Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

‘How did you guess that?’ Nory’s father would ask, from deep in his doze.

‘Well, for one thing, the book seemed to be flopping.’

‘Was it flopping?’

‘Yes, it was.’

And then Nory’s father would say, ‘Well, I guess that just about wraps it up,’ and shut the book and say goodnight. The next time that it was his turn to read, he wouldn’t remember any of what he had already read, and he would go through several pages, saying ‘Did we read that? Did we read that?’ Nory usually could remember because she had a not-too-shabby memory for things that were read to her. It was very rare for Nory’s mother to fall asleep reading to Nory. Sometimes Nory almost fell asleep when she was reading to her dolls but almost never when she was being read to.

One night Nory’s father managed to read three Aesop’s fables in a row that just weren’t up to sniff. Aesop had had a very bad fable-writing day. Maybe the wax wasn’t smooth enough for him to concentrate. Nory’s father fell asleep after about ten minutes of reading and slept until Nory’s mother woke him up by coming in to give Nory a K and H and a G of W. That anagram stood for a ‘Kiss and a Hug and a Glass of Water.’ The next day, they drove to Wisbech to see Peckover House, a Stately Home, and on the way Nory had the idea of getting each one of them to think up a fable, as something to do in the car.

Her mother’s fable was about an ivy plant that overdoes himself and stays green year round, even through the freezing snows of winter. First he was evergreen for the pure joy of it, and then he was a little less happy and a little more bitter because the other plants failed to follow his lead of staying green and even made little jokes about the ivy plant and his odd winter habits. Finally the ivy got so upset with the rest of the garden for sleeping through the lonely cold months that his anger made his leaves turn brown at the edges and his tendrils stop uncurling. The gardener, who was used to his being green and healthy all year, pulled him up by the roots and threw him in the compost dump. And the moral was: Stay out of politics.

Nory’s father’s fable was about a cat who loved tuna catfood in cans and refused to eat the whitefish or the beef or the liver in cans, even though he was starvingly hungry, in order to try to force the girl who cared for him to give him tuna every day. The girl got so worried about the cat’s not eating that she took him to the vet. The vet said he was healthy, but he said that she must feed him only dry catfood from now on. And the moral was: He who wants only tuna, may end up with only dry.

Nory’s fable was about two Korean girls. Once there were two little Korean girls. Their parents had died in a car accident, because the ambulance had not had the Jaws of Life to use to save them. The Jaws of Life are, as you know, huge scissors that can cut through metal and pull an injured person from a car. So the poor, tired little girls were sent to an orphanage. There they put up signs that said ‘Help!’ because they were treated very badly. Seeing their signs, a kind woman, who wanted so much to have a little girl, adopted them. They were very grateful. But one day the mother, whose name was Nanelan, had to go to a different country to the Queen’s birthday party. She asked the only couple she could get in touch with to watch her children. But she did not know that these were evil people. The first day she was gone they spilled a puddle of water to make the children slip and hurt themselves and go to the hospital, so that they would not have to pay for the children’s food. The next night the couple, dancing with evil joy, fell into the puddle. Hearing this, the insurance company refused to pay the hospital, and the couple lost all the money. And the moral is: Do not be selfish or your curse will come back.

They asked Littleguy for a fable, too. He came up with two. His first fable was called ‘Bulldozer.’ Once upon time was a train. A train on a track. It saw a diesel train coming on the track, too, and they crashed. The two went kssssh! All the pieces came off they. The puff-puff broke, and the wheels broke, and the track broke. Everything broke. But they went to the shop and got fixed and they got painted, and went to the station and people came on them and they set off. The end.

Littleguy’s second fable was called ‘Browned.’ Once upon time was a bulldozer, pulling a trailer filled with all kinds of choo-choos, digger-trucks, and auger drillers, and dump trucks. And the other ones that have round things, cement mixers. The bulldozer saw a car pulling a trailer by it. And they didn’t crash, they just went right by they. The bulldozer drove and drove and drove and drove and drove and drove and drove. The bulldozer’s name was Browned. The end.

Since there were no morals in Littleguy’s two fables, Nory added them on. The moral of the first fable was: sometimes when there’s a crash, it turns out all right in the end. And the moral of the second one was: sometimes things don’t even crash at all.

At Peckover House, Nory got a National Trust eraser from the gift shop after they had tea.

Nory was proudly born in Boston, Massachusetts, in America. A lot of houses looked like Peckover House in Boston. Boston was old in a beautiful way and it was especially important to Nory because it was frankly the only city she had ever lived in, except Venice for three weeks when she was three years old, where she was baptized with a surprising splash of water in a huge cold church, holding her own candle, that later got broken and had to be thrown out even though it was wrapped in tissue paper. In Venice she also ate pitch-black spaghetti. The black was squid ink and it was quite good. Long ago, they used to use squid ink to make real ink, for using in Medium Nib fountain pens, but probably it would make a kind of ink that no ink eradicator would eradicate. Ink eradicators were made from pigskin and pig-waste, according to a girl at Threll Junior School, who said her sister once visited an eradicator factory.

Threll was just a town, not a city, and Palo Alto, California, was just a town, too, although it had quite a seedy neighborhood in the way that real cities do. You might imagine a French person going around Palo Alto, California, with an American person. The American would say, ‘As you will notice, there are some seedy areas.’ The French person would say, in his very strong French accent, ‘Oh, is this — city area?’ Pronouncing it of course the way the French teacher at the Junior School pronounced it. And the American would misunderstand and say sadly, ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is seedy. There’s just no getting around it.’ Maybe that’s how the idea that cities were seedy came about, if it happened quite a number of times. Also when people don’t cut their grass, it grows so long that it shoots out a tassel of seeds, which was a sign that the people in that house didn’t care about their yard. Maybe they were caring for a sick person who was cooped up in the house, or maybe they were busy giving themselves shots of drugs and alcohol and didn’t have the energy to walk out their front door and cut the grass. That’s another way the idea that cities were seedy could have come about.

Nory’s favorite street in Palo Alto had a number of stores on it, including the toy store. Nory spent half an hour there one Saturday in the summer while Littleguy played with the breakdown train at the Thomas the Tank Engine table. She looked through every one of the Barbie outfits, because her new best friend, Debbie, said she liked Barbies with black hair and blue dresses. Debbie had given Nory a friendship locket to celebrate that they were new best friends, and Nory was extremely happy about that and wanted to give Debbie a Barbie from money she earned selling hand-lettered signs to her parents. She looked and looked, and finally tucked away behind a whole lot of other outfits she found a dark blue Barbie dress with lighter blue sparkles on the front, and she hung it back on the hook as the very first one and went to get her mother. When she came back, though, another girl was there with her mother, and the girl was holding the blue dress outfit in her hand. Nory stood there and tried her best to hint by the sad hopeless way she was flopping her arms and looking at the blue dress in the girl’s hand that she had just spent a whole half an hour going through every outfit to find it, but the girl and her mother ignored her, or didn’t know what she was flopping about, and she didn’t want to say anything, because of course the girl had found it all by herself, it’s just that the girl wouldn’t have had hardly a chance of finding it if Nory hadn’t found it and put it on top where it got the special feeling of being the first outfit on display.