by M. E. Kerr
“Jeepers creepers, look at all the peepers,” Cowboy would remark.
She’d try her best to laugh it off, but she’d get red and start cracking her knuckles, and I’d wish I’d just eaten in my room, or not gone on the trip at all.
My mother’d purr, “You have to expect to be admired when you’re such an extraordinary little beauty, darling.”
But she’d knock back a double martini to get past it, and my father’s face would be fixed in a scowl, his angry eyes trying to meet with the peepers’ eyes to stare them down.
Except when we were all tooling along together in the car, I never really saw the sights when we went places. I saw the sightseers see me.
That afternoon in English class, I got my paper handed back along with all the others except for Calpurnia Dove’s. I saw her sitting at the front of the class empty-handed, biting her lips to keep from smiling, looking down at her desk so no one could see her eyes shining.
Miss Grossman had marked my paper A–. She wrote across the top of the first page: Watch your spelling. But this is excellent. You know, going away to college is a way of traveling. You see a lot and you’re getting your first taste of independence, and you’re on your own. Did you ever think of that, Little Little?
Miss Grossman was the only person I knew who’d figured out a way of going to heaven without dying. You just went from high school to college.
If you were accepted by a college, Miss Grossman put your name up on her bulletin board with a gold star pasted next to it. You got a silver star for even sending in an application.
My father always told me, “It isn’t wrong to want to skip college. Just be sure you’re not passing it up for the wrong reason.”
“Just be sure,” my mother’d chime in, “you’re not trying to avoid the real world.”
“Of course I’m trying to avoid it,” I told her. “It’s real to you, but not to me.”
“There’s no way to avoid the real world,” my father could be counted on to point out in these conversations. “Not going to college is not going to stop the real world from being right outside the front door.”
“Then I’ll stay in the house,” I’d murmur back.
On and on.
Cowboy always said our mother faced the real world the same way someone handled a headache: she took something for it, from a bottle.
After we got our stories back and all read Miss Grossman’s comments, she said, “And now I’d like to read something for you that Calpurnia Dove wrote.”
It began:
The first time I was ever called nigger I was four years old and went home crying. Didn’t even know why I was, didn’t even know what “nigger” meant. Only knew it was bad. So my mother say oh they got around to saying that to you, did they, well get in the boat here along with the rest of us, you got a lot of company on the stormy sea, honey, ain’t one of us not been called that, ain’t one of us heard “nigger” for the last time, either.
I used to daydream that I was from an all-dwarf family. I would imagine my mother, father, grandparents, and Cowboy all shrunk to my size, living in a little house locked in against a larger world, laughing at them and cursing them, sharing their tyranny with other La Belles.
Although in various ways and straight out I was told by my mother I would not grow to be as tall as other people, it did not sink in until my little sister grew bigger than I was.
In every room of our house, there is a chair my size.
When Cowboy was very young, she would always try to sit in my chairs. For a time, my father added other small chairs to appease Cowboy, until she was too big to be comfortable in them.
When she stopped sitting in the little chairs around the house, I grabbed at them ecstatically, as though they were cake and the other hungry cake-eater in the house had suddenly dropped out of the contest.
Then came the day Cowboy no longer needed to be lifted to the drinking fountain outside Lathrop’s on Main Street, and no longer needed to stand on the box to wash her hands in the bathroom sink.
The picture was coming into focus.
My mother answered all my questions in tears, and my father never gave up the idea of measuring me by the long yellow tape measure fixed to the kitchen wall.
Cowboy, during this period, let me have things of hers she really wanted for herself.
When school let out that Friday afternoon, it was like a summer day and I took a walk in Stardust Park.
When I saw him outside the penny arcade, I thought he might be someone we’d invited to my party, who’d arrived a day early.
I took a good look at him. My mother’d describe him as “not p.f.,” which was her way of saying someone was not “perfectly formed.”
That morning, at breakfast, my mother’d said, “We have all p.f.’s coming to your party except for Jarvis Allen and Lydia Schwartz, and neither one of them bothers me. They’re both from lovely families and Lydia’s so cheerful about her little lame leg…. Jarvis plans to study law, which I told your father is remarkable.”
“What’s remarkable about it?” I said.
“He’ll be getting down all those heavy books,” my mother said.
“Law books, Little Little,” said my father.
“He’s going to be a lawyer like his father,” said my mother. “They’ll be Allen & Son.”
“He’s setting a fine example,” said my father.
Whoever the dwarf was in Stardust Park, he wasn’t Jarvis Allen or Lydia Schwartz.
I walked in the other direction, thinking of Calpurnia Dove’s boat on the stormy sea, wondering why I went the other way and not toward him.
He made me think in those few seconds of Gnomeland.
It was in the park for only one summer.
That was the summer I was twelve, and it was the only summer my parents did not take Cowboy and me to the park.
I remember one night at the beginning of the summer, overhearing my father and my grandfather.
“She’s got to see her own kind someday, Larry,” my grandfather said.
“Not that way,” my father said. “Not on exhibit like freaks.”
“I agree, but—”
“But what!” and my father’s voice was raised and angry. “I want them out of there! How did they get in there in the first place?”
