Distortions

Wally Whistles Dixie

What an amazing life David has had: born in the Sierras, completely unexpected, his mother in labor only two hours, two and a half months premature, weighing four pounds even. Not much larger than two trout in a pan, his father was fond of saying, staring at his extended flat palm. Given up for dead in India at age ten, he then gained weight, his heart beat normally again, the fever vanished overnight. Married at sixteen — an elopement — in Reno, Nevada, to a thirty-year-old ballerina. But these are facts, and the trivia is more interesting: he can find a mosquito in a room even when it’s not humming, go straight to its hiding place and catch it. Once he lifted his car by the back bumper — not in a moment of terror, nothing pinned under it, just to see … and he did it! He has memorized pages of Fitzgerald’s notebooks: descriptions of pretty girls, F’s thoughts on poetry, things F. will write etc. But he has read no F. novels! A lot of men cook, but David has published a cookbook that was translated into Japanese. The dedication is to the doctor who pronounced him doomed in India. David once played the oboe on a Scott Silver record, and before that time he had only played the violin. He practiced for a couple of days, and bleup bleuuuu buhloo. His wife, Sheila, is interesting too. There aren’t many forty-five-year-old ballerinas who are still with it. She still flies from the floor like a bouncer on a trampoline. She proposed to her husband on impulse, in a place called The Silver Slipper Café in Reno, telling him that he might spend years looking and she might spend years looking, and that they could end all the looking, what the hell. He insisted that they wait twenty-four hours, secretly suspecting that she was drunk. She was a little insulted, and the wait just gave her more time to look, but when he realized that she was and had been sober he took her to The Wedding Chapel by the Pool. After a brief ceremony, witnessed by a drunken fat woman and a weeping thin woman with a Doberman held on a leash that wrapped around her legs, Sheila and David exited the chapel swinging their arms and smiling. Sheila did a dance that ended with her diving into the pool and splashing another couple on their way into the chapel. So graceful! He didn’t know until then that she danced. They became servants for rich people on Long Island, and after five years — timed perfectly because Sheila was pregnant — the daughter of the rich people died, leaving a lot of money to her secret love, David. They left Long Island and went to Vermont, where they opened a restaurant. David wrote his cookbook and Sheila danced through their basement with paper flowers in her hair, followed by young children who looked like they were limping. The restaurant was a success, sushi being then very hard to find in that part of Vermont. He told the patrons about F’s ideas. Her class gave after-dinner performances, throwing their paper flowers to the customers at the end of the show. They made rhubarb wine. He sewed his own shirts, from material shipped to him from Hong Kong. She shaved her eyebrows and penciled thin arcs above her blue-gray eyes when it was outré. They had lawn furniture in their house, covered by fur rugs of nonendangered species during the winter. It was suspected that they were serious dopers. Not so. They drank the rhubarb wine, lounged on the fur, and tried to contend with their baby, Wally. At first it wasn’t bad — a small, pinkish, naked thing that lay on its back on a fur rug and played with wine-bottle corks laced together on a string by David. Wally liked the way they smelled. His mother’s pirouettes, the regular creaking of the floor, lulled him to sleep. He learned to speak at an early age, calling the mess he made in his pants “poopy”—which he also called the puppy. They meant to think of a name for the puppy, but nothing seemed appropriate. Wally was named for a male nurse who took care of Sheila after the baby’s birth. “Not really!” the nurse kept saying. Apparently it is untrue that babies are often named for doctors and nurses. The male nurse was extremely flattered and gave Sheila two bed baths a day when other women went to the showers. When Wally was a year old he got a strange look in his eye; he looked pissed off, to tell the truth. He and the puppy would be lying on their backs side by side, and Wally would straighten up and look very pissed off. Heredity? His mother was a bit cynical, but should this influence a one-year-old? Did he somehow sense that Sheila pounded her calves at night, telling them not to bulge? Did he sense an air of dissatisfaction in the house? They took him to a young doctor whom they felt they could speak frankly to, about vibrations … that the baby might be picking up bad vibrations. The doctor was shocked. They found an older man who was indifferent to the idea of vibrations, and stuck with him. David liked the way the doctor shrugged when he asked if bad vibrations could be getting to Wally. The first doctor had said, “You don’t beat this child, do you?”

When he was two, Wally began to wander off. A free spirit, Sheila felt. David thought he would fall off a cliff or drown. He was more practical; after all, he hadn’t proposed to her in The Silver Slipper Café. “You hold my love against me!” Sheila said, aghast. Wally took the aghast facial expression from his mother and combined it with a very distressed downturned mouth and ran away. You might also say that his eyes were very large and he pouted. It is a little difficult to describe his expression, but it was strange, and Sheila thought so too, although she didn’t say that to David. When he was three, Wally jumped off a table and broke his leg. While he was laid up, he colored to pass the time. Wally’s doctor paid a house call — amazing things happened to these amazing people — and pronounced Wally “just fine.”

