Little Little

by M. E. Kerr

  There was a tire commercial on TV, no sign of Dora yet.

  “We should have some soy sauce for this stuff,” Laura Gwen said.

  “Well, we don’t have no soy sauce,” said Digger.

  “It goes good with it.”

  “There’s too much salt in soy sauce,” said Digger.

  The babies were ant-anting in unison.

  “Chop suey without soy sauce is like french fries without ketchup,” said Laura Gwen, yelling over the anting.

  “Then get some soy sauce next time!” Digger shouted back.

  “You do the shopping, Digger!”

  “I get what’s on the list!”

  “You get a lot that’s not on the list, too, like beer!”

  I decided to get out of their way and carried my plate to the kitchen. I stood on tiptoe to place it on the counter.

  “See if they’ve got their pacifiers, Sydney,” Laura Gwen shouted at me.

  I leaned down and tried to get them to take the rubber doughnuts in their baskets and the babies let go piercing screams, their little faces the color of lobsters. I jumped back.

  “I scared them, I guess,” I said.

  No one could hear me above their wailing. They looked like their little blue veins were going to pop through their skin.

  Laura Gwen came strolling into the kitchen.

  “I scared them, I guess,” I said.

  “They don’t know the difference,” she said.

  But I was always wary of kids, even that little. Kids were always trouble. I would rather pass a barking dog on a street than little kids. In any town, little kids were the ones who knew who was off, who was crazy or different or bad, and liked to follow behind you in a line saying mean things.

  I’d been followed by these little monsters my own size crying, “Bump back humpback!”—marching to it, bumpety bump back, bumpety humpback, holding their knuckles to their mouths to imitate horns, parading behind me like the circus had come to town.

  I pulled the chair over to the sink, ready to get up on it and help with the dinner dishes, but Laura Gwen said never mind, there wasn’t room.

  “Just rinse your plate, Sydney.”

  Digger was in there with his eyes glued to a rerun of The Odd Couple.

  Laura Gwen was bent over the baskets calming her daughters.

  It was then that I saw the poster propped behind the kitchen faucets.

  THE LION IS COME UP FROM HIS THICKET

  Jeremiah 4:7

  LITTLE LION

  appearing

  Sunday, September 27, 9 A.M.

  First Presbyterian Church

  La Belle, New York

  “Walk with me.”—Little Lion

  Smiling down at me from the center of the poster, in a white suit with a tiny Bible open in the palm of one hand, was Opportunity Knox!

  6: Little Little La Belle

  WHAT I DO AFTER school and on weekends is drive around in my car.

  It was my sixteenth-birthday present, ordered for me by my father, equipped with extension pedals.

  My father says his first car was blue, too, an English Ford he called The Love Bug. My mother says oh yes and wouldn’t you still like to drive around in it with Lana Waite, and watch the tires pop, she’s such an elephant.

  My mother’s always teasing him about his high school sweetheart, whom we see waddling around Cayuta, her pudgy hands feeding herself maple creams from Fanny Farmer while she does her errands.

  Before my father met my mother in college, he was the Golden Boy of La Belle, New York, voted “most handsome” in his class and “most likely to succeed.” He has a thick scrapbook bulging with snapshots of himself. There he is in his green-and-white football uniform running for a touchdown, and there he is on the steps of my grandfather’s church, Easter Sunday, in his new gray flannel suit. He is poised on the diving board at Cayuta Lake Yacht Club a moment before he performs one of his super swan dives, and all in white he steps aboard his sailboat to win another race. All the teenage poses, including those with Mrs. Waite when she was young and slender, the pair of them off for a picnic on bicycles, off to the school prom in formal clothes, off to ski, to skate, The Ones at La Belle High School in their day.

  I look at those old photographs and imagine some sadistic oracle sweeping down on them during some golden moment, telling her she’ll end up so fat she’ll break chairs, and him he’ll father the town dwarf.

