Threll was just a town, not a city, and Palo Alto, California, was just a town, too, although it had quite a seedy neighborhood in the way that real cities do. You might imagine a French person going around Palo Alto, California, with an American person. The American would say, ‘As you will notice, there are some seedy areas.’ The French person would say, in his very strong French accent, ‘Oh, is this — city area?’ Pronouncing it of course the way the French teacher at the Junior School pronounced it. And the American would misunderstand and say sadly, ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is seedy. There’s just no getting around it.’ Maybe that’s how the idea that cities were seedy came about, if it happened quite a number of times. Also when people don’t cut their grass, it grows so long that it shoots out a tassel of seeds, which was a sign that the people in that house didn’t care about their yard. Maybe they were caring for a sick person who was cooped up in the house, or maybe they were busy giving themselves shots of drugs and alcohol and didn’t have the energy to walk out their front door and cut the grass. That’s another way the idea that cities were seedy could have come about.
Nory’s favorite street in Palo Alto had a number of stores on it, including the toy store. Nory spent half an hour there one Saturday in the summer while Littleguy played with the breakdown train at the Thomas the Tank Engine table. She looked through every one of the Barbie outfits, because her new best friend, Debbie, said she liked Barbies with black hair and blue dresses. Debbie had given Nory a friendship locket to celebrate that they were new best friends, and Nory was extremely happy about that and wanted to give Debbie a Barbie from money she earned selling hand-lettered signs to her parents. She looked and looked, and finally tucked away behind a whole lot of other outfits she found a dark blue Barbie dress with lighter blue sparkles on the front, and she hung it back on the hook as the very first one and went to get her mother. When she came back, though, another girl was there with her mother, and the girl was holding the blue dress outfit in her hand. Nory stood there and tried her best to hint by the sad hopeless way she was flopping her arms and looking at the blue dress in the girl’s hand that she had just spent a whole half an hour going through every outfit to find it, but the girl and her mother ignored her, or didn’t know what she was flopping about, and she didn’t want to say anything, because of course the girl had found it all by herself, it’s just that the girl wouldn’t have had hardly a chance of finding it if Nory hadn’t found it and put it on top where it got the special feeling of being the first outfit on display.
They went to another toy store a week later, but there were no blue dresses that were right. Blue was not in fashion at that moment. So Nory got Debbie a tiny glass panda bear posed on a branch, all made of droops of light blue glass, because Debbie was devoted to pandas and had about thirty of them in her room. Nory wrote Debbie a letter soon after they came to England that said:
Dear Debbie,
How ary you? How is your school? I went to the Fitz Willyham museum, where there was a fan room, and there is a fan launguage for things you’re not allowed to say in public if you place the fan behind your head it means ‘Don’t forget me’! There was a fan that I preticularly liked, It is made from coal and mother of peal. I went to Pecover House, but I think it should be famous for its garden more than the house. It has a wunderful statue of a girl and a dog made from stone, and a green house with a fern that will crumple-up when you touch it. I miss you and your dog Sharpy, how is that shoe consuming feind? I hope to be seing you again soon. Love Eleanor PS Please write back.
She drew a picture of a girl holding a fan behind her head at the bottom of the letter.
The best dream Nory had ever had was about Debbie. Nory had died, although she didn’t come to that conclusion until a different part of the dream. She whispered in Debbie’s ear, ‘Debbie, Debbie, it’s me.’ Debbie recognized Nory’s voice and looked up. Debbie had a very wide face, and she could get a look that was kind of still, kind of unnerved. Her mouth looked bigger because her lips were over the wiring of her braces. She made that unnerved look at Nory. She said, ‘Nory! Nory! Is that you?’ She recognized Nory’s voice, even though she couldn’t see her.
‘Don’t worry, Debbie,’ said Nory, in a calm gentle voice. ‘Don’t be scared. I would be too if I were you.’ Debbie seemed calmer. Nory showed her the newspaper, which said on the front page ELEANOR DIES IN A FIRE. Not her family, not anyone else. Later on in the dream Nory said Boo to Garrick, a kid in her class, sort of fakily: ‘Garrick? Boooooo!’
Garrick said, ‘No way, she can’t be a ghost, she’s dead already.’
‘Oh, yes I can!’ said Nory and fumed out in her full ghostiness. Garrick started running out of fear and tripped. That was funny because Garrick was a ten-year-old and usually extremely confident and pleased with himself and made fun of Nory’s spelling, which wasn’t very good. In fact it was a ‘bosaster,’ as Littleguy would say. But the wonderful part of the dream was when Debbie looked up, hearing the voice, and knew it was Nory nearby her.
9. A Strange Vegetable
‘It’s sometimes kind of impressive,’ Nory thought, ‘to try to envision how many bricks there are in a city.’ You could tell a city was old by the colors and crookedness of its bricks. In Boston Nory noticed that usually the bricks were red, but in Threll they were usually, not to be disrespectful, kind of a dirty yellow, and they were even less straight than in Boston. You wouldn’t expect dirty yellow crooked bricks to look pretty, but they did, especially where you could see places in the walls where there had been old windows or old doorways that had been stuffed with other bricks and stones and pieces of old buildings.
That was what a certain memory that you had forgotten felt like — you knew that a window had been there but it wasn’t now, just an old brick wall, so you couldn’t see through it. There was a very tall brick wall around the garden of the Bishop’s Palace at Threll, with pointy stones on top, so that the poor people couldn’t sneak in at night and steal the cauliflowers, which might have looked tempting in the moonlight to a very hungry mouthwatering person of long ago. At Waitrose, the supermarket, they sold darling little dwarf cauliflowers in the ‘Dwarf Food’ section. It wouldn’t be called dwarf food in America because that would hurt the feelings of a real dwarf, who would feel not too pleased about being compared to a vegetable.
Waitrose also sold a mysteriously pointy green plant, halfway between a cauliflower and a pine tree, called a Romanesco. Nory’s mother said that ‘Gothico’ would be a better name for it. It was intended to be eaten for dinner, but it looked like a screensaver on Nory’s mother’s computer called ‘Permafrost II.’ ‘Worms’ was the neatest of all the screensavers, though.