Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Seven Dwarf Essays

I

Growing up, my son always said that when he grew up he wanted to be a seven dwarf. That was how he said it. "I want to be a seven dwarf." It was funny, of course, because he wanted the most out of that expressed desire. He wished to be both a dwarf-an interesting aspiration in itself-and all seven of the Disney alternatives at once. And this use of a singular plural could have also meant he also meant he wanted to be a whole new category of dwarf, an eighth dwarf-beyond Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc.-while still retaining the magic completeness of the whole tribe, the one and the seven. Part of the gang but separate too. He wanted to be both uncharacteristic and characteristic at the same time. He was learning to sort by sorting. This bent had shown up quite early. In the crib he watched the floating flotilla of four stuffed bears circling above him, suspended from the twirling arms of a wind-up mobile. The bears were identical save for the different colors of their matching overalls. I cut them down when my son was sitting up, and as soon as he could, he sat for hours, it seemed, and arranged the bears in a line-red, blue, green, yellow; green, red, blue, yellow; blue, yellow, red, green. It seemed to be in his blood, this four-letter alphabet like the code in DNA. Later it would be flags-he could recognize all the different state flags-then di nosaurs, Power Rangers, Pokemon. Even now, in the next room while I type this, the teenage version of my son has been at it for hours, arranging the song titles, the artists, the lyrics on the expanding electronic litanies of his iPod. But nothing has ever quite taken him like the Seven Dwarfs did. Not the bears or the flags or the toys or the cards or the songs. "A seven dwarf," he answered when I asked.

2

When I was growing up my favorite comic book was Adventure Comics, featuring the Legion of Superheroes, kids roughly my age endowed with various powers-strength, speed, smarts. One hero could inflate and bounce. One could grow small. One could grow tall. One turned invisible. One turned into anything at all-chairs, rocks, light poles. The girl who could split into two, once could split into three. But one self had been killed long before I started reading the series. The twins treated their missing sister like a phantom limb. What I liked best was knowing that each hero had a specific weakness. Ultra Boy had ultra powers of strength, speed, etc., but could only use them one at a time. Then there were the cousins from ill-fated Krypton, Superboy and Mon-el. One could be mortally injured by Kryptonite that could be shielded only by lead; the other was vulnerable only to lead. The weaknesses and strengths were interlocking and always exploited by this month's villain. It was never the whole legion who did battle, only some subset, a team of seven, say, a lineup always shifting. Though they were heroes, those kids were freaks, of course, accurate metaphors for their teenage readers' sense of strangeness. They came by their powers by accident-swept by cosmic dust, blasted by gamma rays. Or did they simply drink the wrong drink? Issue from the star-crossed combination of parents? And there is that fatalism in their genes, the chromosomes those modern threads spun, stretched, and snipped by the three sisters. We all embody our own ancient tragedy-the very stuff that allows us to thrive as a race might well be the fatal flaw, the circumstance of our own demise. The fourhanded carbons are the little gods that destroy and create. The oxygen-hungry human brain we are so proud of is an accident, and the pride the brain can conjure will be the very thing to cause our extinction. It's an old message, these fatal flaws. I remember teenage superheroes sitting around their clubhouse (they had a clubhouse!) lamenting their fates, wishing they could be like other normal teenagers of the twenty-fifth century. Or I think I remember them wishing for that. But other "normal" teenagers are never normal. Or the normalness of teenagers never feels normal. The Legion of Superheroes characters embodied the body growing up, an analog of that awkwardness. It was the theater of between-ness.

