I Was a Teenage Dwarf

by Max Shulman

  “Yes, I know,” she said because it was true.

  I don’t mean Elizabeth Barrett was feeble-minded or retarded or anything like that. She was just dumb, like all seventeen-year-old girls are dumb. Well, maybe a shade dumber. But it was certainly nothing to worry about. It didn’t bother me one bit. It didn’t bother Elizabeth Barrett either. And it didn’t bother Mr. Schultz, Elizabeth Barrett’s father. It only bothered one person in the whole wide world: Mrs. Schultz, Elizabeth Barrett’s mother.

  I don’t understand Mrs. Schultz at all. It seems to me that if I had a daughter like Elizabeth Barrett, I would almost keel over with pride. Why do you know that she’s got nearly one hundred athletic trophies? But you’d never know it, because Mrs. Schultz, her mother, won’t let her keep the trophies in the house. (The house, incidentally, is the house next door to mine. The gulls finally got to Beans Ellsworth’s family and they pulled out. Beans herself didn’t mind the noise too much because she was always riveting her hot rod anyhow, but her mother went into a decline and got the dry heaves and they had to move. Then the Schultzes moved in.) Well, like I was saying, Mrs. Schultz won’t let Elizabeth Barrett keep her athletic trophies in the house. Mr. Schultz, Elizabeth Barrett’s father, has to keep them down at the office along with Elizabeth Barrett’s hand grips and chest expander.

  When you ask Mrs. Schultz how come she won’t let Elizabeth Barrett keep her trophies in the house, know what she says? “Ah,” she says, “these trophies, these silly baubles—just a childish fancy, just a passing phase. Athletics mean nothing to Elizabeth Barrett, for au fond, she is a highly aesthetic child.”

  Au fond means “at bottom,” and that gives you some idea of what kind of person Mrs. Schultz is. She can’t say three words without one of them is French. I’d never understand her at all if it hadn’t been for broadening my horizons last summer. I mean, the simplest kind of thing, she’s always got to fancy it up with French words. Like if you say to her, “How are you, Mrs. Schultz?” she will say, “Ça marche.” That means “it marches,” and will you be good enough to tell me how that makes any sense at all? You ask a woman how she feels, and she tells you “it marches.” Not “I feel fine” or “I feel pretty good” or “I’m chafed,” or anything sensible like that. No. “It marches,” for Pete’s sake!

  It would be different if Mrs. Schultz was French or if she’d lived in France for a long time—or even for a short time—but the closest she ever got to France was Poughkeepsie, New York. That is where Vassar is located, which is where her folks sent her to college. They’d have done better to drive a spike through her head, because she was absolutely useless when she got back home. She kept talking French all the time and writing weird poems that didn’t even rhyme, and at night she wouldn’t let anybody turn on the lights; she just lit candles.

  Well, naturally this upset her folks a good deal, and they kept hoping she’d find a husband and get out of the house, which was a very thin hope, because most of the guys around town took one look at her and went screaming into the night. But finally one guy came around, and he stayed—George Schultz. I’ll never understand what got into Mr. Schultz, because he is a very intelligent man and one of the ten top bowlers in the whole country. But anyhow he stuck, and finally she married him.

  (My mother and father have no idea that I know all this. I happened to overhear them talking about it in the living room one night after I’d gone to bed. From my bedroom it’s easy to hear what they’re saying in the living room. All I have to do is climb out on the roof and hang down over the eaves.)

  Well, after a while Mr. and Mrs. Schultz had a baby daughter. Everybody’s got a favorite name for a girl. Mr. Schultz had one that he loved dearly, and he always hoped that someday he would have a daughter so he could call her by that name—Gussie. Well, sir, when he suggested it to Mrs. Schultz, she set up such a tumult that the nurses came running from every ward in the hospital. Gussie was withdrawn right away, and instead Mrs. Schultz named the baby Elizabeth Barrett, after this puny English poetess who laid around with a temperature for about forty years.

  They couldn’t have picked a wronger person to name her after. Elizabeth Barrett Schultz was the healthiest baby in the history of the breed. But her mother refused to believe it. She kept insisting that Elizabeth Barrett was a delicate, sickly type, which was a pretty weird opinion when you considered Elizabeth Barrett’s ruddy complexion, milk-white eyeballs and rippling biceps.

