by M. E. Kerr
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about this rain,” she cooed down at him. “This rain is going to just ruin my hair.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Little Lion. “I was going to leave my car behind the church so the Faithful wouldn’t get hurt mobbing it as they do. But they’re nearly all gone, and I could run you to where you’re going, and then drive up to the La Belles’.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t hear of that, Little Lion!”
“We can drop you on our way,” said my father.
“Now, I wouldn’t hear of that, sir,” Little Lion said to my father. “I will just back out my new little white Mercedes convertible quick as a wink and do the honors. It’ll be no trouble at all.”
Eloise Ficklin said, “Let me tell my manager that he can go on without me. Oh, it’ll be a relief to him, we spend so much time together! Are you sure it won’t be an imposition, Little Lion?”
“I’ll be delighted to do it,” said Little Lion, and my mother shot me one of her looks.
Little Lion grabbed my hand as Eloise Ficklin darted out of the study.
“Hallelujah, honey, it’s good to be with you at last!” He picked up our joined hands and kissed my knuckles. “I kept waiting for you to walk with me. You know that was what I was waiting for all along.”
“Little Little won’t walk with anyone,” said my mother. “She’s too independent.”
“Well, life turns out strange sometimes. I was anticipating climaxing my service with my Little Little walking with me, and I got Dora instead.”
“She’s very tall for a diminutive,” said my mother. “She’s a good head taller than you are, Little Lion.”
“I will lift up mine eyes,” Little Lion answered.
“Little Lion,” said my father, “you might tell Little Little that the carriage awaits. Granddaddy’s sitting out there in it, in the rain. I’d tell Little Little myself only she seems not to hear anything I have to say this morning.”
“Now, we are not going to wash the family linen out in public, Larry,” said my mother. “Somebody better go find Cowboy and Mock.”
“I’ll go find them,” my father said. “We’ll see you at the house, young man.”
“I would ask you to ride along with us, Little Little,” Little Lion said to me, “but there’s only room for two.”
“And Dora is a big girl besides,” said my mother. “It’d take several coats of mayonnaise to cover her.”
Little Lion laughed and squeezed my hand. “I trust she’s invited to the banquet?”
“She’s not on the list,” said my mother.
“We can make room,” I said.
“Honey, I would love nothing more than to include her but we’re not having chicken à la king or anything like that. We’re having slices of beef Wellington, and I’ve already made room for Norman Powers’s mother who wasn’t expected, plus that dear little tyke from Mineola, New York, who showed up unexpectedly.”
“She can have my slice of beef Wellington,” I said.
“When it’s your favorite thing in the whole world, honey? Why, we planned it especially for your birthday,” said my mother, shooting me another one of her looks.
“We’ll manage,” I said.
“Nothing is impossible to a willing heart,” Little Lion said.
My mother said, “All lay load on the willing horse.”
“I like your sense of humor, Mrs. La Belle,” said Little Lion.
On the way home in our car, my mother said, “That little snip. If she’s a diminutive, I’m a Siamese twin.”
I sat in back, on my Kiddyride, between Mock and Cowboy.
Cowboy whispered at me, “That was him next to Gus Gregory, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“He kept watching you over his shoulder,” she said.
I said, “I know it.”
My mother was continuing her diatribe. “Little Little, now is the time to fight fire with fire. Telling him to ask her to the banquet was a major mistake, but—”
“Whose idea was that?” my father asked.
“It was his idea,” said my mother, “but Little Little went right along with it, which was a major mistake.”
“Maybe Little Little isn’t all that taken with him in the ninth place,” said my father. “I’m not all that taken with him.”
“You wouldn’t be all that taken with Prince Charming if he rode right up Lake Road on a white horse with a wedding ring in a box in his back pocket,” my mother said. “You’d keep her in a hothouse the same as Grandfather La Belle keeps his prize roses in one, if you had your way.”
“If we were speaking, I would,” said my father.
