by M. E. Kerr
“I don’t want you taking a bus all the way to a school like that,” my mother used to argue whenever the subject of Twin Oaks came up. “A school like that is for children whose parents don’t want them.”
“Don’t love them,” my father said.
“Don’t realize they have to live in the real world, Little Little.”
“A school like that one at Twin Oaks is where parents send children they don’t know how to deal with,” said my father. “Most of the children in that school live there.”
“Maybe they like living there,” I said. “Maybe those kids want out.”
“Out of what?” my mother said.
“Out of the real world?” my father said.
“Why not?” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s no way out of the real world,” my mother said.
My father said, “It’s there, Little Little.”
“Not in that school.”
“I don’t even like the description of that school,” said my mother. “For the physically exceptional. Something about that description doesn’t sit right with me. Two-headed people could go to that school.”
“Two heads are better than one,” I said.
“Little Little, this is a serious subject!” said my mother. “Most of the children in that place have been dumped there! Now, that’s a strong word, but I think that’s the only word for most of the children in that school. I don’t want you spending your days in a depressing environment!”
One afternoon, my father and mother and I drove to Wilton for a tour of the school, which was a separate part of Twin Oaks.
“I just can’t see you going there, sweetheart,” my mother said all the way back in the car.
“It’s not that it’s a bad place,” said my father.
“It’s a nice enough place, but, sweetheart, some of those poor little things are so sad!”
“Don’t call people ‘things,’” said my father.
I said, “Don’t you think people in La Belle think I’m a poor little thing?”
“No, I don’t think people in La Belle think you’re a poor little thing!” said my mother. “I’d like to meet anyone who thinks you’re a poor little thing!”
“The point is, Little Little,” said my father, “it’s not the real world.”
“The real world isn’t real to me, anyway,” I said. “What’s real about a world where you can’t reach the handles of doors?”
“Sweetheart, what door handles can’t you reach that you really have to reach?”
“We’re not talking about door handles,” said my father. “We’re talking about this school. Now, I frankly feel this school could be depressing, as your mother’s pointed out. Some of those youngsters there are too physically exceptional.”
“Not p.f. enough,” my mother said.
“I’m tired of p.f.,” I said. “I’m not p.f.”
“You are so p.f.,” said my mother. “You’re little but you’re p.f.”
“There was a boy there on a board,” my father said. “That’s what we mean, Little Little.”
“If you don’t like going to school in La Belle,” my mother said, “pick out any regular boarding school in the country, cost is no consideration, and go there!”
“And have my classmates’ parents drive off saying, ‘Did you see that poor little dwarf? It’s a nice enough place but that dwarf could be depressing.’”
“In the first place you are not a dwarf,” my mother said, “and in the second place little people who are p.f. don’t depress anyone! They don’t!”
“I’m not for the boarding school idea at all,” my father said.
“Well, you won’t let go!” said my mother. “Even if it’s for her own good, you won’t let go.”
“She doesn’t want to go to boarding school,” my father said.
“She’s never thought about it,” my mother said.
“Why should she?”—my father.
There was always a point in these conversations when I began to be referred to as “she” or “her,” as though I wasn’t there in person, but very much there as their permanent, unsolvable problem.
If Cowboy was a cat she would carry Mock Hiroyuki like a kitten, by his neck, she was so protective of him.
When he announced he had to go home to get ready for the game that afternoon, Cowboy walked him up to Lake Road, to wait while he thumbed a ride.
Mock Hiroyuki is the closest Cowboy has ever come to playing with a doll, and their relationship made my family nervous.
When I went back to the solarium, even though Cowboy and Mock were at least a half a mile from the house, my mother whispered to me, “What is it she sees in that boy?”
She was sitting in the white wicker chair, thumbing through the newspaper. “How can she spend so much time with him?”
“Maybe the Hiroyukis wonder how he can spend so much time with Cowboy.”
“According to your father, the Hiroyukis are too busy trying to set up something called a pachinko parlor downtown, a place full of pinball machines. Now, that’s all this town needs!”
“This town is like me trying to pretend I’m tall,” I said. “Why doesn’t it just face the fact it’s different?”
“And let pinball machines in right in the downtown?” my mother said. “Would you like to live in a town with a Japanese pinball machine parlor right across from The Soda Shoppe? I wouldn’t.”
Then she started in on the Hiroyukis, on a trap plant being one thing and a pachinko parlor being quite another, on give some people an inch and they take a mile, and the next thing you know there’s a sukiyaki restaurant next to the pachinko parlor, and after that the geisha girls arrive.
I went and sat in my white wicker rocking chair, which is my size and has white duck pillows tied to it and faces the white duck couch where my mother moved to, to spread out the newspaper, rambling on about what the Japanese wanted to do to La Belle.
Once Cowboy and I found all the love letters my mother and father had written to each other. My father signed all of his “Always and all ways, Larry,” and she enclosed poems she wrote in hers. One was called “Larry, Our Love Is Sputnik.” (Launched the same night Reaching for outer space and finding itself a baby moon A satellite of earth Where other lovers wait and Play it safe and never / Dance with stars.)
