Little Little

by M. E. Kerr

  “Three,” I said.

  “Who are you there with?” my father said.

  “His name is Sydney Cinnamon.”

  “You’re there with a boy?” my father said.

  “I don’t know any boy named Sydney Cinnamon,” said my mother.

  “Is he a TADpole?” said my father.

  “He’s not on our list,” my mother said. “I know every name on that list.”

  “Who is he, Little Little?” said my father.

  “Is he little?” my mother said. “Is he a diminutive?”

  “He’s little,” I said.

  “Who is he?” said my father.

  The operator broke in at that point and demanded more money for the next three minutes.

  “What’s the number there?” my father said.

  “The show is going to start any minute, so don’t call me back,” I said. “I just want you to know I’m okay.”

  “Where did you meet him? He’s not on our list,” my mother said.

  “Little Little,” my father said, “you’re not with The Roach?”

  “The Roach?” my mother said.

  There was the operator’s click and the dial tone.

  I thanked Mr. Gruberg, the manager, for the chair I’d used to make the call. He knew me from all the times Cowboy and I had sneaked to the theater last summer, while my parents went to dances at Cayuta Lake Yacht Club. We only had time to see one feature without their knowing we were there. My parents didn’t object to the movies The Palace showed as much as they feared the rats that were supposed to live in The Palace, and “the element” that went to the late night shows—a lot of kids who smoked pot and made out in the back rows, and some of the town drunks who dropped in to nap.

  While Sydney bought us a huge container of popcorn, I lit a cigarette for a few fast puffs before we got inside.

  A red-faced fellow with blurry eyes asked me where my mamma was and if she knew I was smoking cigarettes.

  “This little pixie is older than you think,” Mr. Gruberg told him.

  “Come on,” Sydney said, and we went inside, and all the way down to the front row.

  The feature was beginning, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, starring Bruce Dern.

  Sydney passed me some popcorn. “Did you ever see Ghidra, the Three-Headed Monster? He was two hundred feet tall besides.”

  “I saw The Thing with Two Heads here, last summer.”

  “That was boring,” he said. “Ray Milland had his head grafted onto Rosie Grier’s and they spent the whole time talking about racial issues.”

  “I know it,” I said, “but it was on with Curse of the Werewolf, which was what we’d really gone to see, and never got to see because we could only see one and it was last.”

  “It was good,” Sydney said. “It was about a feral creature. There’s a science fiction writer called—”

  People behind us went, “Shhhhh!”

  “Philip José Farmer,” Sydney whispered. “He wrote a whole anthology about feral men called Mother Was a Lovely Beast.”

  “You read a lot of weird stuff,” I whispered back.

  “Shut up!” a man yelled.

  “You read Sara Lee,” Sydney whispered back.

  We ate all the popcorn and tossed the empty container under the seat. Just as Bruce Dern began to stitch two heads onto one body, I grabbed Sydney Cinnamon’s hand and said, “Operations give me the creeps.”

  He looked over at me and smiled, and then he said something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “I said I’m planning on having dental work done,” he said.

  He had his free hand across his mouth so I could hardly hear him.

  “What did you say about the dentist?”

  “I’m hoingtoonehoon.”

  “Take your hand away from your mouth I can’t hear you.”

  “Skip it,” he said.

  I watched the two heads being stitched on the body as I thought about what he could mean and then I got it. “Oh,” I said. “Your front tooth bothers you.”

  “I’m going to have my fang capped,” he said.

  “How very Sara Lee,” I said.

  He gave me a shove in my ribs with his elbow.

  We sat there staring up at the huge screen, holding hands tightly, when what sounded like a herd of elephants charging down the aisle produced my father.

  “Little Little, I’d like to talk to you!”

  “This man is my father, Sydney.”

  “How do you do,” said Sydney.

  The people behind us began shouting at us to shut up.

  “Little Little, come out into the lobby!” my father demanded.

  “Daddy, we’re in the middle of the movie.”

  “You heard me,” he said, and Sydney let go of my hand.

