Published in the March 2000 issue

1. The Youth in Asia

"THAT'S IT," MY MOTHER SAID AFTER HAVING SADIE PUT TO SLEEP. "MY CAT DAYS ARE OVER."

In the early sixties, during what my mother referred to as the "tail end of the Lassie years," my parents were given two collies they named Rastus and Duchess. We were living in upstate New York, out in the country, and the dogs were free to race through the forest. They napped in meadows and stood knee-deep in frigid streams, costars in their own private dog-food commercial. According to our father, anyone could tell that the two of them were in love.

Late one evening, while lying on a blanket in the garage, Duchess gave birth to a litter of slick, potato-sized puppies. When it looked as though one of them had died, our mother placed the creature in a casserole dish and popped it into the oven, like the witch in "Hänsel and Gretel."

"Oh, keep your shirts on," she said. "It's only set on 200. I'm not baking anyone; this is just to keep him warm."

The heat revived the sick puppy and left us believing our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.

Faced with the responsibilities of fatherhood, Rastus took off. The puppies were given away, and we moved south, where the heat and humidity worked against a collie's best interests. Duchess's once beautiful coat now hung in ragged patches. Age set in and she limped about the house, clearing rooms with her suffocating farts. When finally, full of worms, she collapsed in the ravine beside our house, we reevaluated our mother's healing powers. The entire animal kingdom was beyond her scope; apparently, she could resurrect only the cute dead.

The oven trick was performed on half a dozen peakish hamsters but failed to work on my first guinea pig, who died after eating a couple of cigarettes and an entire pack of matches.

"Don't take it too hard," my mother said, removing her oven mitts. "The world is full of guinea pigs. You can get another one tomorrow."

Eulogies always tended to be brief, our motto being "Another day, another collar."

A short time after Duchess died, our father came home with a German shepherd puppy. For reasons that were never explained, the privilege of naming the dog went to a friend of my older sister's, a fourteen-year-old girl named Cindy. She was studying German at the time, and after carefully examining the puppy and weighing it with her hands, she announced it would be called Mädchen, which apparently meant "girl" to the Volks back in the Vaterland. We weren't wild about the name but considered ourselves lucky that Cindy wasn't studying one of the harder-to-pronounce Asian languages.

When she was six, Mädchen was killed by a car. Her food was still in the bowl when our father brought home an identical German shepherd, whom the same Cindy thoughtfully christened Mädchen Two. This tag-team progression was disconcerting, especially for the new dog, who was expected to possess both the knowledge and the personality of her predecessor.

"Mädchen One would never have wet the floor like that," my father would scold, and the dog would sigh, knowing she was the canine equivalent of a rebound.

Mädchen Two never accompanied us to the beach and rarely posed in any of the family photographs. Once her puppyhood was spent, we more or less lost interest. "We ought to get a dog," we'd sometimes say, completely forgetting that we already had one. She came inside to eat, but most of her time was spent out in the pen, slumped in the A-frame doghouse my father had designed and crafted from scrap pieces of redwood.

"Hey," he'd ask, "how many dogs can say they live in a redwood house?" This always led to my mother's exhausted "Oh, Lou, how many dogs can say that they don't live in a goddamned redwood house?"

Throughout the collie and shepherd years, we had a succession of drowsy, secretive cats who seemed to share a unique bond with our mother. "It's because I open their cans," she said, though we all knew it ran deeper than that. What they had in common was their claws. That and a deep-seated need to destroy my father's golf bag.

The first cat ran away, and the second was hit by a car. The third passed into a disagreeable old age and died hissing at the kitten who had prematurely arrived to replace her. When, at the age of seven, the fourth cat was diagnosed with feline leukemia, my mother was devastated.

"I'm going to have Sadie put to sleep," she said. "It's for her own good, and I don't want to hear a word about it from any of you. This is hard enough as it is."

The cat was put down, and then came the anonymous postcards and crank phone calls orchestrated by my sisters and me. The cards announced a miraculous new cure for feline leukemia, while the callers identified themselves as representatives of Cat Fancy magazine. "We'd like to use Sadie as our cover story and were hoping to schedule a photo shoot. Can you have her ready by tomorrow?"

We thought a kitten might lift our mother's spirits, but she declined all offers. "That's it," she said. "My cat days are over."

When Mädchen Two developed splenic tumors, our father dropped everything and ran to her side. Evenings were spent at the animal hospital, lying on a mat outside of her cage and adjusting her IV. He'd never afforded her much attention, but her impending death alerted in him a great sense of duty. He was holding her paw when she died, and he spent the next several weeks asking us how many dogs could say they'd lived in a redwood house.

