Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Pamela asked what pot-stickers were, and Nory said they were a Chinese food filled with meat that can burn your mouth when you bite in on them. At her old school, they also learned to write in Chinese characters, Nory said.

Pamela laughed and said, ‘In Chinese! You learned to write in Chinese?’

‘Yes,’ said Nory, feeling a little proud of being able to do that fairly unusual thing. ‘We had to, because it was the International Chinese Montessori School. We spent half the day on Chinese, we did our multiplication tables in Chinese, lots of things. Would you like me to write something for you?’

Pamela said okay, so Nory got a piece of paper out of her backpack and sat down on the sidewalk and wrote her the character for ‘hao.’ Hao was made up of two parts. Half of it was part of the character for mother, and half of it was part of ‘child,’ because the Chinese think that mother plus child equals good. It’s a good thing for a child to have a mother near her and a mother to have a child near her. So, sensibly, hao means good. In Chinese it looked like this:

Nory gave the paper to Pamela. Pamela looked at it and nodded. She said, ‘How would you say six times seven in Chinese?’ Nory said ‘Liu cheng qi den yu si shi er. So six times seven is forty-two.’

‘Oh,’ said Pamela.

‘If you know your numbers, it’s really easy,’ said Nory. ‘Would you like me to show you how the Chinese character for two could have turned into our American-English number 2, and how the Chinese three could have become our 3?’

‘Yes, but maybe another time,’ said Pamela, ‘because I think we have to go in.’

‘Okay,’ said Nory. ‘Well, bye.’

‘Bye,’ said Pamela.

That afternoon Nory tried to reinstruct every tiny detail of the International Chinese School in her mind. Talking about it to Pamela showed her how much she was already forgetting. It was a lovely school, where the kids were nice, most of them. When she first started in Upper Elementary one of the kids, Carl, who should remain nameless, told her in detail how he was going to kill her by throwing her in a swimming pool filled with poisonous insects. Carl was a warped older boy who left after that year.

A number of kids ganged up on her in the very beginning of that year, which was just about the only time anything that an adult would call being bullied ever happened to her. It was distressing enough that she could connect it to what Pamela might be feeling. But then she tried to think, ‘Honestly, was it a terrible thing that that boy, Carl, said all that mean stuff to me, and other kids mocked me?’ In her memory it wasn’t so unbearably bad because it was a very very long time ago. But that might be because it hadn’t gone on and gone on. You remember things better that happen over and over again, like Stop, Drop, and Roll. Except when they happen so many times that you don’t notice them whatsoever. Some parts of Neverending Story , the movie, she remembered very well, like the stone giant, and the flying dog that the boy meets. There’s a girl in the movie who is a princess who is important in a way because she’s going to die, but she’s minor, actually: the heroine is the boy. Nory thought she must have seen The Neverending Story recently in an advertisement, maybe a preview before another movie that her mother rented for her, because parts of it she had in her mind very clearly and colorfully and parts of it were fogged in. At the beginning some bullies throw the boy into the garbage, and he comes back at the end and he throws them into the garbage, all three of them. And someone loses his horse, because it sinks into the swamp and dies. That could be in Neverending Story II . There was a story similar to that part in a booklet that Nory’s father bought for her at the Cathedral shop. A man asks another man if he’s seen a hat floating in a very muddy road. The other man says, ‘Golly, no, I haven’t, why?’ And the first man says, ‘Well, I suspect there may be a man sitting on a horse underneath the hat.’

At the time they were mean to her, Nory had told Ms. Fisker about the boys in her class. Ms. Fisker was the upper elementary teacher who taught in English, in the afternoon. (Bai Lao Shi taught in Chinese, in the morning.) But Ms. Fisker said Nory had to learn how to handle the older boys and work matters out for herself. ‘Oh, Nory, I can see you’re developing a long tail, I can see it growing’—that’s what Ms. Fisker would say, because she was strongly not in favor of tattle tales. The rule was: ‘Don’t be a tattletale for little things, do be a tattletale for big things.’ Say if someone has broken someone’s thumb in the door. Something major. But Nory’s parents thought that Ms. Fisker probably should have ordered the older boys not to gang up on Nory. At some point the boys just stopped, though. And now it was just in her memory.

When Carl said that he would kill her by tossing her in the swimming pool with the insects she just disgustedly said, ‘Carl, you’re fat.’

Carl said, ‘Well, not as fat as your butt.’

When Carl said that, Nory couldn’t help giggling. Then he pointed at her and said, ‘Haw, haw! You think it’s funny! Haw, haw! I made you laugh!’ So Carl won that battle face down, because it’s really dumb-seeming to giggle at times. Carl just hated Nory, for some reason. And Nory hated Carl.

But a lot of what happened that year she couldn’t remember nearly as well as that bit. ‘That bit’ is how they would say it in England, and if you asked your friend to come over, they would say that you asked her to ‘come round.’ These days Nory couldn’t remember the order she had learned things at the ICMS or all the works she did — they called them ‘works,’ the little projects, like the number pyramid or a geography puzzle that they did. She couldn’t even remember all the kids in the class. She remembered one very nice girl named Steffie who left later on, who had a birthday party at her swimming pool where Nory had floundered into the deep end and had gotten about a gallon and a half of water in her lung and thrown up a tiny bit on the grass. She gave Steffie a pair of tiny glass slippers, wrapped up in probably the best wrapping paper she had ever drawn, with a picture of a girl in a rowboat near a willow tree on it. She still thought about those glass slippers. They were paperweights that a glassblower made, but they worked as real doll shoes. She wished she had those glass slippers, they were amazingly wonderful. But Steffie’s parents moved away to Lafayette and she started going to a different school. So that was the last birthday with Steffie.

It disturbed Nory very much to think that all she was going to know about what happened in her life was not very much at all. You only can really remember the things that happened when you were an older child and the things that happened to you now — that is, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or late last week. You live your life always in the present. And even in the present, this day, dozens and hundreds of little tiny things happen, so many that by the end of the day you can’t make a list of them. You lose track of them unless something reminds you. Say someone says, ‘Remember when you dropped your ruler this morning?’ And you do remember. But then that is lost in the tangle.

Now, some things you can just accept that you’re not going to have the slightest chance of remembering. It would be nice, but you know that it would be basically impossible. For instance, being in your mother’s womb, as it’s called. Some people thought babies could remember that. Nory one morning asked Littleguy if he could remember being tucked away in Mommy’s belly, long ago, and he said, ‘Yes. It had all things there, in she’s tummy. It had things that were called steam trains . It was filled with they. Filled with steam trains, City of Truro, Lord of the Isles, the Mallard. Pictures with steam trains, and toy ones, and jumping things, all. Filled, filled with they.’ Well, of course there weren’t toy trains in Nory’s mother’s womb, unless maybe he was remembering the small intestine chuffing around. Maybe he was remembering a freight train of food being digested going around and around him. But probably not.