Little Little Read online

  Long after she was out of chaps and boots, she had a thing for horses (and still does, though it does her no good, my father won’t buy her one). She went on for a while to her sports stage. Anything that bounced or could be thrown and caught was all she cared about. She spent long hours in the den with my father in the blue light of the boob tube cheering on men with first names like Bucky and Buzz, her dinner served on a tray the same as my father’s.

  The death and suicide stage came in her early teens and was a disguised way of protesting having to have anything to do with me outside our home. She took to her bed rather than have to wait for me in front of school, or sit with me in the cafeteria, or say I was her sister.

  Now it is hard to tell which one of us is most strange, me or Cowboy, though a dwarf will always look stranger anywhere.

  Cowboy doesn’t wear her ten-gallon hat and chaps to school anymore, but in other ways she lives up to her name. She is tall enough to be sought out by the La Belle High girls’ basketball team (the only ones at school who seek her out) and walks as though she just got off the horse she wishes she owned. She spits sometimes, swears she doesn’t, but she stops and hawks into the gutters—I’ve seen her do it. And she smokes Camel cigarettes with no hands. A Camel dangles from her mouth at all times away from home and school, and she lopes around like some tall farm boy coming in from the wheat fields. Her hair is all tight curls, to her shoulders, and tangled, never combed. She claims a comb won’t go through it. Whatever she says comes out of the corner of her mouth. Her shy smiles are always tipped and she rarely shows teeth when smiling. I imagine that she smells of hay and manure, not a bad smell but a musky one my mother says is all in my head: “No one else smells Cowboy, Little Little.”

  Cowboy likes to laugh with her hands in her pockets and her head thrown back, and when she’s not relaxed she cracks her knuckles.

  “When is Life going to straighten you around!” my mother cries at her, and hugs her, says, “Oh, Cowboy, you are something, aren’t you?”

  Our little town in the Finger Lakes, upstate New York, has been partially saved from economic disaster by the arrival of the Twinkle Traps plant, which is Japanese-owned. And Cowboy has been saved from being ostracized by nearly everyone except the girls’ basketball team, by glomming onto Mock Hiroyuki, a Japanese boy her same age, fifteen, new to our town and the country’s customs.

  Cowboy is now in her Japanese stage.

  She enters our house calling out “Kon-nici-wa,” and leaves with “Sayonara!”

  If we ever need Cowboy for anything, we know she is at the Hiroyukis’.

  3: Sydney Cinnamon

  I WAS ALWAYS A sentimental fellow. My eyes teared at the memories of old times and leaked at the sounds of old songs recalling past days with friends I never saw anymore. I had favorite places, too, and one of them was Stardust Park.

  Immediately after I checked into The Stardust Inn that hot Friday afternoon in September, I walked down to the park, even though I knew it was closed because it was off season.

  Stardust Park was only thirty miles from The Twin Oaks Orphans’ Home.

  When I was at Twin Oaks, I lived in Miss Lake’s cottage, where most of the handicapped lived. There were ramps for wheelchairs there instead of stairs, and sinks and closets and drinking fountains, et cetera, were lower to accommodate us.

  All the kids who lived in Miss Lake’s called it Mistakes.

  There was every kind of kid to be expected there, but I was the only dwarf.

  Stardust Park in the summer was a miniature Disneyland, filled with all the things you’d find in one of those places, from a 62-MPH roller coaster to a ten-foot walking chicken.

  I was taken there one time with some others from Mistakes, just as the sun was rising in the early morning sky.

  We always went to public places before the public was allowed in.

  Some of the employees who ran the rides and sold the souvenirs were sitting around having their morning coffee.

  Even though they were supposed to be prepared for the visit from Twin Oaks, they didn’t look it. Their heads whirled around as we filed past them, and I said under my breath, “MyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?”

  I always said what everyone watching us was thinking when we came into view. OhmyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?

