by M. E. Kerr
“I don’t feel duty bound to have one, and I intend to have one,” my mother said. “If we live to get there.”
I slowed down.
“Everyone’s gone to a lot of trouble to get here,” said my mother. “Jarvis Allen and his mother came all the way from Missouri.”
“That’s what I mean,” I said. “I’m duty bound to have a good time because Jarvis Allen and his mother came all the way from Missouri. He’s so Sara Lee sometimes I want to throw up in his hair.”
“Lit-toe! Lit-toe!” my mother exclaimed. “Jarvis Allen is one of the nicest young men in TADpole or any other organization and what does ‘Sara Lee’ mean? Did you say Sara Lee, like Sara Lee the cake?”
“Sara Lee means Similar And Regular And Like Everyone Else.”
“Jarvis Allen?” my mother said.
“Jarvis Allen.”
“With that little twisted leg of his?”
“Twisted leg and all, he’s a Sara Lee,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know where you got your Sara Lee theory, but I’d take it back to wherever you got it and get a better one. Jarvis Allen has overcome a great deal to become what he is, and you of all people ought to appreciate that. You ought to thank God you’re p.f. and didn’t have to overcome what he’s had to.”
“What he’s become is a bore,” I said. “It hasn’t got anything to do with being p.f. or not p.f. A bore is a bore.”
“Besides,” my mother said, “I don’t see anything wrong with being similar and regular and like everyone else.”
“I know you don’t,” I said.
“Oh, Little Little, this is no way to begin your birthday weekend. Little Lion will be here tomorrow morning and you’ll feel a lot better!”
I pulled into the circular drive in front of The Lakeside Motel, where there was a banner reading:
WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN DIMINUTIVES.
“I hope the silverware arrived,” my mother said. “Let me off at the front door, and while you’re parking the car, park that bad mood you’re in.”
“Okay,” I said and stopped the car at the entrance.
“Okay?” she said, leaning across to give me a kiss. “Because this is your party, Birthday Girl, and I might just read my poem for everyone.”
One of the conveniences The American Diminutives provided at parties and conventions was silverware scaled down to the proper size for us. When it didn’t arrive, we had to use plastic forks and spoons and knives or make do with regular services, which were always too heavy and unwieldy.
Jarvis Allen’s mother always set up a little booth where she took orders for special silverware, kitchen utensils, sporting equipment, and so on, and as I came in the back door of the inn, I saw her assembling it.
“Happy birthday a day early, Little Little,” she said. “You’d better hurry. They’re about to start the meeting in the ballroom!”
By the time I got there, the meeting was underway. Jarvis Allen was announcing the names of TADpoles who had been accepted at colleges around the country.
“… Lydia Schwartz, Syracuse University!”
Applause.
“Norman Powers, Rider College!”
Applause.
“And last of all, with all due humility, yours truly has been accepted for pre-law at the University of Missouri.”
Applause and cheers and whistles.
Jarvis Allen held his hand up for silence.
“And now,” Jarvis Allen said, “before we commence the festivities, I would like to suggest that we all sing our TADpole song, which is the first one on your song sheets, and I would be delighted to start us off!”
He began tapping his good foot and humming to find the pitch, and then to the tune of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” he began, and everyone joined in.
Over hill, over dale,
We will hit the dusty trail,
As the TADpoles go rolling along!
In and out, hear us roar,
Little’s better, less is more!
As the TADpoles go rolling along!
And its Hi! Hi! Hee! Diminutives are we!
Shout out your message loud and strong (one, two!)
We’re all small,
And going to have a ball,
As the TADpoles go rolling along! (Keep ’em rolling!)
As the TADpoles go rolling along!
After I said something hateful about someone, I always had the suspicion God was going to get me for it, so I made a beeline to Jarvis Allen’s side after I’d filled my plate with chicken à la king from the buffet.
He was sitting with Lydia Schwartz, and both of them were discussing their college plans, over in a corner of the ballroom.
I began to feel like Lavinia Thumb, Tom Thumb’s wife, with no plans to do anything but what my husband had in mind, as I listened to them, and I tried to get a picture in my mind of what Little Lion even looked like, although there were posters of him all over La Belle. I had the image on that poster registered all right, but I couldn’t remember him in any other pose than that one with his hands stretched out and the Bible in his palm.
What I could see in my mind’s eye was Sydney Cinnamon’s lopsided grin with the snaggly tooth and light blue eyes, and I could hear him talking to me, and hear that theme song of his, “La Cucaracha,” dancing in my head.
“… always been somewhat of an overachiever,” Jarvis Allen was saying, “but they are the ones who make the waves in the world.”
I remembered a day under our raft last August when Jarvis Allen told me he’d be willing to make out with me, so I’d have the experience. I told him thanks, anyway, but I wanted my first experience to lead to my second, not to discourage me from ever doing it again, and he held my head underwater for a slow count of ten.
“I want to be a newspaperwoman,” Lydia Schwartz said. “My mother worked for The New York Times before she got married. She could have been a great reporter but she gave it all up to have a family.”
“Wisely so,” said Jarvis Allen.
“Why wisely so?” I chimed in.
