Nicholson Baker: The Everlasting Story of Nory

They went to another toy store a week later, but there were no blue dresses that were right. Blue was not in fashion at that moment. So Nory got Debbie a tiny glass panda bear posed on a branch, all made of droops of light blue glass, because Debbie was devoted to pandas and had about thirty of them in her room. Nory wrote Debbie a letter soon after they came to England that said:

Dear Debbie,

How ary you? How is your school? I went to the Fitz Willyham museum, where there was a fan room, and there is a fan launguage for things you’re not allowed to say in public if you place the fan behind your head it means ‘Don’t forget me’! There was a fan that I preticularly liked, It is made from coal and mother of peal. I went to Pecover House, but I think it should be famous for its garden more than the house. It has a wunderful statue of a girl and a dog made from stone, and a green house with a fern that will crumple-up when you touch it. I miss you and your dog Sharpy, how is that shoe consuming feind? I hope to be seing you again soon. Love Eleanor PS Please write back.

She drew a picture of a girl holding a fan behind her head at the bottom of the letter.

The best dream Nory had ever had was about Debbie. Nory had died, although she didn’t come to that conclusion until a different part of the dream. She whispered in Debbie’s ear, ‘Debbie, Debbie, it’s me.’ Debbie recognized Nory’s voice and looked up. Debbie had a very wide face, and she could get a look that was kind of still, kind of unnerved. Her mouth looked bigger because her lips were over the wiring of her braces. She made that unnerved look at Nory. She said, ‘Nory! Nory! Is that you?’ She recognized Nory’s voice, even though she couldn’t see her.

‘Don’t worry, Debbie,’ said Nory, in a calm gentle voice. ‘Don’t be scared. I would be too if I were you.’ Debbie seemed calmer. Nory showed her the newspaper, which said on the front page ELEANOR DIES IN A FIRE. Not her family, not anyone else. Later on in the dream Nory said Boo to Garrick, a kid in her class, sort of fakily: ‘Garrick? Boooooo!’

Garrick said, ‘No way, she can’t be a ghost, she’s dead already.’

‘Oh, yes I can!’ said Nory and fumed out in her full ghostiness. Garrick started running out of fear and tripped. That was funny because Garrick was a ten-year-old and usually extremely confident and pleased with himself and made fun of Nory’s spelling, which wasn’t very good. In fact it was a ‘bosaster,’ as Littleguy would say. But the wonderful part of the dream was when Debbie looked up, hearing the voice, and knew it was Nory nearby her.

‘It’s sometimes kind of impressive,’ Nory thought, ‘to try to envision how many bricks there are in a city.’ You could tell a city was old by the colors and crookedness of its bricks. In Boston Nory noticed that usually the bricks were red, but in Threll they were usually, not to be disrespectful, kind of a dirty yellow, and they were even less straight than in Boston. You wouldn’t expect dirty yellow crooked bricks to look pretty, but they did, especially where you could see places in the walls where there had been old windows or old doorways that had been stuffed with other bricks and stones and pieces of old buildings.

That was what a certain memory that you had forgotten felt like — you knew that a window had been there but it wasn’t now, just an old brick wall, so you couldn’t see through it. There was a very tall brick wall around the garden of the Bishop’s Palace at Threll, with pointy stones on top, so that the poor people couldn’t sneak in at night and steal the cauliflowers, which might have looked tempting in the moonlight to a very hungry mouthwatering person of long ago. At Waitrose, the supermarket, they sold darling little dwarf cauliflowers in the ‘Dwarf Food’ section. It wouldn’t be called dwarf food in America because that would hurt the feelings of a real dwarf, who would feel not too pleased about being compared to a vegetable.

Waitrose also sold a mysteriously pointy green plant, halfway between a cauliflower and a pine tree, called a Romanesco. Nory’s mother said that ‘Gothico’ would be a better name for it. It was intended to be eaten for dinner, but it looked like a screensaver on Nory’s mother’s computer called ‘Permafrost II.’ ‘Worms’ was the neatest of all the screensavers, though.

Nory gave the Romanesco to the Cathedral to be a part of the arrangement that was done by Threll School in the South Door, for the Harvest Festival. Kids had carried in carrots in bunches, and zucchini, which were called courgettes in Threll, and broccoli, apples, and sugar beets. But luckily nobody else in the school had given a Romanesco, which made hers easy to see. Nory’s father took three pictures of Nory in her school jacket and tie standing to one side of an open bag of potatoes. The potatoes were shaped just like the stones they put on either side of a lot of the sidewalks in Cambridge to remind your feet in a polite way that you were getting close to the grass. Cambridge was, as you may know, where you go to get a Ph.D. After they went to the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge, Nory told herself a story in the car, holding one of her dolls.

One day, there was a little tiny baby. She was born too early, so she was really, really tiny. She should have gone into an incubator, but her parents weren’t rich enough, so she couldn’t. They just had to raise her as being a really, really small little person. She had a big soft-spot because she was so early. And her umbilical was too long. And so on. She was, on the whole, too small. Just a tiny little person.

When she was about three weeks old, she could already do her grasping. She couldn’t really turn yet, but she could turn her head, ever so slightly. She turned her head ever so slightly. She could almost grasp. She couldn’t have handled it yet, because that would be just impossible, so amazing that it would be a fairy tale, which this is, of course, but she seemed to be trying to grab for her mother’s fan. And ever since, she seemed to be totally interested in fans. Just completely interested in them. Her parents named her Colander.

When Colander was full grown, she was a midget, because she was just a tiny person. When she was twelve, the tallest she ever was, she was as tall as Frank is. She was really short. So one day — it was really hard for her to go to school and museums and because people might tease her because she was so short — but one day they went to a museum. It had a lot of different things in it, china and armor and sculpture. They wandered here and there. She said: ‘I see that dark room. What’s in that dark room?’

They went into the dark room she had looked at. And there were the most beautiful fans that she had ever seen. So many different kinds, shapes, sizes. In the corner of each glass case was a little yellow box of some kind of mold killer to keep all the fans from being eaten by a strong fan-eating fungus.

But the fan that really caught her eye was one that was carved from mother-of-pearl, when you opened it up. When you closed it, it had beautiful ivory carvings of children, and then the ivory was put on top of jade. And there was beautiful gold-plating, where the hair of anything would be. For instance, if there was the hair of a mother it was gold-plated, all the hair was true gold plate. And there were also some diamonds put here and there on the fan. There were many other fine fans in the room, but that one was her total favorite.

She wanted most of all in the world to have it. She wanted to start a collection, and she wanted that fan in the centerpiece of it. That was all she wanted. She thought about fans, she drew pictures of the fan, in school she doodled ‘fan’ on her hand when she’d gotten totally bored with the conversation the teacher was giving to them. It was a long conversation in Latin and she hadn’t been studying Latin all that carefully because she was thinking about the fan. The fan was what entertained her.