  There was me, and there was Wheels Potter, who had no legs and got about on a board with roller-skate wheels attached to it. There was Bighead Langhorn, whose head was the size of an enormous pumpkin set on a skinny body just a little taller than mine. There was Wires Kaplan, with his hearing aid and his thick glasses and his bum leg. There was Cloud, the one-armed albino, in his dark glasses with his massive head of curly white hair the texture of steel wool. There was Pill Suchanek, whose mother had taken some drug before Pill was born that threw her whole body out of whack and left her with flippers for arms. There were a few in wheelchairs and one on crutches, all led by a teacher we nicknamed Robot, because his first name was Robert and his only facial expression was a smile, his only mood cheerful.

  I paid very little attention to The Underground City or the ten-foot chicken, the 62-MPH roller coaster, The Space Shuttle, The Early American Village, or Winter Wonderland.

  I had gone on that expedition expressly to see Gnomeland.

  Age eleven, I had never seen another dwarf, except on television or in drawings and photographs.

  When I entered Gnomeland, I could not believe my eyes. It didn’t matter to me that they were all dressed in cute little costumes with bells attached to stocking caps and felt shoes on their feet, that the men wore fake white beards and some of the men and women wore cone-shaped red hats.

  I laughed aloud at the buttons some wore proclaiming THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE GNOME.

  I saw some with humps and some without, some wizened and ugly and some not, some old, some young—they all looked good to me.

  I imagined (or I didn’t) that they were all smiling at me especially, as though we all shared a fantastic secret.

  Still, shyly, I stayed by Robot, who must have read my bashfulness as some sort of reluctance.

  “Are you bothered by this, Sydney?”

  “Bothered?”

  “By this … commercialization?”

  “I’m not bothered,” I told him, not really sure what he was talking about. I added, “Anything but,” longing to speak to one of them, to get my nerve up to say something.

  But all I managed was a futile tug at the arm of Robot’s coat when he said all right, next was the boat ride through The Underground City.

  “Come on, Sydney!” Robot called as I fell behind. “Get ready to row row row your boat!”

  A hunchback dwarf with a fat cigar in his mouth stood at a microphone singing, “You’re gnomebody ’til somebody loves you….”

  I believed that I had died and gone to heaven.

  When I got back to Twin Oaks, I wrote to Gnomeland, asking how old you had to be to get a job there, and enclosed a stamped self-addressed envelope to be sure of an answer.

  I remember you but stay in school, a Mr. T. Kamitses wrote back. Get an etucation. Anyways, this is the last year Gnomeland will be at Stardust Park, for our contrack was not renewed. Good luck!

  I kept the letter. Even with its bad news and bad spelling it was the only communication I’d ever had with another like me.

  Six years later, walking through Stardust Park, I thought about that day.

  That day was the beginning of when I knew I’d make it.

  Of course I knew she was Little Little La Belle the instant I saw her by the shuttered cotton candy stand.

  I was walking along, looking for some sign of the trailer camp mentioned in this note awaiting me when I’d checked in at The Stardust Inn:

  Hey, Roach, remember your old buddy Digger Starr? Me and Laura Given got married and now have twin daughters. I’m playing my last year for The Bombers. We got a trailer parked in the trailer camp near the park if you can make dinner Fri. night about 7. Our rig is the si
lver one with the babies yelling inside (ha! ha!) so show up for a special dinner in honor of the sellebrity. (You.) It will be swell to see you so show up from your old buddy, D.S.

  If I had to go anywhere at night, I liked to figure out my route ahead of time. I looked for well-lighted bus stops and streets with stores along the route, figuring out any moves I might be forced to make by gangs of kids, or a dog, or a mugger.

  If the trailer park was close to the Inn, I planned to take a taxi, and this was what I was working on when I saw her.

  I had a chance to look at her before she spotted me. Aside from Dora, who appeared on national television as The Dancing Lettuce Leaf in the Melody Mayonnaise commercials, she was the most beautiful dwarf I’d ever seen.

  I’d only seen Dora on the tube, watching sometimes for hours to catch a glimpse of her, so Little Little La Belle was the most beautiful dwarf I’d ever seen in person.

