Little Little Read online

  Little Little

  M. E. Kerr

  For Mildred Greenwald

  –Millie–

  Always new

  &

  For Alison and Thor–

  Old friends are Gold

  Contents

  1. Sydney Cinnamon

  2. Little Little La Belle

  3. Sydney Cinnamon

  4. Little Little La Belle

  5. Sydney Cinnamon

  6. Little Little La Belle

  7. Sydney Cinnamon

  8. Little Little La Belle

  9. Sydney Cinnamon

  10. Little Little La Belle

  11. Sydney Cinnamon

  12. Little Little La Belle

  13. Sydney Cinnamon

  14. Little Little La Belle

  15. Sydney Cinnamon

  16. Little Little La Belle

  17. Sydney Cinnamon

  18. Little Little La Belle

  19. Sydney Cinnamon

  20. Little Little La Belle

  21. Sydney Cinnamon

  22. Little Little La Belle

  A Personal History by M. E. Kerr

  1: Sydney Cinnamon

  “SYDNEY,” MR. PALMER SAID, “you are on your way to becoming the most famous dwarf in this country, no small thanks to me. And now I have a favor to ask you.”

  Those words, spoken on an ordinary August day, in the offices of Palmer Pest Control, were the beginning of my new life.

  So far, age seventeen, I had had two other beginnings.

  One was my birth and abandonment to The Twin Oaks Orphans’ Home in Wilton, New York.

  One was my first appearance as The Roach, mascot for the Wilton Bombers, at halftime during the first game of the year. I was fifteen, and though I didn’t know it at the time, it was to be the last year I’d attend Wilton High School.

  “Sydney Cinnamon,” Mr. Palmer said that morning in his office, “with everything against you, you made yourself into something. You created a self for yourself. You are The Roach, an entity of your own invention, and I admire you for it. I have something along the same order in mind for myself.”

  “What are you planning to become?” I asked him.

  “I’m not planning to become anything. I’m planning on Palmer Pest Control becoming something. I want to go national, Sydney! I want to be big!” Mr. Palmer looked like an enormous bird, like the kind of huge, skinny, long-beaked bird that swooped down from the sky, poked around in the dirt, and carried away the very creatures Mr. Palmer exterminated for a living.

  “Sydney,” he said, rubbing his palms together ecstatically, “I’m negotiating with a Japanese named Hiroyuki for a merger with Twinkle Traps, over in La Belle, New York. Together, Twinkle and Palmer could control the market. I need your help, Sydney.”

  He knew he could ask me to do anything. Because of him, I had changed from an orphaned dwarf who picked up odd jobs jumping out of birthday cakes, or working summers at resorts like Leprechaun Village, to a TV personality who earned enough money to finally order clothes made that fit, and furniture my own size.

  The commercials I made for P.P.C., as The Roach, were famous in upstate New York. If Mr. Palmer had exaggerated slightly in saying I was on my way to becoming the most famous dwarf in the country, it still did not take away from the fact I had my own little fame wherever I went.

  And fame is fame. The big fish in the little pond doesn’t bother its head about larger bodies of water. Thanks to Albert Palmer, I’d gone from entertaining as The Roach at halftime in high school football fields to making commercials and appearing at shopping centers, and starring at openings of everything from bowling alleys to cut-rate liquor stores.

  I even had my own theme song, which was “La Cucaracha,” and my own groupies, kids who congregated wherever I appeared, and waved pieces of paper at me that they wanted me to autograph.

  “I’ll do anything you say,” I told Mr. Palmer, and he rubbed his bald head and grinned at me, then came around and sat on the front of his desk, facing me.

  “The last week in September,” he said, “the Wilton Bombers are playing the La Belle Boots, at La Belle. Sydney, I’d like you to make an appearance at halftime. It’s a way to tell our home team you haven’t forgotten your beginnings, and we’re still in there rooting for them. And it’s a way to show you off in La Belle.”

  “That’s easy,” I said.

