I Was a Teenage Dwarf

by Max Shulman

  Ma crossed her arms on her chest and showed her teeth and hollered, “We are all going to France for the summer and that’s final!”

  And Pa and I looked at each other and sighed, because we both knew that when Ma gets like that, you can’t move her with a derrick.

  So I went next door to tell Beans the horrible news. “Gee, that’s tough, hey,” she said. “We’d of had a ball messing with that three-and-a-half-liter L-head Bugatti this summer.”

  “Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” I said, sighing, and kicking at some broken clam shells that littered the driveway.

  “Well, so long, Jack,” she said. “Stay loose.”

  “You too, hey,” I said. “And don’t worry. Summer’ll be over before you know it.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Then she said, “Like heck it will. Every day without you will seem like a whole year.”

  Then she bust out crying, and I don’t mind telling you that I did a little crying myself. Then she stooped down and kissed me, and then I went home to pack.

  A week later we got to Paris. I was afraid for a while that we were going to have to lock Ma up and wrap her in damp sheets. I mean, she went ape when she saw that town, I mean, she flipped her whole wig. Everything she looked at—a building, a statue, a street, a tree—she would yell “Oo!” and “Ah!” so loud that Pa and me would try to pretend we weren’t with her.

  I don’t know what she was getting so excited about. Sure, it’s a pretty town, but what good is a pretty town when everybody in it hates you? I mean you couldn’t get a smile out of a Frenchman if you yanked off his shoes and tickled his feet. The waiters glare at you, the cops swear at you, the bellhops sneer at you, and the taxi drivers try to run over you. I bet a fellow could make a fortune selling Yank-Go-Home buttons to the French.

  I guess you can’t blame them too much. They’ve been overrun with so many tourists for so long that they must be good and sick of them by this time. It’s like you’ve got a house and company comes and you’re glad to see them, but then they keep coming and coming and coming, and finally all you wish in the world is that they would go away and leave you alone.

  But still and all, if the French don’t want tourists to come over, why do they keep inviting us? Like all those ads you see in American papers and magazines. “Come to France—Land of Love and Laughter.” Well, the only laughter I heard in France was when my mother’s new hat fell into the pond at the Tuileries and got ate by a swan.

  Pa feels the same way about France as I do. In fact, worse. You can’t blame him; it was him who had to pay the bills. Ma kept buying guidebooks and looking up new restaurants, and every night she would drag us to a different place and Pa would scatter traveler’s checks like autumn leaves. And on top of it, he got such heartburn that all the bicarb in Paris couldn’t make a dent in it.

  But Ma loved every costly minute. Each morning she would wake us bright and early, and we would have breakfast on the balcony of our hotel, eating real fast so the soot wouldn’t have time to settle on our croissants. Then we would start sight-seeing—the Right Bank, the Left Bank, the Montmartre, the Invalides, the Louvre, the Palais-Royal, Notre Dame, Chaillot—with Ma stopping every three feet and yelling “Oo!” and “Ah!” while the natives glared at her and ground their teeth and made coarse gestures.

  At night we would limp into Ma’s latest restaurant discovery, where they would seat us behind a post, and the sommelier would sell us whatever vintages were going bad, and the strolling violinist would come over and play the latest American tunes like “Ramona,” and “Mairzy Doats,” and the headwaiter would make us a special dessert right at the table—burned pancakes filled with alcohol—and marry off his daughters with the profits.

  This went on for a couple of weeks, and then one morning Pa said he wasn’t going sight-seeing with us that day; he was going to this meeting on “Colds: Their Cause and Cure,” and he would meet us back at the hotel in the evening. I offered to go along with him, but Ma grabbed me by the ear and made me hang around Napoleon’s tomb with her all day. When we got back to the hotel, Pa said he had enjoyed the meeting, and he had met Docteur LeBlanc, who read a report on rheums, that’s French for “colds,” and Docteur LeBlanc had asked all of us to come to dinner at his house that night. He wanted Pa to help him get his paper published in an American medical journal.

  “How wonderful!” Ma hollered. “A real French dinner with a real French family!”