Cowboy and I had gotten out the World Almanac to look up the date the Russians launched Sputnik, which was before my mother and father got married.
I often looked at my mother and tried to imagine her swept off her feet by any emotion. But I couldn’t, any more than I could imagine her when she was my age and planning to be a famous poet.
In one letter my father wrote, You’ll be the brilliant lawyer’s wife and I’ll be the brilliant poetess’s husband. Oh, Ava, my life—what a life we’ll have!
I’d think again of the Sadistic Oracle sweeping down on him as he was bent over the sheet of blue stationery that letter was written on.
“You want to know what it’s really going to be like, Larry? You’ll flunk your bar exam and go into the boot business. She’ll write doggerel for the local paper.”
I said to Cowboy, “The perfect couple about to live the perfect life. Then I came along.”
“It hasn’t got anything to do with you,” Cowboy said. “It’s growing up. If you could grow up and become something besides an adult, it wouldn’t be so bad. Nothing good begins with ‘adult.’ There’s adult, adulterate, adultery—”
And we’d laugh, but I was never totally convinced I hadn’t ruined their life.
“Well, look at it this way, then,” Cowboy would argue. “They ruined yours. It was the combination of the two of them that made you what you are, wasn’t it? If you’d had other parents you might not be what you are.” Then she’d always rush to add, “Not that what you are is bad.”
My mother finally found her poem in The Examiner, across from an editorial urging that the city dump be cleared and made into an
airport.
“Honey!” she said. “Turn the sound down a little on the TV so I can read you my poem. They printed the one about autumn!”
I went across and stood on the stool to turn the sound down.
Then I sat on the stool and waited for her to read me her poem.
“Here goes, Little Little,” she said, and her face was flushed with pleasure.
She said, “Are you ready?”
AUTUMN
God takes his paintbrush to the leaves,
Splashing them like an artist painting
Rich reds and browns and oranges across the green,
I catch them falling in my hands another year,
My senses suffused with beauty.
—Ava Hancock La Belle
“It’s good, Mommy,” I told her. I liked it all right, but it didn’t make me jealous the way anything Calpurnia Dove wrote did.
“Now, don’t exaggerate. Just tell me if it’s good, as one would-be writer to another.”
“It is good. I like it.”
“Is it really good?”
“Very good.”
She jumped up and ran across to me. “Oh, honey, they printed it!”
It didn’t do any good, it never did, to say please put me down.
She held me, dancing around the solarium with me, planting wet kisses across my cheeks, both of us laughing, finally, me squirming, though. I smelled the mint on her breath and knew she’d had a few from the crème de menthe bottle she kept at the bottom of her white wicker yarn basket.
“We’ll have a good time at the game!” she said. Then she began to sing: “We’re the Boots! Toodle toot! We’re the Boots of La Belle fame! We’re the Boots who win the game! Toodle toot! Feel our boot!”
She danced faster, with me in her arms, jiggling me up and down the way I sometimes danced with our cat. “Toodle toot! Feel our boot!”
She put me down and knelt to be face to face with me.
“Did you like my poem, honey? Oh, I know I’m not the greatest poet in the world, but it’s a nice little poem, do you really think so, Little Little?”
“I like it, Mommy.”
She wiped a tear away. “Oh, why am I bawling like a baby, hmmm? I guess I’m just so happy!” That sounded so insincere, even to her, that she rushed on to babble something truer. “I’m tired, too, I guess. All these plans for your big birthday! I can’t believe you’ll be eighteen, honey. I was married the year after I was eighteen. I was a young bride. And we waited. Purposely. We waited to have you because we were so young and we wanted some years together, just your daddy and me. And what years they were! All the midnight sails from the yacht club ended right at our dock! Everyone came here, everyone!”
She hugged me hard.
Over her shoulder, I saw Eloise Ficklin dance across the television screen dressed as a lettuce leaf. Even with the sound turned down, I knew what she was singing: “I’m dancing to the melody, Oh happy happy days, When I lie down I’ll have a coat of golden mayonnaise.”
9: Sydney Cinnamon
A SISTER OF ONE of the Bombers’ cheerleaders babysat for Digger and Laura Gwen while they went to the game.
About an hour before game time, they picked me up in front of The Stardust Inn, in a taxi I’d offered to pay for.
“Your shell needs dusting, Sydney,” Laura Gwen said, pushing it in front with the driver.
I sat between them and Digger said, “Did you know the man who owns the La Belle Boot and Shoe factory has a midget daughter?”
“I know,” I said.
“Which is the reason Little Lion is coming here on Sunday,” said Laura Gwen. “There’s going to be a whole convention of people like you, Sydney, coming in from all over. The driver just told us.”
“It’s a birthday party for Little Little La Belle,” I said.
“Are you going?”
“I’m the entertainment.”
