Distortions (9 page)

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.