Nory showed the page to Pamela the next day, and Pamela read it over twice carefully. ‘One very important thing you should know is that here we don’t say Mom, we say Mum, and we spell it with a u,’ Pamela said. ‘And I think you shouldn’t describe Claudia by her interests, but by how she looks. You probably should rewrite the beginning including a bit more about her appearance.’ That was Pamela’s complete reaction. She didn’t say ‘Good,’ or ‘Nice try,’ or ‘Well done,’ or anything like that. (If you fell or dropped something, sometimes the boys would call out, ‘Well done!’)
Nory thought to herself, ‘If you don’t want to write it, Pamela, fine, but don’t refuse to help write it and then tell me to rewrite it. I did the best I could.’ But maybe Pamela was a little embarrassed by the mention of the two of them being best friends, since they’d never actually talked about being best friends.
They chatted about the book quite a number of times after that, but the first page was the one and only page that got written down. Oh well.
51. The Wind
Mostly Nory and Pamela spent more and more time together at school as friends. Actually at times there were four friends total, since Pamela had an I.F. named Leyla (I.F. stands for Imaginary Friend), and Nory thought it would be a friendly gesture to have an I.F. herself, too. She thought for a long time and came up with Penny Beckinsworth as her new I.F. She liked the name Penny, and Beckinsworth sort of sounded like a person you would think was worth beckoning for. She made up a song that she sang to the rhythm of ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’: Penny Beckinsworth I reckon is a friend. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon is a friend. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon. Penny Beckinsworth I reckon is a friend. But Nory had never been too good at keeping up with imaginary friends. For example, if you write an I.F. a letter, you never get one back, unless you write it, too, which takes some of the fun out of it. On weekends in particular, Nory sometimes missed having someone real over to play with. Just simply to play with, period, end of discussion. It hadn’t happened very much this year, strangely enough. Her parents were happy to watch her perform a play in which she dressed up Littleguy as a dog or a swan or an airplane engineer, and they were happy to listen to a story she had made up or play Battleship with her, and Battleship was quite fun, even when you were hit, because you could think up a new way to say you were hit, such as ‘Ouch, I seem to have developed a yawning hole in my forecastle,’ or ‘Yikes, hoist out the rubber dinkies, she’s a-going down!’ But it wasn’t the same as having your very own friend over to play. Littleguy also missed his best friend from school in Palo Alto. His new friend Jack spit onto the steam engines and that was not good to do, he said. But he had a different friend, Oliver, who he said was ‘a very nice shy boy.’ Littleguy had gotten into the usual habit of walking up to a stranger in the toystore and saying, ‘Hello, I’m shy.’
Nory played some with her dolls but she was desperate just to have another nice girl her age in her room. Pamela refused to give Nory her phone number because she said she wasn’t supposed to give out vital information such as her phone number unless her parents said it was okay, and she kept forgetting to ask them if it was okay. Her number was ex-directional, which means that you can’t get it by calling 192. 192 sounds like it would be the same as 911 in America but actually it’s the same as 411. Nory had Kira’s number but she and Nory were not getting along all too well. They had just enough of a shred of friendship left to want the other person to act the way they wanted them to, rather than just not caring.
On Sunday afternoon Nory’s mother took Nory and Littleguy to a playground near the Cathedral. There was a nice little child who was Littleguy’s age for him to play with, but as usual, no child Nory’s age. Nory’s mother went over to supervise Littleguy on the slide, and Nory swang on the swings, which always made her feel lonely feelings unless there were tons of other people swinging on them, and then she sat anonymously on the bench. She started flipping through a catalog that her mother had brought along. There was a wind that day, and Nory liked the wind. Whenever she had a chance in a drawing or a painting, she included a tree with long flexible branches being blown by the wind, because it was one of her favorite things to paint or draw in all art. She noticed the pages of the catalog rustling and thought, ‘I know, I can try being friends with the wind!’
She held the catalog open on her lap. She asked the wind, ‘So what do you think, do you think I’d look good in this dress?’ And the wind would either turn the page or not turn the page, or rattle the page a little without completely turning it. If the wind didn’t turn the page, it meant yes, it liked the dress. If the wind only rattled the page, it meant that it still hadn’t reached a decision. And if it did turn the page, Nory would look at the new page and say, ‘Oh, so you think I’d look good in that dress? How interesting. I’m not so sure, but maybe.’ The wind was not all that chatty, but it seemed nice and it had definite ideas about the fashions Nory should wear. That was kind of fun, although it had something of a lonely feeling to it, too.
That night Nory had a bad dream, not horrible, but not exactly enjoyable. It came to her probably because the light in her bathroom had burnt out again and it was windy, which meant that squeakings kept coming from outside. She dreamed her winding way through old dark and deserted buildings and found a room where there was a giant ring of black metal, with black metal hooks all the way around it. She knew they were the hooks you use in a slaughterhouse, where you would hang up the meat. The ring was turning, slowly, but it looked as if nobody was in the building except Nory. That was the frightening thing.
She got up and paddled into her parents’ bedroom and asked them if it was morning, or if it wasn’t morning could she possibly read because she’d had a scary dream. They lifted their heads and croaked out that they were sorry she’d had a scary dream but everything was all right and yes, she could read. She went back into her room and turned on the light to read some of Puppies in the Pantry. Then she stopped reading and remembered a really good speech at Cathedral service. Mary, Jesus’s mother, had been frightened and someone told her, Do not be frightened, the Lord is using you as his servant, and we all must do as Mary did and strive to serve the Lord and be helpful to him. ‘I will strive to serve the Lord, I will strive to serve the Lord,’ Nory said to herself, and when she had said it she felt infinitely happier and smiled her way deep down into the pillow and closed her eyes. Before she went back to sleep, she had a strong wish to tell a quick story to herself about a girl who met a princess. Nobody had anything else for her to do, since it was plum in the middle of the night, so that’s what she did.
52. A Story About a Girl Who Meets a Princess
It was a bright, sunny day in May. A girl, by the side of a large creek, sang. She was happy and playing. She was totally content. She was an orphan; she lived on the street, or places like that. She ate wheat straight from the kernel, and whatever she could find in her wanderings. Except meat, which she did not care for.
She was not very big for her age. She was what’s known as a small, young girl, to most people. To herself, she was not young at all. She was very smart and had lived awhile. She had no recollection of what had happened in her younger days, but when she was ten years old, she got her dog, a big golden retriever. He was the person she looked after, and he looked after her. He was the person she knew best in the world. She loved him. He came along wherever she went. They were content.