  I said to Sydney, “You don’t have to come.”

  “I’ll come,” he said.

  My father waited for us to get out of our seats and then followed behind us. I could see that he had on his pajama top under his overcoat, he had left our house in such a hurry.

  The three of us stood in the lobby, my father crouched over with his knees bent and his hands on his knees. “It is now one in the morning. You have a big day ahead of you tomorrow, Little Little.”

  He didn’t look in Sydney Cinnamon’s direction at all.

  I said, “Daddy, this is Sydney Cinnamon.”

  “I know who it is.”

  “How do you do, sir,” Sydney said.

  “Howdoyoudo,” my father said so fast it sounded like one word, still not looking at Sydney. “Did you hear what I said, Little Little? You have a big day tomorrow, beginning very early in the morning.”

  “We’ll only stay through the first feature,” I said.

  “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “Thanks, but I have my car.”

  “We’ll pick up your car tomorrow.” He finally gave Sydney Cinnamon a fast glance. “You can get a cab—there’s a cab stand across the street.”

  “This is what I call really humiliating!” I said.

  “Call it anything you want,” my father said. “I’m taking you home!”

  Then my father straightened up and barked out, “Lit-toe, Lit-toe, right now!”

  “But—” said Sydney Cinnamon.

  “Right NOW!”

  “On my eighteenth birthday?” I said.

  “Hey,” Sydney smiled at me, covering his tooth with his hand. “Happy Birthday!”

  He had barely finished the sentence when my father picked me up bodily and carried me out of the lobby, into the street.

  “That is the last you’ll see of The Roach!” he said.

  17: Sydney Cinnamon

  WHEN I WAKE UP in my room in Wilton, the first thing I see is myself reflected in the full-length mirror across the room. I am in my little bed, made especially for me by a Wilton carpenter, and next to it is the bureau he built to my size, and the desk and chair. I know the real world begins just outside my door and down the hall, where the bathroom confronts me with the toilet and sink, which take great effort to reach, and I am again like a mushroom growing in a forest inhabited by giants. But for that space between waking up and getting up, I am myself. I wiggle my toes and see them reflected at the foot of my bed, pulling the covers away from the mattress. I sit up and put a pillow behind me, and my feet stretch out a quarter of the way down my mattress.

  When I am traveling and lonely, I miss my own room, and I woke up in The Stardust Inn to find my body lost in the enormous double bed, as the events of the night before came back to my consciousness. I put the huge pillow behind me and sat up, my feet coming just to the part of the sheet turned over at the top of the mattress.

  I remembered Mr. Gruberg, who drove me back to the Inn so I didn’t have to get a taxi. He was leaving The Palace anyway, he said, and said he had to laugh when he saw Larry La Belle just pick up his little girl and carry her off kicking and pounding with her little fi
sts.

  “Oh, no offense,” he said, “I know you didn’t feel so hot about it. I’d like to be able to take my own kid in hand that way, though. Well, don’t worry, young fella, you are a young fella, aren’t you. How old?”

  “Seventeen,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, because there are other fish in the sea.”

  “Not in my sea there aren’t,” I said.

  “In any sea,” he said emphatically.

  I didn’t want to chance soiling his seat, so I didn’t stand on it but rode beside him watching the tops of trees and blinking traffic lights. I thought of a short story called “Godman’s Master” by Margaret Laurence. It was about a dwarf who had been made to live inside a box all his life while his master pretended that inside the box was an oracle. The dwarf would make pronouncements through a hole, and sometimes he would cough, this tiny cough that sounded like a butterfly had cleared its throat. After a man rescued him from the box, he insisted to the dwarf that there was much more to freedom than just not living in a box.

  The dwarf had answered, “You would not think so if you’d ever lived in a box.”

  “Mr. Gruberg,” I said, “you and I don’t swim in the same sea.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Last summer I met a lot of little people. The town was filled with them because of her, you know, she’s getting to the marrying age I heard was the reason. So I observed little people pretty well. They’d come down to see the shows.”