3

"Line up!" my son commanded me, his mother, his grandparents, his babysitter. We added up to seven, and we lined up. "March!" he would then command, and we marched. The previously distributed simulations of shovels and picks were at slope arms over our shoulders. A few of the implements were actual scale models of picks and shovels but some were toy golf clubs, an umbrella, a plain old stick. Outfitted, we marched. "Sing!" We sang "Heigh Ho!" as we marched. It was this part of the movie my son returned to over and over, this going off to work. He learned very early to manipulate the remote for the VCR. He marched the Seven Dwarfs over to the mines and back, studying the formation. Disney aided the obsession by producing a videotape of excerpted songs from a variety of films in its vaults. The Dwarfs marching and singing while they did so was one bit featured. We made it to the couch. "Dig!" and we dug, mining the cushions and pillows. We sang: "We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, in a mine the whole day through!" And took a breath and sang: "To dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, that's what we like to do." I never understood the accepted conventional wisdom about attention span and the modern child. We marched endlessly. We sang for hours. We dug to China and back. It was I who always lost interest, attention waning. I called the marches to a halt, rained on the parade. The other adults becoming self-conscious again, put down their tools, brushing the dust from their clothes. I distracted my son (who was redistributing the tools, reordering the cadre of dwarfs before him as they struggled up from their knees) by flipping on the TV, the accepted accused culprit of expanding the attention deficit, the supposed modern distraction. He scanned the tape and found the marching, the digging, and sent the images of the dwarfs back and forth on the screen. He watched as if it were the replay of the scene he had just finished staging, an actual record not simply another version. He worked the buttons of the remote, pored over the images. Maria Montessori said that a child's play was his work, or was it a child's work is his play? In my stupor I thought it doesn't matter. It works both ways.

4

I remember the exact moment my son transformed. It was at a school carnival, an annual event, we had attended since he was in second grade. Now he was in sixth, and although the booths and games of the fair remained constant, he was changing, literally growing, lengthening, stretched out. We drifted together over to the dunking booth. A friend of his, already wet, was on the bench, taunting the hurlers as they wound up. We watched the action side by side. Without thinking, I draped my arm around his shoulders. Instantly, I felt him tense at the touch, and immediately he began to wilt and melt away, twist out from underneath my half-embrace. It was almost botanical, leaves curling up in contact to some toxin.

In the movie Snow White mistakes the scaled-down house and furnishings she stumbles on in the forest as the habitat of children. She herself is, as they say, but a child, a child lost in the woods. Or until very recently Snow White was indeed a child. She now finds herself in the woods because one day, without her knowing it, she crossed some line from child to adult. That day the Magic Mirror's magic radar noticed that she was no longer what she had been. She became "the fairest," a code for pubescent, I suppose. Now she could be "seen." The mirror reflected that fact back to the Queen, her evil stepmother. I always ask why that day, why this one particular day? Did Snow White generate the final cell of her milky skin that morning, grow the final significant eyelash? Pubescence also suggests sprouting down or fine hair. Did the last of the downy coat sprout? Or shed? Did her lips happen to blush the proper shade of red, her eyes refract, at last, the right frequency of sparkle? Something made her euphemistically "fairest," this final part of the puzzle. One day. It was a Thursday, I guess, and the world changed. In the forest, breaking into the Dwarfs' house, she mistakes it as the house of lost children. She identifies with their lostness. She is lost. And maybe she sympathizes with their childness. She herself was recently a child. She suspects, however, that something has changed. She is no longer a child. She doesn't fit into any of the beds she finds, uses all the beds in the house for her bed. And later, when the Dwarfs return from mining, they peek over the beds' footboards, seven Kilroys Were Here. She awakes, startled to discover that the children she anticipates are not children after all. "Why," she says, "you're little men!"

Now I think of another moment, another scene from when my son was much younger. One day, I was driving in the car. My son was strapped into his car seat in the back. As I adjusted the mirror it reflected him, stuffed into what seemed to be an undersized bucket. I was taken with how he had changed, grown larger, and I considered for a second the disclaimer printed on the outside mirrors of such reflected distortion: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. But I couldn't help asking him, "When did you grow up?" Without hesitating he answered, "Night time."

5

Living in Oblivion is a movie about making a movie. There is a dwarf in one scene of the movie being made in the movie. It is a dream sequence, and the dwarf hired to play a dwarf in the dream is directed to laugh. The actor asks the director for his motivation. And the director shrugs, offering only that it is a dream. After several unsuccessful takes the dwarf finally erupts, condemning the use of dwarfs in movies, in stories. Dwarfs, he says, are always in cinematic dreams. The only work he can get as a dwarf actor is in playing a dwarf in a dream. "When you dream," he asks the director, "do your dreams have a dwarf?" The dwarf actor eyes the director, who is considering the question. "I'm a dwarf," the dwarf says, "and I don't even dream of dwarfs."

