by M. E. Kerr
Cowboy didn’t deny that, either.
“I couldn’t find anybody better,” I said.
“At least he’s p.f.,” said Cowboy. “That’ll set her heart to beating.”
I said, “You like Little Lion, don’t you? Didn’t you like him when you met him?” I weighed the possibilities of telling my sister I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, watching an ash as long as my first finger dangle at the end of her cigarette before it fell to the rug atop other cigarette ashes. That alone didn’t impress me that Cowboy had good judgment.
Cowboy said, “The Japanese consider it bad luck to shorten your last name. Did you know that, Little Little?”
I said sayonara to any heart-to-heart talk with Cowboy, and went across to my bureau for my car keys.
On my way to Stardustburger, at the beginning of Stardust Park, I saw the same dwarf I’d seen there the day before.
He was walking along by himself, head down, kicking the autumn leaves.
I drove past him slowly, wishing I had the nerve to pull over and ask him if he wanted a ride somewhere.
I remembered the way Little Lion walked. He bounced. Everything about Little Lion was buoyant. I could almost feel a charge of energy when I touched the envelopes his letters arrived in, as though an even more miniature Knox Lionel were inside, racing up and down the loops of the script. His letters were always fat ones, with little fat hearts dotting the i’s. His handwriting was like he was: running boldly all over the place.
Sometimes late at night I imagined us somewhere in a little house raising kids who grew larger and larger, filled with his energy, breaking the furniture as they grew, their heads crashing through the ceilings, their arms holding us over their heads, laughing. “Hallelujah!”
While I was in my car eating my Morning Muffin, I watched the dwarf go inside Stardustburger.
I saw others watching him along with me, one big truck driver whirling around with a grin, nudging another man and pointing.
The dwarf skittered through the door, not looking in any direction but straight down.
He didn’t see me, I don’t think, but I decided to send him some sign that I was around, that he wasn’t the only one that morning.
7: Sydney Cinnamon
AFTER I WOKE UP in The Stardust Inn, I stood on a chair by the window and looked out at the lake, and what seemed like the beginning of another hot September day.
The heat from the lights in a TV studio was nothing compared to the heat of the sun under my shell, when I was performing out in the open. My commercials took less time to shoot, too, and I didn’t use up that much energy.
I hadn’t done my halftime act for a while, and I felt that I needed some kind of warm-up, so I decided to walk down to Stardustburger for breakfast, instead of ordering it served in my room.
I didn’t even have to ask where Opportunity was staying when he arrived in La Belle, but I did, and they told me at the desk he was expected sometime Sunday morning.
I left this note for him:
Dear Opportunity, Did anyone ever tell you that as Little Lion, in your white suit, you look like Pillsbury’s Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy? I’ve come up from my thicket, too, and my little ass is also going first class. When you get in, call Room 807 for a reunion with another ex-Leprechaun. Guess who?
At Stardustburger I ordered a Morning Muffin and a Dr Pepper, after I managed to get myself up on a stool at the counter.
When the waitress brought my order, she put a paperback book beside it.
“This was sent in to you by Little Little La Belle,” she said.
“Where is she?”
“She always eats in her car … out there.”
I whirled around on my stool in time to see a blue Volvo pull away.
“You one of those TADs?” the waitress asked me.
“What’s a TAD?”
“I don’t know what it stands for, but we had a whole lot of them here this past summer, invited by the La Belles. Little friends for her.”
I picked up the book. It was called Shadow of a Broken Man.
What I liked best were the kind of books Cloud and I passed back and forth in Mistakes. I owe my reading tastes to Cloud, whose father was an alcoholic poet-in-residence at some small junior college. Cloud’s mother had gone mad one Christmas and Cloud’s father had written a poem about it called “No, No, Noel,” published in a poetry journal. Cloud never read books about normals. He said there was always a ring of untruth in them.
We shared dog-eared books that were underlined and dirty with the marks of eager fingers, as we got others in Mistakes to read them, too.
