Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Pamela said, ‘Oh no, I can’t go to Mr. Pears, because he’ll go to Mrs. Thirm.’ So she just didn’t do anything. And it began to get gradually a little worse and a little worse, time by time. Kira kept saying to Nory, ‘Whatever you do, do not speak to Pamela.’ She said: ‘Every time you speak to Pamela it will make you less popular.’ She said, ‘Just spend your time with me.’ Nory liked Kira and was in the early part of a friendship when you are sort of under a person’s spell a little, basically. So for two days she did stay away from Pamela more than she had — not completely, because she sat next to her for one lunch, but she spent most of the time with Kira. But it pulled at her, what she was doing, because she knew she was not helping Pamela and maybe hurting her feelings. Nory told this to her parents. They said that when a group of people decide to not speak to a person and pretend they don’t exist it was called the Silent Treatment, and though it wasn’t physically bullying in the meaning of punching someone or screaming at them it was a quiet mental torture and awful. They wanted to tell someone at the school about it, but Nory said that Pamela didn’t want anyone to know about it. They said that the bad thing about bullying was that people who didn’t ever imagine that they would be doing mean things to a person, people like Kira, ended up doing mean things, because it spreads. And the person who’s being bullied gets kind of numb and bewildered and doesn’t know how to take action.

So next break-time Nory sat on a wall side by side with Pamela. Kira was furious and stomped off. Nory found her later in the music room, with the headphones on, reading a book. Nory said, ‘Kira! I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I’ve been in a state about it. I looked in the changing room, I looked in the classroom, I looked under the tree, I looked in the bathroom, I didn’t even go to the bathroom because I was so busy looking for you. I even looked in the front field!’

Kira said, ‘Oh, hm, yes.’ She was not apologetic in any way and just sat there like a bump on a rug.

It hurt Nory’s friendliness toward Kira that Kira had this character flaw of being very possessive and jealous and needing her all to herself. And the thing was, also, that Kira was generally in some ways a rough kind of punching friend — friendly punching. If Kira got mad at something, she would tighten up Nory’s tie so afterward for a little while Nory’s neck had a sweaty feeling from the itch of the collar. But when Nory went back to being friendly to Pamela, Kira began saying sharp sarcastic things, that were half-jokes, half not-jokes, like: ‘Nory, do you like torturing people?’ Nory was confused for a second because her parents had used that word and she thought Kira was talking about Pamela. She said, ‘Um — do you?’

‘No,’ said Kira. ‘But evidently you do, because that’s what dentists do.’

‘Kira!’ said Nory, laughing, but not feeling particularly good. Her feelings were still hurt later when she thought about it. She could have said, still jokingly, but meaning what she was saying, ‘How dare you insult the poor dentists, who are just trying to help. It’s your fault. You got your own cavities. You should have brushed your teeth. Then the dentist would only have to put good old paste inside of your mouth, spread it around, and Mr. Thirsty would suck out all the saliva that gathered into a little puddle in your lower mouth.’ Nory liked the feeling of Mr. Thirsty thirsting out the saliva, the hollow bubbling sound he made. Mr. Thirsty was just a name dentists gave to a certain little bended piece of suction tube, to make it seem friendlier to kids. And it worked. If you you kept it in too long, you might completely dry out your mouth, which would be an interesting experiment. Probably a dental researcher has tried it. Nory used to try to dry her tongue completely by sticking it out for a long time. If you lie there on your bed with your tongue out for long enough it will get so totally dry that it glues itself to your mouth when you pull it back in. But it’s probably not good to do that too much. In one of her books about Egypt there was a horrible picture of a mummy curled up on its side with its tongue sticking out. They’d found the tongue in five pieces, dried up of course, and they’d carefully glued it back together. It was black and completely disgusting.

One boy, one of the three boys named Colin that Nory knew of — there was Colin Sharings, Colin Deat, and Colin Ryseman — started coming up to Nory after she was spending time with Pamela. He started saying, in a smeary little high voice, ‘Oh, ho, Pamela’s friend, oh? Pamela’s friend.’ Nory had saved up a little list of things that she could say back to this kind of person. Such as: ‘Calling all police, calling all police, there’s a grub in the classroom. Take it away, take it away.’ There were lots of grubs in the yard of the Trumpet Hill house. They were white little wigglers, not very attractive, and if somebody stepped on them, they went all red.

If it was outside that Colin came up and said something unpleasant, then Nory could say that she had no idea that earthworms could talk.

