The Myth of Wile E

Mama Dancing With the White Elephant

When there's nothing to do but wait for the sun to come back, you sort of begin to question the whole sunshine time-sharing arrangement we have with the people on the opposite side of the world. My understanding is, it's supposed to be pretty much a fifty-fifty split, but some nights the others seemed to take a really long time with the sun, and the night of my birthday was like that. I could only hope the people on the other side of the world were at least making good use of the daylight-not sitting around in windowless offices, staring at bar graphs and pie charts of quarterly earnings projections.

Back when I was a kid and the other side of the world was taking too long with the sun, I'd usually pass the time watching Mama dance with her white elephant.

See, most nights, especially when Daddy was gone, Mama would dance till all hours in front of the living room mirror. She would plié and jeté and bend every which way, with one hand and then the other stretched out towards something invisible she couldn't quite reach. She would take tiny steps across the room on tiptoe. Or she would twirl slowly, one leg bent, one hand curved high above her head, just like the little dancer in Gladys's music box. (Except, Gladys's music box dancer wore a tutu instead of a nightgown, and wasn't holding a cigarette or a glass of Wild Turkey.)

On nights when I couldn't sleep, I'd wander into the kitchen for a glass of milk, but I'd forget all about being thirsty when I saw Mama dancing. I'd just stand in the archway between the kitchen and the living room and stare, while Mama danced and danced without music.

Mama wouldn't notice me, but sometimes her mirror-self would. Sometimes her reflection would turn its head toward me and tell me to go to bed.

And always, Mama would curse her white elephant.

"They told me I had a gift. A God-given gift!" Mama would say to the mirror, as her mirror-self relayed it to me. "Well, let me tell you. Let me tell you. If talent is a gift, it's a white elephant from the Devil. You just be thankful to have no gifts, and don't go wishing for that kind of trouble."

Because I was only seven or eight then, I didn't know what Mama meant by having a white elephant, and since Mama spoke with equal disdain for such mysterious burdens as "cellulite" and "thunder thighs," these all got mixed up in my mind as somehow having to do with unwanted poundage.

Later, of course, I learned the old story, and the way I heard it went something like this:

Once upon a time, in a kingdom called Siam, the white elephant was revered because it was beautiful, and because it was rare. So every white elephant in Siam was declared to be property of the King, and if you found one it was to be fed lavishly and never ever harmed or put to any sort of "useful" labor.

Well, the King of Siam was a very clever king, and it occurred to him that his special white elephants could come in handy as a devious sort of weapon. And so, whenever he was unhappy with a courtier (or so the story went), he awarded the courtier a royal gift: the gift of a sacred white elephant. It was such a great honor that the gift couldn't possibly be refused (not even, I guess, if you worked for the post office). The courtier would have no choice but to spend everything he had feeding the always-hungry white elephant, until at last he was finally ruined.

Or so the story went.

Well, you could look at the courtier as cursed or burdened, I guess.

As for me, I'm pretty sure that when the courtier walked the streets of Siam accompanied by his rare gift, no one thought of the courtier as "poor" no matter how hungry he was or how threadbare his clothes. I'm pretty sure whenever people saw the courtier, they thought the same thing as I did, standing in the doorway watching Mama dance: That whatever the cost, it sure must be Something to have a white elephant.