David Sedaris: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

“Oh, they weren’t bird heads,” the warbler would reassure them. “These belonged to humans, or used to anyway. Flesh bubbling off, hair all tangled with bits of goo in it. I don’t know what they’d done with the bodies, burned them, maybe. Then they used the heads to make a wall.”

“Actually, it was more like a counter,” her husband would say.

It was a wall if ever there was one, but what could you do, ask everyone to stop up their ears while you and your ridiculous mate-someone who had never even seen a counter except in pictures-scream at each other for half an hour? No. It was best just to breeze over it.

“So we see this wall, this counter, be it, made of human heads, and I mean to say, ‘This place stinks like the devil,’ but what I actually say is…” And here, snorting with laughter, she would pass the baton to her husband.

“What she actually says to this small Guatemalan bird is ‘The devil smells me in my place.’ Can you believe it? My mate, Ladies and Gentlemen, or, as we like to call her south of the border, ‘Satan’s sexy stinkpot!’ ”

The listeners would crack up, and the warblers, husband and wife, would enjoy the sensation of having an audience right where they wanted them. This was the reward for spending three months a year in an inferior country. And when the light fell a certain way, when the laughter surged and melded into a harmonious song, it almost made up for all the hardships-the stomach flus, for instance, or the times when, rather than uniting you and your mate, the strangeness of another culture only made you feel more separate, more despicable and alone.

Back in their element, the two warblers were a well-oiled machine. “You want funny, try getting work done down there,” the husband would say, opening the door to their hilarious tales of lazy natives, of how bumbling they were, how backward and superstitious. This begged the question “Why go in the first place? Why not winter in Florida like everyone else?” The warblers would then explain that despite the incompetence, despite the language barriers and the severed heads, Central America was, in its own way, beautiful.

“And cheap,” they would add. “Cheap, cheap, cheap.”

The squirrel and the chipmunk had been dating for two weeks when they ran out of things to talk about. Acorns, parasites, the inevitable approach of autumn: these subjects had been covered within their first hour, and so breathlessly their faces had flushed. Twice they had held long conversations about dogs, each declaring an across-the-board hatred of them and speculating on what life might be like were someone to put a bowl of food in front of them two times a day. “They’re spoiled rotten is what it comes down to,” the chipmunk had said, and the squirrel had placed his paw over hers, saying, “That’s it exactly. Finally, someone who really gets it.”

Friends had warned them that their romance could not possibly work out, and such moments convinced them that the skeptics were not just wrong but jealous. “They’ll never have what we do,” the squirrel would say, and then the two of them would sit quietly, hoping for a flash flood or a rifle report-something, anything, that might generate a conversation.

They were out one night at a little bar run by a couple of owls when, following a long silence, the squirrel slapped his palm against the tabletop. “You know what I like?” he said. “I like jazz.”

“I didn’t know that,” the chipmunk said. “My goodness, jazz!” She had no idea what jazz was but worried that asking would make her sound stupid. “What kind, exactly?” she asked, hoping his answer might narrow things down a bit.

“Well, all kinds, really,” he told her. “Especially the earlier stuff.”

“Me too,” she said, and when he asked her why, she told him that the later stuff was just too late for her tastes. “Almost like it was overripe or something. You know what I mean?”

Then, for the third time since she had known him, the squirrel reached across the table and took her paw.

On returning home that evening, the chipmunk woke her older sister, with whom she shared a room. “Listen,” she whispered, “I need you to explain something. What’s jazz?”

“Why are you asking me?” the sister said.

“So you don’t know either?” the chipmunk asked.

“I didn’t say I didn’t know,” the sister said. “I asked you why you’re asking. Does this have anything to do with that squirrel?”

“Maybe,” the chipmunk said.

“Well, I’m telling,” the sister announced. “First thing tomorrow morning, because this has gone on long enough.” She punched at her pillow of moss, then repositioned it beneath her head. “I warned you weeks ago that this wouldn’t work out, and now you’ve got the whole house in an uproar. Waltzing home in the middle of the night, waking me up with your dirty little secrets. Jazz indeed. Just you wait until Mother hears about this.”

The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? “Oh, I like it too,” she’d said-and so eagerly! Then again, it could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more horrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infested flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide. And she had claimed to like it!

Years later, when she could put it all in perspective, she’d realize that she had never really trusted the squirrel-how else to explain all those terrible possibilities? Had he been another chipmunk, even a tough one, she’d have assumed that jazz was something familiar, a kind of root, say, or maybe a hairstyle. Of course, her sister hadn’t helped any. None of her family had. “It’s not that I have anything against squirrels per se,” her mother had said. “It’s just that this one, well, I don’t like him.” When pressed for details, she’d mentioned his fingernails, which were a little too long for her taste. “A sure sign of vanity,” she warned. “And now there’s this jazz business.”

That was what did it. Following the sleepless night, the chipmunk’s mother had forced her to break it off.

“Well,” the squirrel had sighed, “I guess that’s that.”

“I guess it is,” the chipmunk said.

He headed downriver a few days later, and she never saw him or heard from him again.

“It’s not a great loss,” her sister said. “No girl should be subjected to language like that, especially from the likes of him.”

“Amen,” her mother added.

Eventually the chipmunk met someone else, and after she had safely married, her mother speculated that perhaps jazz was a branch of medicine-something like chiropractic therapy-that wasn’t quite legitimate. Her sister said no, it was more likely a jig, and then she pushed herself back from the table and kicked her chubby legs into the air. “Oh, you,” her mother said, “that’s a cancan,” and then she joined in and gave a few kicks of her own.

This stuck in the chipmunk’s mind, as she never knew her mother could identify a dance step or anything associated with fun. It was the way her own children would eventually think of her: dull, strict, chained to the past. She had boys, all of them healthy, and only one prone to trouble. He had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but his heart was good, and the chipmunk knew he would eventually straighten himself out. Her husband thought so too, and died knowing that he had been correct.