  “And the second part isn’t going to be hard, either. There’s a surprise in it for you, Sydney, one I think you’ll like. She’s your size, Sydney.”

  “Who?”

  “They call her Little Little La Belle. She’s one of the little people, like you, and she’s the daughter of Larry La Belle. Of course, his family is very prominent in that town, town’s named for them. She’s having her eighteenth birthday party that weekend, and Mr. Hiroyuki would like you to make a little surprise guest appearance at the party. His boy’s a friend of the family, and that’d be his gift to this little girl.”

  “It’s all right with me,” I said.

  “You’ll be a surprise for the little lady, and it’ll help me get Hiroyuki in a good mood when we talk merger.”

  I said I would and then I began wangling for the very best accommodations while I was in La Belle.

  I’d learned to do that from a fellow named Knox Lionel. We’d roomed together in the employees’ dormitory at Leprechaun Village, the summer we both worked there. Knox was seventeen that summer and I was fourteen. He was a combination philosopher and con man, who loved to watch the TV preachers and imitate them. He entertained us in the dorm posing as a preacher called Opportunity Knox, a mixture of all the television preachers he’d studied. He could cry like Jimmy Swaggart. He could fret like Rex Humbard. He could beam like Robert Schuller and shake a pointed finger like Billy Graham. He stood on a box to deliver sermons on sin that had us holding our sides laughing.

  But he wasn’t kidding when he preached about sticking up for ourselves.

  “When you go on a job,” Knox always said, “make sure your little ass goes first class! You never know how a job’s going to turn out for you. Some jobs you’ll fend off drunks or ladies who want to hold you on their laps or dogs who want to knock you over and lick your face. Make sure ahead of time you’ve got first-class accommodations. If you don’t stick up for yourself, you’ll go from jobs like that back to some fleabag with the head down the hall.”

  Everything a dwarf needed to figure out, Knox had figured out. Even though he didn’t have a hump like some of us, and was this miniature marvel of a good-looking guy, he never called himself a midget or a little person.

  He’d stand on his box and shout, “The word is ‘dwarf’!”

  He’d lecture us that blacks didn’t get anywhere calling themselves “colored” or “Negro”; that all of us were duty bound to call ourselves the worst thing anyone could call us: dwarf—“And make it beautiful!” he’d roar.

  He was the only dwarf I’d ever met whose mother and father had been dwarfs, too, though I’d heard of a few such cases. There was a dwarf who’d played in a major league baseball game who’d had dwarf parents. He was Edward Gaedel and he’d played one game for the St. Louis Browns in 1951, as a stunt. But the vast majority of us are flukes in our families.

  Knox had appeared in an act with his folks in a series of second-rate carnivals, where they were billed as The Inch Family. He was also the only dwarf in Leprechaun Village who’d been earning his living since he could walk, in one form or another of sleazy show business, until both his parents died. He liked to dress all in white, and said it was because of all the years he could never wear white, when he was working carnies in dusty lots, or on the road for weeks with no place to get his clothes cleaned.

  Some of them in the dor
m didn’t like him; some were fascinated by him; all agreed he had the smarts, and we called him “Opportunity.”

  There was a time in Skaneateles, New York, where I’d been sent away from a job on a cold February night because the hostess of the Valentine party hadn’t been told I had a hump. She said there was no way I could play Cupid, since I was supposed to appear practically naked. Anyway, she said, Cupid wasn’t a hunchback. Instead of the hundred dollars I’d been promised, in addition to a hotel room and meals, she gave me a twenty, and said to please leave before the guests arrived.

  Later on in my large, comfortable room at The Skaneateles Inn, feasting on filet mignon and watching the snow fall on Skaneateles Lake, I gave silent thanks to Opportunity Knox.

  I also learned, from then on, always to mention the hump, though later, as The Roach, that never mattered. I had my plastic shell covering me as I performed.

  Mr. Palmer said, “Sydney, you’ll have a room with a view, color TV, a separate bath—nothing but the best! You’ll be put up at the Stardust Inn. I’m staying there myself!”