  He smiled down at me. “I kept a pile of telephone books to boost them up high enough to see the screen.”

  I thanked him for the ride to the Inn, and walked through a lobby swarming with people, although it was two in the morning. They were some of “the Faithful” Little Lion had described to me, looking for rooms, which were scarce that weekend in La Belle, looking for a glimpse of Little Lion, crowded into the coffee shop for late-night snacks after coming off the road.

  Crowds always made me nervous. My toes got stepped on and I got jostled about in them, so I hurried through the lobby to the elevator.

  Just as I was standing on tiptoe to fit my key into the lock, I heard my telephone ringing. It rang insistently while I worked the key, pushed open the door with my shoulders, and tried to locate the phone in the dark. It kept ringing while I dragged the desk chair across under the light switch, and just as I got up on the seat, the telephone stopped ringing.

  It could have been Mr. Palmer, Digger, Little Lion, but I sat on the bed with my feet hanging down the side, wondering if Little Little had tried to call me.

  When I finally crawled under the covers and fell asleep, I dreamed her father chased me down a winding corridor, caught me, slapped me into a box, and began pounding nails into its side.

  He called at me through a hole, “Good-bye, butterfly.”

  “Sydney,” Mr. Palmer said, “the banquet begins at four. You’ll enter the ballroom at around five-fifteen with the birthday cake. The band will play your theme song right after they play ‘Happy birthday.’ Sydney?”

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of toast. “I’m listening.”

  “I’ll drive you there, and right after your performance we’ll head for Wilton. Mr. Hiroyuki was crazy about you, Sydney. We had an early breakfast and he brought along a model of the Roach Ranch…. Do you want to go hear Little Lion with me?”

  “I have something I have to do first with Digger Starr,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock. “I have to hurry, Mr. Palmer. I’ll go to church with Digger.”

  “I thought up a name for you, Sydney, to use in our first commercial. How does Roy Roachers sound? You’ll be in chaps and a sky piece.”

  “What’s a sky piece?”

  “A cowboy hat, Sydney! They call them sky pieces in Texas. You’ll have a new line. We’re throwing out ‘You’ll be the death of me.’ Instead, you’ll swagger out in your chaps and sky piece, ready to draw your pistol, and you’ll say: ‘Name your poison!’ Then ‘Roach Ranch’ will flash across the screen and you’ll keel over. Like it?”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s dynamite, Sydney!”

  “I’m in a hurry, Mr. Palmer.”

  “Sydney,” he said, “don’t be late. Have your shell down in the lobby so we can leave there at four-forty-five sharp. This is an important event where Hiroyuki’s concerned, and remember to keep it secret. It’s a surprise!”

  “Oh, it’ll be a surprise,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll see you in church, Sydney.”

  “Maybe. But we’ll probably be a little late.”

  “Not probably,” Digger complained when I told him the same thing down in the lobby. “We will be. Laura Gwen’s already in line outside the church along with a couple dozen dwarfs. I hope this doesn’t take too long, Sydney.”

  “I tried to get them to deliver it,” I said as we walked toward Wicker Wonderland. “I talked to them on the phone but they don’t have anyone to take it out to Lake Road.”

  The La Belles were probably already at church. I counted on that.

  “You know what the cab fare’s going to be? They’ll soak you, Sydney.”

  “Cost is no object,” I said, sounding like Mr. Palmer.

  “We better make it to that church before Laura Gwen walks,” Digger said.

  “She won’t walk,” I said. “Where would she go?”

  “That’s what Little Lion calls coming to Jesus,” Digger said. “He calls it walking. He yells out for people to walk with him.”

  Then Digger said, “What’s this all about, Roach?”

  “It’s about a birthday present.”

  “Well, me and Laura Gwen are always at your service. You keep that in mind, old buddy.” He grinned down at me and messed my newly combed hair with his large hand.

  “Another thing,” he said as we arrived at Wicker Wonderland. “That time I stuck you up on the shelf in Sip-A-Soda? I came right back to get you down, you know.”