The next year they were gone.
I had the feeling the dwarf in the park was following me, and I decided if he was, I’d wait for him. I’d speak to him. I looked back once and he was standing by the roller coaster.
I realized I was relieved. I always was timid when it came to meeting anyone new.
But I did glance back a second time, and watched, astonished, while he did a cartwheel, and then, on his feet, gave me a lavish bow.
I laughed out loud but doubted that he saw or heard it from that distance.
That same summer Gnomeland was at Stardust Park, my grandfather took me to Pennsylvania.
We were approaching a motel and I was seated beside him in his black Lincoln, strapped to my kiddyride, about to have a “surprise”—his only explanation for this weekend trip in the dead of August.
My grandfather, Reverend Warren La Belle, is a cream puff whose soft sweet center isn’t immediately visible. If you know him, you know it’s there, but he is a big man with craggy features and bushy eyebrows, who barks out his sermons and frowns his way through most days.
He isn’t a man you question about a surprise he’s planned, and I didn’t ask any questions as we took that unusual journey together.
The first thing I saw was a red-white-and-blue banner over the coned roof of The Pennsylvania Dutch Inn, saying:
WELCOME TADPOLES AND PODS!
“What are ‘TADpoles and PODs,’ Grandfather?” I finally ventured. We were driving up a circular road, heading toward the parking space behind the motel.
“You’ll see, Little Little.”
Then, coming into view, coming out of cars and around the sides of cars, falling from the h
eavens for all I knew, were others like me, redheaded, blond, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, straight, twisted, beautiful, ugly, in-between: a world of me.
My grandfather parked and turned off the ignition. “We’re at a convention, Little Little. ‘TAD’ stands for ‘The American Diminutives,’ and TADpoles are the children.”
“And ‘PODs’?”
“Parents Of Diminutives.” He looked down at me, watching me watch out the car window.
“Where did they all come from?” I said.
“Their homes. Same as you.”
Then he put his hand over mine. “Your mother and your father were against this, Little Little. You know how they are where you’re concerned. They’d keep you under glass, if they could, to protect you. Your mother, particularly. She’s afraid you’ll see others who aren’t in as good shape as you are and it’ll upset you. Well, I see people my size lame and twisted, too, and so should you. This isn’t a perfect world, Little Little, far from it. We’re all mixed in together. Right now you’ve got the world in miniature, in more ways than one. Want to have a look?”
The pool at the motel had been drained of most of its water, since the only guests that weekend were TADpoles and PODs. The deep end was only about four feet, and the shallow end one foot.
My grandfather made himself at home with the PODs after I changed into my bathing suit. I could hear him behind me, up on the lawn, his deep voice pontificating and his laughter thundering louder than anyone’s.
I looked around shyly and finally spotted a girl playing with a large red rubber ball, in the water by the swimming-pool ladder, down at the deep end. She was a most amazing-looking girl with the kind of gossamer blond hair angels have, perfect skin tanned from the sun, and dancing dark eyes that flashed with her wide, white smile.
I was as vain about my swimming as I was about my own blond hair, which was longer than hers and straight, not curly like hers. I swam vigorously toward her with my best strokes, then grabbed hold of the side and took off my cap, tossing my hair.
When I told her my name, she said, “If you’re going to swim, you have to wear your cap. It’s a rule.”
“Well, I’ll just hold on here for a while. I’m from New York.”
“Your hair is touching the water.”
“It always gets a little wet anyway.”
“It shouldn’t touch the water. It’s against the rules.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My hair isn’t touching the water because I can stand at this end,” she answered.
We looked at each other for a moment, and I heard the shouts of the other kids and the soft rock being pumped through the loudspeakers. I saw her dark eyes hardening ever so slightly although the smile stayed on her mouth.
“Maybe I should get out and put my cap back on,” I said.
“I’d say so.” She moved out of my way so I could climb the ladder.
As I reached for the rung she said, “I’m four foot one. I can stand at this end.”
She wasn’t finished.
“You’d better not swim down at this end if you can’t touch bottom.”
“I’m a good swimmer.”
“But I’m really not one of you,” she said. “You’d better go meet the others.”
She was the first one like me I’d ever talked to.
Later, as I made friends with the others, they told me her name was Eloise Ficklin, and she never made friends with TADpoles who were perfectly formed.
“She’s a repudiator, that’s what we call her kind.”
“I call her mean.”
“She hates coming to these conventions but her parents make her come. She wants to pass, to pretend she’s just short, so she picks out TADpoles who aren’t like her at all, and claims she’s helping out. The more you’re like her, the less she’ll like you.”
My grandfather said to me that night, “Well, you have learned something about prejudice today, Little Little. The person at the top of the ladder doesn’t pick on the one way at the bottom. He picks on the one on the rung next to him. The fellow way at the bottom picks on the fellow on the ground. There’s always someone to look down on, if looking down on someone is your style.”
“I really hate her,” I said. “No one’s ever treated me that way, and I’d never treat anyone that way.”
“Oh, you may get around to it,” my grandfather said. “No one looks up all the time. When things get tough, your eyes drop, Little Little. Just remember to raise them back up before you’ve lost your direction.”