Our mother, in turn, frequently paused beside my father's tattered, urine-stained golf bag and relived memories of her own.

After spending a petless year with only one child still living at home, my parents visited a breeder and returned with a Great Dane they named Melina. They loved this dog in proportion to her size, and soon their hearts had no room for anyone else. The house was given over to the dog, rooms redecorated to suit her fancy. Enter your former bedroom and you'd be told, "You'd better not let Melina catch you in here," or, "This is where we come to pee-pee when there's nobody home to let us outside, right, girl?"

The dog was my parents' first true common interest, and they loved her equally, each in their own way. My mother's love tended toward the horizontal, a pet being little more than a napping companion, something she could look at and say, "That looks like a good idea. Scoot over, why don't you." A stranger peeking through the window might think that the two of them had entered a suicide pact. She and the dog sprawled like corpses, their limbs arranged into an eternal embrace. "God, that felt good," my mom would say, the two of them waking for a brief stretch. "Now let's go try it on the living-room floor."

My father loved the Great Dane for her size, and frequently took her on long, aimless drives during which she'd stick her heavy, anvil-sized head out the window and leak great quantities of foamy saliva. Other drivers pointed and stared, rolling down their windows to shout, "Hey, you got a saddle for that thing?" When they went out for a walk, there was the inevitable "Are you walking her, or is it the other way around?"

"Ha, ha," our father always laughed, as if it were the first time he'd heard it. The attention was addictive, and he enjoyed a pride of accomplishment he'd never felt with any of his children. It was as if he were somehow responsible for her size and stature, as if he'd personally designed her spots and trained her to grow to the size of a pony.

When out with the dog, he carried a leash in one hand and a shovel in the other. "Just in case," he said.

"Just in case what? She dies of a heart attack and you need to bury her?" I didn't get it.

"No," he'd say. "It's for her, you know, her . . . business."

My father was retired, but the dog had business.

I was living in Chicago when they first got Melina, and every time I came home, the animal was bigger. Every time there were more Marmaduke cartoons on the refrigerator, and every time my voice grew louder as I asked myself, "Who are these people?"

"Down, girl," my parents would chuckle as the dog jumped up, panting for my attention. Her great padded paws reached my waist, then my chest and shoulders, until eventually, her arms wrapped around my neck and her head towering above my own, she came to resemble a dance partner scouting the room for a better offer.

"That's just her way of saying hello," my mother would say, handing me a towel to wipe off the dog's bubbling seepage. "Here, you missed a spot on the back of your head."

Among us children, Melina's diploma from obedience school was seen as the biggest joke since our brother's graduation from Sanderson High School. "So she's not book smart," our mother said. "Big deal. I can fetch my own goddamned newspaper."

The dog's growth was monitored on a daily basis, and every small accomplishment was captured on film. One could find few pictures of my sister Tiffany, while Melina had entire albums devoted to her terrible twos.

"Hit me," my mother said on one of my return visits from Chicago. "No, wait, let me get my camera." She left the room and returned a few moments later. "Okay," she said. "Now hit me. Better yet, why don't you just pretend to hit me?"

I raised my hand and my mother cried out in pain. "Ow!" she yelled. "Somebody help me! This stranger is trying to hurt me, and I don't know why."

I caught an advancing blur moving in from the left, and the next thing I knew, I was down on the ground, the Great Dane ripping holes in the neck of my sweater. The camera flashed, and my mother roared, "God, I love that trick."

I rolled over to protect my face. "It's not a trick."

She snapped another picture. "Oh, don't be so critical. It's close enough."

With us grown and out of the house, my sisters and I reasonably expected our parents' lives to stand still. Their assignment was to stagnate and live in the past. We were supposed to be the center of their lives, but instead they constructed a new family, consisting of Melina and the founding members of her fan club. Someone who obviously didn't know her too well had given my mother a cheerful stuffed bear with a calico heart stitched onto its chest. According to the manufacturer, the bear's name was Mumbles, and all it needed in order to thrive was two double-A batteries and a regular diet of hugs.

"Where Mumbles?" my mother would ask, and the dog would jump up and snatch the bear from its hiding place on top of the refrigerator, yanking its body this way and that in hopes of breaking its neck. Occasionally, her teeth would press the on switch and the doomed thing would flail its arms, whispering one of its five messages of goodwill.

"That's my girl," my mother would say. "We don't like Mumbles, do we?"

"We?"