  If I had conjured up an ideal female out of my imagination, I couldn’t have surpassed what I saw standing by COTTON CANDY in the late afternoon sunlight. She had long blond hair that shined and spilled down past her shoulders, and unlike the girls at Leprechaun Village she wore a dress instead of pants. She had long legs for someone so tiny, and she was thin and still tanned from summer.

  The great disadvantage of being The Roach was that, without my shell, few people knew that was who I was. Some of my groupies who waited for me regularly when I made appearances had come to know me without it, but mostly I was an anonymous dwarf.

  I think I am by nature a performer, and away from the hot lights of local TV stations, or the crowds at some place like The Golden Dragon (in long lines to receive one free fortune cookie in honor of its opening), I am not pushy. I see my hump reflected in watery patterns of store windows and pull my sweater down where it rides up in back, and cover my buck fang with my hand. I have my downs.

  They pass. I am normally noisy, dancing to my radio and tapes in my room over Palmer Pest Control, cracking jokes and amiable around people, and in my daydreams stepping before the footlights like Michael Dunn, who played the dwarf in the movie Ship of Fools. Sometimes I see myself beating a tiny tin drum like Oskar in Günter Grass’s book … and sometimes in my act I sing under my shell, imagining myself singing windowpanes to pieces as Oskar did. I am a closet tenor who dreams of stepping out of his closet, and out from under the shell, to thrill the crowds with “Danny Boy.”

  When Little Little La Belle finally did look in my direction, she looked hard and directly at me, and that was when I might have nodded, waved, smiled. I froze instead. I stayed so still she might have mistaken me for one of those wooden trolls people buy at garden centers and stick on their lawns. Except I was standing in the middle of a cement sidewalk outside of the penny arcade.

  I could feel my face get red, and I looked away, demonstrating at least that my head moved.

  By the time I glanced up at her again, she had started walking in the opposite direction.

  I followed, not at a fast pace, but I went in the same direction she was going.

  I knew she’d take a second look. We dwarfs come upon each other about as often as fish nest in trees, unless we’re all working together someplace. I planned a friendly wave that I couldn’t seem to bring my arms to execute, so when she sneaked a glance over her shoulder through her long golden hair, I merely trudged along in line with her, my arms paralyzed.

  She walked faster. I didn’t want to charge after her in hot pursuit like some dwarf rapist on the loose. I finally stood near the 62-MPH roller coaster, as stopped in my tracks as it was.

  When I was at Leprechaun Village, after a day’s work (we emptied ashtrays, brought pillows down poolside, paged people wanted on the telephone, ran errands, and got drinks from the bar) every night I would watch Opportunity Knox get dressed for a date. He was popular not only with other dwarfs but with normal-sized females as well. One night he slipped off for a very secret rendezvous with a guest, the wife of an Italian count, who gave him a gold signet ring inscribed Amoretta. That same night I had trudged along to a local movie with a group of employees, envying his luck.

  “It isn’t luck, Sydney!” he’d insist. “Fate loves the fearless! Happiness hates the timid! Are you going to miss the plum because you’re afraid to shake the tree? Are you always going to be the anvil, and never the hammer?”

  I stood there remembering that, doing hypnosis on Little Little La Belle’s back as she walked along: You will look my way again!

  It took her around twenty seconds to register my message, to turn and take another look, and I got ready for my one little puff of a gesture. There was no small effort involved, either, with my hump, which was the reason I’d perfected the stunt years ago, so that my feet went off the ground like flying.

  She gave a look and I gave back: a cartwheel.

  Back on my feet, I saw she was still watching me, and with one arm across my stomach, and one behind me an inch from my hump, I bowed low.

  4: Little Little La Belle

  WHEN I WAS GROWING up, it was my Grandfather La Belle who gave me names like Richard Gibson, famous painter and most famous miniaturist in all the world … Toulouse-Lautrec, whose paintings were priceless and in every major museum … Attila the Hun, who led an army of half a million across Europe … Croesus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, from whom we get the expression “rich as Croesus” … and Richebourg, a spy in the French Revolution. On and on.