  Mrs. Schultz finally gave up on the idea that her daughter was puny, but she still said that Elizabeth Barrett had all kinds of hidden literary and artistic talents and as soon as she was through with high school she was going off to Vassar. This bothered me something awful, because after high school I was going to State University and naturally I wanted Elizabeth Barrett to go there too. So did Mr. Schultz, Elizabeth Barrett’s father. He kept telling Mrs. Schultz he couldn’t afford Vassar. “What’s the matter with State?” he’d say, but she’d give him a fierce look and he’d shut up.

  Mrs. Schultz’s feeling about me is easy to describe: she loathed me. She did everything she could to break up Elizabeth Barrett and me—including Trueblood Eaton.

  I’ll tell you about Trueblood Eaton. Most of the kids at Central High School carry sandwiches in their lunch bags. Sometimes somebody brings a chicken leg or a hard-boiled egg or even a few sticks of celery. But Trueblood Eaton, every single day for three whole years, brought an artichoke and a little jar of melted butter, and he would sit all by himself in the lunchroom, tearing the leaves off the artichoke one by one and dipping them into the butter and nibbling on the ends with the tips of his front teeth, and when he was through he would screw the top back on his jar of melted butter and drop it into his brief case—he carried a brief case to school.

  Besides this, he was the hairiest man I ever saw in my life. He had a great big black thatch on his head, and his jowls were as blue as a gangster’s. Even in high school he had to shave every day.

  One day Elizabeth Barrett said to me, “Mother wants me to go out with Trueblood Eaton.”

  “What?” I said, hardly believing my ears. “Why, that’s ridiculous!”

  “Yeah,” said Elizabeth Barrett.

  “What’d you tell your mother?” I asked.

  “I told her no,” she said.

  “Good girl,” I said. “What did she say then?”

  “She said if I didn’t go out with Trueblood I couldn’t go out with you either. She says for every date I have with you I have to have one with Trueblood. Otherwise I can’t have any dates with you.”

  “Well, she won’t get away with this,” said I. “There’s laws in this country.”

  And the fact is, I did talk to a couple of lawyers, but they couldn’t seem to find any law that covered it, so for one whole miserable year I had to share Elizabeth Barrett with Trueblood.

  It was pretty bad for me, but it was worse for Elizabeth Barrett. I mean, here is a kid who likes to live it up and laugh and dance and fling herself about in a lively manner. And what did she do with Trueblood? First they would go to a foreign movie, which Elizabeth Barrett hates because the subtitles always disappear before she can finish reading them. Then they would go to a Turkish place, where they would get sticky cookies and little cups of horrible coffee and there was no jukebox. Then Trueblood would walk her home, stopping every once in a while to throw her this kind of line: “Look, Elizabeth Barrett, look at the infinitude of the night! Oh, cosmos! Oh, endless cosmos, endlessly creating, endlessly devouring!”

  Well, naturally she didn’t like this sharing business and neither did I. And I’ll tell you who else didn’t: Trueblood. I want to be perfectly fair to Trueblood. Loathsome he was, and a pip-squeak, and a creep, and hairy as a baboon, but all the same, when this guy fell in love, he fell hard.

  This whole ugly thing kept building and building, and finally in May, just before the Senior Prom, it blew up. The Prom, of course, is the most important event of your whole high school career, so natu
rally I wanted to take Elizabeth Barrett. Trueblood felt exactly the same way. In fact, he felt so strongly about it that he jumped up in the lunchroom one afternoon, left his artichoke, and screamed at Elizabeth Barrett, “You have to go to the Senior Prom with me!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, very polite, “but I already have a date.”

  “If you don’t go with me,” he yelled, “I will lock myself in my room and become a recluse.”

  “Don’t do that, Trueblood,” said Elizabeth Barrett. “A person needs fresh air.”

  But he did. I’ll be a son of a gun if he didn’t go right home and lock himself in his room. He never even showed up for his high school diploma. Boy, the whole school was talking about it! Everybody kidded Elizabeth Barrett, calling her a temptress and a siren who made hermits out of cast-off lovers. Elizabeth Barrett only giggled, but I could tell she was kind of pleased by the idea.

  Her mother wasn’t pleased one bit. “Oh, ma petite!” she shrieked at Elizabeth Barrett. “How could you do it? How could you send away a fine, sensitive boy and choose this lout?” She meant me.

