Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

She carried him wherever he went. And, the end.

The thing that had failed in Nory’s own life was that right now she didn’t have a best friend in England. And she honestly missed her best friend from America, Debbie, who hadn’t written back. Some kids are not so good about writing letters, though. Another sad and unfair thing was that Nory had only gotten a tinily short time to have Debbie as her best friend, since she’d only met her very recently, in about the past two years.

The great thing that was important to know about Debbie was that she love, love, loved telling stories with her dolls. She had four stuffed kitten dolls that made a purring sound when you turned them at an angle, not quite identical in their faces but almost identical, and she had an extraordinary imagination that just went on and on and on to an endless limit. Nory and Debbie played the Samantha game together, which was an everlasting game, in which disaster after disaster happened to Samantha and everybody else who took place in it. One time Samantha was hanged by her foot on the lampshade because a dog named Fur was going to burn her. Fur was actually a very good dog, he was a puppet dog that Debbie loved most of all her animals and slept with. (Debbie loved her pandas, too, but her pandas were more of a collection.) But they had to have a bad creature in the story or it wouldn’t have the feeling of something failing, so they had the idea that he had been given a pill by this wandering bad person that made him bad for a short time. So the result was that he was being quite dreadful, temporarily, and wanted to kill the kitties and Samantha. That allowed him to be bad for the sake of the story but not overall bad for the sake of Debbie’s dear animal that she slept with. The four adventurous kitties figured out a way to save themselves by pretending there were only two kitties and getting the dog Fur to take a second pill that would make him go to sleep. When he woke he was his old warmhearted self again. Telling those stories with Debbie was so miracly much fun.

Before she knew Debbie, Nory told her stories by herself. It was hard to remember how she began, but it appeared to her now that she might have begun with little snibbets of stories she told in different voices in the bath, or looking in the mirror, because those were some of the most important storytelling situations. She had a rubber raccoon that had hundreds of adventures in the bath. Obviously she couldn’t take Cooch herself because Cooch was (speaking of things you shouldn’t speak of) sewn: she was a cloth puppet and couldn’t get wet.

Sarah Laura Maria Raccoon was one when Nory found her, abandoned by her parents lying cold and numb by the road. She and Sylvester had adopted her, and then it turned out that Cooch was their own lost child. A witch had taken away their own child long before. The witch came pouring up from the steam of a grilled cheese sandwich one day, an ugly thing, and stole their dear Coochie away, and their hearts were broken, or ‘juken down’ as Littleguy would say, since that’s how he pronounced broken down. Heartjuken for many long years they lived in their small cottage, until one day they found an older Raccoon cold and abandoned by the road. ‘We must adopt her, she looks so much like our own long lost Sarah Laura Maria,’ they said. When she revived a little she told them what had happened, that she had been living a perfect life with her two parents when a wicked witch came along and took her, but fortunately she escaped by throwing salt in the witch’s eye and dashing out of the witch’s boat and jumping overboard, where the mermaids took her to their castle and cared for her and tried to teach her as best they could to be a mermaid raccoon. She had grown very thin when she was with the witch but she grew plumper now, feeding on sea salads. And sometimes — if by chance someone in a boat threw it overboard — a good old potato. She did her best and she wore long flowing dresses made of the finest kinds of seaweed found near Africa, but she was a land-raccoon in her heart and finally she thanked the mermaids with many hugs and waves and swam ashore. There the husband and wife, out on a walk on the beach, found her.

‘Darling, do you notice how much this Raccoon looks like our own dear child?’ the mother asked.

‘Yes, yes I do,’ said the husband. ‘I wonder if she’ll want to play with some of the toys that our dear little child used to play with.’ Sadly he went upstairs and got down the box of things. There was a Fisher Price Main Street, with a set of five letters that you could put into a mailbox, and a set of foam numbers that fit together, and many other things.

‘I had just that toy,’ said Cooch. ‘And just that toy.’

‘You did?’ said the parents, in amazement. ‘Could she be …?’ they wondered. ‘What is your name?’

‘Sarah Laura Maria,’ she said.

‘But that is the name of our own daughter, who was stolen away by a witch many years ago!’ said the mother and father.

‘I was stolen away by a witch, too,’ Coochie told them shyly.

‘You’re our daughter! Oh, come here, oh my!’ And they hugged her and kissed her and were overjoyed forevermore.

So Nory did tell stories like that before she met Debbie, to herself, but Debbie was a wonderful friend because she was willing to let the story go where it preferred to go, and she could think up disasters for Samantha that Nory couldn’t conveniently think up by herself. Debbie had a very wide, wide face, and long black hair that was shiny and perfect, because her parents were Chinese and Filipino, although she spoke only American, plus the Mandarin Chinese they learned in the International Chinese Montessori School, which was also called ICMS. Neither of them could speak Cantonese, which was a totally different bowl offish from Mandarin. When the two of them were drawing something together, though, they would sing a song in Mandarin that their Chinese teacher taught them, called ‘Namoowami tofo.’ The song went something like

Xie er po, mao er po,

Shen shang de jia sha po.

What it meant was basically, ‘His shoes are broken, his hat is broken.’ Or rather, that was the translation that the teacher gave them. The problem was that their teacher hardly knew a giblet of English. Nory’s translation to herself was, ‘Shoes are torn, hat is torn, his whole outfit is torn.’ The song was about a crazy monk. The best part was just a sound, ‘Namoowami tofo,’ which was the prayer to the Buddha that the monk used to do his magic. He was born from the Buddha. His name was Ji Gong. He was very free, even though he was a monk.

Nory still sang the song quite often, because some Chinese songs are so great that how can you not sing them? But she was at the point of forgetting a lot of the Chinese characters she used to know, such as

which means ‘wood,’ or

which means ‘spill.’ She never wrote Chinese now. Nobody in her class now at Threll Junior School was Chinese, even though there were some Chinese kids in the Senior School, and so there was nobody who even understood what a Chinese character was, and what pin yin was, and how you had to memorize the order of the strokes.

Her parents originally thought they might get a Chinese tutor for her in Threll, but Nory had school on Saturday mornings here, and plenty of homework, and that left her only one day off. If a Chinese tutor came on Sunday, Nory wouldn’t be exhausted so much as thinking, ‘Oh, my poor scrabjib of a weekend!’ When would they have time to drive to a castle or a palace, which is what they did every weekend? At Oxburgh Hall, high up in the tower where the princess stayed and sewed, they saw a little brick place where the Catholic priest would have to stuff himself when the government inspectors came sniffing.