by M. E. Kerr
“Turn it down, Cowboy!”
“Does he like being The Pink Dragon better or Roy Roachers?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I’ve never asked him.”
I sit up in bed and rub the sleep from my eyes. I toss The Tin Drum on the night table, remembering where I’d left off the night before. Oskar, the dwarf hero, went to see a Christmas play, Tom Thumb. Only you never saw Tom Thumb onstage. You just heard his voice and saw people chasing after him. He sits inside a horse’s ear, crawls in a mousehole and a snail shell. He gets in a cow’s stomach and a wolf’s stomach.
At the end of the play, when Tom Thumb names all the places he’s been and says, “Now I’m coming home to you,” Oskar’s mother hides her nose in her handkerchief, and then can’t stop hugging him all through the holidays.
Sounds like my mother when she’s minty.
Cowboy is pulling on her jeans and cussing about basketball practice keeping her from seeing The Pink Dragon in action.
“Don’t you see enough of him?” I ask her.
“You don’t seem to,” she says.
I am remembering that it is Friday, the day Miss Grossman hands back our writing assignments.
I am betting that no matter what Calpurnia Dove has written, my true story of a dwarf named Lia Graf will be the one Miss Grossman reads in class.
Weeks of research have gone into it. It has everything: bathos, pathos, even Hitler.
Lia Graf, whose real name was Schwartz, was a world-famous twenty-seven-inch dwarf who’d appeared with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. When she was twenty years old she’d even sat on the lap of the richest man in America, J. P. Morgan, while he was testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. Wearing a blue satin dress and a bright-red straw hat, she perched there as photographers snapped their picture. Someone had put her up to it, in an attempt to embarrass Morgan, but he rose to the occasion and told her he had a grandson bigger than she was.
She came to a sad end in a Nazi concentration camp, doomed not only because she was a Jew but also because she was a dwarf. The Nazis were embarked on a program to destroy all people who were physically abnormal.
It was Sydney Cinnamon who told me about her and helped me do the research in the La Belle library.
It was Sydney Cinnamon who got me to check out The Tin Drum, too.
Today I dress carefully in a blue wool number Mrs. Hootman made for me, as I plan to be the center of attention at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon.
At breakfast my father complains about having to go to a Lions’ Club luncheon, which means trying to park on Genesee Street, impossible because of all the $%#& congestion caused by The Pink Dragon.
“Wait until the geisha girls get here!” says my mother, who is thumbing through the latest edition of The TADpole Tattler.
“Cowboy, don’t wear your hat at the breakfast table!” my father snaps.
“Don’t wear it at the lunch table or the dinner table, either,” says my mother. “Someday you’re going to wake up and that hat’s going to be missing.”
Then my mother’s face lights up and she says, “Little Little, listen to this! You remember that sweet little tyke from Mineola who dropped into your birthday party unexpectedly and I was worried that we didn’t have enough beef Wellington?”
“Naomi Katz,” I said. “What about her?”
“She and Roderick Wentworth are hosting a joint New Year’s Eve party to be held down in Miami, Florida. Oh, how I would love to go to Florida!”
“Too bad you’re not a TADpole,” Cowboy says.
“The PODs are invited, too,” says my mother, “and Roderick Wentworth is p.f. and planning to be a CPA.”
“Wow!” Cowboy says. “A p.f. CPA!”
“I’m not directing this conversation to you, Cowboy.”
“Don’t direct it to me, either,” I say. “Roderick Wentworth has chronic halitosis.”
“Something that can be corrected,” says my mother.
“Did you tell Mrs. Hootman we’re having company for dinner?” I ask her.
“I told her,” says my mother.
My father looks up and asks, “Who?”
“Oh, guess,” says my mother. “Just guess.”
“He’s more like a permanent fixture around here,” says my father. “I see him around here as often as I see the oven in the kitchen and the walnut sgabello in the hall!”
“And Mock,” I say. “You see him as often as you see Mock Hiroyuki.”
“That’s not by choice, either,” he mumbles into his fried eggs.