“Are they paying you?” Digger asked.
“I’ll get something for it.”
“Well, that shell needs dusting, Sydney.”
“So dust it!” Digger said. “While I’m suiting up, you get a rag and dust it for him!”
“I can dust it myself,” I said.
“I’ll dust it for you, Sydney,” she said.
“Roach,” Digger said, “me and Laura Gwen was remembering the first time we ever seen you, that Halloween at the game. You’d just started going to Wilton High, and you came to the game with some of them from Twin Oaks, remember?”
“I remember,” I said. I wasn’t likely to forget it. A group of us from Mistakes had gone to the high school stadium in costume. It was my first try at getting myself up as The Roach. Bighead Langhorn had put a white sheet over his body and gone as the explosion of the atom bomb, and Cloud had gone as God, his body wrapped in cellophane. Wheels had rigged himself up as a Volkswagen convertible, and Wires Kaplan went as Reddy Kilowatt.
“I remember I said you’d be a helluva mascot that day,” said Digger. “You remember my saying that to you?” He reached for the can of beer between his legs and took a swallow.
“I remember,” I said.
“Sydney, why don’t you stand on the seat, to see,” Laura Gwen said.
“Stand up here on the seat,” Digger said, patting the seat.
“I can see enough.”
“You can see the rate card is all you can see. Stand up here.”
He gave the seat another pat and I stood up on it.
“That’s better,” said Digger. “I remember it was the first season The Bombers played after that year of austerity. That year was what ruined me.”
“That year wasn’t what ruined you,” Laura Gwen said. “What you’re swallowing down right now was what ruined you.”
“Oh yeah? How’s a scout going to recruit you if he can’t see you in action?”
“No scout was recruiting you,” Laura Gwen said.
“What about that day?” I said, trying to steer them away from another argument.
“I remember I told you you’d be a helluva mascot, and the school needed something like that to put it on the map,” Digger said.
“I remember that,” Laura Gwen said. “It was Digger’s idea.”
“Well, the band struck up ‘La Cucaracha’ and I just went into my dance,” I said.
“And you were good,” Digger said. “I said you’d be a helluva mascot.”
“I know,” I said.
“Just as long as you know that.” Digger took a pull of his beer. He said, “What I’m getting at is we’re pals, buddy. We pals?” He held up the can as though he was making a toast.
“Pals,” I agreed.
“So I was thinking, Roach, old pal—”
“Sydney, old pal,” Laura Gwen said.
“I was thinking this is my last year at Wilton High, and I could make myself available to you, if you ever need something like a manager.”
“Or an agent,” said Laura Gwen. “Someone to book you into jobs.”
“Fight your battles for you, buddy.”
“You’re part of the family, Sydney,” Laura Gwen said.
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “So far I’m getting along.”
“But you want to do more than get along, buddy,” Digger said.
“I’ll think about it, thanks,” I said.
“We’d see that nobody takes advantage of you, Sydney,” said Laura Gwen.
“A little guy like you,” said Digger, “needs a big guy to look out for him.”
“You think about it, Sydney,” said Laura Gwen.
“Just think about it, buddy,” said Digger.
Laura Gwen said, “I’ll dust your shell when we get there.”
I left them by the locker room and walked over to the field. The teams were doing loosening-up drills, wind sprints, and light practice.
Coach Korn was still with the Bombers, his old self, barking out insults and orders.
I sat in the front row and watched for a while, then I took ou
t the book about Mongo, the dwarf detective.
I read while the action went on around me.
The coach was yelling, “That pass was too soft! Zip it! Zip that ball!”
Mongo was about to rent a car while I tried to figure out how his feet were going to work the pedals of a rental car.
“You broke your pattern! You broke your pattern!” Coach Korn was barking.
The sun was that same hot one from the day before, and there was not much breeze from the lake.
The two school bands were arriving, taking their places on opposite sides of the field, tuning up.
Right around then I heard a girl’s voice, “I see you got the book,” and swung around and looked at her.
“Hello there,” I said.
Little Little La Belle was dressed in the Boots’ colors, a white skirt and a green sweater, with her sun-colored hair spilling past her shoulders.
I had to smile looking at her, sorry because I had a front tooth bigger than the others, with a filling out besides.
“I finally figured out who you are,” she said. “You’re The Roach.”
I tried not to smile too wide. “I know who you are, too.”
“Everyone knows me around here.”
I looked down at her tiny feet, which were in tan boots with stiletto heels. I used to wear boots that high myself when I was at Mistakes, but my legs were bad, and boots like that gave me backaches, too.
“Thanks for the book,” I remembered to say. “I’m still reading it.”
“I see.”
I got to my feet to see if even with those boots of hers I’d be taller. My hump made me look shorter, which was another reason I stood, and I found us eye to eye.
A tall man down on the cinder path, wearing a green sweater, called to her. “Little Little!”
“My father,” she said.
I shot him a look that could kill because I didn’t want her to go.