I wonder sometimes why Disney World and all the worlds of Disney are such hits. Why do certain things take us? Why do certain aesthetic arrangements succeed? Why, of all the flavors in the world, should a cola catch on? Why that cartoon mouse or that cartoon dog? The images created by Disney crowd out any alternative Alices or Snow Whites or even Dwarfs. Sometimes I think it is genetic, that people are predisposed, attracted naturally to certain combinations of things, hard-wired to respond instinctually as they do to an infant, say, or a puppy. I read somewhere of Mickey's graphic evolution, his transformation from the ratlike steamboat Mickey to the high-foreheaded, big-eyed, shorter-nosed, babylike Mickey we all know. And love. Disney World is the place dying children wish for. As a last wish! Stanley Elkin's novel The Magic Kingdom even features this curiosity. A tour of seven terminal children (their maladies roughly analogous to the Disney dwarfs' characteristic monikers-the "Sneezy" is a child with cystic fibrosis, the "Sleepy" child has narcolepsy, etc.) is trucked off to the Florida theme park. The children in the novel try to make it clear that this manufactured happiness of this happiest place on earth is not making them happy. It isn't their last wish at all. They long for a chance to grow up, of course, and seek in the sexless magic kingdom a chance for sex. An ultimate ride, their first and last roll in the hay. They desire to desire. They wish their illicit wish.

Disney World is a deathless place, simply enough. And I think of all the dying children who will never grow up, sentenced not only to an early death but also to an adult's version of an early death. Better to die than to grow up. There is, in the real Magic Kingdom, this studied confusion between life and death-the robots and androids, the elaborate costumed characters, the endless parades, the "cast members" sweeping, sweeping and smiling, smiling. The Main Streets ageless, frozen in time just in time.

Perhaps it was just the names. Disney was the first to name the dwarfs in the old story. No, I take that back. According to Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley in their book Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Making of the Classic Film, an English artist, John Hassall, did name them in an illustrated edition of the story in 1921. He went with domestic utensils and pantry products-Plate, Spoon, Knife, Fork, Wine, Bread, and Stool. Holliss and Sibley include the brainstorming list of names from Disney's preproduction. Scrappy, Doleful, Crabby, Wistful, Daffy, Hoppy, Soulful, Awful, Graceful, Flabby, Goopy, Puffy, Hotsy, Shifty, fifty names in all. On the list are five of the final seven. Dopey and Doc were afterthoughts, it seems. A doctor friend of mine told me she always liked Doc, of course, not just out of professional courtesy but because he is the only noun name among a legion of adjectives. The adjectives grow into nouns once they are used as names, characteristic becoming character. My son could do a pretty fair impression of Grumpy. I would egg him on. "Be Grumpy," I would say, and he would cross his arms over his chest and lower his brow and frown, pouting, tilting his head down to look at you through silted eyelids. This was his face when he was truly grumpy, when he would register his frustration perhaps at having the dwarfs' march choreography go wrong. I was taken by the performance. I recognized myself in his clouded visage. After working for hours on a rustic portrait of the dwarfs he would howl and destroy his work. Not right! Not perfect and turn back to the same task. How silly, I thought, unable to see what he saw, unable to see the flaw in what he saw. Until I saw myself in the scaled down drama before me, my own unselfconscious grumpiness, my idiosyncratic grumbling over a spoiled draft of an essay or story I was working on, an adult version of this play. These names, these dwarf names, are like labeled portals, doorways into adult attributes. They are gateways between these separate worlds of child and adulthood. Bashful, to me, seems the most adult, a late stage of maturation, the growing awareness of self. I am thinking of those experiments with children, their foreheads smudged with ashes without their knowing, released into a room with mirrors. Only those at a certain age will the notice the smudge on the forehead in the mirror and then try rub it off. The rest are oblivious.