“Well, we aren’t,” I said.
Mock Hiroyuki giggled and my mother told him, “There is nothing funny in this situation, in case anyone should ride up on a bicycle and ask you. That little snip is pushing her way into Little Little’s birthday celebration.”
Mock clapped his hands across his mouth and sank down beside me on the backseat.
“I’m not all that taken with him, either,” Cowboy said.
“Aren’t you?” I said.
“Not all that taken with him.”
“Well, I doubt very much that Cowboy is anyone to judge who is and who isn’t a catch,” said my mother.
“Are you?” my father asked her.
“Well, I caught you, didn’t I? In my opinion, Little Little,” said my mother, turning around from the front seat to see me better, “you should go home and put on that pretty little light blue dress Mrs. Hootman made for you last summer, and come out fighting, beginning at lunch. I don’t know why in the world you didn’t walk with him this morning, when it was obvious to everyone in that church he was waiting for someone special, calling out to her that way. Why, that was painful!”
“I’m not religious,” I said.
“The whole thing was painful!” Cowboy said.
My father said, “A-men.”
My mother turned back in the front seat and stared at the road, sighing and shaking her head. She said to my father, “Would you rather have her with The Roach, Larry?”
“I’d rather not have her with either of them.”
“Oh, don’t we know that! You’d rather have her to yourself.”
“The way I see it,” said my father, “there’s just no damn hurry, Ava. She’s got time. She’s only eighteen.”
“I remember when that little Blessing girl from Cleveland took her time deciding whether or not to marry that little Tompkins boy who was studying to be a doctor. Before she knew it he turned around and married what’s-her-name who won the TADpole chess tournament every year.”
“Oh, don’t start in on that little Blessing girl again,” said my father.
“She’s still living at home and she’s in her twenties now,” my mother said. “All we’re talking about here is a full happy life, with a family, all that anyone’s entitled to.”
“That’s all you’re talking about here,” said my father. “We aren’t talking about it.”
“Mock?” Cowboy said. “Do Japanese families bicker all the time?”
“Bery often bicka,” said Mock.
“Mock,” my mother said, “we are not bickering. We just want what’s best for Little Little.”
“We want her to do the loveliest thing that an oyster ever has a chance to do,” Cowboy said.
“They want me to make a pearl, Mock,” I said.
“I’m glad everyone in the backseat thinks that’s hilarious,” said my mother.
When we got inside the house, the white wicker giraffe was waiting for me next to my walnut sgabello in the hall.
“What is this?” My mother’s face broke into a delighted smile. “It has a card around its neck. Honey, I’ll read it for you…. It says: ‘I long for you.’ The long neck! I long for you! Now, darling, that is what I call original! Isn’t that original?”
I stood up on the sgabello and read the card myself. There were only thos
e four words across it.
“Is that from Little Lion?” said my father.
“Who else?” my mother said. “Now, there’s someone after my own heart. Original, amusing, poignant, too, there’s something very poignant about it—that dear little darling, and here this was waiting for you all the while he was standing there begging you practically on bended knee to come down the aisle and walk with him.”
“Mrs. La Belle?” Mrs. Hootman appeared in the doorway.
“Yes, Mrs. Hootman, just a minute. Little Little?” my mother said. “This is a very touching gift if you ask me, which I realize no one did.”
“No one ever has to,” my father said.
“And even you, Larry, have to admit this is a dear little birthday remembrance. You yourself never matched this in all the time you were courting me, and you weren’t unoriginal.”
“Thank you,” said my father.
“So, honey, you put on that little sky-blue dress Mrs. Hootman made for you (of all her dresses, Mrs. Hootman, that’s my favorite) and you get yourself ready for Little Lion. He went to all this trouble to have this waiting for you.”
“Mrs. La Belle?” Mrs. Hootman tried again.
“Yes, Mrs. Hootman?”
“That giraffe isn’t from Little Lion.”
