The Everlasting Story of Nory

31. Oatmeal

Nory liked writing ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ at the end of stories, and of course she could go right ahead and continue them. But she had very old stories that she’d written when she was seven and eight that had that in big letters at the end, and when she came across them stuffed in her desk in Palo Alto she thought, ‘Wow, I haven’t exactly done what I said I would do, have I?’ Basically, when she wrote ‘To Be Continued’ at the end of a story it almost always meant ‘To Never Be Continued,’ that is, ‘To Be Dropped Like a Hot Potato.’ This made her a little sad when she realized it. She had gotten the idea of ‘To Be Continued’ from the movie Back to the Future, which ends with those words in huge letters. Back to the Future was another movie where the second movie, Back to the Future II, was equally as good as Back to the Future I, like Neverending Story and Neverending Story II.

So probably she wouldn’t write any more of the story of Ranrof, because by the time she got around to it she would have become a little older and she would think some of it was kiddish and she would be on to other unexceptional things. Also everyone had to read their stories aloud in class and when she she read hers some of the boys made low gurgles and snickers when she read the part about the girl throwing herself around the dog’s neck. They thought it was girlish and sweetsy-cue, which didn’t matter one bit because Nory liked the story. But it was true that after they gurgled she stopped working on it.

Her mother came in while Nory was still dozily under the covers thinking of what project she should do that morning and she said it was time for Nory to hop to. A few minutes after that her father came popping in and said, ‘Let’s go, kiddo, let’s go, let’s go.’ So it was a school day, was it? Well well! How fair was that? Nory chatted to herself for not a very long time in the mirror, pretending to be surprised by her toothbrush flying in from the side, and trying out different surprised expressions. Then she tucked in all her dolls for the day, which took a good amount of time. She had only been able to take eleven dolls to England from America, not including Raccoon. By then her mother was calling out, ‘Urgent call for Nory!’ and her father was calling out, ‘Extreme two-minute warning!’ So she bustled on her school outfit and tied her tie and tucked the ends of it in her skirt, since they were always much too long to be becoming since basically the tie was too big for a child her age, and she went downstairs to have oatmeal.

The bowl was hot enough to burn your fingers from the microwave but the cold milk cooled its heels. Nory’s father sometimes hummed to the sound of the microwave, because the microwave was extraordinarily loud, much louder than the one they had in America, which is named after Amerigo Raspucci, who made a map of America that was not terribly accurate because the technology that they had available in those times was not good, and the microwave sounded like the humming note of a bagpipe. He hummed a hymn that Nory liked from her school hymnbook, ‘And did those feet, in ancient times.’ Sometimes he hummed songs he made up, like ‘Snort-victims on parade, exchanging glances.’ But he had gotten into a very bad habit of also making a strange little humming sound when he put a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth. He said the warmness of the oatmeal made him simply have to make that strange noise, but Nory’s mother said she wasn’t very fond of hearing that sort of moaning at the breakfast table before there was time for the coffee to work, and once Nory had to say to both of them, ‘Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an argument.’ That was the way Nory got them to stop when they were going up the stages of having a fight, although it didn’t work every single time. However, they didn’t fight nearly as much as some of her friends’ parents.

In America Nory ate cornflakes or frozen waffles with maple syrup. The cap of the syrup got congested with scrabs of dried syrup, which turned to pure sugar, so that you could barely get it on or off. But in England, no frozen waffles. In America Littleguy had Cheerios with bubanda, which was what he called banana. But here everyone ate oatmeal, everyone in her family, that is, and were quite content eating oatmeal in fact, and they quite happily sang hymns to the sound of the microwave while it cooked their breakfast. In the International Chinese Montessori School Nory wouldn’t have dreamed of having a hymnbook. Yet here she had a prep book, a hymnbook, a reading logbook, and six or seven subject notebooks each of a different color. Her favorite was the ‘English — Stories’ notebook because it was a soft blue color, and she had sort of gotten used to the idea that she had made a mess-up and written ‘Engish’ first and had to quietly sneak in the ‘l.’ That was the notebook where she wrote down her stories for Mrs. Thirm, for instance the one about a girl who finds a dog.

Nory’s family liked being in Threll because it made them do things not too differently but a little differently. Here Nory had tons more religion in her life than in America, since they never went to church in America except on Christmas and Easter, and maybe one or two other times when her grandmother visited, since she liked to go. But here the whole Threll School had a service at Cathedral once a week, on Monday usually. There was a great joke Nory knew about Friday. What is the fish’s least favorite day? Fryday. That joke was probably invented in England, because England was a place that loved things swamped in hot grease. One day when they went out for breakfast and Nory’s father ordered bacon and eggs and the bacon came out all clenched up in a little shape like a lettuce, and he said ‘Jesus Christ, they deep-fat-fried it!’ That was the day Nory had the idea of making a doll that would have an egg she would cook in a pan. It was not good to take the Lord’s name in vain, or shoot the bird at anyone, for that manner, no matter what they do.

Every night they all said grace. They also said grace in America, but in America Nory always said the same thing, meal after meal, which was: ‘Thank you, God, for this delicious dinner, bless the food on the table, Father, Son, Holy Ghost amen.’ Nory’s father didn’t believe in God but he said that he liked the idea that other people did, and Nory’s mother believed in the idea that God was the goodness in human beings but not that there necessarily was a certain particular god who knew everything everyone was thinking and worked us all like magnetic marionettes. But Nory really believed in God as a thoughtful and extremely supreme person, and Littleguy believed that God was the driver of a steam train and the devil drove a diesel. And they all liked saying grace because it was just a calm and holy thing to do before you start munching away at your first bite, no matter what you thought about religion.

And here in England Nory was starting to say different graces, because she went to the Cathedral so much and had R.S., which is Religious Studies. ‘Thank you God for this delicious dinner, and bless the Pope and the Bishop and all the people in the church, and Mr. Pears, and all the people who are sick in their minds or their bodies, and everything else, Father, Son, Holy Ghost amen.’ Or, ‘Thank you dear Lord for this delicious dinner, and thank everyone who was worked so hard in their lives and is still working hard now, and bless our lord and your son who we cruelly murdered amongst ourselves, and bless the Pope and the Dean and the Bishop and the Archbishop and all the chaplains, and everyone else in the church, please forgive these humble words of prayer, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, amen.’ A different one every night, sometimes with little silent parts in the middle while Nory was thinking out what she wanted to say. And now Littleguy was coming in at the end saying, ‘Now me: Holy Ghost, everyone in the church, amen!’ When he said it he touched his chest in a dear way.

Then Nory’s parents would nod and say ‘Thank you, very nice,’ and they would start eating. If before dinner they had been shouting at Nory to come right now to the table, the grace stopped any scolding of her by building a little wall between what had happened before dinner and what happened at dinner. No singing was allowed during the actual main part of the dinner but you could sing in between dinner and dessert, or if you had to demonstrate something you learned in drama class or something a kid did that you had to show by standing up, you could do that between dinner and dessert, as well. For instance, Roger Sharpless and Nory had had a pretend fight in which he had pretended to swop her in the face and she had ducked so that each time his fist would clong into the wall. That sort of event happened in Tintin a fair amount. Roger and she had Tintin in common, and they also both liked 99 Flake. 99 Flake is a candybar that you can’t get all that easily in America. Actually 99 Flake is the name if you’re talking about the ice cream made with the candy bar, and Flake is the name if you’re just talking about the candybar.