told them so many times, on TV ads as well — wasn’t there anything else in the world that kids should know? For instance other safety things, like: Be careful when you play with your little brother because his head is quite hard and it could break your nose. Or, don’t run in fancy black shoes because their soles are nine times out of ten extremely slippery. Or, don’t try to pull down a wooden Chinese-checker set from a shelf above your head because it can fall straight on your toe and make the toenail turn dark purple and almost completely fall right off. Or, don’t chew too wildly or you might bite your tongue, which really hurts.

Or what about things that were not about safety at all, such as for instance salting meat, or about the three layers of the tooth, the inner layer, the middle layer, and the outer layer, called the crown, or the three layers of the coffin in Egyptian times, the layer of gold, the layer of silver, and the layer of something else, like bronze? Everybody’s gotten the idea that when somebody died, the Egyptians mummified them. Well, does that mean everybody got to be mummified, or does that mean ten out of a hundred? Why not spend some period of time answering that kind of question, rather than endlessly ‘Stop, drop, and roll’?

Long ago they used to preserve meat by stuffing it into a barrel with tons and tons of salt. The salt was so salty that the germs that are dedicated to making meat go bad couldn’t do what they were planning to do, because of the gagging taste, and the meat just sat there, month after month, getting saltier by the minute. The history teacher at Threll Junior School told that very interesting thing to the class, and when a boy began talking loudly and interrupting, the teacher said, ‘Be quiet, or I’ll stuff you in a barrel of salt.’ The boy turned bright red. Another time the teacher, Mr. Blithrenner, said to Roger Sharpless, ‘Roger, if you put your finger any deeper into your nose it’ll come out your ear.’

Nory hated added salt, but she loved Parmesan cheese, and when she was littler she used to pour out a big pile of Parmesan cheese on her plate and dab it up with her finger, if nobody was looking. Her cheeks got bright red when they had spaghetti because of a reaction to the cheese crumbs on them, not because she was embarrassed to eat cheese. She had no embarrassment whatever about eating cheese. Pamela Shavers said Parmesan cheese had lots of salt naturally in it. Crisps were naturally quite salty, as well. Once two bothersome boys found an empty package of crisps in a bin, or trash can, and they went up to Pamela Shavers and said, ‘Oh, Pamela, would you care for a bag of crisps?’ Pamela took the bag and squeezed it and when it went flat they laughed.

But there was something different than Parmesan cheese about pure salt sprinkled around on food — the wicked little crystals — as opposed to mixed into food, that Nory really wasn’t such a fan of. Also sugar sprinkled in with vegetables — if she didn’t know that there was added sugar in a pan of carrots, then it was fine, but if she knew, then she couldn’t bear to think about it. Nowadays Littleguy was a tremendous fan of any kind of sprinkleable cheese. He and Nory had their own individual miniature cheese dispensers, labeled ‘E’ for ‘Eleanor’ and ‘F’ for Frank. Littleguy ate the cheese by pouring out a little hill of it on his plate when their parents were talking about something like the history of table manners and not paying any attention, and then he licked his spoon so that it was sticky and rolled it in the cheese so that the little scribbages of the cheese stuck to the spoon.

Well, so far, nothing about ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll’ at Threll Junior School, not a hint of it, which was a relief. Because really how much use would it be to know that rhyme in a fire? It depended on the kinds of clothes you were wearing whether that would be a good safety tip or not. For instance, say you were trying to dash across some burning piece of wood to escape through the front door, and the hem of your nightgown caught fire. It wouldn’t be a good idea to throw yourself on the floor and start rolling around, because the floor might be burning, and if you had on a stretchy soft nightgown, you could pull it off and scamper out of it through the hole in the neck, when if you rolled around with it on, your legs would surely get burned.

They had had two fire drills already at the Junior School — one on purpose, and one by mistake. In a fire, the whole class was supposed to line up in a double row and the person at the front of the line called out the name of each child and checked it off on a piece of paper to make sure they were in line. The problem was that some kids would make a run for it, and the person calling out the names would wonder if those kids were hurt back in the back of the class and couldn’t call out, when actually they were already outside, flopped out on the Astroturf gasping in that farm-fresh air. What if there was terrible smoke, would they all line up lying down, and have their names called that way?

Drama class was turning out to be very good at the Junior School. In drama class they were paired off, a boy and a girl together, and they were learning to die in various ways. One person poured boiling oil on the other and the other had to act out what it was like to have boiling oil poured on him. Then they switched off. The drama teacher was very, very good. The first week they learned how to die by being shot, and they practiced fake falls. The teacher said, in a very sweet voice, ‘Oh dear, a sad, sad, thing happened to me today. So sad. I forgot my popgun. So I’ll just have to shoot you without it, like this.’ And she pointed her finger at each kid and said ‘Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!’ Everybody pretended to get shot and died. To do a fake fall, you begin standing up — of course — and you slide one of your knees down, down, almost touching the ground, then turn your head, and fall on the side, slide your whole arm down, then go still and dead. It’s easy to do it slowly, but to do it quickly, as if you’re really dropping dead, is not such an easy project. That was why it was so important to learn how in drama class.

In drama they also did a little skit where two people go to a pub, which is a bar, and one asks the other if he or she would like a drink, and then tells him to look somewhere off—‘Oh, look at that interesting menu over there, how fascinatingly interesting’—and then, plip, poisons the person’s drink by dropping a little tiny red pill into it. Nory poisoned Stefan’s drink first, and he writhed around on the floor until she thought he was going to sprain something. (A sprain is worse than a strain — they are two totally different things. A lot of kids didn’t realize that.) Then, when it was Nory’s turn to be poisoned, she acted the part of a princess who drinks the drink, realizes that it’s poison, because so many evildoers are wanting to steal the kingdom from her family, feels the stabbing of pain in her stomach, knows she is going to die within a manner of minutes, puts her hands together in a quiet adjustment on her lap, stretches out on the floor, and dies with the barest flutter of her eyelids.