Littleguy liked having Nory read books to him. However, she had to be careful about certain books. He was not frightened of spiders so much. But owls were a different bowl of fish! To him the nighttime was full of owls rustling and blinking their huge staring eyes. In Nory’s house, they couldn’t even say ‘owl,’ they had to spell it out. When Nory read Littleguy a book like The Country Noisy Book and they came to the page with an o-w-l sitting in a tree at nighttime, she would bustle to the next page. If she tried to casually cover the owl up with her hand, it never worked, because he knew it was under there. Sometimes Littleguy would try to be brave. ‘I like owls very much,’ he would say. ‘But I don’t like just that owl.’
Once Nory’s mother found Littleguy in the Art Room late at night trying to color over the yellow eyes of a scary owl with a red marker, because he didn’t like coming across it in his Winnie the Pooh magazine, which he had been flipping through before he fell asleep. Another time he told Nory that two very bad owls were wanting to look in his window, behind the curtain. When Nory heard that, with the frightened seriousness on his face, she also felt a little twizzle of fear down the back of her neck and places like that, because she especially did not like the idea of things waiting outside for her and staring in through blank, black windowpanes at night. The first and one of the few early, early things she remembered about her life was of running down a long hall and stopping at the edge of a window. Then bang: she thought she saw the ugliness of the Tweety Monster with its frown-eyed face, on the other side of the window, and she screamed ‘Mommeeeee!’ The Tweety Monster was just simply a monster version of Tweety-bird in a Sylvester and Tweety tape — Tweety turned into it when he drank a special potion. No reason to be scared of a casual little cartoon. But it was scary, and when Nory screamed and dashed away from the window Nory’s mother said gently, ‘I know, I know, but it’s just drawings. There’s no Tweety Monster out there, no bad thing, only the gentle night and the squirrels all fluffed up to keep from getting too cold, and the raccoons having a pleasant chew of garbage. Everything’s all right.’ Her mother’s eyes were the most soothing, nicest, softest, deepest eyes that any mother could ever have. They were, to be specific, blue. Sometimes instead of two owls Littleguy had a bad dream about two old, old trucks from the scrapyard with huge tires driving around the living room with their bright lights on. And yet in real life, Littleguy loved trucks more than anything, except trains. One time Littleguy even said he had a nightmare about sitting on the toilet and not having a book to read.
That was one thing that Nory really thought was not quite fair about bad dreams, when they went ahead and took something you loved, like trucks, or mirrors, or your mother, or were proud of, like sitting in the bathroom all by yourself, and made them scary. If Nory had a library, she would not allow any Goosebumps books in the children’s department, because just the covers were frightening, never mind the dreadful insides, and kids weren’t even aware how frightened they were sometimes until later that evening. There was one book with a picture of an evil doll that she really thought was a bad idea. Why ruin the idea of something nice, like a doll, by making it so horribly scary that you couldn’t think about it and couldn’t trust it? Your dolls aren’t going to do anything bad to you. Your dolls should be trusted to be in your room with you in the middle of the night. Goosebumps books got kids much more scared than they ever wanted to be, or ever expected they would be, and they didn’t need that help anyway, since their own dreams would do a superb job of scaring their dits off just on their own. But still, Nory’s cousin Anthony and her friend Debbie loved reading Goosebumps books and couldn’t think of a funner thing to do. So not everyone had the same reaction.
Nory especially disliked when she had teeth-dreams. Say, for example, a beautiful graceful fluffer-necked duck that was just sitting away the time in the reeds by a river, its feathers being fluttered by the wind, and when you came up to it in the dream to hold out your hand to it to say hello and give it a piece of bread it would suddenly curl back its beaks and show huge fangy teeth. Or a horse with pointy teeth and bug-eyes with white rims would chase her. Or cows with pointed teeth. But those dreams were mostly ones she’d had long ago and gotten adjusted to. Another fairly old dream Nory had was of being chased through various shades of colors by a queen who was determined to cut off her arm for a punishment. Nory dashed away from her, but the Queen came chugging closer, with some of her men, and Nory realized she couldn’t escape. So she made them a compromise. She said to the Queen, ‘Okay, okay, don’t chop off my arm, you can chop off my head.’ That way, she wouldn’t experience the pain. The Queen said, ‘All right!’ And wham, the ax came circling. ‘Ah, how nice,’ Nory felt. She didn’t have to bow or anything. She didn’t even have to put a paper bag over her head.
The moral of the dream was: Better to be dead than armless in agony. It wasn’t a perfect moral, though, Nory thought afterward, even for a dream — which isn’t too surprising since it’s too much to expect of your dreams that they would end up giving off good morals — but really, you can learn to do almost everything you would need to do without arms: play cards with your toes, and that kind of thing. You might hesitate for a moment if your dentist wanted to work on your mouth holding the tools in his toes, true. That might not be the world’s most raging success.
5. A Slight Problem After Lunch
At least if Nory had a bad dream she could go into her parents’ room and poke at them gently until they woke up enough to comfort her back down. Not every kid had that kind of luck. Some of the kids at Threll School were there all day and all night, twenty-four hours a week. Roger Sharpless was a very short boy with an intelligent face like a detective who cried on the first day in the Cathedral during service during the first week. ‘Why are you crying?’ Nory asked, in a whisper. ‘Sometimes I cry during the day,’ he whispered back. Afterward, when they were walking to the Junior School building, he said that he missed his parents horribly. He said that the sight of the little white pillow on his bed in his room reminded him of his old room and that made him cry, because think about it, going away from everything you know, your rugs, your windows, your parents, your driveway, your exact look of street, can be quite a shock to a nine-year-old. He also told her a fact that he said he would never forget in his whole life, because he had gotten it wrong on a test one time: the Greeks wrote by making marks on wax. Nory felt that it was kind of him to tell her, because now she would never forget it either.