“Well, it’s not my choice to spend all winter locked into snow country,” my mother says. “I would love a Florida vacation, and here we have the golden opportunity right in front of us. You know the Wentworths, Larry. He’s in mobile homes.”
“Little Little says his breath smells.”
“I’m talking about his father! His father’s in mobile homes!”
On and on.
Cowboy is riding to school on the back of Mock’s new moped. My mother is bumming a ride to her Creative Crafts Coffee Klatch with me. Her car is in Ace Garage. She backed it into an oak tree at the end of our driveway, and saved the tiny red glass pieces of the smashed taillight, telling me she’d use them in a collage she is planning to make. A truly imaginative person, she says, can always find the beauty.
As I drive her down Lake Road, she says in another month we won’t even be able to see the lake over the snowdrifts, and that there’s a hotel in Miami that runs an elevator outside the building, with an angel for an elevator operator, “wings and all.”
“I don’t want to leave school,” I say; “my English class is just getting interesting.”
“I wonder if that’s the real reason you don’t want to leave, Little Little.”
“Well, it’s one of them.”
“And the other?”
“There are a lot of others. I like snow, besides.”
“Snow? You like snow? All I do is worry about you falling in some snowdrift and you sit up there on your little seat and tell me you like it?”
We ride along in silence for a while until she musters up the courage to come to the real point.
“Little Lion was a mistake,” she says, “but you correct a mistake, you don’t compound it with another one.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning don’t get all caught up with this Cinnamon character.”
“Boy,” I say. “He’s not a character.”
“Well, he’s running around as a dragon one minute and appearing as a roach cowboy on the television the next—you don’t think of him as a boy, you think of him as a character.”
“I think of him as a boy.”
“He’s been to dinner three Friday nights in a row, honey.”
“Mock has, too.”
“Oh, Mock … Mock’s just a friend. Cowboy’s young, and Mock’s young, not at a point where they’re supposed to be planning what they’d like to do with their lives. Honey, all I’m saying to you is that I’d give my eyes to see you walk down the aisle on the arm of some nice, serious young man who wants to make something out of himself.
“How could you see me do that without your eyes?” I say.
“I might as well talk to that telephone pole up ahead,” she says. “But I know one thing I would do, if I were you, Little Little.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, if you’re going to be seeing him for whatever little interlude it takes you to get tired of him, you ought to speak to him about his tooth. Now, that’s something that can be corrected. That tooth of his sticks out too far.”
“Can’t you ever get past that thing you have about physical appearances?” I said. “If Mozart had a pimple on his nose, you wouldn’t even be able to hear his music. You’d just be sitting there wishing you could squeeze the pimple!”
“I would never squeeze anyone else’s pimple, Little Little!”
“You know what I mean,” I
tell her, yelling. “If Shakespeare had a hair coming out of his nose, you wouldn’t hear a word of one of his plays—you’d be wondering why he didn’t take a tweezer to it!”
“Slow down and stop shouting!”
“If Pablo Picasso had a wart on his finger, he wouldn’t be the world-famous painter in your eyes, he’d be that fellow with the wart on his finger who paints! You are all caught up in and bogged down in p.f.! Sydney Cinnamon has one of the best minds of anyone who’s ever sat down at our dinner table and all you see is the tooth that sticks out!”
“That’s not all I see,” my mother says.
“The hump, the tooth that sticks out, the twisted leg—you never see anyone’s real worth!”
“But he can go right down to Dr. Rosten and get that tooth fixed in an afternoon, honey, that’s all I’m saying. That tooth is something he can correct.”
“Why should he?”
“Stop getting yourself into such a snit right after breakfast,” my mother says. “It’s not good for the digestion, and don’t go past my stop.”
“I hope there’s nobody in your Creative Crafts Coffee Klatch with a mole on her nose or anything disgusting like that,” I say.
“There isn’t,” she says. “And thank you for the ride. Next time I’ll think a long time before I decide to share a little feeling with you I might have about improving someone’s appearance.”
