The Everlasting Story of Nory

18. A Little About Raccoon

The thing that had failed in Nory’s own life was that right now she didn’t have a best friend in England. And she honestly missed her best friend from America, Debbie, who hadn’t written back. Some kids are not so good about writing letters, though. Another sad and unfair thing was that Nory had only gotten a tinily short time to have Debbie as her best friend, since she’d only met her very recently, in about the past two years.

The great thing that was important to know about Debbie was that she love, love, loved telling stories with her dolls. She had four stuffed kitten dolls that made a purring sound when you turned them at an angle, not quite identical in their faces but almost identical, and she had an extraordinary imagination that just went on and on and on to an endless limit. Nory and Debbie played the Samantha game together, which was an everlasting game, in which disaster after disaster happened to Samantha and everybody else who took place in it. One time Samantha was hanged by her foot on the lampshade because a dog named Fur was going to burn her. Fur was actually a very good dog, he was a puppet dog that Debbie loved most of all her animals and slept with. (Debbie loved her pandas, too, but her pandas were more of a collection.) But they had to have a bad creature in the story or it wouldn’t have the feeling of something failing, so they had the idea that he had been given a pill by this wandering bad person that made him bad for a short time. So the result was that he was being quite dreadful, temporarily, and wanted to kill the kitties and Samantha. That allowed him to be bad for the sake of the story but not overall bad for the sake of Debbie’s dear animal that she slept with. The four adventurous kitties figured out a way to save themselves by pretending there were only two kitties and getting the dog Fur to take a second pill that would make him go to sleep. When he woke he was his old warmhearted self again. Telling those stories with Debbie was so miracly much fun.

Before she knew Debbie, Nory told her stories by herself. It was hard to remember how she began, but it appeared to her now that she might have begun with little snibbets of stories she told in different voices in the bath, or looking in the mirror, because those were some of the most important storytelling situations. She had a rubber raccoon that had hundreds of adventures in the bath. Obviously she couldn’t take Cooch herself because Cooch was (speaking of things you shouldn’t speak of) sewn: she was a cloth puppet and couldn’t get wet.

Sarah Laura Maria Raccoon was one when Nory found her, abandoned by her parents lying cold and numb by the road. She and Sylvester had adopted her, and then it turned out that Cooch was their own lost child. A witch had taken away their own child long before. The witch came pouring up from the steam of a grilled cheese sandwich one day, an ugly thing, and stole their dear Coochie away, and their hearts were broken, or ‘juken down’ as Littleguy would say, since that’s how he pronounced broken down. Heartjuken for many long years they lived in their small cottage, until one day they found an older Raccoon cold and abandoned by the road. ‘We must adopt her, she looks so much like our own long lost Sarah Laura Maria,’ they said. When she revived a little she told them what had happened, that she had been living a perfect life with her two parents when a wicked witch came along and took her, but fortunately she escaped by throwing salt in the witch’s eye and dashing out of the witch’s boat and jumping overboard, where the mermaids took her to their castle and cared for her and tried to teach her as best they could to be a mermaid raccoon. She had grown very thin when she was with the witch but she grew plumper now, feeding on sea salads. And sometimes — if by chance someone in a boat threw it overboard — a good old potato. She did her best and she wore long flowing dresses made of the finest kinds of seaweed found near Africa, but she was a land-raccoon in her heart and finally she thanked the mermaids with many hugs and waves and swam ashore. There the husband and wife, out on a walk on the beach, found her.

‘Darling, do you notice how much this Raccoon looks like our own dear child?’ the mother asked.

‘Yes, yes I do,’ said the husband. ‘I wonder if she’ll want to play with some of the toys that our dear little child used to play with.’ Sadly he went upstairs and got down the box of things. There was a Fisher Price Main Street, with a set of five letters that you could put into a mailbox, and a set of foam numbers that fit together, and many other things.

‘I had just that toy,’ said Cooch. ‘And just that toy.’

‘You did?’ said the parents, in amazement. ‘Could she be …?’ they wondered. ‘What is your name?’

‘Sarah Laura Maria,’ she said.

‘But that is the name of our own daughter, who was stolen away by a witch many years ago!’ said the mother and father.

‘I was stolen away by a witch, too,’ Coochie told them shyly.

‘You’re our daughter! Oh, come here, oh my!’ And they hugged her and kissed her and were overjoyed forevermore.