Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

But the guiltiness did stay in her mind and make her act differently. For instance, three kids found a butterfly on a tree near the dining hall at Threll School one time, near the beginning of term. They were trying to make it fly, but it wasn’t cooperating. One of the girls wanted to put it in her backpack. Immediately, Nory thought, ‘If it goes in there, with all the heavy books and notebooks, it will end up like one of the cookies that I put in my backpack that is now just a dust of crumbs. It will be the death of that butterfly.’ So she said to the girl, ‘Here, take my pencil case and put the butterfly in there.’ The girl carelessly took it and put the butterfly in. That meant that Nory was totally without a pencil case. The pencil case had pencils, including a Barbie pencil, her medium nib pen, her ink eradicator, her National Trust eraser, ruler, protractors, everything. She had to borrow pens from kids, and at first they were nice about it, but after a few days they were really mean about it and said, ‘Are you going to beg for a pen again? I’ll tell you right now you can’t have one.’

Of course one of the reasons she’d given the girl her pencil case was not just to protect the butterfly, but probably more because she wanted the girl to be impressed by her generous act of handing over the pencil case. Finally her mother said, ‘You must get that pencil case back from that girl or you will have to buy another pencil case out of your own allowance.’ So Nory asked the girl for the pencil case back and got it at the end of the day, feeling huge relief.

Another story about a pencil case was a more horrible one. Daniella Harding said, and Nory wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth, but she said that she got the pointy end of a protractor stuck through her cheek. Kira asked, ‘Did you scream?’ Daniella said that she’d had to go to the san. She got a little scar on her face. But Nory had had a friend at the International Chinese Montessori School in Palo Alto who was always making things up, and ever since then she was not so quick to believe everything every kid told her, especially if they told the story a certain way. She could have gotten the scar from poking herself with a pencil. Or it just could have been a simple fall-down-and-scrape-your-face.

A lot of Nory’s stories used to be about her most beloved stuffed animal, a puppet raccoon called Sarah Laura Maria, who was often being stolen away by a bad witch and helped by a good witch, stuff like that, but lately Nory had begun a whole set of stories about a girl named Mariana who has a very sad but in some ways good life. Coochie, which was Nory’s other name for Raccoon, still was in some stories of her own, too. Cooch had recently begun attending a boarding school as a day student in the dresser in the guest room of the house in Threll they were renting. Samantha and Linnea and Vera, other dolls, were going there as well, each in its own drawer. They were full boarders. There were quite a number of flying squirrels at the school, who would climb on the play-structure and fly off in great arches. Coochie tried to do it but she had eaten too many jacket potatoes for lunch and she fell down and got badly scraped and bruised. It wasn’t the sort of scrape you get when you scrape your knee on the Astroturf, which makes it completely red, it was more of a real cut. A girl in Nory’s class named Jessica — the one who said Nory had a ‘squeegee accent’ on one of the first days — fell on the Astroturf and got two red knees when they were playing hockey.

‘Oh, are you okay?’ Nory asked her.

‘If I were “okay,” would I be sitting down with tears pouring down my face?’ Jessica said.

‘No,’ said Nory. Almost all children were rude sometimes. Nory herself was quite rude from time to time. Once she had told a boy who had said her teeth were too big that his shoes were dusty. He had turned bright red and looked so hurt that she felt bad afterward.

It wasn’t a good idea to stop any possibility of liking a person because of one single thing they did. Sometimes people forget themselves. Sometimes, though, what a child did was so bad, so severe, that you lost all your ability to keep up any friendly feelings toward them. Such a thing happened last year at International Chinese Montessori School, when Bernice wrote Nory a folded note that said ‘I’m sorry’ on the front, after they had an argument, and then inside it said, ‘Dear Eleanor, I’m sorry, but I am not going to live with you in a house when we grow up, I’m going to live with my first best friend.’ That was just the limit, that ‘first’—Nory couldn’t now detect one tiny scrabjib of friendship for Bernice in her heart when she thought of her. Her best friend now was Debbie, probably, who was shyer and nicer.

Littleguy occasionally said rude things that could hurt your feelings, but he was two and usually it was a question of him just not understanding what he was saying. Once on Saturday afternoon for instance Nory tried to teach Littleguy how to play field hockey, after having spent some of her morning on Astroturf learning the basics. He hurt her feelings when he rejected a hockey stick she especially made for him out of a wooden pole, a toilet-paper tube taped on at an angle, and some green ribbon from her Samantha doll as decoration spiraled around. She had been rather pleased with this homemade stick.

‘Littleguy — so do you like it or do you hate it?’ she asked him, wanting to jostle him into saying a little thank-you.

‘I hate it,’ said Littleguy, but in a pleasant, good-natured way. ‘I want that stick,’ meaning Nory’s real stick.

‘That’s not the right way to talk to Nory,’ called out Nory’s father from inside. ‘She made that hockey stick especially for you and used a whole green Samantha ribbon and a toilet-paper tube to decorate it.’

‘I’m sorry, Nory, I’m sorry, Nory,’ kind little Littleguy said, very nicely, looking up at her with his serious little mouth and hopeful eyes.

Nory said, ‘Thank you, Littleguy.’ She loved the open feeling you got when someone said I’m sorry to you after you were mad or hurt-feelinged at them — the feeling of the scrumpled paper of the unhappiness going away from your chest. It made you almost burst with generousness toward them. ‘But it’s really my fault,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to you for asking the question confusingly in such a way that you couldn’t tell which way was the right way to answer for politeness.’

‘Me, too,’ said Littleguy. ‘Do you want to see my gooseneck trailer? It’s had a bad mergency. It’s stuck in the mud.’

Littleguy of course cried a hundred times a day — he had about eight different kinds of crying, several of them rather ear-gnashing — but Nory almost never cried because she had learned a few years earlier that it more or less ruins your reputation to cry, even if someone says something that makes you want to. It’s very embarrassing to cry. Boys especially will like you more if you don’t cry, and want to be your friend. Jessica cried when she fell on the Astroturf but it was a pretty bad fall, two knees at the same time. And she said the rude thing to Nory partly just because she was purely a rude girl some of the time, but partly because she was embarrassed, and she was very serious about boys, in almost a teenagery way, or not quite in a teenagery way but in a double-digit kind of way, and she probably worried that her enemy-friend, Daniella Harding, would tell Colin Deat that she had cried on the hockey field. Not as many people cried at this school as at Nory’s old school.

There were two times this year so far Nory almost, almost cried. One was when Shelly Quettner found out that Nory kind of liked a boy by the name of Jacob Lewes. Nory told it to Daniella Harding, who turned out to be Shelly Quettner’s sidekick in the whole process. Shelly started saying to Daniella, ‘What did she say? What? What? What?’ And she squeezed it out of her. Or maybe Daniella wanted to tell her all along, it wasn’t so clear. Instantly Shelly Quettner was saying to the class, ‘Nory fancies Jacob Lewes!’