Fatal flaw indeed! How dare Ms. Beryl say that? She was definitely a little chatty from time to time, but she had been chatty at every school she had ever been to, it was in her deepest nature to be chatty, and other kids were tons chattier, they actually shouted or threw things, and she was only eight at that time, eight going on nine. In Chinese class in the morning she did not have nearly so much of a problem with the ‘fatal flaw,’ but there too she sometimes did forget herself and talk a little to Bernice or Debbie. The Chinese teacher was much more strict, and a few times she got furious at Bernice and shouted in Chinese, because Bernice made fun of her sometimes by saying slangy things very softly in English that the teacher couldn’t understand, but Bai Lao Shi was much calmer than Ms. Beryl. Every morning the kids stood on the field next to the school and did Chinese exercises, shouting out the numbers — yi, er, san — while Bai Lao Shi blew puffs on a silver whistle. Sometimes she held the whistle in her teeth. She had one silver tooth.
26. A Bad Dream That Joe, the Baby-sitter’s Son, Once Had
Nory’s parents were not completely happy about Ms. Beryl as a teacher, especially after she wrote them the note about the fatal flaw, and at the dinner table they had discussion after discussion after discussion about what they should do for the next year. The result of the discussions was they rented over their house, and presto, ‘We don’t mind if we do go to England!’ The good thing about being in England was that there were lots of teachers at the Threll Junior School, and each one had things they did well and things they did less well. So you never got that feeling of too much Ms. Beryl. Each morning Nory’s mother would take her and Littleguy to the school, Littleguy in his miniature uniform, which was very cute, and Nory in her jacket and tie and gray skirt and backpack, and each afternoon Nory’s father or mother would pick her up and take her to tea at the tea place near the cathedral, where she had peppermint tea and a piece of chocolate cake with a little dopple of whipped cream next to it, while Littleguy slept in his stroller if they were lucky. Sometimes they read and sometimes they talked about the subject of the day, whatever it was.
Each person contributes something in this world. Some people make bricks, for example, and some make chocolate cakes. Some invent a new kind of powerful glue or maybe a marionette that works by magnets. Or they put the little ball bearings inside whistles that twirl around. Of course some people contribute more than others. Nory’s contribution was going to be that she would be a dentist and help people with their teeth. Nory’s mother’s contribution was teaching Nory and Littleguy about everything, and how it’s important to be honest and not hurt people’s feelings. Nory’s father’s contribution was writing books that help people go to sleep. The books that Nory read to help her go to sleep were: Garfield comics, Tintin books, and sometimes a chapter book like The Wreck of the Zanzibar, although there was a description in that book of a cow lying on his back with his feet and arms extended in the air, cold and dead because it had been drowned in the water, that was not too pleasant. When she was just dozing off she liked something cheerful, with hand-lettered words, in capitals, nothing scary. Tin tin was very popular in England, Garfield not quite as popular as in America. There was a Garfield cartoon in which Garfield has amnesia. He’s talking about how he’s upset that he’s lost his memory, and how John is upset, and Garfield lies back on the table and turns his head back and puts his hand over like he’s swimming backwards, just one hand, and he puts his finger up, and he takes a bit of the frosting of the cake off and says, ‘Well, I remember being hungry.’ Or no, maybe it was, ‘Do I remember being hungry?’
You needed to give yourself the best chance of not having a bad dream by dozing off reading something cartoonish and happy, basically. But even then a bad dream can launch itself off in your head. It could just be something from a movie you saw. In Palo Alto, there was a girl in Girl Scouts whose mother was very big on letting kids see grownup scary movies. There was one movie about a mother who turns out to be evil, with yellow fangs and eyes with nothing but white. Nory had to be very careful not even to think about not thinking about that movie, because it could clamp onto her and she then would not be able to help thinking about it, and the only way to escape thinking about it would be to tempt herself by thinking up something even scarier, and the only way to escape from that was to think about sometime even scarier than that, until you were swamped with scariness and couldn’t escape until morning.
Sometimes a movie isn’t frightening at all, except for in one pacific spot, when you don’t dream of expecting it, like that very good movie about a kid who’s being flown over Canada in a plane, but the man who’s flying him has a heart attack, so they crash, and the heroine has to survive by himself in the wild until he’s rescued. All that is just fine. But nobody warned Nory that there was a scene in the movie in which the kid has to swim out to the plane, which is in the middle of the pond, to get something he needs, and dive under the water, and the dead man’s horrible light purple staring face suddenly floats into the picture, with fear-music. Oh! It should say on the box, THIS MOVIE IS REALLY GOOD EXCEPT FOR ONE SCENE THAT WILL SCARE YOU OUT OF YOUR SHOES FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO KEEP FROM THINKING ABOUT IT. (ALSO ONE SCENE THAT IS DISGUSTING BECAUSE YOU SEE HIM EAT A GRUB.) The movie came back to her much less often nowadays, though. When you spend time in another country like England, there is so much new stuff coming pouring in that it even changes your nightmares. There was another movie about a boy who goes on a dogsled race. Everything’s going along just fine, until for some reason the movie gets it into its head to have a corpse slide down on a dogsled at night. The corpse hits a bump and sits up, and there’s his blank dead face, sheet-white, staring backwards at you.
Probably one thing that some kids do is that they watch the particular movie over and over until they go kind of numb and it doesn’t scare them, because you’re not supposed to be scared. Your brain toughens up, like the knees of the camels. But you have to stop at a point being tough, because there is definitely such a thing as being much too tough. There are other things you can do to help the situation, though. If you have a bad dream, and you wake up really frightened, and it’s still dark, don’t just lie there unhappy. You can finish the dream off in a good way. You tell yourself, ‘This is my dream, it came from my own brain, I control it, and I have a chance now that I’m awake to make a few small, shall we say, adjustments to it.’ Nory told this tip to Joe, who was Ruth the baby-sitter’s son, when Joe told her a bad nightmare he’d had. Joe was Ethiopian, from the country of Africa, where he spoke a completely different African-American language, or rather African-African language, and he had learned to speak English quite well in only one short year in Palo Alto. His bad dream was that he and his dad were walking along, when a man jumped down from a tree and said ‘Mfoya, mfoya!’—something like that — which means, ‘Dead, dead!’ The man pointed to some bones. Joe’s dad thought the man was just Joe’s friend, or just being kind of friendly. Then when his dad turned away the man bit Joe deep in the neck. Joe said ‘Gah!’ His dad turned around in surprise, and then he and the man fought, and his dad finally killed the guy by strangling him and hitting his head on a rock. But the guy’s wife came out and she was very very angry. They were carnibels, or they seemed to be, anyway. The guy’s wife ate Joe, finished him up, tooth and nail. So in the end Joe was only bones in the grass by the roadside.