  My mother was also Someone in her small town, a cheerleader and all-A student who dreamed of becoming a writer and everyone said looked like the movie star Grace Kelly. But in La Belle, New York, she was the outsider, and there were those who said Larry La Belle’s life took a complete turnaround because he married her.

  So my mother always took pains to point out Lana Waite, and say, “Look, Larry, there’s your old girlfriend, Orca the Whale!”

  I go to La Belle High with Wendy Waite, her daughter, who is the school fatty and one of the ones I give rides to after school. I pick my passengers carefully, although there are no lines in the school parking lot waiting for the opportunity to ride with me. Calpurnia Dove, my great rival, is one of my passengers, and Gerald Percy, the town sissy, darts past the jocks who call him “fag” to slide in beside me. I even give a lift at times to Dorsey Bobbin, who shows himself to girls summers in Puck Park behind the rosebushes until the police come, although in my backseat he huddles in a corner and says only, “Here’s my street,” when we come to it.

  None of them are my friends, really. I don’t make friends, or like to go to other people’s homes where nothing is my size and everything is out of reach. In the halls at school and at lunch I pal around with Cowboy, and now with Mock Hiroyuki, who clings to Cowboy like Saran Wrap to your fingers, and says the letter l like r, so calls me “Riddre Riddre.”

  After school, Cowboy reports to the gym, for her only moments as a school heroine, the tallest girl on the La Belle High basketball team. Mock waits just outside the gym door for her, composing haiku (“After I am dead Come and cry over my tomb Little cuckoo bird”).

  When I’ve dropped everyone off at their corners, I hang out in my car. It is like my own little apartment on wheels. I have my own library in it. I have sweaters, a raincoat, extra shoes, lots of Flairs in various colors of ink, my three-subject notebook in which I write my stories, my glass globe of the world filled with dimes all the way to the Great Lakes, and a carton full of tapes: top ten, rock, golden oldies.

  What I do a lot is drive around this town.

  They all know me in this town.

  I don’t know all of them, but they all know me.

  They know my name and they tell the story about my father bringing his new bride back from college. They say what a handsome young couple they were, and how they built their new home on four acres of old La Belle land up on the side of Cayuta Lake called the Gold Coast, because so many of the rich in the town settled there. They describe the parties the young Larry La Belles threw, and how the moonlight sailing races started off from the yacht club, went the distance of the long lake, and wound up at the La Belle dock, festooned with brightly colored lanterns, music playing, a dance waiting, and a midnight buffet.

  Oh, they were the special ones, they say, and then this beautiful blond little girl was born, as normal-looking in the beginning as any one of our children.

  On and on.

  People are not afraid of me the way they are of Willie Moat, who’s both crippled and crazy and calls out filthy words from his bedroom window on South Street. And they aren’t embarrassed to look at me, as they are when they see old Dr. Kimbrough’s widow lurching around town drunk, picking through city trash baskets with three hats on her head, and hundred-dollar bills tucked in her gloves she asks the bus driver to change.

  I am as different as they are, but people smile at me. Just seeing me makes them smile, the way you smile at an amusing child.

  I go someplace like Stardustburger, at the head of the lake near Stardust Park, and they a
ll know my name, although I don’t know theirs. I go there a lot because I don’t have to get out of my car to be served.

  I read and eat and sometimes smoke a cigarette.

  And sometimes someone will shout at me from another car or truck, something like, “Hey, Little Little, aren’t you afraid that cigarette will stunt your growth?”

  I give them the finger, the gesture my mother says she’d like to know where I learned and wishes I would please stop using.

  “I’ll stop when they stop with their cracks,” I tell her.

  “But they aren’t shouting obscenities at you, Little Little.”

  “They aren’t shouting have a nice day, either.”

  “Can’t you just stick your tongue out at them?” my mother asks.

  “Shake your fist at them,” my father suggests.

  “Just make a face,” says my mother.