During the final years of Mädchen Two and the first half of the Melina epoch, I lived with a female cat named Neil who'd been abandoned by a scary alcoholic with long fingernails and a large collection of kimonos. He was a hateful man, and after he moved, the cat was taken in and renamed by my sister Gretchen, who later passed the animal on to me. My mother looked after the cat when I moved from Raleigh, and she flew her to Chicago once I'd found a place and settled in. I'd taken the cheapest apartment I could find, and it showed. Though they were nice, my new neighbors could see no connection between their personal habits and the armies of pests aggressively occupying the building.

Neil caught fourteen mice, and scores of others escaped with missing limbs and tails. In Raleigh, she'd just lain around the house doing nothing, but now she had a real job to do.

Her interests broadened, and she listened intently to the radio, captivated by the political and financial stories that failed to interest me. "One more word about the Iran-contra hearings and you'll be sleeping next door with the aliens," I'd say, though we both knew that I didn't really mean it.

Neil was old when she moved to Chicago, and then she got older. The Oliver North testimony now behind her, she started leaving teeth in her bowl and developed the sort of breath that could remove paint. She stopped cleaning herself, and I took to bathing her in the sink. When she was soaking wet, I could see just how thin and brittle she really was. Her kidneys shrank to the size of raisins, and while I wanted what was best for her, I naturally assumed the vet was joking when he suggested dialysis.

In addition to being old, toothless, and incontinent, it seemed that for the cost of a few thousand dollars, she could also spend three days a week hooked up to a machine. "Sounds awfully tempting," I said. "Just give us a few days to think it over." I took her for a second opinion. Vet number two tested her blood and phoned me a few days later suggesting I consider euthanasia.

I hadn't heard that word since childhood, and immediately recalled a mismatched pair of Japanese schoolboys standing alone in a deserted schoolyard. One of the boys, grossly obese, was attempting to climb the flagpole that towered high above him. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, he hoisted himself a few feet off the ground and clung there, trembling and out of breath. "I can't do it," he said. "This is too hard for me."

His friend, a gaunt and serious boy named Komatsu, stood below him, offering encouragement. "Oh, but you can do it. You must," he said. "It is required."

This was a scene I had long forgotten, and thinking of it made me unbearably sad. The boys were characters from Fatty and Skinny, a Japanese movie regularly presented on The CBS Children's Film Festival, a weekly TV series hosted by two puppets and a very patient woman who pretended to laugh at their jokes. My sisters and I watched the program every Saturday afternoon, our gasbag of a collie imposing frequent intermissions.

Having shimmied a few more inches up the pole, Fatty lost his grip and fell down. As he brushed himself off, Skinny ran down the mountain toward the fragile, papery house he shared with his family. This had been Fatty's last chance to prove himself. He'd thought his friend's patience was unlimited, but now he knew that he was wrong. "Komatsuuuuuuuu!" he yelled. "Komatsu, please give me one more chance."

The doctor's voice called me back from the Japanese schoolyard. "So. The euthanasia," he said. "Are you giving it some thought?"

"Yes," I said. "As a matter of fact, I am."

In the end, I returned to the animal hospital and had her put to sleep. When the vet injected the sodium pentobarbital, Neil fluttered her eyes, assumed a nap position, and died. My then-boyfriend stayed to make arrangements, and I ran outside to blubber beside the parked and, unfortunately, locked car. Neil had gotten into the car believing she would live to experience the return trip, and that tore me up. Someone had finally been naïve enough to trust me, and I'd rewarded her with death. Racked by guilt, the Youth in Asia sat at their desks and wept bitter tears.

A week after putting her to sleep, I received Neil's ashes in a forest-green can. She'd never expressed any great interest in the outdoors, so I scattered her remains on the carpet and then vacuumed them up. The cat's death struck me as the end of an era. The end of my safe college life, the last of my thirty-inch waist, my faltering relationship with my first real boyfriend--I cried for it all and spent the next several months wondering why so few songs were written about cats.

My mother sent a consoling letter along with a check to cover the cost of the cremation. In the lower-left corner, on the line marked memo, she'd written, "Pet burning." I had it coming.

When my mother died and was cremated herself, we worried that, acting on instinct, our father might run out and immediately replace her. Returning from the funeral, my brother, sisters, and I half expected to find Sharon Two standing at the kitchen counter, working the puzzle from TV Guide. "Sharon One would have gotten five-across," our father would have scolded. "Come on, baby, get with it!"

With my mother gone, my father and Melina had each other all to themselves. Though she now occupied the side of the bed left vacant by her former mistress, the dog knew she could never pass as a viable replacement. Her love was too fierce and simple, and she had no talent for argument. Yet she and my father honored their pledge to adore and protect each other. They celebrated anniversaries, regularly renewed their vows, and growled when challenged by outside forces.

