Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Finally she got a new tray of food, and she sat anonymously down. People in her class were leaving to go back to the Junior School building. One after another they were going. Nory had her eye on them the whole time, except when she was looking down at her plate. She thought, ‘Ah, but she’s still there, so it’s okay.’ And then when that girl left, she said to herself, ‘Ah, well, she’s still there, so when worse goes to worse, I can go back with her.’ The problem was that the Junior School was far away from the dining hall, across two streets, and Nory had an awful if not atrocious sense of direction and knew she would never find it by herself. So she ate and ate and finished up and whammed out the door of the dining hall, hurrying to be with a girl who was in her class. Dorette was her name. Dorette said, ‘Sorry I can’t talk, I’m meeting a friend.’

Nory said, ‘Oh, okay.’ The other girl came up. It was a girl Nory didn’t like very much because she had said that Nory had a ‘squeegee’ accent on one of the first days of school. Nory stood a little way behind and started following them as they went around the buildings toward the old gate.

Dorette turned and said, ‘Go away. Why are you following us?’

‘Because I don’t know the way home,’ said Nory.

‘Home? Home?’ the girls said.

‘I mean, the way back to the class,’ said Nory.

‘Oh, go on, you know the way,’ the two girls said. ‘You lead us, and we’ll follow.’

So Nory started tenderly walking in front of them down the street, not vastly sure she was pointing in the right direction. There was a road curving up a hill that didn’t look familiar. There were no crosswalks. She turned around and noticed that the girls weren’t behind her. She started to feel scattered and scared. Then the two girls jumped out from behind a bush with red berries and laughed. She started following them again, and they told her to go away. Fortunately just at that point a teacher came out from a door in the building and the two girls said, all nicey-nicey, ‘Hello Mr. So-and-so.’ They began chatting with him. Nory was worried that they would tell the teacher that she had been following them and she would get in trouble, but they didn’t. So she could sneak along, pace by pace, some distance behind, from bush to bush. That was how she was able to get back. Later that day, on the playground, another girl said, ‘Hah-hah, you were sent back, you were sent back.’ Nory had no idea what the girl was talking about, so she said, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘For dropping your tray,’ the girl said. Nory said, ‘I was not. I went to the end of the line because you shouldn’t cut in. And I’m from America. We don’t say sent back in America to mean what you mean. We don’t say bin in America, we say trashcan. We don’t say crayons when we’re talking about colored pencils, we skip to the case and say colored pencils . Got it?’

The girl made a rabbit-nibbling face and shuffled off to Buffalo.

In history class that day, the teacher was talking about the Crusades, and he suddenly said, in the weirdest cowboy accent you ever heard, ‘And they went in, shootin’ and hollerin’ and plunderin’ up tarnation, by golly.’ Then he said to Nory, ‘I’m sorry. I should have asked your permission first. Do you mind if I make fun of the way Americans talk?’

Nory said, ‘If you think that’s the way Americans talk, go right ahead.’

The teacher said, ‘Thank you. And I give you permission to call us limeys whenever you like.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nory. ‘But why would I want to say that?’

‘In the States, that’s what you call us, is it not?’ said the teacher.

‘I don’t know, but I don’t think so,’ said Nory. ‘What are limeys?’

‘Ah, they’re an ancient seafaring people who eat limes on shipboard to keep their teeth from falling out,’ said Mr. Blithrenner.

Besides History, there was I.T., which were the initials of Information Technology, where they were learning the middle row of letters on the keys of the Acorn computers. And there was French, and Geography, and Music, and Netball, and Hockey, and other classes, too. There were a surprising amount of teachers at Threll School all together. Even the headmaster of the Junior School was the teacher of a class called Classics. He started off one class by reading in a deep, roly-poling voice about the trickles of blood of the Trojans mixing with the muddy water that collected in pools at the base of the walls of the ruined city. It turned out to be the story of Hercules. Or, not Hercules precisely, but someone with a name quite a bit like Hercules, although it wasn’t Hector either. Anyway, whoever he was, he was dipped in magical waters when he was a baby except for where he was held by his ankle.

A few days after that, the headmaster spoke to the whole Junior School in Hendall Hall, which was the place the whole school got together, except when they went to Cathedral once a week. He told them about a painter who had not believed in himself and had been so hungry that he had squeezed tubes of oil paint into his mouth. The paint had lead in it, and it affected his brain in a negative way, and soon enough he gruesomely shot himself in the chest. Now his paintings were worth millions of dollars, which would probably be billions of yen.

Kids want to eat lead because it tastes sweet, Nory knew, which is also why they want to eat toothpaste. You’re only supposed to put a pea-sized amount of toothpaste on your toothbrush but many kids put more. Nory thought that what they should make is a tube of toothpaste that squirts out green until you’ve squirted out just the right amount, and if you try to squeeze more out after that, the color turns red, meaning stop: Green light, red light. If you eat too much toothpaste, the fluoride in it will turn your teeth gray, but there was a kid at the Junior School who had a bad cavity or some sort of medical thing gone wrong in one of his pointy side teeth, one of the bicuspids maybe, that made it completely gray ‘from smokebox to buffer,’ as Littleguy would say. You only saw it when his mouth made a malicious laugh, as in ‘Hah-hah-hah, hah-hah-hah, I’m going to revenge myself on you for that!’ If that boy, who was really a fairly nice boy, had had a sweet tooth and eaten tube after tube of toothpaste, that same tooth would be just as gray as it was now, but he wouldn’t have the cavity to worry about, and the rest of his teeth would match the color exactly so it would blend in and wouldn’t be so noticeable. Nory’s own teeth were sometimes a little yellow, she thought, but then she went on a rampage brushing them individually one by one and got them to look pretty white. They looked white in photographs, anyway, which made her happy.

The moral of the story about the child who was dipped in magical water was: nobody is one hundred percent immortal. Except God, for those who believed in God. The moral of the story about the painter was: you never know who will be famous and talented, so try not to get discouraged, and don’t allow handguns. The moral of the story about gray teeth was: sometimes by trying to do a good thing, you do a bad thing instead.

Aesop’s fables were where the idea of having a moral came from, but some of them made no sense whatever. Before bed, Nory’s parents read to her in alternation with each other, so one night her mother would read something, the next night her father. That first week of September, while Nory was listening to her mother read A Hundred and One Dalmations , she was listening to her father read Aesop’s Fables . He very often fell asleep a few minutes into reading. You could tell he was beginning a doze because he would start pronouncing the words in a hurrying murmur and then stop. Murmur, then stop, murmur, stop. And phrases would get into the story that had nothing to do with anything. If Nory gave him a nudge in the arm, he would bob awake and squinch his eyes shut very tight and flare them open them very wide and forge off into another page. Then very gradually his voice would fall away into a mutter again. ‘Seward’s folly hima hima hima cartouche hima hima Barcelona hima hima hima.’ Sometimes he read for pages that way, it was really quite remarkable, mixing giblet after giblet of totally unrelated nonsense into the story. ‘And the canisters could use some priming,’ is something that he said one time, in the middle of the story of the crow and the stones. Nory wrote it down and told them all at breakfast. If the story was good, Nory’s father didn’t fall asleep nearly as fast as if the story was going through a boring stretch. Then the nudging didn’t work and she finally had to say, ‘Daddy, you’re tired, aren’t you?’