Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Still, Nory thought it would be nice if you could think back at least to the age of three. It shouldn’t be impossible. Three was older than Littleguy, and Littleguy could understand an amazing number of things. But Nory couldn’t go back that far, really, except for a few scribs and scrabs. She remembered being eight, and back into being seven, and she went pretty much back to five, and then — it teetered a little bit. She only remembered her fourth birthday party, a Mermaid party, because she had watched the tape of it a number of times on TV.

One thing, though, she made a point of remembering and passing on to her older self. Every year that she got a year older she said to her parents, ‘Remember when I was five, I said I was five going on six? Remember when I was six I said six going on seven? When I was seven I’d be going seven on eight? Then going eight on nine? Well, now I’m going nine on ten.’ So each year the list of years got a little longer, but she remembered the earlier times that way, by saying the list over. Being thirteen would be very nice, because you’re in your teens when you’re thirteen, and you don’t have to read a big sign that says, ‘Children under the age of twelve cannot attend to this.’ Another thing she made sure to bring along every year with her for a long time was the memory that there were many many little amounts of money that she hadn’t paid back to her parents. Little collections of change she had found in the car and thought could be hers but maybe not, or times her parents had bought her a doll outfit or something when she told them she would reimburse them later when they got home from her own money, or gifts she bought other people with her own money, but borrowing it from her parents since she’d forgotten her purse. She would skip a week, not thinking of it, then still remember it and bring it into the next week, then skip a week, then bring it over. Finally she couldn’t keep the amount in her head because it had been added onto and subtracted from so much, and it began to pull at her, and she thought, ‘I know, I’ll pay them a hundred dollars when I grow up, and that will surely make up for anything I borrowed along the way.’ Then she didn’t have to keep track of that.

Ms. Fisker was a very good teacher with a humongously good memory. She could keep in the front-runners of her brain what each child knew and what they hadn’t learned yet. And she could persistently keep the whole class quiet and doing their own work, privately. That’s something you almost had to do as a teacher in a Montessori school because each kid is at a different level, learning some different scribbet of a thing, and there are lots of different ages of kids in a class. So for instance in Nory’s class there were kids who were seven and kids who were eleven. Some were doing ‘six plus five’ kinds of things, some were doing ‘numbers of seconds it takes a flicker of light to spark to the earth divided by the speed of light’ kinds of things, and Ms. Fisker had to be totally on her toes about that. Some were learning how to break up words into syllables and some were learning that a noun was a large black triangle and a verb, which is an action, was a large red circle, and the reason why is because it’s a red rolling ball, moving. And a proper noun was a long purple triangle, if Nory wasn’t mistaken, and the the articles, like ‘an,’ ‘a,’ and ‘the,’ were either a short light blue or a short dark blue triangle. The adjectives were either short light blue or short dark blue, depending on what the articles were. The adverb is a smaller orange circle. Each of these things had to be learned, one by one, by coloring in the shapes over the sentences, and some kids were at the black-triangle stage and some were at the small-orange-circle stage. And there were keyholes and green half-moons, and on and on — Nory had never learned grammar out that far. Nobody at the Junior School knew about these grammar shapes because they were specially designed as part of the Montessori system, so all that time she had spent thinking about why a black triangle was like a noun, because it had a wide base and just sat there steadily being whatever noun it was, was just time that could have gone ‘poof’ away, as far as her teachers now were concerned. But she liked knowing that a red circle stood for a verb because it rolled. You could use it for other things you learned later, for instance you could say to yourself, ‘Mass is a blue triangle, energy is a red circle.’

So each kid in Ms. Fisker’s class had a different number of these shapes and math skills scrummaging around in their head, and Ms. Fisker had everything that they had in their heads in her head, at just the level that they had it, each of them, which was part of why she was such a good teacher. After Carl luckily left, Nory got used to the class and Ms. Fisker started to like her and told her things. The most amazing thing Ms. Fisker told her was that she was getting married and going to a different city. It was really amazing to think of Ms. Fisker, one of the proudest teachers, getting married, but she did. Of course, she had been married once before and had a son who was eighteen, but the class hadn’t really taken that in. They didn’t really know that very much. Ms. Fisker had a mischevious cat, and she would wake up, and the cat would prance around on her, and knock down her bottles. Her cat was a mischievous little thing. One time her son had had an operation on his knee and the cat jumped up on his leg and she said he almost went through the ceiling. If you were designing a teacher from scrap, you couldn’t design a teacher better than Ms. Fisker. But Ms. Fisker’s last day at the school was at the teacher-appreciation dinner at the end of the year. The main dish at the teacher-appreciation dinner was a huge fried pig. Its head was there on the big pan in the middle of the table. The head of a pig was not in Nory’s opinion a good menu choice for a teacher-appreciation dinner since there were a lot of younger kids who might be very bothered by the sight of that head, not to mention older kids such as Nory herself who might be revolted as well. You could see its closed eyes. To be polite, she ate a taste of the pig, but only a taste. And that was the last she saw of Ms. Fisker for quite a while.

The teacher who came in place of Ms. Fisker was Ms. Beryl, who was good but totally different. She liked talking about herself a lot, whereas Ms. Fisker only told them a few careful things, such as about her cat in the morning. Ms. Beryl gave out extremely hard spelling lists with words like ‘dicotyledon’ and ‘pinnate’ and ‘microeconomics’ because she was probably more interested in the much older kids, the eleven-year-olds, and wanted them to be getting ready to go to college. It kind of slipped Ms. Beryl’s mind that the younger kids were still trying to get it into their heads how to spell ‘really’ and ‘tomorrow’ and ‘would’ and ‘unknown.’ Nory had a custom of spelling ‘tomorrow’ as ‘tomaro.’ The math suddenly turned into a jostle of cube roots and algebra kinds of things, with x’s and y’s and breaking things down into their factories, when Nory was still trudging away with her times tables. As her friend Bernice said, ‘When you wear a bra, you study algebra, not before.’

So Nory got exceedingly distracted, looking at the days of the week on the wall calendar and thinking ‘SuMTWTHFRS, hmm, that could almost spell smothers with furs ,’ and from time to time she got into a state of click-laughing with Bernice, who was an easy person to get into a state of click-laughing. They positively could not stop, even though they were almost on the edge of crying, begging each other with their eyes not to start out on another huge laugh, and Ms. Beryl would get furious. Click-laughing is just when you laugh so heroriously that you only make little tiny sounds at the back of your throat. It set Ms. Beryl on fire, and one time, she wrote a note in Nory’s booklet that said that Nory must make a more asserted effort on her concentration skills, because her constantly wanting to know what others were doing around her and her constantly being unable to resist distracting them from what they were working on by giggling was her FATAL FLAW. Ms. Beryl read her note to Nory’s mother and underlined FATAL FLAW three times while she read. Nory was standing a short distance away, pretending to be thinking over other things or nothing, but she heard it near and clear. On the other hand, she wasn’t exactly sure what a fatal flaw meant. But now that she had been going to Classics class at the Junior School and had learned about heroines like Achilles, she knew.