  So we washed our faces and took a taxi out to Neuilly where the LeBlancs lived in a big fancy apartment that was full of paintings and art objects and hard little chairs to sit in. There was Docteur LeBlanc, who was a fat man in a blue pin-stripe suit. There was Madame LeBlanc, who wore a simple black dinner dress and had pointy shoulder blades. And there was their daughter Berthe.

  I didn’t pay much attention to Berthe at first, except maybe to shudder a little because she was a pretty spooky kid—fourteen or fifteen years old, about as big around as my thumb, 600 bracelets on each arm, and big, black, hollow eyes like in a horror movie.

  By and by we all sat down to dinner, and Ma said to Berthe, “I suppose you go to school, Berthe?”

  And Berthe said, “But no. The school is for the children.”

  And Ma said, “But what do you do if you don’t go to school?”

  And Berthe shrugged and said, “One paints. One composes. One writes.”

  “Really?” yelled my mother, looking like she’d just found the Lost Dutchman Mine. I could see right away what was in her crafty head; she was plotting to sick Berthe on me so I could get my vistas broadened.

  “Really?” Ma kept hollering. “Oh, how marvelous!”

  “Berthe had a one-woman show at the Neo-Cubism Gallery last month,” said Madame LeBlanc.

  “Her concerto has been performed by the Anti-Rhythm Society,” said Docteur LeBlanc.

  “She has had two poems published in the Despair Quarterly,” said Madame LeBlanc.

  “How wonderful! How glorious!” shrieked Ma. “And what are you working on now, Berthe?”

  “One attempts a novel,” said Berthe.

  “Oh, how divine!” hollered Ma. “And what is it about?”

  “The love,” said Berthe.

  “How nice!” shrieked Ma. Then she said, “Berthe, why don’t you and Dobie take a walk after dinner? He is terribly interested in literature.”

  Pa choked on a fishbone.

  “I prefer to stay in the home,” said Berthe.

  Docteur LeBlanc, who wanted to talk to Pa real bad about getting his paper presented in America, gave Berthe a filthy look.

  “Berthe,” he said sharply, “you will walk with Dobie.”

  “Yes, my father,” said Berthe.

  So after dinner Berthe pinned a little dead fox around her neck and we went outside. We walked for about sixty miles without talking, because I couldn’t think of one solitary thing to say to her, and I guess she couldn’t either. But at last she said, “So you are interested in the literature?”

  And I said, “No. I am interested in the automobiles.”

  “Pah!” she said.

  Then we did another sixty miles, and she said, “Have you met the mistress of your father?”

  “The what?” I said.

  Then she explained it to me and I’ll tell you something: If she’d of been a boy, I’d of given her a fat lip right on the spot. In fact, I’d of done it if she’d of been a normal-sized girl.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’ll have you know my father is a taxpayer and a veteran, and I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  Then she said, “I have boredom. Take me to the home.”

  “With pleasure,” I said.

  So we started walking home fast, both in a snit, but after a while I looked at her—so puny and scrawny and cuckoo-eyed—and I wasn’t sore any more and I said, “You bug me, Berthe. I mean I don’t dig you whatsoever. What’s with all this painting and writing and composing? What do you do for chuc
kles?”

  “The chuckles are for the children,” she answered.

  “Well what do you think you are—an old woman?” I said.

  “It is not the years that make the age,” she said. “It is the suffering.”

  “You been sick or something?” I asked.

  “The whole world is sick,” she said.

  “Not me,” I said. “I feel great.”

  “That is the sickest of all,” she said. “To be sick and not to know it.”

  “Berthe,” I said, “I can’t paint or write or compose. But, just the same, I am ten times smarter than you are, and I’ll tell you why: because I know the world is not sick. It’s full of wonderful things like friendship and fresh air and water sports and love—”

  “The love!” she sneered. “You species of a muskrat, what do you know of the love?”

  “I know it’s wonderful,” I said, which I do.

  “Wonderful!” she said, sneering some more. “Sacred blue, but you are an imbecile! The love is not wonderful. It is miserable. It is full of the remorse and the anguish and the hate!”

  “The love is full of the hate?” I said, blinking rapidly. “Boy, are you wacked up!”