There was Very Special People, by Frederick Drimmer, featuring three-legged men, dwarfs, giants, and pinheads. There was Freaks, by Leslie Fiedler. The Dwarf, by Pär Lagerkvist. Leo and Theodore and The Drunks about Siamese twins, by Donald Newlove. There was Freaks Amour, by Tom De Haven, and The Geeks, by Craig Nova. Memoirs of a Midget, by Walter de la Mare, and The Elephant Man, by Ashley Montagu.
All such books were frowned on by Miss Lake.
“We will not dwell on our differences from other people!” she would screech at us if she came upon one of these books. “We will emphasize our similarities, not our dissimilarities! It does no good to wallow in it!”
“She’s a Sara Lee, so how does she know if it does good or not?” Cloud would complain.
It was Cloud who thought up the label Sara Lee for normals: Similar And Regular And Like Everyone Else.
All those at Twin Oaks who didn’t live in Mistakes were Sara Lees.
It was also Cloud who dreamed up Mistakes’ own version of Academy Awards night, with little clay Frankenstein statues we called Monsters to simulate Hollywood’s Oscars.
One year I won a Monster for “Least Likely to Be Adopted,” and grinned and blushed my way up to the makeshift podium outside Cloud’s closet, while everyone sang Cloud’s song, “I Gotta Be Me and Not Sara Lee.”
There was the year Wheels won a Monster for “Most Likely to Be Refused Service in a Restaurant,” and Wires Kaplan won a Monster for “Most Likely to Scare Little Children.”
Miss Lake detested this dark humor and would not tolerate any use in her presence of our nicknames for each other: Pill, Wires, Wheels, Gimp, and my own nickname in those days: Quasimodo, who was the hero of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Cloud was the entrepreneur of Mistakes, and once tried to rent himself out as a lucky piece upon hearing that in certain places down South people kidnapped albinos and took them home since they believed a captured one brought success. He also told me certain people said it was lucky to touch a hunchback’s hump, and one Saturday afternoon positioned me outside Big Market in downtown Wilton, with a sign saying TUCH MY HUMP FOR LUCK $1. While the others from Mistakes went to see a disaster movie, Cloud and I were in business, until someone reported us to Miss Lake.
“Why would you do that to yourself, Sydney?” she complained as we all drove back to Twin Oaks in her car. “You didn’t even spell ‘touch’ right.”
“Cloud made the sign,” I said, and Cloud passed me six dollars in the backseat of the car, my share in our venture. He whispered to me, “We should have charged more. We could have cleaned up.”
“Don’t call Albert ‘Cloud,’ Sydney,” said Miss Lake. “His name is Albert Werman.”
“I like ‘Cloud,’” Cloud said. “Before I came to Twin Oaks they used to call me Albert Worm, or just plain Wormy.”
“And ‘touch,’” Miss Lake continued dauntlessly, “has an o in it.”
I stayed in Stardustburger long after I’d finished my Morning Muffin and Dr Pepper, sipping coffee and reading Shadow of a Broken Man.
It was about a dwarf detective named Mongo.
Some of it I liked a lot. I liked the part where Mongo described how his normal brother carried him on his shoulders when Mongo was a kid, “through a tortured childhood brimming with jeers and cruel jokes.”
It made me glad I’d grown up at Twin Oa
ks, in Mistakes.
If my mother hadn’t decided to dump me when I was born, I could have wound up the only one different in some small town, and gone through what Mongo described.
The only thing I knew about being left at the orphanage was that my mother signed me over to them. I was not even sure Cinnamon was my last name. For all I know they could have been making cinnamon buns for lunch in the kitchen at Twin Oaks when I was dropped off there, and that was how I came by the name. I wasn’t even sure of the Sydney. Maybe he was the taxi driver who brought me to the door, or a groundsman who found me on the steps balled up in a blanket. No one I asked seemed to know any more than I did.
Whoever my mother was, I imagined her leaving me there in tears and never getting over it. I also added to that fantasy her death of a broken heart at an early age.
I recognize that there’s a possibility this lady caught a fast cab direct from the delivery room of the hospital, dumped the brat with the hump on the doorstep, and went to the nearest roadhouse calling for a celebration: “Champagne for everybody! Whew, was that kid a creep and a half!”