"You want me to go where?" When invited to visit one of his children, my father would beg off, saying, "I can't leave town. Who'd take care of Melina?"

Due to their size, Great Danes generally don't live very long. There are cheeses that last longer. At the age of eleven, gray-bearded and teetering, Melina was a wonder of science. My father massaged her arthritic legs, carried her up the stairs, and lifted her in and out of bed. He treated her the way men in movies treat their ailing wives, the way he might have treated my mother had she allowed such naked displays of helplessness and affection. Melina's era had spanned the final ten years of his married life. The dog had ridden in the family's last station wagon. She'd attended my father's retirement party, lived through my sister's wedding, and celebrated the election of two Republican presidents. She grew weaker and lost her appetite, but against all advice, my father simply could not bear to let go.

The Youth in Asia begged him to end her life.

"I can't do it," he said. "This is too hard for me."

"Oh, but you must do it," said Komatsu. "It is required."

A month after Melina was put to sleep, my father returned to the breeder and came home with another Great Dane. A female like Melina, gray spots like Melina, only this one is named Sophie. He tries to love her but readily admits that he may have made a mistake. She's a nice enough dog, but the timing is off.

When walking Sophie through the neighborhood, my father feels not unlike a newly married senior citizen stumbling behind his apathetic young bride. The puppy's stamina embarrasses him, as does her blatant interest in younger men. Passing drivers slow to a stop and roll down their windows. "Hey," they yell. "Are you walking her, or is it the other way around?"

Their words remind him of a more gracious era, of milder forces straining against the well-worn leash. He still gets the attention, but now, in response, he just lifts his shovel and continues on his way.

2. Jesus Shaves

"HE NICE, THE JESUS. HE MAKE THE GOOD THINGS, AND ON THE EASTER WE BE SAD BECAUSE SOMEBODY MAKES HIM DEAD TODAY."

"And what does one do on the fourteenth of July? Does one celebrate Bastille Day?"

It was my second month of French class, and the teacher was leading us in an exercise designed to promote the use of one, our latest personal pronoun.

"Might one sing on Bastille Day?" she asked. "Might one dance in the street? Somebody give me an answer."

Printed in our textbooks was a list of major holidays alongside a scattered arrangement of photos depicting French people in the act of celebration. The object was to match the holiday with the corresponding picture. It was simple enough but seemed an exercise better suited to the use of the word they. I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.

Normally, when working from the book, it was my habit to tune out my fellow students and scout ahead, concentrating on the question I'd calculated might fall to me, but this afternoon, we were veering from the usual format. Questions were answered on a volunteer basis, and I was able to sit back, confident that the same few students would do the talking. Today's discussion was dominated by an Italian nanny, two chatty Poles, and a pouty, plump Moroccan woman who had grown up speaking French and had enrolled in the class to improve her spelling. She'd covered these lessons back in the third grade and took every opportunity to demonstrate her superiority. A question would be asked and she'd give the answer, behaving as though this were a game show and, if quick enough, she might go home with a tropical vacation or a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer. By the end of her first day, she'd raised her hand so many times, her shoulder had given out. Now she just leaned back in her seat and shouted the answers, her bronzed arms folded across her chest like some great grammar genie.

We finished discussing Bastille Day, and the teacher moved on to Easter, which was represented in our textbook by a black-and-white photograph of a chocolate bell lying upon a bed of palm fronds.

"And what does one do on Easter? Would anyone like to tell us?"

The Italian nanny was attempting to answer the question when the Moroccan student interrupted, shouting, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?"

Despite her having grown up in a Muslim country, it seemed she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said. "I have no idea what you people are talking about."

The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain.

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, shit."

She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid.

"He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber."

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

"He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."

"He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."

"He nice, the Jesus."

"He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today."

Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as "To give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," the Italian nanny explained. "One, too, may eat of the chocolate."

"And who brings the chocolate?" the teacher asked.

I knew the word, and so I raised my hand, saying, "The Rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

My classmates reacted as though I'd attributed the delivery to the Antichrist. They were mortified.

"A rabbit?" The teacher, assuming I'd used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?"

"Well, sure," I said. "He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have the basket and foods."

The teacher sadly shook her head, as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said. "Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome."

I called for a time-out. "But how do the bell know where you live?"

"Well," she said, "how does a rabbit?"

It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That's a start. Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth--and they can't even do that on their own power. On top of that, the Easter Bunny has character; he's someone you'd like to meet and shake hands with. A bell has all the personality of a cast-iron skillet. It's like saying that come Christmas, a magic dustpan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks. Who wants to stay up all night so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they've got more bells than they know what to do with right here in Paris? That's the most implausible aspect of the whole story, as there's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their jobs. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bell's dog--and even then he'd need papers. It just didn't add up.