Nory tried the earthworm one out on him one afternoon. ‘My goodness, I simply had no idea earthworms could talk! Boy, did you prove me wrong.’ Colin kicked some leaves and said, ‘So you didn’t know earthworms could talk, Pamela’s friend? You don’t know very much, do you, Pamela’s friend?’ Then he walked drearily away, chin on parade. It was sort of a tie. It’s difficult because of the golden rule, you shouldn’t ever say anything that’s extremely rude, but you get angry, and you have to come up with comebacks that are not bad words, and not too insulting, not so insulting that it’s really mean to bring them up. So for example you couldn’t ever bring up Arthur’s problem with the cavity in his bicuspid, because that’s too true to make fun of. Colin Sharings had a pink mole on his ear, but you couldn’t make fun of that, either. You had to come up with whatever you’re going to say very quickly, too, because there you are, and there’s the person who’s said the rude thing to you, smirkingly looking pleased with himself, and the longer the rude thing is out on its own the more chance there is that people will laugh against you.

The first time Colin came up and mocked her for being Pamela’s friend Nory wasn’t prepared for it. She just said, ‘Yes, I’m Pamela’s friend. Is there a problem?’ That worked quite well, except that Nory was standing with Kira when Colin said it, so Colin then said to Kira, because he was a fiend of badness, ‘And you like Pamela, too-hoo,’ using the grossest kind of mocking singing voice. Kira didn’t say anything, so Nory said, ‘No, as a matter of fact Kira doesn’t like Pamela. So that shows how much you know about the whole kitten caboodle.’

But Pamela herself was nearby and probably heard Nory say that, and Nory worried afterward that that would hurt her feelings to have said that Kira didn’t like her to Colin. Pamela didn’t mention it next time they talked, though. After that crude awakening, Nory began saving up the comebacks so she wouldn’t get tricked into saying something she wouldn’t want to have said.

But the other problem, which was a bigger problem, was that some of why Nory wanted to be friendly with Pamela was because she thought Pamela truly deserved to have some friends who stuck with her, and she knew that if she was friendly with her it might be just that tiny straw that broke the camel’s back of the habit that the kids had of ganging up on her. But Nory also had an idea that probably Pamela would never be a really close true friend, a dear friend, because they were quite different in certain ways. Other people were being bad to Pamela, and so Nory was feeling she ought to do her best to forfeit her obligation and be more of a friend than she would have been naturally, in real life, which made her feel a little artificial. When she walked back to the Junior School with Pamela they had all-right conversations but they weren’t the kind of conversations about things that she would have had with Debbie, where they talked about how much fun it was to put Barbie shoes on ‘My Little Pony’ horses and dress up their manes with flower petals. Debbie loved those ‘My Little Pony’ horses, and you had to admit, seeing them all set up in a row, they looked pretty fancy in high-heeled shoes, with their puffy manes. And it wasn’t the kind of wild-laughter conversations that Nory sometimes had with Kira or Janet or Tobi, at the Junior School, where somebody would keep trying to say something over and over and couldn’t because it was so heroriously funny they couldn’t finish the sentence. Pamela told Nory about everyone in her family. Very interesting: her uncles, her aunts, her cousins, her second cousins, what they did, what they looked like, what they watched on TV. Nory told Pamela about her family, but not in as much detail because it wasn’t as impressive a family, since she only had four first cousins and a lot of her great-aunts and people like that had already died. They both agreed that chutney was fairly disgusting, but when Nory said that the thing she liked least in the world, par none, was fried chicken, Pamela said she liked fried chicken and that her Dad went out and bought fried chicken from Captain Chicken USA at least once a week. (Captain Chicken was a place that was trying to trick you into thinking it was Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the same red letters, and figuring that, ‘Oh, you’re English, you won’t be able to draw a difference.’) Nory hurried on to explain that probably she disliked fried chicken for a particular reason, which was that she’d had it so much at her old school, the International Chinese Montessori School, where it was piled up in large foil pans and got cold and was extremely dark-meatedly greasy. Nory had eaten too much Chinese fried chicken in her life for her to be able to stand another drumstick. The rest of the food had been pretty good, though, she said. No jacket potatoes, of course, because the Chinese are basically less interested in potatoes than America and England is. The jacket potato is a European dish. One time, Nory told Pamela, her whole class at the International Chinese Montessori School learned to make pot-stickers, which are difficult because sometimes you make the wrapping small and there’s too much of the meat, or the filling, in the pot sticker, and sometimes you do too little filling. There are many problems and things that can go wrong. It’s really difficult, and you have to seal it with egg.