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.
24. What You Do and Don’t Remember
That afternoon Nory tried to reinstruct every tiny detail of the International Chinese School in her mind. Talking about it to Pamela showed her how much she was already forgetting. It was a lovely school, where the kids were nice, most of them. When she first started in Upper Elementary one of the kids, Carl, who should remain nameless, told her in detail how he was going to kill her by throwing her in a swimming pool filled with poisonous insects. Carl was a warped older boy who left after that year.
A number of kids ganged up on her in the very beginning of that year, which was just about the only time anything that an adult would call being bullied ever happened to her. It was distressing enough that she could connect it to what Pamela might be feeling. But then she tried to think, ‘Honestly, was it a terrible thing that that boy, Carl, said all that mean stuff to me, and other kids mocked me?’ In her memory it wasn’t so unbearably bad because it was a very very long time ago. But that might be because it hadn’t gone on and gone on. You remember things better that happen over and over again, like Stop, Drop, and Roll. Except when they happen so many times that you don’t notice them whatsoever. Some parts of Neverending Story, the movie, she remembered very well, like the stone giant, and the flying dog that the boy meets. There’s a girl in the movie who is a princess who is important in a way because she’s going to die, but she’s minor, actually: the heroine is the boy. Nory thought she must have seen The Neverending Story recently in an advertisement, maybe a preview before another movie that her mother rented for her, because parts of it she had in her mind very clearly and colorfully and parts of it were fogged in. At the beginning some bullies throw the boy into the garbage, and he comes back at the end and he throws them into the garbage, all three of them. And someone loses his horse, because it sinks into the swamp and dies. That could be in Neverending Story II. There was a story similar to that part in a booklet that Nory’s father bought for her at the Cathedral shop. A man asks another man if he’s seen a hat floating in a very muddy road. The other man says, ‘Golly, no, I haven’t, why?’ And the first man says, ‘Well, I suspect there may be a man sitting on a horse underneath the hat.’
At the time they were mean to her, Nory had told Ms. Fisker about the boys in her class. Ms. Fisker was the upper elementary teacher who taught in English, in the afternoon. (Bai Lao Shi taught in Chinese, in the morning.) But Ms. Fisker said Nory had to learn how to handle the older boys and work matters out for herself. ‘Oh, Nory, I can see you’re developing a long tail, I can see it growing’—that’s what Ms. Fisker would say, because she was strongly not in favor of tattle tales. The rule was: ‘Don’t be a tattletale for little things, do be a tattletale for big things.’ Say if someone has broken someone’s thumb in the door. Something major. But Nory’s parents thought that Ms. Fisker probably should have ordered the older boys not to gang up on Nory. At some point the boys just stopped, though. And now it was just in her memory.