“Promises. Promises,” I tell her, stopping the car. “Sayonara.”
“Don’t go to the pachinko parlor after school, either,” she says, getting out. “It’s bad enough that The Pink Dragon is at our table every Friday night. Oh, I’m used to him and that isn’t a complaint—he’s welcome—but a pachinko parlor is no place for a little girl.”
She gives me a smile before she shuts the car door. “Oh, honey, I know you’re a big girl now. But you’re our Little Little and we love you so much!”
I cross my eyes and blow her a kiss.
“Your eyes could snap and stay that way forever,” she tells me. “Then what would you do?”
“Then what would you do?”
The morning drags unbearably, and I cannot concentrate on Newton’s three laws of motion in science or Gibbon’s version of the fall of Rome in history. Even the special assembly, “Marijuana Can Wreck Your Mind,” makes me squirm impatiently in my seat, although the school has come up with an ex-con who murdered two men as the lecturer.
On my way out of the auditorium I pass Calpurnia Dove and notice that she is wearing a new pink sweater with a matching skirt and the same color knee-high socks.
At lunch, Sydney Cinnamon has saved me a seat in the back of the cafeteria. He is excited about a book he’s reading called Freddy’s Story.
“Listen to this,” he says, wiping away crumbs of tuna fish sandwich from his mouth. “This is when Winesap, the historian, has just finished a lecture on all the Bigfoot creatures that have been sighted all over America. He’s being approached by another historian named Agaard, and he says—”
“Sydney,” I sigh, “I’d rather read the book myself.”
“Just listen to this,” he insists the way he always insists. “Agaard comes up to Winesap and he says, ‘I have a son home who is a monster.’” Sydney grins over at me. “Isn’t that a neat beginning?”
“Neat,” I agree.
“Then Agaard invites Winesap home to meet his son, who’s eight foot tall!”
“I’ll borrow it when you’re finished,” I say.
Then he starts to tell me about more new things he’s bought for his apartment, behind the pachinko parlor. Whenever I go there, he shows me something new he’s bought. Once he surprised me with a miniature water bed he’d had custom-made. We stretched out on it and listened to tapes of The Bee Gees, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Haydn’s Surprise symphony, drinking white wine from new crystal goblets, while he told me Haydn’s wife was so mean she used his manuscripts as curlpapers.
He is always enthusiastic about something, but today I am not a good listener.
I am saved from pretending that I am by a quartet of freshmen who surround Sydney Cinnamon to ask for autographs.
“Roy or The Dragon?” he asks them.
“Both!” they chorus in unison.
I finish the date-and-nut sandwich Mrs. Hootman has made me for lunch and count the minutes to English class: one hundred and three.
Finally we are filing into Miss Grossman’s room, where she has written across the blackboard in yellow chalk:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easier who have learned to dance.
—Alexander Pope
After all of us are in our seats, Miss Grossman begins handing back everyone’s story but the one she’ll read.
My mind is still reeling with the sight of my own before me on my desk, marked A+, when Miss Grossman speaks.
“And now,” she says, “I want you all to be still and listen to this.”
Sickly, I sneak a glance across at Calpurnia Dove, who just as sickly meets my eye, her story clutched in her fingers.
Miss Grossman begins:
“‘Sydney,’ Mr. Palmer said, you are on your way to becoming the most famous dwarf in the country, no small thanks to me. And now I have a favor to ask you.’
“Those words, spoken on an ordinary August day, in the offices of Palmer Pest Control, were the beginning of my new life….”
While she continues to read, after I have recovered from the punch of shock to my insides, I turn around in my seat and stare at Sydney Cinnamon.
He smiles at me, his light blue eyes very bright, and gives a helpless shrug to his shoulders.
I decide that my mother is right.
That tooth of his sticks out too far.
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.
My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.
I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.
I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)
Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immed
iate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.
Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the New York Times called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”
One of the hardest books for me to write was Little Little, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.
I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called Deliver Us from Evie. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.
When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called Your Eyes in Stars.