  “Hold your nose as though you smelled something bad”—my father.

  “Raise one eyebrow”—my mother. “You know how to arch your eyebrow?”

  I give them the finger.

  La Belle is a town with a problem just the opposite of mine. It looks good on the outside but is isn’t that way inside.

  You drive into this town and you think it’s picture-postcard perfect. You see the blue lake over the rolling green hill leading into it, and you see all the old-fashioned wooden houses with front porches and third stories, tall old trees on the lush green lawns, and quaint white churches with steeples that chime the hour.

  At the tower of my grandfather’s church a carillon plays “God Bless America” at noon, “Old McDonald” at six o’clock, and assorted carols at Christmas.

  There’s an old red-brick courthouse behind Puck Park with its pond of swans and ducks swimming around, and a gleaming white city hall with marble steps leading up to six white columns.

  There are elaborate modern high schools, the Super-Duper markets, the four-in-one cinema, The Soda Shoppe, all here and all in danger of becoming extinct.

  For the thing that keeps new industry from moving to La Belle and makes La Belle most strange is Cayuta Prison. It sits in the center of the town, with a high wall around it and gun-carrying guards posted in towers at four sides.

  My grandfather says it is like a boil on the rear end of a beautiful lady, although that’s one opinion he’s never shouted from the pulpit.

  At first when the Japanese trap plant moved here, everyone went bananas over La Belle’s good luck in getting it.

  Then the Chamber of Commerce began wondering how it could sell the town to other heads of industry when all they saw on the bus to La Belle were Japanese businessmen and men manacled to other men.

  The Chamber of Commerce began complaining that La Belle no longer looked like an all-American typical small town.

  Little did they dream what was in store for them that would cloud the picture even more.

  Last spring, after a long winter of my mother staging horrible parties where I was to make friends with my classmates from La Belle High, my mother sat me down for a talk.

  “Well, Little Little,” she said, “I am ready to admit I have been going at this thing all wrong. If I was a big person in a world of little people, I myself might be reluctant to try making friends with them, although I think I would have made some effort.”

  “I don’t need friends,” I said.

  “Oh, honey, there’s where you’re wrong. Your father and Cowboy and I aren’t going to be around forever, you know, and anyway you have to have a life, sweetheart. Someday get married, someday have children.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I just told you why. Your father and I and Cowboy aren’t going to be around forever is why. Then what happens to you?”

  “I’ll get along,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not going to spend my days and nights worrying that you might not,” my mother said, “so I am joining POD. Little Little, we’re going to lick this thing, beginning this summer. We’re going to open our house to the TADpoles and you are going to make yourself some real friends!”

  There is no arguing with my mother, once her mind is made up.

  From Memorial Day through Labor Day, “diminutives” began pouring into La Belle, crowding onto the bus from Syracuse with the Japanese businessmen and the convicts. The Howard Johnson motel was overrun with them, and at Cayuta Lake Yacht Club, which is across from where we live on the lake, members and guests relaxing on the lawn looked out at gangs of TADpoles jumping off our raft, crawling around our sailboats, paddling our canoes, running down our beach front, and sunning themselves atop rocks protruding from the water.

  We have nothing against the little people, the head of the Chamber of Commerce wrote in an appeal to my grandfather, but you can see, can’t you, that their presence in our midst confuses heads of industry as they size up La Belle as an ideal, average small town in which to raise their families?

  There is nothing, Reverend La Belle, that we can do about the prison, and we dearly need the Twinkle Traps factory to survive. Would it be possible for Mrs. La Belle to curtail, or halt altogether, her participation in this particular organization’s activities?

  My grandfather responded with a demand for suitable facilities for “La Belle’s new and most welcome visitors,” insisting that in some convenient downtown area there should be a scaled-down drinking fountain, urinals, and telephone booth.

  On his sermon board outside the First Presbyterian Church there was a message reading: Welcome to The American Diminutives and TADpoles and PODs…. “See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently.” New Testament: I Peter 1:22.