Nothing we said was of any help to the Moroccan student. A dead man with long hair supposedly living with her father, a leg of lamb served with palm fronds and chocolate. Confused and disgusted, she shrugged her massive shoulders and turned her attention back to the comic book she kept hidden beneath her binder. I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far-fetched to begin with.

In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith, a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the grammar lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn't believe that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? If I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses and a carton of menthol cigarettes. So why stop there? If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next. The virgin birth, the resurrection, and the countless miracles--my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.

A bell, though, that's fucked up.

3. Giant Dreams Midget Abilities

"WHEN YOU'RE PLAYING YOUR GUITAR, MAKE BELIEVE YOU'RE PLAYING AN ACTUAL WOMAN," MISTER MANCINI TOLD ME. "GRAB HER BY THE NECK AND MAKE HER HOLLER."

My father loves jazz and has an extensive collection of records and reel-to-reel tapes he used to enjoy after returning home from work. He might have entered the house in a foul mood, but once he had his Dexter Gordon and a vodka martini, the stress melted away and everything was "Beautiful, baby, just beautiful." The instant the needle hit that record, he'd loosen his tie and become something other than the conservative engineer with a pocketful of IBM pencils embossed with the command think.

"Man, oh man, will you get a load of the chops on this guy? I saw him once at the Blue Note, and I mean to tell you that he blew me right out of my chair! A talent like that comes along only once in a lifetime. The guy was an absolute comet, and there I was in the front row. Can you imagine that?"

"Gee," I'd say. "I bet that was really interesting."

Empathy was the wrong tack, as it seemed only to irritate him.

"You don't know the half of it," my father would say. " 'Really interesting' my butt. You haven't got a clue. You could have taken a hatchet and cut the man's lips right off his face, chopped them off at the quick, and he still would have played better than anyone else out there. That's how good he was."

Because it was the music we'd grown up with, I liked to think that my sisters and I had a genuine appreciation for jazz. We preferred it over the music our friends were listening to, yet nothing we did or said could convince him of our devotion. Aside from replaying the tune on your own instrument, how could you prove you were really listening? It was as if he expected us to change color at the end of each selection.

Due to his ear and his almost maniacal sense of discipline, I always thought my father would have made an excellent musician. He might have studied the saxophone had he not been born to immigrant parents who considered even pot holders to be an extravagance. They themselves listened only to Greek music, an oxymoron as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Slam its tail in the door of a milk truck and a stray cat could easily yowl out a single certain to top the charts back in Sparta or Thessaloníki. Jazz was my father's only form of rebellion. It was forbidden in his home, and he appreciated it as though it were his own private discovery. As a young man, he hid his 78's under the sofa bed and regularly snuck off to New York City, where he'd haunt the clubs and consort with goateed hipsters. It was a good life while it lasted. He was in his early forties when the company transferred our family to North Carolina.

"You expect me to live where?" he'd asked.

The Raleigh winters agreed with him, but he would've gladly traded the temperate climate for a decent radio station. Since he was limited to his record and tape collection, it became his dream that his family might fill the void by someday forming a jazz combo.

His plan took shape the evening he escorted my sisters Lisa and Gretchen and me to the local state university to see Dave Brubeck, who was then touring with his sons. The audience roared when the quartet took the stage, and I leaned back and shut my eyes, pretending the applause was for me. In order to get that kind of attention, you needed a routine that would knock people's socks off. I'd been working on something in private and now began to imagine bringing it to a larger audience. The act consisted of me dressed in a nice shirt and tie and singing a medley of commercial jingles in the voice of Billie Holiday, who was one of my father's favorite singers. For my Raleigh concert, I'd probably open with the number used to promote the town's oldest shopping center. A quick nod to my accompanist, and I'd launch into "The Excitement of Cameron Village Will Carry You Away." The beauty of my rendition was that it captured both the joy and the sorrow of a visit to Ellisburg's or JCPenney. This would be followed by such crowd pleasers as "Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should" and the catchy new Coke commercial, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing."

I was lost in my fantasy, ignoring Dave Brubeck and coming up for air only when my father elbowed my ribs to ask, "Are you listening to this? These cats are burning the paint right off the walls!" The other audience members sat calmly, as if in church, while my father snapped his fingers and bobbed his head low against his chest. People pointed, and when we begged him to sit up and act normal, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted out a request for "Blue Rondo a La Turk."

