Nory said to Joe, ‘Okay, that’s scary, I admit, but now you can finish it. Try this. Your dad sees your bones and thinks, “Gosh, I have to act fast, I have to get Joe to a hospital.” He puts the bones in a bag and goes off. “Please could you help him get better?” your dad asks.’
Joe said: ‘At the hospital they’re going to say, “Sure, we’ll do it, but you have to give us two thousand dollars.” ’
‘Right,’ said Nory, ‘and your father just won the lottery, so he pulls out his wallet and he says, “This is your lucky day!” ’
‘And they put me in a machine that sticks all my parts back on me, arms, legs, a built-in heart, a built-in liver,’ said Joe. ‘And I wake up and I see my dad, and I say, “Dad? Dad? What happened?” ’
27. Nory’s Museum
That was back at the Palo Alto house, while Nory’s parents were out for dinner and Ruth was there babysitting. Later on that night, Nory asked Joe if they had fake food in Africa, fake Japanese food, the beautiful kind that was in the window of Japanese restaurants, and he said they didn’t. Japan wasn’t important in Africa. Nory asked Joe if he liked fake Japanese food. He said he did. Nory told him her idea for a museum of fake food from all different lands. She would take very beautiful china plates, and place the food on them. It would be a small one-room museum, full of glass cupboards. She would go to all the Japanese restaurants, and call all the toy stores. There would be a children’s area and a gift shop. And she would sell fake foods, for good prices, if she had duplicates, because thousands of toy stores would be sending her fake food at the same time. There would mostly be fruits and vegetables, and Japanese food, such as the one of seaweed shaped in a cornucopia, with rice tucked into it and crabmeat sprinkled over the rice. The children’s area would have plastic plates, but beautifully painted also. ‘Does that sound like a good idea for a museum?’ Nory asked.
‘Sure, yeah,’ said Joe. He said a lady came into his school to do a nutrition demonstration, and she had tons of fake food. The chocolate chip cookie looked so real, Joe thought it was real at first. The meat was cool also, he said. It was red, but you could see light coming through it.
‘Ah, the meat was translucent,’ said Nory. ‘Transparent is when you can see clearly through it, but translucent is when you can only see the glow of light but nothing in particular.’ Joe nodded. It was amazing how much English he knew. You couldn’t even tell he had ever not known English. Joe knew a huge amount more English than Nory knew Chinese, and she’d been studying it for four years. But they both had the same trouble with the multiplication table. Nory’s parents gave their little red car to Ruth when they moved to England, and Ruth wrote a letter telling them that the car was running very well except for the fact that it needed a new engine.
28. Problems with Rabbits
So at night you could read Garfield or think about something happy-making, like a plan of having a fake-food museum, and arranging the fake loaves of bread on tiny plates, in order to try to be sure not to have a bad dream. But still they sometimes happened, and there was nothing you could do. Clang! Bad image. Fright. Run, wake up, lie in bed, panting. Nory’s latest bad dream came after they went for a walk one day and saw hundreds of rabbits poking their heads out of holes. How could you get a bad dream out of something nice like that? And also, why would you want to? It had to do with the place that was just grass now, near the Cathedral, that said ‘Monk’s Burial Ground’ on the map. So the monks were probably still under there even though their gravestones were totally and completely gone. In the dream she was a monk at first, who went out every day to feed the rabbits, wearing her hood. She fed them celery from a big white barrel. They were quite happy. But then a disease hit the rabbit families, a bilbonic plague with sores around their eyes. They started dying, even though Nory tried to care for them. She found the antidote, some yellow flowers in the forest, but then she died and was buried as a monk, in the monk’s cemetery, under the grass. The rabbits got better and grew back after some time and they started digging tunnels. Nory was a rabbit in this part of the dream, nibbling her way through the ground. All of a sudden she came to a different kind of thing she nibbled through. What is this white crumbly stuff? Ugh! Bone is what it was. The earth trickled away and she was in a humongous underground tomb, where she saw that she’d just nibbled straight through the chest bones of a dead body that turned out to be the corpse of the monk. They had to cover over the corpse, because it was shrunken and awful to the eye. Plus it was starting to shiver or tremble. Then Nory was flying overhead in an airplane, but the airplane ran out of gas, and she couldn’t find northeast. It went into a spiral, and she jumped out in a parachute and fell and was knocked out. The rabbits saw the parachute spread itself out on the ground and thought, ‘Aha! Perfect material for covering the corpse of the dead monk!’ So they took hold of the parachute in their teeth and started pulling it down, down, which of course dragged Nory down, too, into the hole, since all the parachute strings were still harnessed to her, and she woke up underground, with rabbits all bustled around her and with something lumpy and unnerving next to her hidden under her parachute. She pulled the parachute away and there was a dead shrivelly face whose eyes and mouth immediately opened, all together, and a tongue popped out that was totally black. That was where she woke up in real life.
Now that was not a particularly good spot to be in when you wake up from a dream and Nory was not in the least bit happy. She got up, tottled to the bathroom, which was also not a perfect experience because the lightbulb that was usually on over the mirror had burned out, so the only light was from the streetlight, and then she went into her mother and father’s room and said: ‘I had a frightening dream.’ Her mother reached her hand out and squeezed her arm and hand and said in her murmury sleepy voice, ‘I’m so sorry, my baby girl, try not to think about it, everything is all right, goodnight, my baby, love you.’ She made kissing sounds with her lips.
‘Goodnight, love you,’ said Nory, and she stumbled back to her room, but she still had the fright living in her chest and when she saw the covers of her bed she thought, ‘No, I definitely can’t get back in there by myself,’ and she turned around and went back to her parents’ room and said: ‘Can I sleep in your bed? I’m still scared.’ But her parents almost never let her sleep in their bed, although they used to let Littleguy sleep in their bed until he was over two, which wasn’t totally fair. Sometimes they let Nory come in in the morning and snuggle in, however. ‘Tuck in, tuck in,’ her mother would say then, lifting a corner of blanket, and that made her feel so happy.
Her father got up and said, ‘I’ll tuck you in.’ He tucked her in her bed and stroked her head and said, ‘Nothing is bad, everything’s okay, pick something to think about with bright sunlight in it, Splash Mountain or having tea at the museum with the fan room or looking out from Oxburgh Hall over the fields. Or playing in the sprinkler with Debbie.’
‘But I’m still quite scared,’ Nory said. ‘Can I read?’
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ said her father. ‘If you absolutely have to read to get your mind going in a different direction, go ahead and read. Goodnight, sweetie pie.’