  Although I’d never been in La Belle, New York, I knew about the Inn. As a youngster, I’d gone with others from Twin Oaks for an outing at an amusement park on the outskirts of La Belle: Stardust Park.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m glad to do it.”

  “Sydney,” he said, getting off his desk, “La Belle has a fine library, too.”

  The few times we’d traveled anywhere together, I often had Mr. Palmer leave me at the local library while he took care of business.

  I was comfortable in libraries, and reading was my passion.

  Once, on a job, when I jumped out of a cold cherry pie at a George Washington’s Birthday bachelor party, the guest of honor and I got talking.

  He told me he was a psychologist, and he wanted to question me about my life-style. He was drunk—they always are at bachelor parties—and when he found out how much I read, he leaned into me and suggested, “You’re overcompenshating, Shydney.”

  “For what?”

  “For being sho short,” he said. “You want to know sho much sho people forget your shize.” Before he fell face down into his plate he added, “You esh-esh-cape that way, too.”

  After I became The Roach, I read even more, and then I think I was overcompensating, not for being a dwarf, but for being a high school dropout.

  That was something I didn’t thank Opportunity Knox for; it was his example I’d followed. He used to tell us all we needed was to say that we’d graduated from high school. “You can fake it!” he’d say. “You can fake anything!”

  Once he told me, “We can’t walk to where we’ve got to get, Sydney, because our dear little legs won’t get us there as fast as the competition’s. So we’ve got to jump!”

  In his room at the dorm in Leprechaun Village he had one of those signs that said THINK. THINK had been crossed out, and HUSTLE had been written over it. Then HUSTLE had been crossed out, and SCHEME! had been written over that.

  Mr. Palmer shook my hand. “Sydney, then it’s settled? You’ll make your appearance at halftime, do the guest shot for the little La Belle girl’s party, and I want you to have dinner with Mr. Hiroyuki and me one night. The rest of the time you’re on your own…. Do you still read and watch TV at the same time?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That way I don’t miss anything.”

  “From my way of looking at it, you miss two very important things,” said Mr. Palmer. “You miss the point of what you’re reading and the point of what you’re watching.”

  He laughed and slapped my back, and we started toward the door together.

  I remembered something else from my days at Leprechaun Village: a dwarf with bad legs, like mine, whom we called Artoo-Detoo, because he walked like the robot in the old film Star Wars.

  “Imagine thinking back to a time when you were another size!” Artoo-Detoo would exclaim. “Imagine growing out of your clothes—waking up one morning and your wrists have jumped past your shirt sleeves!”

  I watched myself in the wall of mirrors at the end of Mr. Palmer’s office. I thought of the time I had visited Stardust Park. I was eleven then. Yet very little about my physical appearance had changed in those six years.

  Three foot four and a half, still … the same hump, not bigger, not smaller. Legs too short for my body. My face could pass for normal. Light blue eyes, fair teeth except for one that hung like a fang longer than the others, bucking out from the row, sandy-colored hair, good skin … but the rest of me was like God’d gone mad when He started making me from the neck down.

  “So long, Sydney,” Mr. Palmer said in the doorway. “See you in September. In La Belle.”

  2: Little Little La Belle

  YOU ARE INVITED TO A PARTY

  Get out your drum and fife and fiddle,

  We’re giving a party for Little Little,

  On a September weekend here in La Belle,

  Reserve a room at The Lakeside Motel,

  There’ll be lots to do on Sat. and Sun.

  A banquet, a movie, and other fun.

  It’s a TADpole party for our little queen,

  It’s a birthday party, she’ll be eighteen!

  —Ava Hancock La Belle

  Once when my sister, Cowboy, was little, she asked me why I wasn’t “throwed away” when I was born.

  “I wasn’t throwed away,” I told her, “because no one knew then that I was different.”

  “Wasn’t you littler than anybody?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You was funny-looking, though, wasn’t you?”