21: Sydney Cinnamon
IT WAS FIVE-THIRTY when they entered the pantry. The banquet was running late. The waiters were just clearing away the dinner plates. I was resting, out of sight so I’d be a surprise. I was stretched out on top of a sack of Magic Mashed Potato Flakes, in the storeroom just behind the pantry.
“Dora”—I heard Little Lion’s voice—“the Lord sent you to me.”
“Eloise,” she corrected him.
“Eloise, the Lord sent you to me.”
“I hate that Little Little La Belle! I hated her when I first met her and I still hate her!”
“This is not a time to talk of hatred, hon. Hallelujah!”
“I hate these TADpole affairs, too. You don’t know how many I’ve been dragged to by my parents, and PODs is a good name for my parents, because they are pods! If I’d been one inch taller than normal, they’d have gone through the Yellow Pages looking for an organization of giants!”
“Walk with me, I was begging, and you came down that aisle toward me with the face of a Botticelli angel, with your golden hair.”
“Don’t touch it, please, because I can’t get a wash and set tomorrow morning, and I have a real early appointment…. I couldn’t believe it when I went to that church to hear you, and there they all were—the Munchkins!”
“I have a great many dwarfs among the Faithful, Dora, being a dwarf myself.”
“Eloise,” she corrected him again. “Well, I’m four foot one!”
“Every inch a beauty!”
“That little shrimp doesn’t think her own pee smells.”
“Dora, Eloise—never mind Little Little right now.”
“Don’t tell me she’s your girlfriend? A dynamite little guy like you?”
“Eloise, a man of God needs many inspirations. Where do you go from here?”
“You’ve got big hands for such a little fellow, don’t you? I’m making supermarket appearances in the Tri-State Area for my client.”
“These hands do the Lord’s work.”
“Is that what you call it?” She chuckled.
“Where are you going next?”
“I’m due at the Super-Duper Market on Salina Street in Syracuse, nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Oh, darlin’, be real careful of my hair, hmmm?”
“Will you be at the Inn tonight?”
“Do you want me to be at the Inn tonight, Little Love?”
“Hallelujah, Babe!”
“Well, hallelujah yourself, Preacher.”
They stopped talking for a while and I didn’t have to see them to know what they were up to. I sat up on the sack of Magic Mashed Potato Flakes, moving as quietly as I could, easing my stocking feet down until they touched the floor.
“I’ve seen you on television,” she said.
“I’ve seen you, too.”
“I saw you on The Powerful Hour.”
“I used to turn on the set just to wait for you to come on. Sometimes you did”—smack, smack—“and sometimes you didn’t.”
“You pulling my leg?”
“Not yet.”
“I really mean it about my hair, hon. It’s been so darn humid here all day, too.”
There was a pause in the conversation while I inched my way past the potato sack toward the door.
Then she said, “I hate her hair. Looks like a monkey styles it.”
“We don’t have to talk about her,” Little Lion said.
“The same monkey that does her hair makes her clothes, if you ask me.”
“Honey? Babe? Give yourself to the moment and don’t be worrying your angel’s head about another female.”
“They’re going to be serving that little insect her birthday cake any minute, Little Love.”
“What time is it?”
“How’m I going to not worry my head about another female if you’re going to worry yours about what time they present that ugly cake to that little gnat all dressed in baby blue?”
“Well, I am a guest of the family, my angel.”
“I say let’s us vamoose and the hell with her and her cake.”
“Well, now—”
“You could get our coats and I could just slip out the back and be waiting for you in your car.”
“Oh, babe, the devil tempts the mighty with the answer to his prayers, and how does the mighty resist? You tell me.”
Just as I peered around the doorway, I saw Reverend La Belle charging through the swinging doors of the kitchen. I ducked back inside the storeroom.
“Little Lion! Here you are!”
“Hello, Reverend! You know Dora … Eloise. It’s time to carry the cake in, and Eloise here has promised to help me do the honors.”