Driving home from the concert that night, he drummed his palms against the steering wheel, saying, "Did you hear that? The guy just gets better every day! He's up there onstage with his kids by his side--the whole lot of them jamming up a storm. Christ almighty, what I wouldn't give for a family like that. You guys should think of putting an act together."

My sister Lisa coughed up a mouthful of grapefruit soda.

"No, I mean it," my father said. "All you need are some lessons and instruments and I swear to God you'd go right through the roof." We hoped this was just another of his five-minute ideas, but by the time we reached the house his eyes were still glowing. "That's exactly what you need to do," he said. "I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner."

The following afternoon, he bought a baby grand piano. It was a used model that still managed to look imposing, even when positioned on a linoleum floor. We took turns stabbing at the keys, but as soon as the novelty wore off we bolstered it with sofa cushions and turned it into a fort. The piano sat neglected in the traditional sense until my father signed Gretchen up for a series of lessons. Lisa was assigned the flute, and I returned home from a scout meeting one evening to find my instrument leaning against the aquarium in my bedroom.

"Hold on to your hat," my father said, "because here's that guitar you always wanted."

Surely he had me confused with someone else. While I had regularly petitioned for a brand-name vacuum cleaner, I'd never said anything about wanting a guitar. Nothing about it appealed to me, not even on an aesthetic level. I had my room arranged just so, and the instrument did not fit in with my nautical theme. An anchor, yes. A guitar, no. He wanted me to jam, so I jammed it in my closet, where it remained until he signed me up for a series of private lessons offered at a music shop located on the ground floor of the recently opened North Hills Mall. I fought it as best I could and feigned illness even as he dropped me off for my first appointment.

"But I'm sick," I yelled, watching him pull out of the parking lot. "I have a virus, and besides that, I don't want to play a musical instrument--don't you know anything?"

When it finally sank in that he wasn't coming back, I lugged my guitar into the music store, where the manager led me to my teacher, a perfectly formed midget named Mister Mancini. I was twelve years old at the time, small for my age, and it was startling to find myself locked in a windowless room with a man who barely reached my chest. It seemed wrong that I would be taller than my teacher, but I kept this observation to myself, saying only, "My father told me to come here. It was all his idea."

A fastidious dresser stuck in a small, unfashionable town, Mister Mancini wore clothing I recognized from the young-squires department of Hudson Belk. Some nights he favored button-up shirts with clip-on ties, while other evenings I arrived to find him dressed in flared slacks and snug turtleneck sweaters, a swag of love beads hanging from his neck. His arms were manly and covered in coarse, dark hair, while his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.

Not a dwarf but an honest-to-God midget. My fascination was both evident and unwelcome and was nothing he hadn't been subjected to a million times before. He didn't shake my hand, just lit a cigarette and reached for the conch shell he used as an ashtray. Like my father, Mister Mancini assumed that anyone could learn to play the guitar. He had picked it up during a single summer spent in what he called "Hotlanta, G. A." This, I knew, was a racy name given to Atlanta, Georgia. "Now that," he said, "is one classy place if you know where to go." He grabbed my guitar and began tuning it, holding his head close against the strings. "Yessiree kid, the girls down on Peachtree are running wild twenty-four hours a day."

He mentioned a woman named Beth, saying, "They threw away the mold and shut down the factory after making that one, you know what I mean?"

I nodded my head, having no idea what he was talking about.

"She wasn't much of a cook, but, hey, I guess that's why God invented TV dinners." He laughed at his little joke and repeated the line about the frozen dinners as if he would use it later in a comedy routine. "God made TV dinners, yeah, that's good." He told me he'd named his guitar after Beth. "Now I can't keep my hands off it!" he said. "Seriously, though, it helps if you give your instrument a name. What do you think you'll call yours?"

"Maybe I'll call it Oliver," I said. It was the name of my hamster, and I was used to saying it.

Then again, maybe not.

"Oliver?" Mister Mancini set my guitar on the floor. "Oliver? What the hell kind of name is that? If you're going to devote yourself to the guitar, you need to name it after a girl, not a guy."

"Oh, right," I said. "Joan. I'll call it . . . Joan."

"So tell me about this Joan," he said. "Is she something pretty special?"

Joan was the name of one of my cousins, but it seemed unwise to share this information. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Joan's really . . . great. She's tall and . . ." I felt self-conscious using the word tall and struggled to take it back. "She's small and has brown hair and everything."

"Is she stacked?"