  Cowboy knew my plans.

  “They’re very Japanese,” she said.

  “My plans aren’t Japanese, they’re just my plans.”

  “They’re Japanese. Marrying someone you hardly know.”

  “I’ve been writing to him since last July,” I said. “You just have Japanese on the brain.” We were talking about Knox Lionel, a young preacher known as “Little Lion,” whom grandfather La Belle had invited to Cayuta last summer.

  “You don’t know what he’ll be like.”

  “Mommy says you never know what a man’s really like until after you’ve married him.”

  “Mommy just wants you to get safely married.”

  “Or just married,” I said.

  “She worries too much about you, Little Little.”

  We were in our room discussing this, the morning of the Boots/Bombers game, my birthday weekend. None of my guests would arrive before late afternoon.

  At one time Cowboy and I had separate rooms, our parents operating on some theory we needed separate identities, as though we could ever confuse ourselves. But our parents try. They would fry up Brillo pads and eat them salted if they thought it would help anything. So at one time I was in my little dollhouse room with everything in miniature, and Cowboy was across the hall with her baseball bat, basketball, bowling ball, golf clubs, and tennis racquet jammed into her closet, and we’d visit.

  It was our own idea to move in together. My little things are on one side of the room—the neat side—and her big things and big mess are across from me.

  Cowboy sank her large hands into the pockets of her jeans and paced in her Nikes, smoking a Camel.

  “When do you plan to tell Mom and Dad?”

  “They’ll get the good news from him.”

  “Oh no!” Cowboy groaned. “He’s actually going to ask for your wee little hand?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I couldn’t marry a Goody Two-shoes. I couldn’t be a minister’s wife.”

  My Grandfather La Belle had discovered Little Lion at a conference on Christian Views of Eschatology. Which is another way of saying death. (My mother says crossed over, or passed on. No one dies in my mother’s head. They just go on to their next appointment, somewhere the living are not.)

  My Grandfather La Belle immediately invited Little Lion to a TADpole party my m
other gave last July Fourth.

  Little Lion is nineteen, three feet five and a half inches tall, redheaded, and freckled, a catch, who proposed to me in bold script across a sheet of stationery with “WALK WITH ME”—LITTLE LION ENTERPRISES across the top:

  Though you have worn my ring only two months, Little Little, my love, we must take long steps to catch up in this world—Hallelujah! I have faith enough for two and enough passion to turn your head around! I would like to announce our engagement at your big birthday celebration. I’ll be coming direct from another appearance on The Powerful Hour (wait until you see my new white double-breasted suit—it’ll blow you away!)…. Also, let me speak to your parents privately before you say anything. That’s traditional. The Bible teaches (Proverbs 22:28) “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” … How I wish my dear parents were alive to meet you! You remind me of my own sainted mother, darling one!

  Little presents began arriving, each one with a Little Lion card attached across which he would write: “Love! Hallelujah!”

  Among them was a book called Shadow of a Broken Man, by George Chesbro. The hero of the book was Mongo, a dwarf, who was a professor of criminology and a private detective who’d once been in the circus.

  “The TADpoles should read this book,” Little Lion wrote. “Here’s a dwarf who got out of the freak show and made something of himself!”

  I kept the book in my car library, along with other books Little Lion sent. Most of them weren’t novels, and nearly all of them were about overcoming obstacles.

  “Doesn’t he ever read anything depressing?” Cowboy asked me once. “It’d get me down if I had to read about rising above it all the time!”

  That morning in our room, Cowboy said she hoped I wasn’t just talking myself into him.

  “Well, isn’t that what everyone wants, what last summer was all about? Getting me married?”

  “Not necessarily overnight, Little Little.”

  “Still, that’s what it was all about.”

  Cowboy didn’t deny it.

  “When Mom hears the news she’ll be overjoyed,” I said.