“What about having an enemy? Is that looking down on someone?”
“Enemies you look square in the eye, as you do friends. You don’t make too much of them or too little. You see them for what they are.”
“Then Eloise Ficklin is my first enemy.”
“Sounds like you made a good choice,” my grandfather said.
That night I prayed to God to get Eloise Ficklin. But if He did, He didn’t do any permanent damage.
Eloise Ficklin now stars on television as Dora, The Dancing Lettuce Leaf, in the commercial for Melody Mayonnaise.
5: Sydney Cinnamon
AT TWIN OAKS, AFTER you finished grade school on the grounds, you were mainstreamed to Wilton High School.
That was where I met Coach Korn and Digger Starr.
Before I worked up my act as The Roach, and became the mascot of the Wilton Bombers, I would hang around the football field on fall afternoons.
Every September, Coach Korn would say the same thing to prospective team members.
“Suppose I tell you to run into a brick wall. If you run through it, you’re a fullback. If you bounce back, you’re a halfback. If you stop and walk around it, you’re a quarterback!”
Digger was a fullback, a freshman when I met him. He was a lovesick fourteen-year-old, big and blond, and mean when he was drinking beer. What Digger remembered most about me from those days was that I became The Roach, and fans came to the game as much to see me perform at halftime as to see The Bombers play.
What I remembered about Digger was an afternoon in Sip-A-Soda, in Wilton, when he got mad at me for telling him not to open a can of beer in there or we’d get tossed out. Digger lifted me up and carried me back to the storeroom. He set me on a high shelf next to gallons of Coke syrup. I was there three hours until the manager found me and helped me down.
But there were happier times, too, when I was tagging after Digger, feeling protected by him, cruising by Laura Gwen’s house with him in his car, listening to his confidences about her, which always began, “Sydney, you’re the only one I’d ever tell this to and I’ll break your tiny neck if you tell anyone else!”
We had been pals enough for me to want to see him again.
That Friday night we all ate Chinese food in the front of the trailer, Stouffer’s Beef Chop Suey with Rice, boiled up in the plastic pouches by Laura Gwen.
I was catching up on their news while we sat in front of the TV, hoping as always for a glimpse of Dora, The Dancing Lettuce Leaf.
Laura Gwen had put on weight the same as Digger, but you could see distant traces of the pretty cheerleader she’d been. She still had the same dimpled face and soft blond curly hair, light green eyes looking a little more tired that night. She snapped at Digger for calling me “Roach.”
I told her I didn’t mind it.
“Well, I mind it. I would hate to be called Roach.”
“Why? They’ve been around 300 million years, so they’re survivors.”
“They’re filthy things!” Laura Gwen said.
“They aren’t. People are,” I said. “Roaches drag people’s dirt around, not their own.”
“Can we eat this here chop suey without talking about roaches?” Digger complained.
“Then don’t call him Roach. Call him Sydney,” Laura Gwen said.
The twin babies (the reason they’d had to get married) in the two big laundry baskets in the kitchen were testing out the idea of crying. One would go “
ant ant” and the other’d go “Ant ant ant.” But they weren’t into it wholeheartedly yet.
“Do you know the preacher Little Lion, Sydney?” Laura Gwen asked me.
“He’s a midget, too,” Digger said.
“I call myself a dwarf,” I said. “What about him?”
“He’s coming to La Belle this Sunday,” said Laura Gwen. “One of the reasons we brought the trailer over is to stay so we can see him.”
“One of the reasons you decided we’d bring the trailer is to stay and see him,” Digger said. He took a swallow of beer.
“You like him, too, Digger. Tell Sydney about the time we saw him on The Powerful Hour on TV.”
“He was testifying on The Powerful Hour,” said Digger. “That’s all.”
“Which is one of my favorite TV shows,” said Laura Gwen. “I had an aunt who got cured of carbuncles watching that show. She turned it on with them, and turned it off without them.”
“Your Aunt Mildred is a hypochondriac, is what she is,” said Digger.
While they argued back and forth about Laura Gwen’s aunt, I remembered a time this evangelist came to a park outside Wilton, and some of us from Mistakes went to see him. Wheels Potter was with us, and he pushed himself on his board down to the front so he could see.
The evangelist was asking people to testify as to what the Lord had done for them. People began getting up and shouting out they’d been changed or cured or transformed overnight. Then there was a lull in the proceedings … then Wheels’s voice. He raised himself as high as he could on his board, and he yelled, “You was asking what the Lord done for me! So I’ll tell you! He just blamed near ruint me!”
I wasn’t religious, though I’d been known to pray in times of crisis. Once, at a Fourth of July parade when I was dressed as a Revolutionary soldier, carrying a ten-inch rubber sword, a bulldog, who’d decided I was a walking Gaines-burger, tackled me during a rousing rendition of “Halls of Montezuma.” While the bulldog chewed his way through my sword, toward me, I prayed and prayed. But prayer was not a regular part of my routine.
The twins were working up their act while Digger and Laura Gwen argued about her Aunt Mildred. They were taking turns going “Unt ant waaa unt.”