Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

EVER LASTING

CRISPS

** Now Even Freasher **

Nory wasn’t allowed to eat the kind of Prawn chips that Pamela usually brought in for break except on special occasions because they had an artificial fragrance of sugar in them and Nory’s parents didn’t want her to possibly get brain damage from a chemical molecule that dressed up in a sweet disguise as if it was sugar when really there was nothing sugary about it, so that your brain didn’t know how to clean itself out after the feeling of sweetness was gone from your mind. Kira didn’t care for Prawn chips — but they really were wonderful because they dissolved on your tongue almost as if they were that kind of super-sour candy that foams up on your tongue.

Finally Space KeBob 7 was over and Nory and Kira went up to Nory’s room and Nory showed Kira her dolls. Kira was polite about them, but not as interested as she might have been. She did like the little metal cars on the edge of the bathtub that changed color depending on whether they were dipped in cold water or hot water. So they played with the color-changing cars for a while. Kira didn’t seem to want to try to get a story going about them, though, the way Debbie probably would have.

Wimpole House was a long quease of a drive away. The farm was good. Some of the rare cows had huge heads and quite bulging eyes that looked as if they might plop out onto the hay. That might explain why they weren’t as successful as the kinds of cows farmers used now. One black cow nipped Littleguy’s finger when he was feeding it some green pellets and the finger turned red. Littleguy cried but then he bravely went on to feed the goats, which turned their heads to fit their horns under the bars of their cage — their lips were soft and speedy over your hand, taking the crumbles of food, and they stretched their necks out so far sometimes that they cut off their breathing a little against the bars and you heard them making choking noises, like a dog when he pulls at his collar. But because there were bars you didn’t feel nervous the way you could feel with the beady-eyed swans by the river.

The house had a crunchy stone path going up to it. Crunchy paths were very important to this kind of fancy palace-house because then when you walked into the house the feeling of walking on a real floor or a real rug would feel unusually wealthy and very hush-hush. Also the gravel helped to clean off any dung or mud or other nonsense from your shoes, although there was much less anonymous dung nowadays than in the days of the wives of Henry the Eighth, for example.

While they were walking up, a little girl bumped her head on a place under the stairs up to the house and cried without any exaggeration, for it had been quite a sharp bump. Nory’s father bought two children’s guidebooks, so Nory and Kira could both have one. The Wimpole children’s guidebook wasn’t quite up to the snuff of the Ickworth children’s guidebook, but what could you do? The main thing about the afternoon basically was that it was a totally different experience going around a Stately Home with Kira because Kira was infinitely competitive, so that if the guidebook said, ‘Can you find such and such a teeny little bell-pull they used to attract the servants?’ then Kira was off in a frantic dash and scrabble to find it before Nory did.

Tables and paintings and chairs and hidden doors went flittering by from room to room that Nory couldn’t look at because she was trying to keep up with Kira. She didn’t want to race, but then again she also didn’t want to lose if Kira did want to race, and Kira definitely wanted to race. Not that they were running, either, just going as fast as they could while pretending to be very calm and smooth and angel-may-care. They came to a picture of a girl walking her dog. ‘Oh, what a lovely painting,’ said Kira, but Nory looked at her out of the corner of her eye because she wasn’t so completely sure Kira actually liked the painting all that much. Kira was just pleased to have gotten there first, possibly, since it was mentioned in the children’s guidebook and Kira was so competitive. Nory had wanted to arrive at the painting at least at the same time as Kira, so that she could admire it without a feeling of having lost a race, because she was a fan-and-a-half of dogs in things like paintings and statues, mainly because she so very much wanted a dog of her own, craved for one, and couldn’t have one, and Kira did have one, a golden retriever, which was just exactly the kind of big, hairy, smelly dog that Nory desperately wanted and couldn’t have because, for one thing, the English government locks up every single dog that comes into England for six months to make sure it doesn’t have a plague.

So, because Nory felt a trifle cross, she said, when they were both in front of the painting of the girl walking her dog: ‘Hmm. Her shoes aren’t perfect, and the dress could go higher up.’ Then she said, ‘Let alone the strange pink sleeve floating out behind her. Also, her hat could be improved. It looks like it’s about to jump the gun. The dog looks a bit vicious, too. He could be improved.’

‘Well!’ said Kira, with some chin in the air and some humphing in the voice. ‘I guess you don’t like that painting very much at all, do you?’

‘I like the ground quite a bit,’ said Nory, ‘and the light catching on the rocks. The bush is good, and the houses, there’s plenty I like, but it’s true — the whole middle part of the picture, including the girl and her hat, is not exactly my taste.’

Kira went back to her guidebook. She was much, much better at the word-puzzles in the back than Nory was, because Kira was a wiz of a speller, and Nory was a speller from Mars, if not from the Big Dipper. Kira knew right on the spot that NGOL ERYLALG was a scramble of LONG GALLERY.

On the stairs they passed by a painting of dead birds, which was called a still life because the birds are not moving or flying, but are just there, still as glass, which makes them easier to paint. ‘Still deads’ would be a more realistic name for them than ‘still lifes.’

‘Ulg, I think I just lost my appetite,’ said Kira.

‘Wouldn’t they go a little rotten while they were being painted?’ asked Nory. She was remembering something Mr. Blithrenner told them in History about the Aztecs, which was that once the priests were done with a sacrifice, they let the person’s brains rot in his chopped-off head. That was somewhat like what they did to Oliver Cromwell for chopping off the king’s head. They dug him up a few years after he was dead, then cut his head off of his by now totally disgusting body, and put it on a spike on a building so that any child passing by would point at it and say, ‘Mom, what is that strange black lump with teeth?’ Once again, nothing to be proud of.

The people who figured out Ickworth House had a better idea of what you would want to pass by on the stairway every day and instead of a big painting of dead birds they put up a woman holding a fan. The real-life fan that was painted in the picture was attached to the wall above the fireplace in one of the rooms upstairs, so you could compare the painted fan and the real fan and see how good a job the painter had done. He had done a fine job. Some fans used to be made from chicken skin, though, so they would qualify as being still lifes, too.

The Yellow Drawing Room of Wimpole House was quite reasonable, and it had a dome that was shaped like the Jasperium of the Cathedral, but with a chandelier hanging down from it that was slightly on the scrawny side. Ickworth had a humongous chandelier over the dining room table. A man there had explained that it used to be at a different house but it had suddenly plundered from the ceiling one day for some reason and they’d had to prune it down, like a huge bush that was run into by a tractor. They carefully saved all the good pieces, and threaded it with new string, and now you couldn’t possibly tell that it wasn’t the way it was meant to be when you looked at it, since it was an extravaganza of sparkles as it was. Kira found out from the children’s guidebook that it wasn’t actually a chandelier but a ‘gasolier,’ running on gas power.