When Carl said that he would kill her by tossing her in the swimming pool with the insects she just disgustedly said, ‘Carl, you’re fat.’
Carl said, ‘Well, not as fat as your butt.’
When Carl said that, Nory couldn’t help giggling. Then he pointed at her and said, ‘Haw, haw! You think it’s funny! Haw, haw! I made you laugh!’ So Carl won that battle face down, because it’s really dumb-seeming to giggle at times. Carl just hated Nory, for some reason. And Nory hated Carl.
But a lot of what happened that year she couldn’t remember nearly as well as that bit. ‘That bit’ is how they would say it in England, and if you asked your friend to come over, they would say that you asked her to ‘come round.’ These days Nory couldn’t remember the order she had learned things at the ICMS or all the works she did — they called them ‘works,’ the little projects, like the number pyramid or a geography puzzle that they did. She couldn’t even remember all the kids in the class. She remembered one very nice girl named Steffie who left later on, who had a birthday party at her swimming pool where Nory had floundered into the deep end and had gotten about a gallon and a half of water in her lung and thrown up a tiny bit on the grass. She gave Steffie a pair of tiny glass slippers, wrapped up in probably the best wrapping paper she had ever drawn, with a picture of a girl in a rowboat near a willow tree on it. She still thought about those glass slippers. They were paperweights that a glassblower made, but they worked as real doll shoes. She wished she had those glass slippers, they were amazingly wonderful. But Steffie’s parents moved away to Lafayette and she started going to a different school. So that was the last birthday with Steffie.
It disturbed Nory very much to think that all she was going to know about what happened in her life was not very much at all. You only can really remember the things that happened when you were an older child and the things that happened to you now — that is, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or late last week. You live your life always in the present. And even in the present, this day, dozens and hundreds of little tiny things happen, so many that by the end of the day you can’t make a list of them. You lose track of them unless something reminds you. Say someone says, ‘Remember when you dropped your ruler this morning?’ And you do remember. But then that is lost in the tangle.
Now, some things you can just accept that you’re not going to have the slightest chance of remembering. It would be nice, but you know that it would be basically impossible. For instance, being in your mother’s womb, as it’s called. Some people thought babies could remember that. Nory one morning asked Littleguy if he could remember being tucked away in Mommy’s belly, long ago, and he said, ‘Yes. It had all things there, in she’s tummy. It had things that were called steam trains. It was filled with they. Filled with steam trains, City of Truro, Lord of the Isles, the Mallard. Pictures with steam trains, and toy ones, and jumping things, all. Filled, filled with they.’ Well, of course there weren’t toy trains in Nory’s mother’s womb, unless maybe he was remembering the small intestine chuffing around. Maybe he was remembering a freight train of food being digested going around and around him. But probably not.
Still, Nory thought it would be nice if you could think back at least to the age of three. It shouldn’t be impossible. Three was older than Littleguy, and Littleguy could understand an amazing number of things. But Nory couldn’t go back that far, really, except for a few scribs and scrabs. She remembered being eight, and back into being seven, and she went pretty much back to five, and then — it teetered a little bit. She only remembered her fourth birthday party, a Mermaid party, because she had watched the tape of it a number of times on TV.
One thing, though, she made a point of remembering and passing on to her older self. Every year that she got a year older she said to her parents, ‘Remember when I was five, I said I was five going on six? Remember when I was six I said six going on seven? When I was seven I’d be going seven on eight? Then going eight on nine? Well, now I’m going nine on ten.’ So each year the list of years got a little longer, but she remembered the earlier times that way, by saying the list over. Being thirteen would be very nice, because you’re in your teens when you’re thirteen, and you don’t have to read a big sign that says, ‘Children under the age of twelve cannot attend to this.’ Another thing she made sure to bring along every year with her for a long time was the memory that there were many many little amounts of money that she hadn’t paid back to her parents. Little collections of change she had found in the car and thought could be hers but maybe not, or times her parents had bought her a doll outfit or something when she told them she would reimburse them later when they got home from her own money, or gifts she bought other people with her own money, but borrowing it from her parents since she’d forgotten her purse. She would skip a week, not thinking of it, then still remember it and bring it into the next week, then skip a week, then bring it over. Finally she couldn’t keep the amount in her head because it had been added onto and subtracted from so much, and it began to pull at her, and she thought, ‘I know, I’ll pay them a hundred dollars when I grow up, and that will surely make up for anything I borrowed along the way.’ Then she didn’t have to keep track of that.
25. The Last Straw
Ms. Fisker was a very good teacher with a humongously good memory. She could keep in the front-runners of her brain what each child knew and what they hadn’t learned yet. And she could persistently keep the whole class quiet and doing their own work, privately. That’s something you almost had to do as a teacher in a Montessori school because each kid is at a different level, learning some different scribbet of a thing, and there are lots of different ages of kids in a class. So for instance in Nory’s class there were kids who were seven and kids who were eleven. Some were doing ‘six plus five’ kinds of things, some were doing ‘numbers of seconds it takes a flicker of light to spark to the earth divided by the speed of light’ kinds of things, and Ms. Fisker had to be totally on her toes about that. Some were learning how to break up words into syllables and some were learning that a noun was a large black triangle and a verb, which is an action, was a large red circle, and the reason why is because it’s a red rolling ball, moving. And a proper noun was a long purple triangle, if Nory wasn’t mistaken, and the the articles, like ‘an,’ ‘a,’ and ‘the,’ were either a short light blue or a short dark blue triangle. The adjectives were either short light blue or short dark blue, depending on what the articles were. The adverb is a smaller orange circle. Each of these things had to be learned, one by one, by coloring in the shapes over the sentences, and some kids were at the black-triangle stage and some were at the small-orange-circle stage. And there were keyholes and green half-moons, and on and on — Nory had never learned grammar out that far. Nobody at the Junior School knew about these grammar shapes because they were specially designed as part of the Montessori system, so all that time she had spent thinking about why a black triangle was like a noun, because it had a wide base and just sat there steadily being whatever noun it was, was just time that could have gone ‘poof’ away, as far as her teachers now were concerned. But she liked knowing that a red circle stood for a verb because it rolled. You could use it for other things you learned later, for instance you could say to yourself, ‘Mass is a blue triangle, energy is a red circle.’