  “Well, Mrs. Schultz,” I answered for Elizabeth Barrett, “maybe I’m not as cultured a person as Trueblood Eaton, but my posture is a great deal better, and I will always try to be good to Elizabeth Barrett.”

  This failed to comfort Mrs. Schultz, but I didn’t worry about it, because I had other things on my mind. Summer was here. This promised to be a wonderful time for Elizabeth Barrett and me because on July first our families planned to move out to Candlewood Lake and we could be together morning, noon and night. But there was a sadness, too, because we knew that when the summer was over we were both going off to college—she to Vassar, me to State—and the thought of it took the joy out of everything.

  Then, suddenly, just before the first of July, a wonderful thing happened: Mr. Schultz went broke. He couldn’t afford to send Elizabeth Barrett to Vassar. Mrs. Schultz carried on like a crazy woman for a while, but finally she admitted that the best they could do was send Elizabeth Barrett to State.

  Well, sir, Elizabeth Barrett and I were both looping with joy, and we settled down at Candlewood Lake for a long, happy summer. First thing we did, we entered the Bass Derby. That’s a contest to see who catches the biggest smallmouthed bass in Candlewood during the summer.

  We went fishing every single day, and it was just wonderful till Mrs. Schultz messed things up. One night she said to her husband, “George, I have figured out a way for us to send Elizabeth Barrett to Vassar.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She picked up a magazine. “This is the latest Vassar Alumnae Bulletin. There’s an announcement here of an essay contest for high school graduates. The girl who writes the best essay will win a scholarship.”

  “Are you suggesting,” asked Mr. Schultz, “that our daughter could win an essay contest?”

  “Well, I don’t see why not,” said Mrs. Schultz, sounding a little edgy. “After all, the girl has inherited a lot of literary ability.”

  Mr. Schultz bust out laughing. So did I, but I did it quietly so they wouldn’t hear me. I was hiding under their porch at the time. But Mrs. Schultz didn’t think it was funny. She put Elizabeth Barrett to work on the essay the very next morning. That’s the day I started to tell you about—the day Elizabeth Barrett caught that beautiful six-pound bass. When she went out fishing with me that morning, her mother made her take along a ream of paper and some fountain pens and the entry blank for the essay contest. Elizabeth Barrett had to promise she’d work on the essay while we fished or else her mother wouldn’t let her go.

  While I ran the boat over to the weed beds where the bass were, Elizabeth Barrett sat in the bow and worked. She got the entry blank filled out without too much trouble, but after that she was stuck. She just sat and frowned and had no ideas at all, and then the six-pound bass hit, which she landed very nicely, which I have told you.

  After that Elizabeth Barrett cast her line back in the weeds, stuck the rod between her toes so she’d know if she got a strike, picked up her pen and paper, and went back to work on her essay.

  After making doodles for about an hour and a half, she suddenly looked down. Then up. Then she dropped the paper and pen and grabbed the rod and yelled, “Strike!”

  Strike it was! This one didn’t take the bait in his teeth and swim around tasting it trying to make up his mind. This one hit, swallowed, and ran, all in one tremendous pass.

  “Give him line!” I yelled. “Give him line!”

  I didn’t have to tell her because the fish was taking it out a mile a minute. The reel handle was going around so fast she couldn’t grab it. The spool was almost bare when she finally managed to get hold of the handle. There was one awful second when it looked like the line was going to part, but it didn’t, and she started to reel the fish in.

  He was a hundred feet away when he first jumped, but even at that distance I could tell he was the biggest bass I’d ever seen. Little by little, inch by inch, he came in—fighting, breaking water every few feet, leaping, diving, zigzagging, still fighting when she had him only two feet from the boat. I netted him and threw him in—nine pounds, maybe more, of smallmouthed bass.

  We yelled and kissed each other for a considerable time, and then I started the putt-putt and we ran over to the Bass Derby headquarters and entered our baby. They could hardly believe it—nine pounds and six ounces on their official scale. They marked it down, and we zoomed home to show everybody our catch.

  We went first to Elizabeth Barrett’s house. “Look!” I cried, holding up the bass to show it to Mrs. Schultz and a man with a beard who was visiting her.