  “Okay,” I said. I smoothed my hair back with my hand and waited for him to open the door.

  “You was already down when I came back,” he said.

  “After three hours I was.”

  He bent over to hear me better, as he opened the door. “What’d you say?”

  “I said I don’t hold grudges, Digger.”

  If I did, I didn’t after Digger carried the ten-foot white wicker giraffe out to the taxi stand in front of The Stardust Inn.

  Around the neck of the giraffe, he’d tied the envelope with a card inside.

  I long for you, it said.

  18: Little Little La Belle

  “TANOSHII TANJOBI, RIDDRE RIDDRE,” Cowboy had whispered at me early that morning, kneeling beside my little bed in her pajamas. “That’s ‘Happy Birthday’ in—”

  “Japanese!” I finished the sentence for her and pulled my covers over my head. “Go away! I’m not speaking to anyone in this family!”

  “I’m the one who shouldn’t be speaking to you,” she said. “I have to wear a dress today because of you!”

  “Go a-way,” I said. “I don’t care what you wear!”

  Name the one thing Cowboy hated most, next to not owning a horse, and it would have to be wearing a dress.

  “I have to wear a dress and panty hose and pumps and go to church!” she said. “All because of you!”

  I stayed under the covers and listened to her rattling hangers in her closet across the room. I was mad at her because of something she’d said the night before.

  The first thing my father’d done when he’d brought me home was unplug the telephone in our room and take it with him.

  Cowboy had held her sides laughing after he’d stormed out of the room, and then asked me what had inspired me to run off with Dwarf Longnose anyway?

  That was a reference to a book that went way back to our childhood.

  Cowboy had brought the book home from the library when she was around five years old. She had selected it herself, along wi
th some others, from Kiddy Corner, telling my mother she’d found a book about me.

  Dwarf Longnose was a children’s book about Jacob, the shoemaker’s son. An evil fairy had used an enchanted herb to change Jacob into a dwarf with a hunched back and a long nose. Jacob’s family had thrown him out, and Jacob had become a successful chef in a duke’s palace. A goose helped him find the herb to turn him back to normal.

  “This is not a book about Little Little!” my mother had yelled at Cowboy. “Don’t you ever bring a book like this home again!”

  “Little Little doesn’t have a hunched back”—my father.

  “Or a long nose!” my mother said. “Cowboy, you are just as mean as you can be! Look at the pictures in this book! Is that what you think your sister looks like?”

  My father had the book removed from the La Belle library, and poor Cowboy never dared check out another library book.

  In one of her suicide attempts, when she swallowed down a combination of Dristan and Midol, then ran into the living room to say good-bye to our parents, she sobbed out all the injustices she’d suffered through as my sister. Bringing home that book and catching hell for it was at the top of her list.

  We’d laughed about it later, and when my mother began giving parties last summer for the TADpoles, always checking out ahead of time who was p.f. and who wasn’t, we’d giggled to each other that the only way Dwarf Longnose would get invited would be if he had royal blood or wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or the chef who had the in with the goose.

  I thought about all that and decided not to give Cowboy a hard time over the remark, so I sat up in bed in time to see her run the left leg of her panty hose because she hadn’t cut her big toenail.

  “*&%$#@!” Cowboy said.

  “I told you to cut your toenails. They’re so long they’re curling over.”

  “If they were curling over, I wouldn’t have run my stocking, Little Little…. Tanoshii tanjobi.”

  “Stick to English.”

  “There’s a whole tableful of gifts for you downstairs, and Little Lion sent white roses.”

  Cowboy ripped off the panty hose and went across to her bureau drawer to rummage through it for another pair. The long ash at the end of her cigarette dropped into the sock pile she’d shoved aside. The white bra she had on, with the little red bow at the V, had nothing filling it. My mother made her wear the bra when she wore a dress. That was one of my mother’s convictions: a bra goes with a dress, just as gloves went with church and something red was worn on Christmas.