“But his expression,” David said to the doctor as the doctor was leaving. “You wouldn’t look so happy if you were a three-year-old with a broken leg,” the doctor assured him.

A vacationing photographer and his wife, who had stopped to eat at the restaurant, noticed Wally’s pictures hung in back of the cash register and wanted to buy them. David wouldn’t part with them, but he let the photographer take pictures. David didn’t think much of it. About a month later, though, the photographer was back, this time with another man. They wanted to write an article about Wally for a magazine; Wally’s art would appear with it. Sheila was delighted. She told the men that her son was artistic, like her. David felt that they should think about it; what if he developed a terrific ego? “He’s already strange,” Sheila said. The photographer took pictures of Wally at his fourth birthday party. There was also a birthday interview, during which Wally echoed everything the interviewer asked:

“Do you like to draw a lot, Wally?”

“Do you like to draw a lot, Wally?”

“Ha! You’re a nice kid. And a good artist.”

“Ha! You’re a nice kid. And a good artist.”

“Do you know any famous artists, Wally?”

“Do you know any famous artists, Wally?”

“Have you ever heard of the Mona Lisa?”

“Have you ever heard of the Mona Lisa?”

“Sure, I have. Have you ever seen it?”

“Sure, I have. Have you ever seen it?”

“You don’t feel like talking today, do you?” the photographer asked.

Wally pulled up his top lip, showing his two big front teeth. “You don’t feel like talking today, do you?” he repeated.

“Nope. I’ll just take some pictures,” the photographer said.

A little girl from Wally’s party stood on her head for the photographer. The photographer noted with interest that Carters still manufactured white pants with yellow roses on them.

Wally’s fourth birthday party was immortalized on a magazine cover. There was a picture of Wally’s head, and above it, in little balloons as if he were imagining them, reproductions of his drawings. The magazine sold a lot of copies, tourists came to the restaurant, Sheila agreed to part with a few drawings — to museums only — and Wally jumped off the roof of David’s station wagon and broke his right arm five days after the cast was removed from his left leg.

Sheila consulted a child psychologist, who had written them to say how interested he was in Wally. She wrote that Wally jumped off of cars and tables and broke his bones. What was she to do? The psychologist appeared in person! Perhaps it was related in some way to her being a ballerina. After that, she beat her legs much harder at night, danced in private, locked the basement door to Wally when she gave lessons. The psychologist, in answer to David’s question about why Wally repeated what was said to him, suggested that it might be related to David’s memorization and quotation of F. Aha! From then on he thought F. He said nothing. Wally didn’t break any more bones. During the year he gave up repeating things. He also gave up art. In fact, when he had to color maps in the first grade, he did it sloppily. “What is your new interest?” David asked Wally optimistically. “Nothing,” Wally said.

In the second grade Wally had a girlfriend, who was in the fifth grade: Susan Leigh. They played the harmonica to each other. When his romance with Susan Leigh ended he took a leap — again from the car top — crashing the harmonica with his fall. Sheila wrote to the child psychologist, saying that Wally was no longer interested in doing anything. After a long time she got a letter. The doctor had retired and was living in the Bahamas. There was a check for eight dollars with the letter. The doctor asked her if she would buy a best-seller he had read about and send it to him, as it was unavailable on his island. She had trouble finding Murderous Midnight, and about a month later she received an angry note from the doctor, asking why she had failed him.

In the fifth grade, Wally was expelled from school, along with another boy; the two had forced a younger boy to pick up a stick and peel off the bark and eat it. Two years later, when he began junior high school, he told his father he wanted permission to marry another thirteen-year-old. “Where would you live?” David asked. “In a tent,” Wally said. “Where would you live in the winter?” David asked. David won his point, but Wally did not speak to him for two months. Then he asked again for David to sign the necessary papers, and for David to give him enough money to live in an apartment during the winter with his bride. “You owe it to me for exploiting me,” Wally said. “I never exploited you,” David told him. Again, Wally did not speak for a long time. His silence was now as predictable as his mimicry when he was younger. Apparently he also refused to speak in school, and a new teacher thought that he was deaf. They would not allow him to continue school until a doctor had tested his hearing. This made Sheila and David angry, and they told Wally that he was being ridiculous. He ran away. He lived in a tent not far from home. He was dirty. He said he wanted to take a trip to New York when David went to the tent to talk to him. “Here, take it,” David said, giving him the money. “I’m sick of all this.” Wally went to New York, then returned to the tent. He never returned to school.