“I wondered how long it’d take you to put in your two cents, Little Little.”
“Why wisely so?” Lydia Schwartz said.
“There can be only one Pope in the Vatican,” said Jarvis Allen.
“Who’s talking about the Vatican?” said Lydia Schwartz. “Not this Jew.”
“All right,” said Jarvis Allen, “a ship can have only one captain.”
“Who’s talking about a ship?” I said.
“You girls know what I mean,” said Jarvis. “Children need a mother. She should be there in the home, ready when they need her.”
“Yawn,” said Lydia Schwartz.
“Snore,” I said.
“I don’t know where the hell I’d be if my mother hadn’t been there for me, and where would you two be?”
I could see my own mother making her way across the ballroom toward us, all smiles, fresh from the PODs’ cash bar.
“Jarvis,” Lydia Schwartz said, “you are a … a …”
I found the words for her. “Diminutive pig,” I said.
Sometimes little lies poured out of my mother’s mouth as easily as rain fell from a stormy April sky.
“Little Little was just saying to me, coming over in the car, how very much she admired you, Jarvis”—my mother, bending over us—“and how much she appreciated your coming all the way from Missouri for her birthday.”
“Did you say all those nice things about me, Little Little?” Jarvis said.
I muttered something under my breath I couldn’t even hear myself.
Jarvis said, “Well, in the same fine spirit of sincerity, I have to say how very much I admired the poem you just read to all of us.”
My mother didn’t get his sarcasm. “Why, thank you, Jarvis,” she said. “I wrote it in a day. Now you all just enjoy your dinner while I get myself something to eat. Lydia, what a sweet little dress you have on. I bet your mama made it.”
&nbs
p; “My mother can’t sew,” Lydia answered.
Jarvis said, “They don’t teach sewing in journalism school, though they should, to females.”
“Well, it’s pretty as a picture,” said my mother, “and now excuse me, please.”
Jarvis turned to me after she’d left and said, “What did you really say about me coming over in the car?”
“Wait until we’re finished eating,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.”
15: Sydney Cinnamon
IT WAS ONLY NINE o’clock when I strolled out of The Stardust Room, three hours until my telephone date with Little Little.
I walked around the lobby, looking for a place that sold magazines and paperback books. I always checked out the newsstands in hotels and motels because they often displayed reading material on racks that ran the length of walls. I could stand and read the titles of all except those on the top rows. In regular stores I was helpless against counters and tables I couldn’t reach.
My eye caught an enormous white wicker giraffe in the window of a store called Wicker Wonderland. The giraffe was a plant holder about ten feet tall, something I would have liked shipped to my room over Palmer Pest Control in Wilton. Even though I would have to stand on a ladder to water any plant I put in it, it would be the pièce de résistance of my collection.
It was Cloud who had started me collecting giraffes. One Christmas he had presented me with a stuffed giraffe that stood four feet higher than I did. He had written on the card, “For the smallest, the tallest!” Since then I had added giraffes in all sizes, made of cotton, clay, china, wood, and leather.
Mr. Palmer had slipped me two hundred dollars at dinner. The white wicker giraffe had a price tag tied to its neck: $185. If the store had been open, I would have bought it, but there was a sign on the door saying OPEN SUN. 9 A.M.–12 P.M.
While I was still searching for the newsstand, a bellboy called me.
“Mr. Cinnamon? I’ve been looking for you.”
He handed me an envelope. “We were afraid you’d slip by us and we’d miss you.”
I gave him a tip, and ripped open the envelope to find his note inside:
They told me at the desk it’s you in Room 807.
I don’t believe it! Come to Room 829.
Love and kisses from the Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy—
Amen, Brother!
“Sydney Cinnamon!” Knox Lionel shouted when he saw me walk through the door. “You old Leprechaun, you!”
His unpacked suitcases were on the floor of the motel room. He was standing there in blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, black boots on his feet, and a black cap pulled down over his red hair.
We threw our arms around each other; then he stepped back and said, “Let me look at you!”
“You look more like a thug than a minister,” I said. “Where’s your white suit?”
“I have to disguise myself,” he said, “or I get mobbed! I’ve been waiting for you, Sydney. I have to move over to The Lakeside Motel. I keep a room one place and stay another—that way I don’t have to fight off the Faithful!”
He picked up the phone and said, “Room 829 here. I have bags to go and I’ll need a taxi.”
Then he turned back to me. “I keep my car here in the lot to throw them off. Come with me? All the dwarfs in town are over at the Lakeside, and, Sydney, there are a lot of us in town!”
“I heard,” I said.
“So come with me while I settle in. We’ll have a drink. You’re old enough to drink now, aren’t you?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “What are you doing here in La Belle?” he said. “Where the hell have you been keeping yourself? Tell me all about it! You’ve heard about me, I guess. Hey, Sydney, I’ve got a lot to tell you! Praise the Lord, it’s like old times!”
On the way to The Lakeside Motel, in the back of the taxi, he told me he had a white Mercedes convertible, a ten-room house on the Palisades overlooking the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River, and a fiancée shorter than he was and prettier than a picture—in that order.