  “Kindly defend from speaking to me,” said Berthe, giving me a frost, “and take me to the home as rapidly as possible, for I wish never to regard the stupid face of you again.”

  “That suits me, buddy,” I said, and took her home without another word.

  Back at her house is when she really bugged me. My mother asked her if she had a good time on her walk, and she gave my mother a big smile and said, “Ah, yes. It made me much pleasure. May I call on all of you tomorrow and take you to see the sights of Paris?”

  Well, sir, I could hardly believe my ears, but Ma was screaming that it was wonderful and divine and Berthe should come to our hotel the next day for breakfast.

  In the taxi going home, Ma said to me, “Isn’t it marvelous, Dobie? She likes you!”

  And I said, “In a pig’s eye. She hates me like poison.”

  And Ma said, “So why is she coming around tomorrow?”

  And I said, “Maybe her father told her to be nice to us so we’ll help make him famous in the U.S.A.”

  And Pa said, “No, son, that’s not it, because I arranged to help him with his paper while you were out walking with Berthe.”

  I scratched my head for a while. “It bugs me,” I said. “What I mean, it bugs me!”

  The mystery kept getting deeper all week long. Berthe was at our hotel every morning to take us out sight-seeing. All day she dragged us down streets and up alleys and under arches and over bridges and through tunnels and around rotundas, and at night she took us to intellectual cafés where everybody had a corduroy jacket, a beard, and a pipe in which they smoked old bus transfers.

  Ma, of course, loved every second of it, but at the end of a week, Pa and I were ready for the boneyard. “Winifred,” said Pa to Ma one night when we got back to the hotel, “couldn’t we go back home already? Huh, Winifred? Please, Winnie?”

  “No!” shrieked my mother. “At long last a girl of culture and intelligence is interested in our boy. We are not going to break it up now.”

  “Ma,” I said, truthfully, “Berthe hates me. Twice this week she called me a species of a camel, and once she kicked me in the ankle.”

  “Love play,” said Ma, smiling.

  “Pah!” I said and went to bed and tried to figure out why Berthe kept coming around, which I could not.

  It was Pa who figured it out three days later. He got up that morning and lifted his weary bones out of bed and put them right back in again, “Winnie,” he said to Ma, “I flatly refuse to go sight-seeing today. There is nothing, including divorce, that you can do or say to change my mind.” Then he pulled the covers over his head, and Ma and two chambermaids couldn’t pull them off.

  So when Berthe came knocking on our door, Ma didn’t let her into the room. Instead Ma grabbed me and we went out into the corridor to greet Berthe. “Monsieur le docteur will not be coming today,” said Ma.

  “He has not the illness?” asked Berthe, looking worried.

  “No, just tired,” said Ma.

  “Oh, the poor little!” said Berthe.

  “Dobie and I will go sight-seeing with you,” said Ma.

  “Come then,” said Berthe. “Regard! The elevator depresses itself.”

  We caught the elevator and went downstairs and got a bus and rode out to Versailles, where Marie Antoinette used to live, and I’ll tell you something: the French revolutionists could of saved themselves a lot of mess if they’d of made her walk through the whole palace instead of cutting off her head, because she surely would of dropped dead of fatigue.

  Berthe stayed with us for an hour or so. Then she said, “I am desolate, but I just remembered that I have an appointment in Paris. Would you mind to finish the tour by yourselves?”

  “I’d kind of like to go back to Paris, too,” I said, but Ma put a wristlock on me and dragged me through every closet and maid’s room in the whole joint.

  It was past six o’clock when Ma and me got home to the hotel. Pa wasn’t there, but there was a message for us to come out to the LeBlancs’ apartment in Neuilly, which we did.

  We could hear screams and yells pouring out of the apartment when we were still down in the lobby. We ran up the stairs and rang the bell and pounded on the door, but nobody came, so finally we pushed the door open and walked in.

  Pa was standing there, looking kind of embarrassed and uneasy. Docteur and Madame LeBlanc, as purple as plums, were yelling at Berthe and shaking their fingers under her nose. Berthe was huddled against the wall, snarling like a cornered mink.

