David Sedaris: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

Copyright © 2010 by David Sedaris

Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Ian Falconer

The cat had a party to attend, and went to the baboon to get herself groomed.

“What kind of party?” the baboon asked, and she massaged the cat’s neck in order to relax her, the way she did with all her customers. “Hope it’s not that harvest dance down on the riverbank. My sister went last year and said she’d never seen such rowdiness. Said a fight broke out between two possums, and one gal, the wife of one or the other, got pushed onto a stump and knocked out four teeth. And they were pretty ones too, none of this yellowness you find on most things that eat trash.”

The cat shuddered. “No,” she said. “This is just a little get-together, a few friends. That type of thing.”

“Will there be food?” the baboon asked.

“Something,” the cat sighed. “I just don’t know what.”

“ ‘Course it’s hard,” the baboon said. “Everybody eating different things. You got one who likes leaves and another who can’t stand the sight of them. Folks have gotten so picky nowadays, I just lay out some peanuts and figure they either eat them or they don’t.”

“Now, I wouldn’t like a peanut,” the cat said. “Not at all.”

“Well, I guess you’d just have drinks, then. The trick is knowing when to stop.”

“That’s never been a problem for me,” the cat boasted. “I drink until I’m full, and then I push myself away from the table. Always have.”

“Well, you’ve got sense, then. Not like some of them around here.” The baboon picked a flea from the cat’s head and stuck it gingerly between her teeth. “Take this wedding I went to-last Saturday, I think it was. Couple of marsh rabbits got married-you probably heard about it.”

The cat nodded.

“Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes-being in love.”

“My husband and I wrote our own vows,” the cat said defensively.

“Sure you did,” countered the baboon, “but you probably had something to say, not like these marsh rabbits, carrying on that their love was like a tender sapling or some damn thing. And all the while they had this squirrel off to the side, plucking at a harp, I think it was.”

“I had a harp player at my wedding,” the cat said, “and it was lovely.”

“I bet it was, but you probably hired a professional, someone who could really play. This squirrel, I don’t think she’d taken a lesson in her life. Just clawed at those strings, almost like she was mad at them.”

“Well, I’m sure she tried her best,” the cat said.

The baboon nodded and smiled, the way one must in the service industry. She’d planned to tell a story about a drunken marsh rabbit, the brother of the groom at last week’s wedding, but there was no point in it now, not with this client anyway. Whatever she said, the cat disagreed with, and unless she found a patch of common ground she was sure to lose her tip. “You know,” she said, cleaning a scab off the cat’s neck, “I hate dogs. Simply cannot stand them.”

“What makes you bring that up?” the cat asked.

“Just thinking,” the baboon said. “Some kind of spaniel mix walked in yesterday, asking for a shampoo, and I sent him packing, said, ‘I don’t care how much money you have, I’m not making conversation with anyone who licks his own ass.’ ” And the moment she said it, she realized her mistake.

“Now, what’s wrong with that?” the cat protested. “It’s good to have a clean anus. Why, I lick mine at least five times a day.”

“And I admire you for it,” the baboon said, “but you’re not a dog.”

“Meaning?”

“On a cat it’s… classy,” the baboon said. “There’s a grace to it, but a dog, you know the way they hunker over, legs going every which way.”

“Well, yes,” the cat said. “I suppose you have a point.”

“Then they slobber and drool all over everything, and what they don’t get wet, they chew to pieces.”

“That they do.” The cat chuckled, and the baboon relaxed and searched her memory for a slanderous dog story. The collie, the German shepherd, the spaniel mix she claimed to have turned away: they were all good friends of hers, and faithful clients, but what would it hurt to pretend otherwise and cross that fine line between licking ass and simply kissing it?

The yellow warbler would often claim that she was fine until she hit Brownsville. “Then-wham!” she’d tell her friends. “I don’t know if it’s the air or what, but whenever we pass it on our migration, I have to stop and puke my guts out.”

“Indeed she does,” her husband would say, laughing.

“An hour or two’s rest is all I need, but isn’t it strange? Not Olmito or Bayview or Indian Lake, but Brownsville. Brownsville every time.”

The birds she was talking to would try to sound sympathetic or, at the very least, interested. “Hmmmm,” they’d say, or, “Brownsville, I think I have a cousin there.”

From the southern tip of Texas, the couple would fly over Mexico and then into Central America. “My family’s been wintering in Guatemala for as long as I can remember,” the warbler would explain. “Every year, like clockwork, here we come by the tens of thousands-but do you think any of those Spanish-speaking birds have bothered learning English? Not on your life!”

“It’s really horrible,” her husband would say.

“Well, funny too,” his wife would insist. “Horrible and funny. Like one time I asked this little Guatemalan bird, I said, ‘Don day est tass las gran days mose cass de cab eyza?’ ”

Here her listeners would cock their heads, confused and more than a little impressed. “Wait a second, you speak that stuff?”

“Oh, I’ve picked some up,” the warbler would say in that offhand way of hers. “I mean, really, what choice do I have? I guess I’m a pretty quick study. At least I’ve been told I am.”

“She’s terrific with languages,” her husband would boast, and his wife would raise a wing in protest: “Well, not always . In this particular case, for instance, I thought I’d asked where all the big horseflies were. A reasonable question, only instead of cob ayo, which is “horse,” I said cab eyza . So what I really asked was ‘Where are all the big head flies?’ ”

Thinking that this was the end of the story, her listeners would quake with polite laughter. “Head flies, oh, that’s rich!”

“But no, wait, ” the warbler would say. “So the Guatemalan bird makes a motion for me to follow him through the thicket. I do, and there in this field are, like, three hundred heads rotting in the afternoon sun. Each one with about fifty flies on it. And I mean huge, the size of bumblebees, every one of them.”

“Oh my God,” the listeners would say. “Rotting heads with flies on them?”