“And she’s from a good family, too,” he said, lighting up a little brown Schimmelpenninck cigar. “Her granddaddy’s a legitimate preacher and her daddy owns this whole damn town!”
I didn’t tell him I knew Little Little.
I walked around to the back of The Lakeside Motel with him, and waited for him while he left a note in her car which read: “Don’t go. I’m here. Little Lion.”
“They’re all in watching a movie right now,” he told me as we went through the back door of the motel. “We’ll have some time to catch up—I want to hear all about you, boy!”—pounding me on my hump. “She doesn’t expect me until tomorrow, so she’s in there with the TADpoles being a proper hostess, and she’s proper, Sydney, not like the ones I used to chase after when you and me were roommates. This gal’s got class!”
As soon as his bags were in the room, he ordered up drinks, a double screwdriver for himself, he said, and what about me? I said I’d have orange juice, too, but I wanted the vodka on the side. I was doing some fast thinking … and I wasn’t a drinker.
He scrambled up on the bed and settled himself against a pillow and said, “God, am I anxious to hear about you! And don’t get me wrong, Sydney. I may not have all the degrees (I don’t have any of them) but I am the little lion fighting in the arena for the Lord, for sure, Sydney! My heart’s in it, A to Z! Sydney, remember that Saturday night in Leprechaun Village we put on the show and I was David in the loincloth fighting that stupid dishwasher supposed to be the giant, and that dame from the audience kept pulling at my loincloth till it slipped down and I was bare-assed? OhmyGod, I’d forgotten that one!”
While he paid the waiter for our drinks, I dropped my double jigger of vodka into his screwdriver, pretending as he turned around that I’d swallowed it.
“I like it better straight,” I said.
He held up his screwdriver. “Sydney, here’s to you, as good as you are, and here’s to me, as bad as I am. But as good as you are, and as bad as I am, I am as good as you are, as bad as I am.”
We drank to that.
Then he said, “Now that I’m doing the Lord’s work, I’ve put all those days at places like Leprechaun Village behind me. You understand that. People don’t like to think their favorite preacher spent his younger years popping out of pies at stag dinners or fishing full ashtrays off dinner tables in a Leprechaun suit, so I’ve wiped away those days, golden as they are in my memory and yours.”
“They aren’t particularly golden in mine,” I said.
“Well, I’m not looking down on anything we ever had to do to make a buck in this life, God knows, Sydney, and I want to hear how you’ve been doing, but you have to understand the Lord’s work is big business. I’m talking about dollars, Sydney, big bucks, and you can’t get out on the wider seas of industry in the same old canoes you used for little lakes and streams.”
“Does she love you?” I asked him. “Does she tell you she loves you?”
“Does who tell me she loves me? My fiancée?”
“Little Little La Belle,” I said.
“She hasn’t had the chance to say yes, thank you, praise God, or hallelujah, which is why I’m here and turning down the big bucks at a tent meeting my organization had scheduled in the hills of Tennessee. It’s her birthday tomorrow, and we’ll finalize it all tomorrow.”
Then he hopped off the bed and said on his way to the telephone, “I’ll have one more double order sent up for us, Sydney. I’m not a lush, believe me, but I drove the whole damn day to get here, straight from a taping of The Powerful Hour—I was in the testimony segment, and I’m beat, my boy, and I want nothing more than to sit back and hear about you.”
His four shots combined with mine finally did him in, and near ten-thirty I helped him from the bathroom to the bed. As we waddled across the room together side by side, I saw us in the full-length mirror and thought of the Siamese twins in Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Scenes from th
e Life of a Double Monster,” which he’d described as walking like drunken dwarfs supporting each other.
He had passed out cold on the rug before I got him up on the bed, and I put a pillow under his head, admired his soft bright red hair and freckled cherub’s face, and threw a blanket over him.
A motel employee told me Star Wars was coming to an end, which gave me time to slip out into the parking lot and get Little Lion’s note from the blue Volvo.
I was breathless from all this exertion as I posted myself just outside the door of the ballroom.
“How did you get here?” she said when she came out with all the others.
I was still panting like a dog. “I ran all the way.”
16: Little Little La Belle
“LITTLE LITTLE,” MY MOTHER said, “where are you? We’ve been worried out of our minds. Larry, pick up the den phone, it’s Little Little!”
“I’m at The Palace,” I said. “I’m going to see the Midnight Monster Double Header.”
“It’s midnight!” my mother said.
“That’s when it starts,” I said.
“Little Little”—my father’s voice—“where are you?”
“She’s at The Palace Theater,” said my mother.
“It’s midnight!” my father said.
“And I’m eighteen,” I said.
“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” my mother said, “but you know what we think of The Palace.”
“What are you doing at The Palace Theater?” my father said.
“She says she’s going to see the Midnight Monster Double Header,” said my mother.
“I’ll be home when it’s over,” I said. “I’m all right.”
“Now just a minute,” said my father. “Who are you with?”
“Are there other TADpoles with you?” said my mother.
“I’m with one,” I said.
“Who?” my mother said.
“Who are you there with?” my father said.
“You promised me you’d come right home after Star Wars,” said my mother. “How many movies can you see in one night?”