There was a family meeting when Wally dropped out of school. It was the second family meeting they had ever had; the first — when his mother felt that they were drifting apart because of their separate interests, shortly before Wally left for the tent — had not been very successful. Wally explained how to pitch a tent, and his father talked about the virtues of homemade pasta, and after his mother insisted that store-bought pasta tasted exactly the same and that when you bought it in a store you didn’t have to spend half a day scraping crap out of a pasta machine, she did a plié. One plié. Then, no more energy left, sat down. That night she slept in the same chair, and the following day she clawed the upholstery on the chair arm before she left it.

“We did not get to the essence of Wally’s problem,” David said to Sheila as they cleaned up the restaurant.

“He doesn’t have any real problem. He’s just a selfish son of a bitch like you,” she said.

“Why do you say he’s selfish?”

“I’m not going to clean that pasta machine tonight or any other night as long as I live,” Sheila screamed, and ran ungracefully from the restaurant.

David began keeping a journal. Mostly it was criticism of Sheila or worries about Wally, and when David realized this he made an effort to say more about his own feelings and life. His feelings were so clichéd that he couldn’t go on with them, though: “I am a nothing,” “Nobody loves me,” “Some days I wonder why I’m alive.” So after a while the book began to fill up with receipts, bills he still had to pay, snapshots, even letters from Wally’s former child psychologist, who was now a severely disturbed man.

“What is that thing?” Sheila asked.

“Unpaid bills,” David said.

“Then why don’t you pay them?” she asked.

Wally began seeing the sister of his second-grade sweetheart, Susan Leigh. They ate out of cans in Wally’s tent. She hung an Escher print in the tent and told Wally he should paint and draw again. Her name was Dianna Leigh. Susan visited the tent once or twice, when she was in town. She was appearing sporadically in off-off-Broadway plays and living with another woman who was in the process of being changed surgically into a man. The woman-man liked the Escher print. Susan declined an offer of Spam on a roll. “Aren’t you vegetarians?” the woman-man asked.

“No. Are you?” Dianna Leigh asked.

“I’m going to become a vegetarian when I become a man,” the woman-man said.

“Why are you waiting until then?” Wally asked.

“She’s going through enough hell now,” Susan Leigh said.

One night Wally walked through the woods to his parents’ place. His father was lying on his back on the front lawn. “You’ll get mosquito bites,” Wally said, and David screamed because he had not heard him approaching. Wally took a small can out of his shirt pocket and sprayed David.

“I want to know how it all began,” Wally said.

David thought that it was a variation of the questions about sex that he had answered when Wally was five and that he had talked about again when Wally was seven because Wally had forgotten it all.

“In Las Vegas,” Wally said. “Wasn’t that where you met my mother?”

“Oh. You mean how all that began. I thought you were talking about the beginning of life. I told you: I was hitching around the country and I ended up in Reno. It was Reno, not Las Vegas. I was sitting in a place called The Silver Slipper Café. Your mother sat down next to me. She said that she didn’t think that anything in the place was worth eating. I don’t know where the conversation went from there, but she ended up proposing.”

Wally was silent.

“Why don’t you go back to school?” David asked Wally.

“Why don’t we go to Reno?”

“What for?”

“Sort of like a second honeymoon or … getting back in touch.”

“You want us to take you on our second honeymoon?”

“A family vacation, then. I don’t care what you call it.”

“Reno is a sleazy place. I don’t want to spend money to get back there. And anyway — your mother isn’t here.”

“Where is she?”

“Visiting her sister.”

“Why do you sound so depressed?”

“I’m not in a very good mood, Wally. And I don’t really like to be reminded of how your mother picked me up in Reno, Nevada.”

“Do you think there’s something awful about it?”

“I just don’t like to think about it.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“I don’t care what you do, Wally. It’s your mother who calls the family meetings and who gets all emotional and walks out on both of us. I just want to lie here in the grass.”

“Well, keep this with you,” Wally said, dropping the insect repellent next to David. Wally walked off. David watched the beam of Wally’s flashlight shining in the woods.

*

“You’re really an amazing family,” Dianna Leigh says to Wally. “Like a Salinger family.”

“Who’s that?” Wally asks.

“Didn’t you ever hear of J. D. Salinger? The Glass family?”

“No.”

“They were this crazy family. My mother gave me the book. She says that Salinger is nuts, too. He runs away if anybody approaches him on the street.”

“Where does he live? Manhattan?”

“I don’t think so …”

“I’ve been thinking,” Wally says. “I don’t think my parents were unhappy until they had me. Because I was a prodigy and all.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“I’m going to write her a letter. I think that if they went back to Reno they could recapture something.”

“That’s romantic.”

“There’s nothing wrong with romanticism.”

“I didn’t mean that there was anything wrong with romance.”