But I can think what I want about this mother of mine, can’t I? I can invent her out of my own imagination, which is not, I’ve grown to appreciate from listening to some stories about real mothers, all that big a disadvantage.
I’ve given my father a suitable escape route, too, pronouncing him dead before I was even born.
I read on about Mongo until I felt hungry customers coming into Stardustburger for lunch, breathing in my hair, wanting my stool at the counter.
Finally I paid up and slipped down off my stool.
I held the book under my arm tightly (it would come to me in wondrous waves that Little Little La Belle had sent it in there to me). I didn’t even mind when a little girl standing in line between her mother’s legs began glaring at me. Okay, I’d give her two seconds to come out with something, but it was four, and I was almost out the door as she shouted, “Is that an elf, Ma?”
Someone else spoke up. “No, sweetheart, that’s a shrimp cocktail!”
On my way to The Stardust Inn, I thought about what the waitress had said, that Little Little La Belle always ate in her car.
I hadn’t thought of the idea that driving a car you could look like anyone else. It was the same in certain restaurants with long tablecloths and something under you to give you height.
Once, in Syracuse, New York, in this fancy restaurant where Mr. Palmer took me after we’d signed the contract for the commercials, a woman seated next to me on the banquette had asked me for a match.
I was sitting on a wooden crate that tomato paste had been shipped in, atop a corduroy desk chair pad from the manager’s office. It was a makeshift arrangement the manager apologized about; the children’s seat was already in use.
The woman hadn’t noticed.
“I don’t smoke,” I told her.
Mr. Palmer got this lopsided smile on his face and said, “Sydney, all the waiters are busy. Why don’t you go over to the hatcheck girl and get some matches for the lady?”
“Oh, I can wait for the waiter,” the woman said.
“He’ll be glad to get you some,” Mr. Palmer said. “Sydney?”
I knew he was setting me up. I could feel my face get red.
“Please, Sydney?” Mr. Palmer gave me a wink.
Okay, so I gave in, got down off the crate, and started away from the table.
I heard the woman exclaim, “Oh my! I never—” and Mr. Palmer chuckle and tell her, “You didn’t want to miss that, did you?”
When I brought the matches back to the table, the woman leaned down and accepted a light. “Well, this takes the cake!” she said, all smiles and purring. “He’s just as adorable as he can be!”
“He’s my new television star,” said Mr. Palmer. “I’m Albert Palmer. Palmer Pest Control.”
“Isn’t he something,” she said.
“Give her your line, Sydney,” said Mr. Palmer.
I said, “My what?”
“Your line,” he said. He laughed and reached down and pinched my cheek. “This little fellow plays a certain little insect which shall remain nameless in this fine restaurant. After a cloud of Palmer Pest Control repellent he says—go ahead, Sydney.”
“You’ll be the death of me,” I said.
Mr. Palmer laughed harder and the woman clapped her hands together with delight.
“Well, you”—she finally talked directly to me, instead of calling me “he”—“are as cute as a bug in a rug!”
“Speaking of bugs in rugs,” Mr. Palmer said, reaching for his business card from the pocket inside his jacket, then winding up like a pitcher about to throw a ball, “my card!” slapping it down on the table.
The woman let it sit there and reached out for me with her long arm, hooking me in toward her.
“Speaking of adorable little bugs in rugs,” she crooned, and leaned down in a halo of perfume to plant a wet kiss on my cheek.
Mr. Palmer chuckled. “I bet that’s the first time you ever kissed a roach!”
So much for show business.
8: Little Little La Belle
WHEN I GOT BACK from Stardustburger, Cowboy was sitting on the floor in our solarium, next to Mock Hiroyuki, helping my mother make out place cards for my birthday banquet.
Mock Hiroyuki has thick black hair, as straight as Cowboy’s is tangled, and he is much shorter than my sister. He always sits so close to her he seems like a tiny kangaroo who has tumbled out of his mother’s pouch and is clinging as close as possible to her.
Because his l’s come out like r’s, he says “harro.”
He said, “Harro, Riddre Riddre.”