  “You will burn your canvases!” Docteur LeBlanc shouted at Berthe.

  “You will tear up your music paper!” shouted Madame.

  “You will smash your typewriter!” shouted Monsieur le docteur.

  “You will return to the school in the morning!” shouted Madame.

  “What in the world is happening?” shouted Ma.

  “Hello, Winnie,” said Pa. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I will tell you now!” shouted Berthe and ran over and grabbed Ma by the lapels. “Madame, I love your husband!”

  “Ten thousand demons!” shouted Docteur LeBlanc.

  “Go to your room!” shouted Madame.

  Ma was too upset to shout. “Oh, dear!” she said and sat down.

  Pa went over and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Winnie. She came up to the hotel this afternoon and started talking crazy, so I rushed her home immediately.”

  “Aha!” said I, everything coming clear. “So that’s why she’s been hanging around.”

  “Yes, that’s why!” shouted Berthe. Then she turned to Pa and said, “I love you, Herbert, and it is a perfect love—all despair and no fulfillment.”

  “I got to give you that,” Pa admitted.

  “And I will write of it beautifully in my novel,” said Berthe.

  “You will not write a line of it!” shouted Docteur LeBlanc.

  “You will smash your typewriter!” shouted Madame.

  “You will go to your room!” shouted Monsieur le docteur.

  “Yes, I will go to my room,” said Berthe. “I have tasted the dregs of the futility. Now I am ready to write.”

  She gave everybody a kooky smile and drifted out.

  “I regret all of this,” said LeBlanc, putting his hand on Pa’s arm. “I trust it was not too painful?”

  “It’s okay,” said Pa.

  “I trust also,” said LeBlanc, “that it will not affect our little transaction?”

  “The medical paper?” said Pa. “No, the deal stands. Send it over—and send it as soon as you can, please. We’re leaving for America tomorrow.”

  “Oh, no!” shrieked Ma.

  “Oh, yes!” said Pa, looking her smack in the eye. And we flew home the next day, and Beans and me got the Bugatti ready in time for the Labor Day drag, whe
re for a change our engine didn’t explode. In fact, it didn’t even start. Beans thinks the trouble is in the flywheel, and all I can say is, brother, if it’s there, she’ll find it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE HEAD AND BODY OF ELIZABETH BARRETT SCHULTZ

  by Dobie Gillis, aged 17

  “What does the average Vassar girl look like?” asked Elizabeth Barrett Schultz.

  “A smallmouthed bass,” said I.

  “Huh?” said Elizabeth Barrett Schultz.

  “There’s a smallmouthed bass on your line,” said I.

  She looked. There was. He leaped like a maniac over half of Candlewood Lake, but she kept reeling him in, playing him cagey, keeping a taut line until she had him next to the boat. I netted him and threw him inside.

  “Looks to be about six pounds, Elizabeth Barrett,” I said, which it did.

  “Gee!” she said, all happy and pretty the way girls are when they’ve just caught a fish. You take any girl, I don’t care if she looks like a kohlrabi, she’s going to be pretty after she catches a fish. With Elizabeth Barrett Schultz, of course, it was a cinch, because she was pretty even when she wasn’t catching fish. Pretty, did I say? She was beautiful! I could write a book about the head and body of Elizabeth Barrett Schultz—if I was a writer, which I am not. I think it’s very important for people to know if they’re a writer or not. You’ll understand what I mean in just a minute.

  “Yes, sir,” I said to Elizabeth Barrett Schultz. “I got to hand it to you. That was real good fishing.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” she said, giving me this kind of eager, nervous look. You have to keep saying nice things to Elizabeth Barrett all the time, because she is a confused and shaky kid on account of her nutty mother, which I will get around to in a minute.

  “Perfect,” I said. “It’s like I keep telling you, Elizabeth Barrett—you’re a natural-born fisherman.”

  “Thanks, hey,” say Elizabeth Barrett.

  “You are also,” I continued, “a natural-born skater, a natural-born swimmer, a natural-born dancer, a natural-born skier, and a natural-born shortstop. In fact you are one of the most talented girls in town. I mean physically, of course. Mentally—let’s face it—you are pretty sluggish.”