Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

There was a lot of attention paid to grass in England. Cows used to keep it short, long ago, but now they used lawn mowers, of course. Sometimes they mowed it very short in a crisscross, so that it looked like a plaid cloth. One large field below the cathedral near Nory’s school was totally bare earth, because they were putting in new grass. One day when she was walking home with her mother they saw five men walking in a row on this field. Each man had a big white plastic thing attached around his waist, like a drum in a marching band in a parade, and they reached into their drums and got handfuls of grass seed and threw it out over the brown field. Nory’s mother thought it was a beautiful sight, and it was. There were some interesting holes in one of the fields they used for sports at Junior School, but nobody seemed to know what was inside them. Not cobras and mongooses, but you never know. You don’t want to reach your hand down in there. Even if you poke a stick in, sharp teeth could suddenly grab the stick, which would be startling. In some fields, people might have been buried there long ago. For instance near the South Door of the Cathedral it was now all grass, but in the map of the way the Cathedral was during Prior Rowland’s lifetime it said ‘Monks Graves.’ Did they move the monks, or just forget about them?

Nory used to not like the idea of burying people terribly much. Now she had come to gripes with it as a fact of life. When she was four she dictated a letter that her father typed out for her:

To Whom it May Concern:

Eleanor Winslow does not want to be buried under the ground.

Sincerely,

Eleanor Winslow.

She scribbled a fake signature, since at the time she had not known how to write, and she put a stamp on the piece of paper and scribbled on the stamp and it looked official. When her hermit crab lost all its claws one by one, very forlornly, and died only a few weeks after they got her, Nory buried her with a grave marker that said:

TO HERMIONE

Soon Gone

She wanted a dog or a rabbit or a kitten, anything warmblooded, except possibly a cow, but her parents said that they couldn’t have one for various reasons.

The field at the school that Nory used for hockey had no holes at all, whatsoever, because it was made of Astroturf. There was lots of sand sprinkled in the Astroturf. Nobody knew why. If you were an animal, digging a hole, and you dug and dug and then dug up to the surface intending to make a South Door for your hole, and you came up under the Astroturf, you would be pretty unhappy about having done all that work for nothing. Maybe there were dead monks under there. Once Nory found a ladybug in the Astroturf and carried it to the edge, and set it on a leaf. That was on a fairly embarrassing day, the second time they played hockey, when Nory’s skirt fell off twice. Luckily hockey was all girls. And another girl had the same problem, too. While Nory was carrying the ladybug off the field, she was worried that it would fly off. If it flew off, it might just land in more Astroturf, where it couldn’t live.

Nory said to it, very confidentially, ‘Don’t fly yet, Ladybug. Ladybug, if you try to fly, I’m going to have to confiscate your ability of flying. I can’t confiscate you, but I can cup my hand over you and confiscate your ability of flying.’ Confiscate was a word she’d learned from a boy who walked back with her from lunch one day. He said that it was a good thing she wasn’t in Five-K, because in Five-K the teacher was awful. If you write in pencil and you were supposed to write in pen, or do something of that level of badness, the teacher would confiscate your pencil and tell you she was going to give it back the next day, and then she never gave it back. The boy said he stole his pencil back. He said, ‘And rightly stole it!’ He opened up the teacher’s drawer and had to fumble through it to find his pencil because it was bursting at the gills with confiscated things.

Ladybugs are very useful bugs because they eat aphids. Nory used to think, ‘Poor little aphids.’ But aphids eat the ladybugs’ eggs, so ladybugs have a right to hate them. It was something a little like Rikki Tikki Tavi and the snake. Nory’s mother said that when a gardener bought a whole jug of ladybugs they had to let them out at night so they don’t know where they are and settle down with those particular aphids as their enemy. Otherwise they might try to escape to the other aphids, which they know better and hate more, because those were the ones who actually ate their eggs. Human beings have an unusual amount of power over the lives of bugs. Kids kill thousands of bugs every day without dropping a hat. Once Nory was looking at a ladybug that was either dead or alive, she couldn’t tell, maybe playing dead or just relaxing or sunbathing or burnt in the sun. But then someone came walking along, not thinking about what she was doing, but just walking along, and she smashed the ladybug, without even seeing it. A green spread out. Insects have green blood. Now, if that had been a child who had been squushed, everyone would be tearing their hair out. Even if a small thing happens to a child, she remembers it and talks about it for a long time. Maybe insects’ blood is white or some other color, and only turns green when it is exposed to air. We think human blood is red but it’s blue just before it comes out of a cut. The very second it reaches the edge of the cut, it changes, in the twinkling of an eye, because of the air.

They were watching a pianist one night, Nory’s mother, Nory’s father, and Nory, because when Nory called her friend Kira, Kira said ‘You’ve got to watch this great piano contest.’ Littleguy was playing with James the Red Engine. One of the people in the contest played the piano so hard he got a red spot on the back of his thumb. He was from Yugoslaw. Nory saw it and said, ‘He’s hurt himself.’

‘Oh, I think it’s just a shadow,’ said Nory’s father.

But it wasn’t. There were little spots of blood on the piano keys. Then the next person had to play. Think of him sitting down and seeing ladybugs of blood all over the piano. He can’t wipe them off because the wiping would make an ugly sound and the judges might remember the ugly sound very well, since it was the very first thing he played, and give him a bad result. His eye would be distracted by the blood and he would make more mistakes, maybe. Or he might think, ‘Hah hah! I won’t bleed, no sir!’ It was sad to think of the people in the contest who practiced so hard their whole lives long and still eventfully lost.

That little thing, a bleeding thumb, was a big thing for a person. For an insect or some other small creature it would be minor. One time Nory scrumpled up a leaf to put it on the compost pile in Palo Alto. She didn’t know that there was a snail on the other side of the leaf. So she accidentally crunched the snail, and she got snail slime all over her hand. It was awful. She hadn’t meant to scrumple the snail. From then on, whenever she picked up a leaf, she turned it over to see if anything was on the other side. Very often there was. Another time she caught a butterfly and was trying to put it in ajar with some grass blades. Its body was in the jar, but its head was accidentally outside, and she didn’t know that, while she was turning the lid of the jar. She looked over and there was its head outside the jar. She snatched the lid away and the head was still partly attached. The butterfly flew away. But she felt the guilt of the idea of having done that pull at her horribly.

Nory’s father said that feeling guilty was useful because when you felt it you had a piece of useful knowledge: you knew that you didn’t want to do that thing, whatever it was, that made you feel guilty, so the guiltiness was a way of teaching yourself what you ought to do in the future. In some cases that was true but Nory felt horribly guilty about having scrumpled the snail and screwed the lid on the butterfly’s head even though she hadn’t meant to.