6

Growing up, my son continued to stage dramas. He acted in his high-school plays. I watched him in Neil Simon's The Good Doctor, a play made up of seven plays based on the stories of Anton Chekhov. There is in The Good Doctor a continuity character named "Anton Chekhov" who often narrates, in a stage manager way, the various vignettes. In the final play within a play, my son played the young Anton Chekhov, and the Anton Chekhov character took on the role of Anton Chekhov's father. The action presents the moment Anton Chekhov's father takes his son, Anton Chekhov, to a brothel on his birthday to make him a man. I sat in the high-school theater surprised, a little taken aback at the maturity of the theme. My son was a freshman. I hadn't known what would transpire on stage. I had asked him if he would like me to run lines with him while he was in rehearsal, and he had always refused. So now I watched my son take part in a depiction of a father facilitating his young son's initiation into manhood. And this construction of the drama contained within it this strangeness, this reversal of roles-the son in retrospect imagining the father at the moment the son was to become a man. I watched from the darkness. My son was very good, I thought, playing a son on the cusp of growing up. He had been in other plays. I see now he had been in plays all his life. He had started by auditioning for parts in the local children's theater. He played the mysterious old man in James and the Giant Peach who brings the magic seeds to James. But here he was playing a son hesitating on a threshold, a gateway concocted by his old man, who was having his own second thoughts about this initiation. But in the end, the play I watched actually enacts its opposite. It takes a turn. It is a false coming-of-age story. The epiphany is that there is no epiphany. The moment of epiphany has come and gone. Instead, the "father" and the "son" realize that now is not the time, that there still is time. Before they even enter it, they turn away from the brothel; they turn back home. Dramatically this turn is done with a name. Turning away from the brothel, the father calls his son back from the brink with the affectionate diminutive. "Antasha," he says, smoothing the boy's hair. My son's real name is Anthony, named for my father, though he has always gone by his middle nickname Sam. After the show I greeted him in the bright sunlight-it had been a matinee-praising his performance, his work. I was surprised by the story. I had been fooled completely, I told him. I believed everything. Outside the theater, in the sunlight, I wanted to go back in time. I wanted time to stand still. "Antasha," I said to him in his full makeup and costume, "Antasha, that was perfect."

7

I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When I was a child my father took me to see the dwarf houses on the north side of town. There was a little village of dwarf houses, six or seven of them, tucked within a neighborhood of larger houses not far from where the river curved toward the hill where Johnny Appleseed is buried. The dwarf houses looked like the regular houses around them except for their size. The houses were smaller in every regard. The scale was dwarf scale. They were bigger than play houses. They were smaller than house houses. Their parts and the materials used in the construction-the doors and windows, porches and chimneys, the shingles and clapboards-were identical to my house save that they were a quarter of the size. We drove back and forth on the road in front of the houses. The mailboxes on the street were the regulation-sized mailboxes but the pole they were perched on was thigh high. My father pointed out how big the meter boxes looked, how the parked cars in the driveway were like regular parked cars, how the silver propane tanks, well, dwarfed the houses like zeppelins moored to their hangers. I suppose we were waiting to see who would emerge from the tiny doorways to check the mail or pick up the paper or water the postage-stamp-sized lawn. We never did catch sight of any of the inhabitants. My father had heard that this was a winter camp of traveling performers. The houses were empty most of the year, the owners on the road with carnivals and sideshows. But even that we were never able to really prove-probably an urban legend. I took my son to see the dwarf houses. He was then the age I had been when my father first took me to see them. It was Christmas and there were little icicle lights hanging from the miniature eaves, halfway down the side of the houses. You know the feeling when you return to look at the houses you grew up in or when you haunt the neighborhoods of your childhood? You have the sensation that everything is smaller-the houses, the trees, the lawns. Memory gives you a map more detailed than the original. The original is underwhelming, shrunken, contracted, lacking. But visiting the dwarf houses I had visited again turned out different. The dwarf houses seemed larger than I remembered them. I drove with my son back and forth around the little grid of narrow streets lined with the dwarf houses. There were lights on, and the Christmas decorations twinkled. The walks had been shoveled and the snow piled up into piles. Smoke seeped from the chimneys. We didn't see anyone. So I drove over to my old neighborhood to show my son the tiny tiny house where I remember growing up.