My mother, with her thing about certain words, tried for the longest time to do something about the way the word “sit” came out of Mock Hiroyuki’s mouth. The Japanese have no si sound; si becomes shi.
“Then just avoid the word ‘sit’ altogether, Mock,” my mother finally suggested. “Just say I’ll take a chair over there.”
“You can say I’ll be seated,” my father said.
“Or, I’d like to get a load off my feet,” said my mother.
“How about I’d like to park my carcass?” said my father.
On and on.
My mother was complaining that “with all these place cards to print out, I haven’t even had time to see if my poem was printed in today’s paper. Did you pick up a copy of The Examiner, Little Little?”
I told her there was a copy in the hall.
“And where have you been?” she said. “Driving around in your car, as usual. Oh, honey, you can’t live in that car!”
“I don’t.”
“You do, and I know why you do, but Daddy didn’t get you that car for you to hide in!”
Cowboy said in an aside to Mock Hiroyuki, “When she’s in the car, nobody knows if she’s big or little.”
“Ah, so desu-ka,” he answered. It is the Japanese equivalent of “you don’t say,” and he says it every other sentence.
“Everybody in this town knows me anyway, Cowboy,” I said. “I just happen to like to drive around.”
“Well, Daddy didn’t get that car for you to drive around in”—my mother.
“Is she supposed to fly it?” Cowboy asked.
“She is supposed to eat breakfast with the family,” my mother said.
“And help us with these place cards,” Cowboy said. “It’s your birthday banquet, Riddre Riddre.”
“You say Riddre Riddre,” Mock Hiroyuki exclaimed and slapped his palm across his mouth and kicked his legs, giggling.
My mother sighed and rolled her eyes to the ceiling and back.
She said, “There’s a letter for you on the hall table, Little Little.”
“From Little Lion,” Cowboy said.
My mother said, “Go get the letter, sweetheart, and when you come back bring The Examiner with you so I can see if my poem’s in it.”
All through our house are little st
ools my mother calls “Belle’s sgabellos” to help me reach things.
There is one in every room, all different and color coordinated to match the decor, some plain wood, one with a needlepoint cover, the kitchen one with chrome legs and a rubber top.
As I got up on the walnut stool in the hall, to reach Little Lion’s letter, a cold chill went through me, imagining myself married to him. My father always said to take my time, and to remember that I didn’t have to marry at all, which would start my mother off on a long harangue. “Of course you don’t have to marry, sweetheart, no one ever said you had to do anything. But keep your eyes open for the right one, because it isn’t easy, darling, in your situation. The best ones get snapped up right away. I remember when that dear little Blessing girl from Cleveland took her time deciding whether or not to marry that dear little Tompkins boy who was studying to be a doctor, and before she knew it he turned around and married what’s-her-name who won the TADpole chess tournament every year, remember?”
“Mitzi Blessing isn’t sorry she didn’t marry Willard Tompkins,” I said. “She’s a teacher now.”
“She isn’t married, though,” said my mother. “She’s still living at home, and she’s in her twenties now. A doctor doesn’t come along every day of the week in TADpoles, not a medical doctor!”
“Mitzi Blessing could care less,” I said.
“Well, her poor mother lies awake nights worrying about her, and I know that for a fact!”
“That’s her problem,” said my father.
“All we’re talking about here is a happy life,” said my mother. “A rich, full, happy life, which you are entitled to, Little Little, the same as anyone else.”
“No one’s saying you have to be married to be happy,” said my father.
“But,” said my mother, “you’ll never convince me that Mitzi Blessing is happy teaching school period. There’s more to life than that. There’s children, your own home.”
On and on.
Little Lion’s letter was four pages long, typewritten front and back, with this P.S.:
Your grandfather suspects I’m going to talk to your father at your birthday banquet. I think that’s the reason he’s arranged to have me address his congregation while I’m in La Belle (so your father can see me in action). He also wondered if I’d like to speak at Twin Oaks in Wilton, where they have a special junior school for the physically exceptional. (I can’t make that, though.) He said at one time you wanted to go there as a day student, commuting from La Belle. There’s so much I don’t know about you, Little Little, so much I’m eager to learn about my love!
