Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

‘I’ll be very glad when we reach the end of term,’ said Pamela.

Nory was suddenly reminded of something she had thought of in the mirror brushing her teeth. ‘You know what we should do?’ she said. ‘Okay, you don’t want to tell the teachers or your parents. But we could still write a book about your whole experience, every good or bad thing that somebody did, Thomas kicking you in the shin, hogging your duffel peg, every single thing. We could make a timeline, first this happened, then that happened.’

Pamela shook her head fiercely. ‘It isn’t something that I want to think about any more than I have to.’

‘Oh, but think about it: you would be thinking about it not in the unhappy way of having it just anonymously happen to you, but in the way of telling it,’ Nory said. ‘And then other kids could read it and know what happened, the story of one girl, or two friends. We could do it together.’

‘I can’t imagine that it would interest people, and I wouldn’t dream of doing it,’ said Pamela. ‘I like to write about nice things.’

‘Okay,’ said Nory, ‘how about — not a book about the present, but a book about the future. Say when we’re both eighteen and we go off to college and have adventures.’

Pamela gave it a second of thought and nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but I can only come up with the adventures because I’m double-jointed and don’t particularly like writing as it hurts my thumb. But I’ll give you hints for some of the adventures. For instance, we could visit a live volcano together and have an adventure. I once visited a live volcano.’

‘That’s perfect!’ said Nory. ‘What name do you want for yourself?’

‘Claudia,’ said Pamela.

Before bed Nory wrote the first page of the book, which was called ‘The Adventures of Sally and Claudia.’

The Adventures of Sally and Claudia

‘Mom I’ll need my file as well,’ Claudia screamed up the stairs. In her freshly washed uniform, she looked as if she was going to a disco rather than Oxford University. She was 18 very smart, and especially keen on maths and the study of vulcanos. She had only just left Threll Senior School and missed it alot and so she might as she had started there when she was in year six and never missed a year. One of the reasons she missed it so much was because of her best friend Sally who had been her friend from her first day at Threll School to her last.

Sally was a very tall girl who was extreamely interested in dentestry and was American. She was know going to Stanford University while her brother borded at Threll School and was a prephect. He was taking a class in model bildiung, where he was bilding a large balsa wood model of the Mallard, which as many are aware is a preticular kind of high speed steam traine. For this whol life he had been interested in everything about traines and it looked as if that woud continue into his double-digets.

If Claudia only knew that Sally was sitting at a table even now and thinking about her, while she did her studying! Claudia was still thinking about Sally as she set off for school on the wet path with her hair sopping wet because of the rain.

As she reached school she could almost see Sally as she had been in Year Six in her school, she felt she could give anything to see Sally agin. So did Sally, who was now hard at work writing a letter to Claudia It went like this:

Dear Claudia,

I miss you so much and think about you every day. I had a maths exam today and I did all right but I could have done better if I hade seen you befor. How are things in England?

Love,

Sally, your friend

TO BE CONTINUED.…

Nory showed the page to Pamela the next day, and Pamela read it over twice carefully. ‘One very important thing you should know is that here we don’t say Mom , we say Mum , and we spell it with a u,’ Pamela said. ‘And I think you shouldn’t describe Claudia by her interests, but by how she looks. You probably should rewrite the beginning including a bit more about her appearance.’ That was Pamela’s complete reaction. She didn’t say ‘Good,’ or ‘Nice try,’ or ‘Well done,’ or anything like that. (If you fell or dropped something, sometimes the boys would call out, ‘Well done!’)

Nory thought to herself, ‘If you don’t want to write it, Pamela, fine, but don’t refuse to help write it and then tell me to rewrite it. I did the best I could.’ But maybe Pamela was a little embarrassed by the mention of the two of them being best friends, since they’d never actually talked about being best friends.

They chatted about the book quite a number of times after that, but the first page was the one and only page that got written down. Oh well.

Mostly Nory and Pamela spent more and more time together at school as friends. Actually at times there were four friends total, since Pamela had an I.F. named Leyla (I.F. stands for Imaginary Friend), and Nory thought it would be a friendly gesture to have an I.F. herself, too. She thought for a long time and came up with Penny Beckinsworth as her new I.F. She liked the name Penny, and Beckinsworth sort of sounded like a person you would think was worth beckoning for. She made up a song that she sang to the rhythm of ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’: Penny Beckinsworth I reckon is a friend. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon is a friend. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon is a friend . But Nory had never been too good at keeping up with imaginary friends. For example, if you write an I.F. a letter, you never get one back, unless you write it, too, which takes some of the fun out of it. On weekends in particular, Nory sometimes missed having someone real over to play with. Just simply to play with, period, end of discussion. It hadn’t happened very much this year, strangely enough. Her parents were happy to watch her perform a play in which she dressed up Littleguy as a dog or a swan or an airplane engineer, and they were happy to listen to a story she had made up or play Battleship with her, and Battleship was quite fun, even when you were hit, because you could think up a new way to say you were hit, such as ‘Ouch, I seem to have developed a yawning hole in my forecastle,’ or ‘Yikes, hoist out the rubber dinkies, she’s a-going down!’ But it wasn’t the same as having your very own friend over to play. Littleguy also missed his best friend from school in Palo Alto. His new friend Jack spit onto the steam engines and that was not good to do, he said. But he had a different friend, Oliver, who he said was ‘a very nice shy boy.’ Littleguy had gotten into the usual habit of walking up to a stranger in the toystore and saying, ‘Hello, I’m shy.’

Nory played some with her dolls but she was desperate just to have another nice girl her age in her room. Pamela refused to give Nory her phone number because she said she wasn’t supposed to give out vital information such as her phone number unless her parents said it was okay, and she kept forgetting to ask them if it was okay. Her number was ex-directional, which means that you can’t get it by calling 192. 192 sounds like it would be the same as 911 in America but actually it’s the same as 411. Nory had Kira’s number but she and Nory were not getting along all too well. They had just enough of a shred of friendship left to want the other person to act the way they wanted them to, rather than just not caring.

On Sunday afternoon Nory’s mother took Nory and Littleguy to a playground near the Cathedral. There was a nice little child who was Littleguy’s age for him to play with, but as usual, no child Nory’s age. Nory’s mother went over to supervise Littleguy on the slide, and Nory swang on the swings, which always made her feel lonely feelings unless there were tons of other people swinging on them, and then she sat anonymously on the bench. She started flipping through a catalog that her mother had brought along. There was a wind that day, and Nory liked the wind. Whenever she had a chance in a drawing or a painting, she included a tree with long flexible branches being blown by the wind, because it was one of her favorite things to paint or draw in all art. She noticed the pages of the catalog rustling and thought, ‘I know, I can try being friends with the wind!’