  “I never looked better,” I said.

  That is a fact. I was a normal baby, even a big one—nine pounds and two ounces at birth. I had my mother’s golden hair and my father’s light green eyes.

  I don’t think my sister ever stops asking herself that question, though we are thick as thieves now and united against a world that is barking mad.

  Still, it has been a blight on Cowboy’s life that the town dwarf is her older sister.

  My mother has this thing about certain words and one of them is “pee.”

  She says don’t say pee. I say I hate the word “urinate,” it’s so official-sounding for something you do with your pants down. Why do you have to use either word? she asks me. Say I have to go to the bathroom if you have to say anything, or say you’d like to wash up. My father says just say excuse me. Or just say I’ll be right back.

  You could say something fun, my father says, like I have to spend a penny, or see a man about a dog. My mother brightens at this prospect and says when I was in high school I said I have to use the Kitty Litter or I have to tinkle. Now they start together enthusiastically, their eyes shining with the pleasure of finding a way to avoid saying I have to pee or I have to urinate…. Où est le WC? I have to use the head. I’m going to the john. I’ve got to see Mrs. Jones. I have to powder my nose. I have to pay a visit to the ladies’. I have an errand. I’m going to the little girls’. I have to make wee-wee. I have to go to the loo. On and on.

  Another word my mother cannot stand is “dwarf.”

  “Don’t say ‘dwarf,’” my mother says. “Call yourself a little person or a midget or a diminutive. Anything but ‘dwarf.’”

  That’s why I prefer to call myself a dwarf.

  “You picture someone with a hump when you hear the word ‘dwarf,’” my mother whines at me.

  I tell her, “One person’s picture is another person’s child. There are probably people who picture cone-headed gnomes when they hear the words ‘little person’ or ‘midget’ or ‘diminutive.’”

  “No, no, no, a little person or a midget or a diminutive is just a very small person, like you, Little Little, perfectly formed and perfectly beautiful.”

  “If I’m so perfect, what does it matter what I call myself?”

  “Well, Little Little, your mouth isn’t perfect.”

  “What’s wrong with my mouth?”

  “It�
��s always open, seems to me, and there’s always something sassy coming out of it.”

  My mother has been trying for nearly eighteen years to have a sense of humor about it. She treats Life as though it were some great force even larger than God. God gets the credit for everything good that happens, but anything bad or bewildering that happens causes her to exclaim, “Well what is Life going to do to us next!”

  Giving birth to someone like me is a little like falling off a horse. The very best thing you can do is get right back on one as quickly as possible, so you lose your fear of horses. Which explains why my sister was hustled into being very soon after my mother’s reeling head was just beginning to assimilate the knowledge I’d never stand taller on two feet than the family dog did on four.

  At five months I weighed fifteen pounds and two ounces and was two feet one inch tall. At the end of a year my weight and height were exactly the same.

  Cowboy was born when I was two, and though I grew a little more, at ten I stopped growing. Cowboy was eight and towering over me. I stood, and still stand, three feet three inches tall.

  My real name is Belle La Belle, but I have always been called Little Little by everyone, even teachers.

  Cowboy’s real name is Emily, and only teachers ever call her that.

  Cowboy was supposed to have been the long-awaited boy, Larry La Belle, Jr.

  All the things my father planned to do with the long-awaited boy were done instead with Cowboy.

  She has gone through many stages.

  The one in which she earned her nickname went on from the time she was four until she was eleven. She rode horseback before her feet were long enough to reach the stirrups, and rode her bicycle as though it were a stallion, jumping off it after she flew into our front yard, letting it clatter ahead and crash into the garage wall, while she walked coolly away from it as though it were standing patiently saddled awaiting her return. Inside our house, I was always the Indian, being pursued by her and lassoed, our mother screaming after her not to wear her hat in the house, not to pull the rope too tight around my neck, “REMOVE THOSE SPURS YOU’LL SCRATCH THE FURNITURE!”