Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

‘A double-decker jelly cake,’ said Nory, ‘Good story, Littleguy.’

‘Not quite yet,’ said Littleguy. ‘It’s a big digger, the scooper, scooper, it goes, kksssh, scooper, scooper, digger. And then there was a big thing there, a dumptruck, auger driller, a front loader.’

‘Yay, good story,’ said Nory.

‘Not quite yet,’ said Littleguy. ‘And there was something in the story, once upon a time, I have another story, I have another story too! Another story!’

‘Okay, just one more story,’ called Nory’s mother.

‘Once upon a time were two flat holes, and there was a big digger truck came over and ran over they, and got dirty dirt on they. They washed their feeties and eyes and toesies and they were all clean, the end.’

They dropped Kira off at her house and the outing was over.

About a week later the Threll School stopped for a vacation. Nory and Pamela shook hands, as if to say, ‘We made it.’ Kira went with her family to a place nearby London, so they didn’t see each other. Guy Fawkes Day happened during the break. There was a huge enormous bondfire and life-size models of Guy Fawkes were thrown into the bondfire. Nory was expecting the models to be little voodoo dolls of Guy Fawkes, not huge floppy heavy dolls the size of people, but life-size was how they did it. Guy Fawkes was a strongly Catholic man who had snuck barrel after barrel of gunpowder down into the basement, and he was just about to blow up the king when he was caught. So they burnt Guy Fawkes in a bondfire and now they have fireworks to celebrate that. Guy Fawkes Day is much more important a holiday in England than Halloween. Possibly they first chopped off Guy Fawkes’s head then burned him in the bondfire, Nory wasn’t clear on that, but that would certainly have been Nory’s preference, because she was not attracted to the idea of being burned. In any case, he was severely punished, in a way the Aztecs would understand quite well. Nory burned her finger on a sparkler in the backyard after the fireworks were over, because the metal got remarkably hot. The skin turned white where it was singed but it felt better when she put an ice cube on it.

No letter from Debbie came in the mail during break, but something else did: Nory’s marks. At International Chinese Montessori School they didn’t have marks at all, just a special conference with Nory sitting there with her parents. The teachers always said this and that: ‘Eleanor, oh, yes: bright, nice girl, talks too much, though, and she has to work harder on her spelling.’ The principal, Xiao Zhang, translated for the Chinese teacher, since Nory’s parents didn’t understand Chinese. There was never a piece of paper with marks on it that said good or bad, the way there turned out to be at Threll school. Threll sent out a sheet of paper with a list of Nory’s different classes and a set of boxes for either Excellent, or Good, or Satisfactory, or Weak, or Poor. Nory got all checkmarks for Satisfactory, except for one Good, in History. No Excellents whatever. She was a little disappointed not to get a Good in Classics because she had liked that class more than all the others and listened like a demon when Mr. Pears read to them. But she was relieved because she had been very worried that she was going to get a Weak in French because the French was completely refusing to stick in her head. Her goal for the year, she decided, was never ever to get a Weak or a Poor. But still, she was a tiny bit sad about English, because she thought her story about the girl and the dog wasn’t just a drab old Satisfactory. It wasn’t just the minimum you had to do, it was actually somewhat above the bare necessities and was possibly in the Good category.

But probably the objection for Mrs. Thirm was that Nory was supposed to write a shorter story that she would finish, and instead she’d written a longer one that ended with TO BE CONTINUED, and also of course her spelling was a disgrace-and-a-half, although Nory’s father said Nory spelled better than anyone did a thousand or two thousand years ago, because back then they had about eight different ways to spell every English word, and people just chose whichever way they felt like. They would say, ‘Today I think I’ll spell chair as chayer and tomorrow chayrre and the day after that, hmm, chaier might be nice, and the day after that I think it will be chere.’ Now it had to be chair every time, no matter what mood you were in.

One other reason Nory might have only gotten a Satisfactory and not a Good in English was that it turned out that Mrs. Thirm was not terribly fond of ‘nice’ and ‘then’ and ‘said.’ When they went back to school after break Mrs. Thirm told them that from then on they had to try whenever they could not to use ‘nice’ or ‘then’ or ‘said’ in their assignments, because they were extremely overused and she was tired of seeing them in their books. Nory felt a little discombobbledied at hearing that, because she used ‘nice’ and ‘then’ and ‘said’ quite often. There were only so many different ways you could say, ‘he laughed,’ ‘she giggled,’ ‘he answered,’ ‘they whispered,’ and so forth and so on, before you suddenly felt, ‘Okay, ladies and jellyfish, it’s time to go back to good old she said.’ And without ‘then’ Nory had to use ‘the following day’ or ‘the next thing that happened was’ or ‘later that week’ or ‘Three days passed,’ which were fine, but so was ‘then.’

Also Mrs. Thirm turned out to not like rhymes in poems, and the poems Nory had written for her had a fair amount of rhymes. One of her poems was:

I Went to a Poor Man’s House

I went to a poor man’s House yes,

The First thing I did was to Look at the poor man’s Dress

yes,

The second thing I did was to look at the Horrible big mess

yes,

The Third thing I Did was to stand up and confess yes

‘What a Horrible Big Mess’ yes.

The Poor man looked down at the Horrible big mess yes

And spoke up But did not confess but merely said ‘yes’!

Another one was:

Please Don’t Frighten Little Birdies Away

Proud people walk through

The little Birdies’ Feast.

And make them fly away.

And make it so they

Can not come back to where

They could have played

All day So please don’t

Frighten the little birdies

Away.

The poem she wrote most recently for Mrs. Thirm was:

I am trapped in a waterfall

And can hear the singing fishermen’s call,

But through the waves and

In a dark and gloomy cave,

I am enjoying what the world gave.

Basically all of Nory’s poems had rhymes in them somehow or other. And then Mrs. Thirm suddenly said: ‘I particularly don’t like poems that rhyme, but it’s just a matter of opinion.’ She told everyone, ‘It’s so difficult, there’s really no point.’ Nory raised her hand to suggest that one thing you could do would be to make a list of all the words that are rhyming words, which would make finding the rhymes a lot easier.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs. Thirm, ‘but it’s such a waste of time to make the list, and then you’re right back where you started, aren’t you?’ So Nory’s poems were not exactly the poems Mrs. Thirm would have naturally preferred. She was still perfectly nice about them, though. She didn’t gnaw her teeth and say ‘Not more disgusting rhymes!’ Teachers in England weren’t like teachers in America writing ‘Great Job!’ and ‘This is a gem of a story, Eleanor!’ and whatnot, and stamping cat-chasing-a-ball-of-yarn stamps around on the page — they just made a quiet checkmark to prove that they’d seen what you did and sometimes corrected the spelling in the margin. Once in a great while they wrote ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent prep.’ They weren’t as emotional.