  “Your fish is dripping onto my rug,” said Mrs. Schultz with a frown.

  “Hello, Elizabeth Barrett,” said the man with the beard, getting to his feet.

  It sure was a familiar voice, but I’d never seen this man before. Elizabeth Barrett didn’t recognize him either, because she gave him a funny look and a short hello.

  “Ah, quel dommage!” he said, chuckling. “To be forgotten so soon.”

  Mrs. Schultz thought this was pretty humorous too. She joined him in a round of merry laughter.

  “Who are you?” said Elizabeth Barrett.

  “Why, darling,” said Mrs. Schultz, “surely you recognize Trueblood Eaton. He’s visiting his aunt and uncle here.”

  “Oh, no!” I yelped, and dropped the fish on the floor and dropped right down on the floor myself. I mean I was laughing so hard I just couldn’t stand up. It was old Trueblood all right—skinny old Trueblood with a face muff. Talk about funny! Why, you could put Groucho Marx and Bob Hope and Red Skelton all in one room and they wouldn’t make me laugh the way puny little seventeen-year-old Trueblood Eaton in a beaver made me laugh.

  I laughed and laughed and laughed, and then after a while I noticed that Elizabeth Barrett wasn’t laughing. Not even smiling. “You don’t think he looks funny?” said I.

  “I think he looks adorable,” said Elizabeth Barrett.

  “Are you nuts?” said I. “He looks like an old-clothes-man.”

  “I think he’s cute,” said Elizabeth Barrett. “He’s kind of—oh, I don’t know.”

  “Debonair?” suggested Mrs. Schultz.

  “Yeah,” said Elizabeth Barrett, smiling and blushing like an idiot.

  I tell you, you just can’t figure out the mind of a woman, even a mind as uncomplicated as Elizabeth Barrett’s. Two months ago she thought Trueblood was the biggest stiff in town; now she thought he was adorable, cute and debonair. And all because of the beard. That was the difference—the beard. To me it was just a laughable group of whiskers; to Elizabeth Barrett it was a whole big deal.

  “Tell me, Trueblood,” said Mrs. Schultz, “what are your plans for the summer?”

  “Oh, I shall rest, ruminate and ponder,” said Trueblood. “In the fall, perhaps I’ll have a spot of college.”

  “I thought you were going to spend the rest of your life in your room,�
�� I said, but nobody paid any attention to me.

  “What college are you going to, Trueblood, dear?” said Mrs. Schultz.

  “State,” said Trueblood.

  “Ma, I want to go to State too,” said Elizabeth Barrett, looking at Trueblood’s beard with mad longing.

  “You shall, chérie, you shall,” said Mrs. Schultz.

  “I thought you wanted her to go to Vassar,” said I, but nobody paid any attention to me.

  “Tell me, Trueblood,” said Mrs. Schultz, “what have you been doing besides growing a beard?”

  “Oh, studying French,” said he. “Doing a bit of writing.”

  “Writing!” exclaimed Mrs. Schultz. “How merveilleux!”

  “Oh, just a little informal essay,” said he, pulling a bunch of papers out of his corduroy jacket. “Nothing very good.”

  “Elizabeth Barrett and I would adore to hear some of it,” said Mrs. Schultz. “N’est-ce pas, Elizabeth Barrett?”

  “Oui,” said Elizabeth Barrett.

  “Well, just a few lines,” said Trueblood, opening up his papers. “It is an essay called ‘Love.’”

  “Catchy title,” said I, but they all frowned at me, including Elizabeth Barrett, so I shut up.

  Trueblood started to read: “‘There is no disguise which can hide love long where it is, or feign it where it is not.’”

  “Quelle élégance!” cried Mrs. Schultz, kissing her finger tips. “Isn’t that magnificent, Elizabeth Barrett?”

  “Yeah,” said Elizabeth Barrett. “Can I feel your beard, Trueblood?”

  “But of course, chérie,” said he.

  She stuck her hands in his beard. “Gee!” she said, shivering all over.

  “Read some more of your essay, Trueblood,” said Mrs. Schultz.

  He did. “The reason why lovers and their mistresses are never weary of being together is that they talk always of themselves.”

  “Délicieux!” exclaimed Mrs. Schultz, kissing her finger tips some more.

  “Can I feel your beard again?” asked Elizabeth Barrett.