I'd never noticed my cousin's breasts and was working to conceal the horrible secret that I'd never noticed anyone's breasts, not unless, like our housekeeper's, they were large enough to appear freakish. "Stacked? Well, sure," I said. "She's pretty stacked." I was afraid he'd ask me for a more detailed description and was relieved when he crossed the room and removed Beth from her case. He told me that a guitar student needed plenty of discipline. Talent was great, but time had taught him that talent was also extremely rare. "I've got it," he said. "But then again, I was born with it. It's a gift from God, and those of us who have it are very special people."

He seemed to know that I was nothing special, just a type, yet another boy whose father had his head in the clouds.

"Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire," adding, "This one is for Joan."

"You know that it would be untrue," he sang. "You know that I would be a liar." The little man played beautifully but sang "Light My Fire" as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match. He finished his opening number, nodded his head in acknowledgment of my applause, and moved on, offering up his own unique and unsettling versions of "The Girl from Ipanema" and "Little Green Apples" while I sat trapped in my seat, my false smile stretched so tight I lost all feeling in the lower half of my face. My fingernails had grown a good three inches by the time he struck his final note and called me close to point out a few simple chords. Before I left, he handed me a half dozen purpled, mimeographed handouts that we both knew were useless.

Back at the house, my mother had my dinner warming in the oven. From the living room came the aimless whisper of Lisa's flute; it sounded not unlike the wind whipping through an empty Pepsi can. Down in the basement, either Gretchen was practicing her piano or the cat was chasing a moth across the keys. My mother responded by turning up the volume on the kitchen TV while my father pushed back my plate, set Joan in my lap, and instructed me to play. "Listen to this," he crowed. "A house full

of music! Man, this is beautiful."

You certainly couldn't accuse him of being unsupportive. His enthusiasm bordered on mania, yet still it failed to inspire us. During practice sessions, my sisters and I would eat potato chips, scowling at our hated instruments and speculating on the lives of our music teachers. They were all peculiar in one way or another, but with a midget, I'd definitely won the my-teacher-is-stranger-than-yours competition. I wondered where Mister Mancini lived and who he might call in case of an emergency. Did he stand on a chair in order to shave, or was his home customized to meet his needs? I'd look at the laundry hamper or the beer cooler, thinking that if it came down to it, Mister Mancini could hide just about anywhere. Though I thought of him constantly, I grabbed any excuse to avoid my guitar.

"I've been doing just what you told me to do," I'd say at the beginning of each lesson, "but I just can't get the hang of it. Maybe my fingers are too shor--I mean litt--I mean, maybe I'm just not coordinated enough." He'd arrange Joan in my lap, pick up Beth, and tell me to follow along. "You need to believe you're playing an actual woman," he'd say. "Just grab her by the neck and make her holler."

Mister Mancini had a singular talent for making me uncomfortable. He forced me to consider things I'd rather not think about--the sex of my guitar, for instance. If I honestly wanted to put my hands on a woman, would that automatically mean I could play? Gretchen's teacher never told her to think of her piano as a boy. Neither did Lisa's flute teacher, though in that case the analogy was fairly obvious. On the off chance that sexual desire was all it took, I steered clear of Lisa's instrument, fearing I might be labeled a prodigy. The best solution was to become a singer and leave the instruments to somebody else. A song stylist--that was what I wanted to be.

I was at the mall with my mother one afternoon when I spotted Mister Mancini reaching up to order a hamburger at Scotty's Chuck Wagon, a fast-food restaurant located a few doors down from the music shop. He sometimes mentioned having lunch with a salesgirl from Jolly's Jewelers--"a real looker"--but on this day he was alone. When asking for his hamburger, Mister Mancini had to stand on tiptoe, and even his head failed to reach the counter. The passing adults politely looked away, but their children were decidedly more vocal. A toddler ambled up on his chubby bowed legs, attempting to embrace my teacher with ketchup-smeared fingers while a party of elementary school students openly stared in wonder. Even worse was the group of adolescents, the boys my own age who sat gath-ered around a large table. "Go back to Oz, munchkin," one of them said, and his friends shook with laughter. Tray in hand, Mister Mancini took a seat and pretended not to notice. The boys weren't yelling, but anyone could tell they were making fun of him. "Honestly, Mother," I said. "Do they have to be such monsters?" Beneath my moral outrage was a strong sense of possessiveness, a fury that other people were sinking their hooks into my own personal midget. What did they know about this man? I was the one who lit his cigarettes and listened as he denounced the careers of so-called pretty boys such as Glen Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro. It was I who had suffered through six weeks' worth of lessons and was still struggling to master "Yellow Bird." If anyone was going to get laughs at his expense, I figured that I should be the first in line.

