The Everlasting Story of Nory

23. Pot-stickers Are Not an Easy Thing to Make

One boy, one of the three boys named Colin that Nory knew of — there was Colin Sharings, Colin Deat, and Colin Ryseman — started coming up to Nory after she was spending time with Pamela. He started saying, in a smeary little high voice, ‘Oh, ho, Pamela’s friend, oh? Pamela’s friend.’ Nory had saved up a little list of things that she could say back to this kind of person. Such as: ‘Calling all police, calling all police, there’s a grub in the classroom. Take it away, take it away.’ There were lots of grubs in the yard of the Trumpet Hill house. They were white little wigglers, not very attractive, and if somebody stepped on them, they went all red.

If it was outside that Colin came up and said something unpleasant, then Nory could say that she had no idea that earthworms could talk.

Nory tried the earthworm one out on him one afternoon. ‘My goodness, I simply had no idea earthworms could talk! Boy, did you prove me wrong.’ Colin kicked some leaves and said, ‘So you didn’t know earthworms could talk, Pamela’s friend? You don’t know very much, do you, Pamela’s friend?’ Then he walked drearily away, chin on parade. It was sort of a tie. It’s difficult because of the golden rule, you shouldn’t ever say anything that’s extremely rude, but you get angry, and you have to come up with comebacks that are not bad words, and not too insulting, not so insulting that it’s really mean to bring them up. So for example you couldn’t ever bring up Arthur’s problem with the cavity in his bicuspid, because that’s too true to make fun of. Colin Sharings had a pink mole on his ear, but you couldn’t make fun of that, either. You had to come up with whatever you’re going to say very quickly, too, because there you are, and there’s the person who’s said the rude thing to you, smirkingly looking pleased with himself, and the longer the rude thing is out on its own the more chance there is that people will laugh against you.

The first time Colin came up and mocked her for being Pamela’s friend Nory wasn’t prepared for it. She just said, ‘Yes, I’m Pamela’s friend. Is there a problem?’ That worked quite well, except that Nory was standing with Kira when Colin said it, so Colin then said to Kira, because he was a fiend of badness, ‘And you like Pamela, too-hoo,’ using the grossest kind of mocking singing voice. Kira didn’t say anything, so Nory said, ‘No, as a matter of fact Kira doesn’t like Pamela. So that shows how much you know about the whole kitten caboodle.’

But Pamela herself was nearby and probably heard Nory say that, and Nory worried afterward that that would hurt her feelings to have said that Kira didn’t like her to Colin. Pamela didn’t mention it next time they talked, though. After that crude awakening, Nory began saving up the comebacks so she wouldn’t get tricked into saying something she wouldn’t want to have said.

But the other problem, which was a bigger problem, was that some of why Nory wanted to be friendly with Pamela was because she thought Pamela truly deserved to have some friends who stuck with her, and she knew that if she was friendly with her it might be just that tiny straw that broke the camel’s back of the habit that the kids had of ganging up on her. But Nory also had an idea that probably Pamela would never be a really close true friend, a dear friend, because they were quite different in certain ways. Other people were being bad to Pamela, and so Nory was feeling she ought to do her best to forfeit her obligation and be more of a friend than she would have been naturally, in real life, which made her feel a little artificial. When she walked back to the Junior School with Pamela they had all-right conversations but they weren’t the kind of conversations about things that she would have had with Debbie, where they talked about how much fun it was to put Barbie shoes on ‘My Little Pony’ horses and dress up their manes with flower petals. Debbie loved those ‘My Little Pony’ horses, and you had to admit, seeing them all set up in a row, they looked pretty fancy in high-heeled shoes, with their puffy manes. And it wasn’t the kind of wild-laughter conversations that Nory sometimes had with Kira or Janet or Tobi, at the Junior School, where somebody would keep trying to say something over and over and couldn’t because it was so heroriously funny they couldn’t finish the sentence. Pamela told Nory about everyone in her family. Very interesting: her uncles, her aunts, her cousins, her second cousins, what they did, what they looked like, what they watched on TV. Nory told Pamela about her family, but not in as much detail because it wasn’t as impressive a family, since she only had four first cousins and a lot of her great-aunts and people like that had already died. They both agreed that chutney was fairly disgusting, but when Nory said that the thing she liked least in the world, par none, was fried chicken, Pamela said she liked fried chicken and that her Dad went out and bought fried chicken from Captain Chicken USA at least once a week. (Captain Chicken was a place that was trying to trick you into thinking it was Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the same red letters, and figuring that, ‘Oh, you’re English, you won’t be able to draw a difference.’) Nory hurried on to explain that probably she disliked fried chicken for a particular reason, which was that she’d had it so much at her old school, the International Chinese Montessori School, where it was piled up in large foil pans and got cold and was extremely dark-meatedly greasy. Nory had eaten too much Chinese fried chicken in her life for her to be able to stand another drumstick. The rest of the food had been pretty good, though, she said. No jacket potatoes, of course, because the Chinese are basically less interested in potatoes than America and England is. The jacket potato is a European dish. One time, Nory told Pamela, her whole class at the International Chinese Montessori School learned to make pot-stickers, which are difficult because sometimes you make the wrapping small and there’s too much of the meat, or the filling, in the pot sticker, and sometimes you do too little filling. There are many problems and things that can go wrong. It’s really difficult, and you have to seal it with egg.

Pamela asked what pot-stickers were, and Nory said they were a Chinese food filled with meat that can burn your mouth when you bite in on them. At her old school, they also learned to write in Chinese characters, Nory said.

Pamela laughed and said, ‘In Chinese! You learned to write in Chinese?’

‘Yes,’ said Nory, feeling a little proud of being able to do that fairly unusual thing. ‘We had to, because it was the International Chinese Montessori School. We spent half the day on Chinese, we did our multiplication tables in Chinese, lots of things. Would you like me to write something for you?’

Pamela said okay, so Nory got a piece of paper out of her backpack and sat down on the sidewalk and wrote her the character for ‘hao.’ Hao was made up of two parts. Half of it was part of the character for mother, and half of it was part of ‘child,’ because the Chinese think that mother plus child equals good. It’s a good thing for a child to have a mother near her and a mother to have a child near her. So, sensibly, hao means good. In Chinese it looked like this:

Nory gave the paper to Pamela. Pamela looked at it and nodded. She said, ‘How would you say six times seven in Chinese?’ Nory said ‘Liu cheng qi den yu si shi er. So six times seven is forty-two.’

‘Oh,’ said Pamela.

‘If you know your numbers, it’s really easy,’ said Nory. ‘Would you like me to show you how the Chinese character for two could have turned into our American-English number 2, and how the Chinese three could have become our 3?’

‘Yes, but maybe another time,’ said Pamela, ‘because I think we have to go in.’

‘Okay,’ said Nory. ‘Well, bye.’

‘Bye,’ said Pamela.