  “All little people!” he would bellow. “All famous!”

  When I asked him where the female dwarfs were, he said they were buried in history along with other notable ladies. He said they were there all right, he just didn’t happen to know about them.

  He’d done a lot of research in the La Belle library and seemed always to have new names for me of other important dwarfs, with one omission.

  “Why don’t you ever tell me about Tom Thumb?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Tom Thumb,” he answered disdainfully.

  “I’ve been reading a lot about him. He was very successful. He was a general and—”

  “He was a general of nothing! He was given the title General by a fellow who had a circus. P. T. Barnum! He wasn’t a real general.”

  “But he was the most famous dwarf in the world, wasn’t he?”

  “He was paraded around.”

  “He met Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington and the Prince of Wales. He even met President Lincoln.”

  “He might have done all that without being a dwarf.”

  “How?”

  “How?” my grandfather said. “By using what he had up here”—tapping his forehead with his finger—“instead of letting someone exploit him!”

  “What does ‘exploit’ mean, Grandfather?”

  “It means to utilize for profit. This Barnum fellow made a lot of money satisfying the public’s curiosity about what someone different looks like. He turned Tom Thumb into a sideshow!”

  “Didn’t he pay him?”

  “Oh, he paid him. But that’s no way to live your life, Little Little, and he’s no example to follow!”

  Long after I needed to be burped, my grandfather would hold me in his arm tightly, jiggling me up and down the way you do a baby, and reciting into my ear:

  If you can’t be a pine on top of the hill,

  Be a scrub in the valley—but be

  The best little scrub by the side of the rill;

  Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

  They were soothing words to hear being danced around my room, until I grew old enough to think them over and decide that the idea of being a bush wasn’t all that appealing, and for me, anyway, not the answer, even if I was best bush.

  Except for Calpurnia Dove, I am the best writer in Miss Grossman’s English class. Miss Grossman usually chooses to read aloud either something I have written or something Calpurnia has written. We are always neck and neck in the race.

  When something Calpurnia wrote is read, I decide Miss Grossman is onl
y being nice to her because Calpurnia is black, and mine is really better. Something tells me that when what I wrote is read, Calpurnia Dove decides Miss Grossman is only being nice to me because I’m a dwarf, and hers is really better.

  There are not many black families in La Belle, or in Cayuta County. We are even uncertain about calling them “blacks” and still slip back at times to “Negro,” “colored,” worse.

  Our downtown restaurants have more blacks waiting on tables than sitting at tables to be waited on, and more blacks than that in the kitchen with their hands in the dishwater.

  What black teenagers there are in La Belle go mostly to Commercial High, to learn trades or business skills. Of the few that go to La Belle High, one is always elected to some office, unanimously. But that high honor rarely gets one of them a seat saved at noon in the cafeteria among the whites, or even a particularly warm hello.

  Calpurnia Dove is the treasurer of our senior class, the only senior in the whole school who’s black.

  That Friday afternoon on my big birthday weekend, the assignment for Miss Grossman’s class had been to write a short story.

  I’d written one called “The Wistful Wheel,” about a wheel who longed to travel alone, but always had to be attached to something to move.

  When I read it to Cowboy, she said, “This isn’t about a wheel. It’s about you, Little Little. You always hated traveling with the family.”

  I hadn’t intended it to be about me, but maybe Cowboy was right. Maybe Miss Grossman was right, too, about what a fantasy was. She said when you wrote a fantasy you were like a spider spinning a web from your own insides.

  Whenever our family went anywhere, we were always stared at because of me. There were always what Cowboy and I called “peepers” in the hotel dining room, or the motel lobbies. Wherever we went, we’d see them looking over the tops of their newspapers or menus, stealing glances when they thought we weren’t watching, sometimes just plain staring at us as though we’d just piled out of a flying saucer direct from Mars.