“The honors are overdue, Little Lion! … How do you do, Miss.”
“Well, we’ll do the overdue honors then, Reverend,” said Dora. “I was just saying to Little Lion how pretty that little granddaughter of yours is!”
“Cake’s heavy!” Reverend La Belle barked.
“All lay load on the willing horse,” said Little Lion.
“And I’d like a word with you first, Little Lion,” said the Reverend. “Alone.”
“I’ll just wait in the kitchen,” said Dora, “like a good little lettuce leaf.” She chuckled.
“Little Lion,” Reverend La Belle said after the sound of the kitchen door swinging shut, “my granddaughter takes second place to no one!”
“Amen, sir.”
“A little girl like that, living protected as she has, isn’t going to get up and waltz down the aisle to walk with any man, eloquent as his plea might be. If you don’t know that, you don’t know dogs bark!”
“I know that now, sir.”
“Performers get up and perform, but shy little girls who aren’t selling mayonnaise for a living are reluctant to step forward. Now you have to make up your mind whether what you want is a snappy saleswoman a head taller than you are or a shy young miss your same size…. Seems to me all through the banquet you were veering toward the former.”
“Reverend, my heart follows after the meek—”
Reverend La Belle cut him off with “Don’t give me a lot of crap, Little Lion. If you want to become affianced to my granddaughter, you better act that way before I bust ass!”
From inside the ballroom the band began to play “Happy Birthday.”
I put on my shoes, got my shell out, and dragged it through the swinging doors to the kitchen, after the singing began.
Waiters stepped around me, stacking the dinner dishes near the dishwasher, while I waited and watched through a crack in the door leading into the ballroom.
Dora and Little Lion were carrying a three-tiered cake across the ballroom floor to the front tab
le. The candles were flickering as they went slowly along, the silver platter between them, headed toward Little Little, who was seated at the end of the table.
While everyone sang chorus after chorus, Little Little crawled down from her chair and walked across to meet them.
There was applause, then cheers and whistles.
Little Little looked out at everyone all smiles, her long yellow hair hanging down to brush the light blue dress, her light green eyes sparkling. The band began to play “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as the cake came toward her.
Then Dora, The Dancing Lettuce Leaf, appeared to begin to dance, but stumbled instead, tipping the tray sufficiently to deliver the gooey white coconut cake directly to Little Little, all down the front of her.
What was left landed at her feet, as the tray spun around the floor like a top, before it flopped flat.
There was a loud, communal Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The dwarf who had sat beside me in church jumped down to stamp out a few burning candles with his feet.
Little Little began to run. She ran down the length of the ballroom floor, heading straight toward the kitchen.
She stumbled in past me, tripped over my roach shell, and landed on the linoleum, where she sat with pieces of cake, and sticky frosting, and a single candle stuck to her.
“Has anyone got a match?” I said, and a waiter handed me an oven match.
I struck it, reached down and removed the candle from the front of Little Little, wiped the wick clean with my fingers, and lit it.
“Make a wish,” I said.
22: Little Little La Belle
“… AND THAT WAS THE Ramones singing ‘Baby, I Love You.’ This is WLAB in beautiful La Belle, and we’ll be with you for another two hours spinning your favorite tunes. The time is seven-ten, and the temperatures rising to the thirties on this first day of November.”
Cowboy is smoking before breakfast again. I hear the scratch of a match and catch my first whiff of tobacco as I roll over on top of a book I’d been reading before I fell asleep.
“Are your spirits laggin’? Come to The Pink Dragon and watch the steel ball fall into the lucky hole that’ll win you a vacation trip for two to beautiful Hawaii, or a brand-new Toyota! These are just a few of the rewards awaiting you at La Belle’s newest fun spot on Genesee Street, where there are sixty-one pin tables and over a hundred prizes! Yes, pachinko is here in La Belle, and The Pink Dragon himself will be on hand afternoons to welcome you! They say dragons are lucky.…”