I'd always thought of Mister Mancini as a blowhard, a pocket playboy, but watching him dip his hamburger into a sad puddle of mayonnaise, I broadened my view and came to see him as a wee outsider, a misfit whose take-it-or-leave-it attitude had left him all alone. This was a persona I'd been tinkering with myself: the outcast, the rebel. It occurred to me that, with the exception of the guitar, he and I actually had quite a bit in common. We were both men trapped inside a boy's body. Each of us was talented in his own way, and we both hated twelve-year-old boys, a demographic group second to none in terms of cruelty. All things considered, there was no reason I shouldn't address him, not as a teacher, but as an artistic brother. Maybe then we could drop the pretense of Joan and get down to work. If things worked out the way I hoped, I'd someday mention in interviews that my accompanist was both my best friend and a midget.

I wore a tie to my next lesson, and this time, when asked if I'd practiced, I told the truth, saying in a matter-of-fact tone of voice that no, I hadn't laid a finger on my guitar since our last get-together. I told him that Joan was my cousin's name and that I had no idea how stacked she was.

"That's okay," Mister Mancini said. "You can call your guitar whatever you want, just so long as you practice."

My voice shaking, I told him that I had absolutely no interest in mastering the guitar. What I really wanted was to sing in the voice of Billie Holiday. "Mainly commercials, but not for any banks or car dealerships, because those are usually choral arrangements."

The color ebbed from my teacher's face.

I told him I'd been working up an act and could use a little accompaniment. Did he know the jingle for the new Sara Lee campaign?

"You want me to what?" He wasn't angry, just confused.

I felt certain he was lying when he denied knowing the tune. Doublemint gum, Ritz crackers, the theme songs for Alka-Seltzer and Kenmore appliances: He claimed ignorance on all counts. I started in on an a cappella version of the latest Oscar Mayer commercial, hoping he might join in once the spirit moved him. It looked bad, I knew, but in order to sustain the proper mood, I needed to disregard his company and sing the way I did at home when alone in my bedroom, my eyes shut tight and my hands dangling like pointless, empty gloves.

My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R

My bologna has a second name, it's M-A-Y-E-R

Oh, I love to eat it every day

And if you ask me why I'll say

'Cause Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

I reached the end of my tune thinking he might take this as an opportunity to applaud or even apologize for underestimating me. Mild amusement would have been an acceptable response, but instead he held up his hands, as if to stop an advancing car. "Hey, guy," he said. "You can hold it right there. I'm not into that scene."

A scene? What scene? I thought I was being original.

"There were plenty of screwballs like you back in Atlanta, but me, I don't swing that way--you got it? This might be your 'thing' or whatever, but you can definitely count me out." He reached for his conch shell and stubbed out his cigarette. "I mean, come on now. For God's sake, kid, pull yourself together."

I knew then why I'd never sung in front of anyone and why I shouldn't have done it in front of Mister Mancini. He'd used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian or, better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we're defined by our desires, I was in for a lifetime of trouble.

The remainder of the hour was spent awkwardly watching the clock as we silently pretended to tune our guitars.

My father was disappointed when I told him I wouldn't be returning for any more lessons. "He told me not to come back," I said. "He told me I have the wrong kind of fingers." Seeing that it had worked for me, my sisters invented similar stories, and together we announced that the Sedaris Trio had officially disbanded. Our father offered to find us better teachers, adding that if we were unhappy with our instruments we could trade them in for something more suitable. "The trumpet or the saxophone or, hey, how about the vibes?" He reached for a Lionel Hampton album, saying, "I want you to sit down and give this a good listen. Just get a load of this cat and tell me he's not an inspiration."

There was a time when I could listen to such a record and imagine myself as the headline act at some magnificent New York nightclub, but that's what fantasies are for: They allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top. I'd done my solo and would now move on to pursue other, equally unsuccessful ways of getting attention. I'd try every art form there was, and with each disappointment I'd picture Mister Mancini holding his conch shell and saying, "For God's sake, kid, pull yourself together."

We told our father no, don't bother playing us any more of your records, but he still persisted. "I'm telling you that this album is going to change your lives, and if it doesn't, I'll give each one of you a five-dollar bill. What do you think of that?"

It was a tough call--five dollars for listening to a Lionel Hampton record. We looked at one another, my sisters and I, and then we left the room, ignoring his cry of "Hey, where do you think you're going? Get back in here and listen."

We joined our mother at the TV and never looked back. A life in music was his great passion, not ours, and our lessons had taught us that without the passion, the best we could hope for was an occasional engagement at some hippie wedding where, if we were lucky, the guests would be too stoned to realize just how bad we really were. That night, as was his habit, our father fell asleep in front of the stereo, the record making its pointless, silent rounds as he laid back against the sofa cushions, dreaming.

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