Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

The complete and total ban on ‘said’ and ‘then’ and ‘nice’ was hard for Nory, though, and it got harder. Poetry they didn’t do that much of in class, but they did unquestionably do a fair amount of story-writing, and Nory would sit writing her story and come to a place where she needed to say, ‘he said’ and she would spend five minutes trying to figure out a way not to say it, and by then the thing she had in mind to write next had disappeared in a chuff of steam, as Littleguy would say. Sometimes she would even write the ‘s’ of ‘said’ and then think, ‘Oh, I’m too tired, I just can’t possibly go through the effort of pulling the top off the ink eradicator at this moment,’ and so she would try to imagine a word that began with ‘s’ but wasn’t ‘said,’ like ‘he smiled’ or ‘he smirked’ or ‘he shouted.’ But then whatever it was that ‘he’ did changed his personality totally and he became this very unaturally smiley or smirky and shouting person that didn’t fit in with the story. Another thing you could do was change the comma to a period and change the ‘h’ into a capital ‘h’ and then go on with a new sentence about what he was doing. Say as an example you by mistake wrote:

‘Mmm, this coliflower looks delishous,’ he s

You’re all the way to the ‘s’ of ‘said’ and suddenly you remember, ‘Oh no, I’ve done it again, Mrs. Thirm said no he said!’ Well, then just go around and around the comma with the point of your pen, turning it into a big and very circular and very confident period, and then just change the lower-case ‘h’ to a capital ‘H,’ which is easy to do since you just have to straighten out the rounded part of the ‘h’ and make the short part long — and then have him doing something casually beginning with ‘s.’ So it would become:

‘Mmm, this coliflower looks delishous.’ He spooned out a large amount for him self and breathed-in the steem.

That was just an example. But that way of solving it also could cause confusion in the story because often it worked out that when you read it out loud to people you couldn’t tell who was talking and it sounded jerky. That was why it drove Nory totally bonkers to have the ban on ‘said.’

As for ‘nice,’ well, yes, Nory did use ‘nice’ a lot, quite frankly. But ‘nice’ was a very, very important word for kids in fifth year, which is fourth grade in America, and it was important to the younger kids of Littleguy’s age as well, and kids in general, because if you think about a kid’s language, it can mean about eighty million different things. You can say a person is nice or a school is nice or a way of spending an afternoon is nice. It’s not as definite as ‘fun’—say a few things went wrong in your afternoon, so it wasn’t completely and frolickingly ‘fun’ but it was still a very ‘nice’ afternoon. Or say Littleguy made a drawing of the Lord of the Isles, a distinguished steam engine, and gave it to Nory as a present. So basically two little circles and a big circle and some driving bars. If you said, ‘Oh, Littleguy, that’s very kind of you,’ it could almost sound a little sarcastic, or too fancy, but if you said ‘Oh, Littleguy, that’s so nice of you,’ you were saying what you intended to say. If you said a person at school was very kind, you could just mean that they were very kind to you, and yet maybe you wouldn’t say they were very nice because for some reason you didn’t want to be with them because they had a different set of interests or maybe they were not very kind to some other person, like Pamela. And furthermost, it was the exact word that kids used, and Nory was writing conversation that kids had, so she would come to a point in the sentence where obviously the word that the child would tend to use was ‘nice’ and she would suddenly remember, ‘Alert, alert, no “nice” allowed’ and she would be ready to tear her hair out by the roots.

Actually Nory wouldn’t be ready to tear her hair out by the roots because it was almost impossible to tear out your hair, from Nory’s point of view, either by the roots or by the bare tips, because you would pull on one big grab of hair, but only some of that would come out, since you never have quite as much of a grip on the whole thing. And besides you can’t have the willpower to pull hard enough to make it all come ripping out like a plot of grass. You could of course cut your hair so that it looks like it’s been teared out if you want to be included in a chapter in one of those books that include all the amazing, but luckily untrue, things in the world. That would be ‘tearing your hair’ to some extent. But the only time Nory ever pulled even one hair out was not when she was going crazy over something like having to not use ‘nice’ in her prep, but when she was thinking very very carefully about something, and as she was thinking she would anonymously take a tiny piece of hair in her fingers and pull at it ever so very slightly, testing how much pulling it could take. Sometimes possibly one hair would finally go poink and come out but that was it, nothing drastic.

Thomas Mottle’s hair was cut straight as a pin in back, so that when he walked it moved with a bobbing motion. He was a chorister, like Roger Sharpless, and he looked like such a pearl of a boy, but really inside he was the kiss of the devil, basically. And one day, which wasn’t the finest of days anyway, Thomas Mottle did something to Pamela that made Nory want to tear out some of his hair, it made her so steamingly angry. It began as a good day because Nory and Kira got into a state of herorious giggling by pretending to worship Nory’s almighty ink eradicator, after Nory got it to balance upright on the table. Actually Nory laughed before Kira noticed, but quite quickly they were laughing the exact same amount, and the funny thing was that Kira hadn’t seen Nory do the thing that was actually funny, she only heard Mrs. Thirm say ‘Nory, what may I ask are you doing?’ Nory had been bowing her head in worship before the ink eradicator and then she and Kira starting saying, ‘No, no, no, no, you can only worship one god,’ so they pretended to attack it and punch it without their hands touching it, because they didn’t want to knock it over.

That was extremely fun, as you can imagine, but then the bad part of the day was that Mrs. Thirm gave them a Mental Maths test in which Nory got one answer right out of fifteen. Mrs. Thirm was saying the multiplication problems aloud very fast in a way Nory didn’t understand, since English people say double-naught or triple-three sometimes when they mean ‘zero zero’ or ‘oh oh’ or ‘three three three’—let alone when they say ‘M-I-double-S-I-double-P-I’ for the spelling of Mississippi, which always tempted Nory to want to write a letter d for ‘double’ or a number two, depending on whether it was numbers or letters, that is. Mrs. Thirm was doing something similar, but not exactly that, and Nory couldn’t conceivably figure out what in the Blue Blazers Mrs. Thirm was asking the class to do — so bingo, one right answer out of fifteen in Mental Maths, which is not a very good record. So that made it not the finest of days. And then after lunch along came Thomas Mottle.

The bothering of Pamela was continuing steadily anyway, and getting worse. It had progressed to the stage of barking Pamela’s shins. But the kids who did it were clever kickers and never did anything when a teacher would catch sight. ‘Barking your shin’ is what it was called because it’s as if the bark came off. In other words, the skin was scraped. Pamela told Nory about it but she only saw it with her own eyes a few times, because they didn’t do it when Nory was there.