Dianna Leigh pouts; she and Wally have not been getting along well in the tent lately.

*

David remembers: “Imagine that you turn on a hose. Imagine your penis as a hose. And the water that sprays out is sperm, those things I just told you about. And the water shoots all over the lawn. Imagine the woman as a lawn. That’s what sex is like, more or less — watering the lawn.” Even at the time, he realized that he had botched it.

*

Wally’s namesake: On vacation, he falls into the Grand Canyon!!!!!!!!! Every year people slip, fall down mountains, into gorges, stumble into snake-infested pools. Well, Wally’s namesake, on a vacation with his wife, twin sons, and his wife’s father, taking a picture, leaning a bit, supporting himself on a fragile tree, falls!!!!!!!!!!!!SzzzzzzzzzzWAAAAAAAAAYAAAAA-AA!!!!right into the Grand Canyon.

*

Wally talks to Dianna Leigh in the tent: “It all comes to nothing. That must be the way she feels about her dancing. My father is the only one left who’s creative, and I think that she complains so much about the pasta machine because he creates the pasta — you know, putting a little spinach and some brains into the linguini … and I can’t think of anything to paint any more. Even my father, and he’s creative, lies on the ground, letting the mosquitoes eat him alive. I guess we are a messed-up family. What happened to that writer’s family?”

“I don’t really remember. I think that they were religious, though.”

*

And now, here’s what will happen to David and Sheila and Wally:

Other people like them for having only one child and not adding to the world’s overpopulation problem.

The restaurant gets a glowing recommendation from the AAA; they say that “the pasta is cooked divinely al dente”

Wally and Dianna Leigh separate. In Provincetown, years later, he sees a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and buys it. It confirms his suspicion that she was full of shit, because there is no Glass family in the book.

Sheila has one breast cut off, then the other. It becomes her new excuse for not dancing. If you don’t believe that this is at all logical, try taking a few leaps without your breasts and see how hard it is to keep your balance.

*

Background information on the trip to Reno, Nevada: If she can’t be a great dancer, at least she can be a good mother, and if Wally wants to go to Nevada, that isn’t much to ask. He’s a good boy. He may live in a tent with that girl, but he hasn’t gotten her pregnant. And perhaps he doesn’t draw because he’s frustrated, the way she is. And David doesn’t feel that he should be so quick to say that what Wally wants to do is nuts. Grinding internal organs into pasta is pretty nutty, as though a customer can tell the difference when it’s smothered in tomato sauce. What the hell — it’ll be a good test for the new car.

*

At The Silver Slipper Café: Two men walk into The Silver Slipper Café. One of the men — a pasty-white, tall man in a shirt with palm trees on it — has a black cat sitting on his shoulder. The other man, also tall, but with a good tan and bloodshot eyes, takes a knife from his friend’s shirtpocket and cuts the phone off from the cord. The waitress notices and starts for the other end of the counter, but both men mouth, “No,” and she freezes.

“Hello, family,” the first man says. The cat looks down at them.

“Hello,” David says.

“What are you enjoying there, family?” the man asks.

“Apple pie,” David says.

“Don’t pick up that hot coffee,” the second man says to the waitress.

She doesn’t. The second man hands Sheila the phone. “I’m gonna call you on this telephone,” he says. “I’m gonna ask you a question. You be Betty Crocker, okay?”

Sheila looks at David, about to cry.

“Sure she will,” David says. “Go ahead, honey.”

“And just so the young fellow won’t be bored, he can whistle ‘Dixie,’” the first man says, tapping Wally’s shoulder.

“Hello, Betty?” the second man says.

“Yes,” Sheila says.

“What ingredients go into an apple pie, Betty?”

“Apples. And sugar and flour.”

“Don’t you put in anything else, Betty?”

“Yes. Lemon juice. Sometimes raisins …”

“What else, Betty?”

“Uh-cinnamon. That’s all, I think.”

“But what accounts for the special goodness of your pies, Betty?”

“Nutmeg. I use … cinnamon and nutmeg.”

“Thanks, Betty. I’ll be ringing off now.”

The other man is standing in back of Wally, who is loudly whistling “Dixie.”

“Out!” he screams, and the two run from The Silver Slipper Café. The waitress screams. The police are called. Sometime during the confusion the cat wanders in.

“That was their cat!” the waitress says, pointing.

“Oh yeah?” one of the cops says. “I don’t think we’ve got anything on it, though.”

“You’re real comedians,” the waitress says angrily.

“This town just puts you in a good mood all the time,” the cop says. “You folks here for a little vacation in vacationland?”

“I don’t know what we’re here for,” David says, trying to comfort Sheila.

“Well, don’t lose what you already got,” the other cop says. He finishes writing something on a piece of paper, rolls up the paper, and holds the door open for his partner.