Maybe the busy hum of Judy’s Grill was a relief for my mom, compared to life with me. She loves the grill with a pathological devotion; I wouldn’t be surprised if she squirted her own breast milk directly into people’s coffee mugs when she went back to work that first week after I was born. Maybe it was a happy, distracting refuge from the horrors of my babyhood. The grill is full of clutter, the smell of shimmering fries fresh out of the metal oil basket, the crunch of pepper grinders, chatter and smack of people eating. There’s nothing to eat in hospitals; even when there’s food there, it tastes like Lysol. And anyway, who has an appetite in a place where the walls look so much like the floor that you’re swimming even as you walk? The U of M hospital smells, looks, and tastes like an antiseptic nothing. Judy’s Grill is a hot red place.
No mom loves watching her tiny dwarf baby get strapped to a gurney, but my mom is pretty tough. My dad still talks about how she cleaned my trach tube every ten seconds for the whole year and a half I had the thing in. He apparently could barely handle it, not because it was gross, he swears, but because he was so freaked out that he’d do it wrong. My mom has always claimed that she had never loved anything the way she immediately loved me. Chad is expected to live with that part of the family lore—I mean, he got a fabulous life so why can’t I at least get to be our mom’s favorite? Plus, I’m a girl, and the way my mom tells it, she really wanted a girl “for herself,” the idea being that Chad was for my dad. And it’s true that Chad and my dad are perfect for each other. Chad’s as noisy and fun as my dad is quiet. He drags my dad out to play football in the backyard, scandalizes him with obscene jokes, and does a brilliant imitation of our mom: “Chad! Judy! Sam! I hear a riot! Someone’s about to get hurt! And it’s going to be Sam!” Her cute Midwestern accent, all nasal and young-sounding.
My mom grew up on a working farm, and she still lives on an animal clock, awake at the first flicker of light in the sky. She prefers chores when the air is still icy and silent, and makes us breakfast at dawn every morning before she and my dad take off for the Grill to feed dozens of other people all day. She also builds and fixes things—TVs, the roof on our house, the tiles in the bathroom. The only thing she leaves for my father to fix is the car, and she encourages him to do that as often as possible, even, I think, when it’s not broken. For their anniversary once, she bought him a board with wheels on it so he can jack the car up a bit and roll underneath it. I think she finds mechanics sexy, and my dad is game. I mean, he fixes the car sometimes, or at least pretends to. Fills it with oil or something. My mom keeps a framed picture of him on her nightstand, even though if she wanted to, she could just look over at him, sleeping next to her. In the picture, he’s rolling out from under the car, grease on his hands and a monkey wrench held up victoriously above him like it’s a weapon.
But even though my mom likes my dad, what she loves most is the three of us. And she went all the way with the claim that she loved me unconditionally—by having another baby after me. I take my little brother, Sam, as proof that my parents weren’t scared off the project. And my mom was rewarded for her bravado, because Sam is the best person anyone has ever met. We all love him most. It’s hard to explain except to say that he’s a delicately wired twelve-year-old with buckteeth and braces, that he weighs less than sixty pounds, has no irony, and takes hip-hop classes on the weekends at the rec center. He wears his Levi’s so low they show his Hanes, and just generally tries so hard it’s heartbreaking.
I can almost imagine Ann Arbor back before me and Sam, when Chad was a little baby and my parents were all hopeful and young. The place would have had more boutiques and fewer strip malls, the same stadium and roads, but I always picture it as an old-fashioned college town, music pouring out the windows of Hill Auditorium, dancers in the shadows at Power Center, the Brown Jug lit up on campus, open all night. That’s where Michigan students sat drinking thin, pre-Starbucks coffee out of cream-colored diner mugs. Judy’s Grill is right across from the Brown Jug, on South University. My mom and dad chose a red color pattern, pizza parlor lanterns, booths, and gingham tablecloths. Eventually they even got a jukebox, and sometimes students hang out there when there are no tables at the Brown Jug, listening to the crappy oldies my parents picked—like Journey and REO Speedwagon.
Not to romanticize too much, though, because it’s usually old people in there, gumming meat loaf and sipping stew through straws. Retirees never put money in the jukebox, so my mom plays them “Happy Together” and the Beatles for free. They love it. And they love me; I’m like the everlasting infant mascot of Judy’s Grill.
Sometimes I think the Grill must have been an absolute Norman Rockwell print before I arrived. And then wham! All of a sudden there was a spontaneous genetic mutation, maybe in her egg, maybe in one of my dad’s sperm. It’s too gross to contemplate that part, since we all know where it goes, but did a dwarf sperm swim up to an average-size egg and hit on it like, “I have other things to offer?” Or was the egg a little bit small? Anyway, there it was. Some famous doctor my parents once had examine me in a hotel room at a conference told them it’s usually the sperm’s fault when your baby’s a dwarf. I wonder if that made my dad feel guilty.
My mom knew she was pregnant right away because of the constant barfing, but they didn’t know about “that” until later, at twenty weeks, to be precise, when the docs noticed “foreshortened limbs” and something about my pelvis on the ultrasound screen. Maybe the technician at the U of M hospital was like, “Oh, let me get the doctor,” because apparently you can tell from an ultrasound if your baby is “of short stature,” which is pretty hilarious, because what unborn baby isn’t of short stature? I mean, foreshortened limbs? Anyway, then my parents were probably like, “Is everything okay, technician?” and she was like, “I’ll let the doctor explain,” and the rest of their lives were mapped out from that moment: my dad’s old-school-ness about the whole abortion thing, the baby they already had, how now his life would be affected by this shit, the deformed one taking up all the attention, the kinds of conversations they must have had, the final decision. Let’s keep her anyway! Or maybe it’s the way they present it now, like they didn’t even consider putting me back. That my mom heard about my dwarfism and loved me even more. More than anything, even Chad, her lanky, healthy toddler. But it wasn’t the Dark Ages. They had ultrasound technology, and when I first found out about that, in seventh-grade health class at Tappan Middle School, I started asking my parents all the time if they had considered a do-over, but that’s not the sort of question where you’ll ever get the straight answer you want. Anyway, now I’ve ruined their lives by ruining mine. So even if they didn’t regret having me then, maybe they do now. Health class is the same one where our teacher once said, “Do you girls want to know the only thing you need to stay out of trouble?” and we were all like, “What, Mr. Katz?” and he said, “A dime,” so we all looked at each other like, “What the hell is he talking about?” and he said, “Take the dime and put it between your knees and hold it there, and that way you’ll stay out of trouble.”
Speaking of trouble, I once read that parents of kids with childhood leukemia suffer more post-traumatic stress disorders and recurring nightmares than the kids themselves do. I can see why. Watching your kid suffer has to suck at least as much as suffering yourself. If my mom could give me her legs, I bet she would. And I’d take them, too, because I’m that kind of person. I’d rip them right off, and use them to tower above and hop over everyone like I was on pogo sticks. It’s a fact, even though it’s hypothetical, do you know what I mean? If she could, my mom would give her legs to me, and I would take them. And that’s why I can never go home again, because having to watch me die of misery over this Darcy scandal might be even more hideous for them than it is for me, if that’s possible. The funny thing is, I’m not a totally bad person, and I know it because if I could choose to make my little brother, Sam, live my life and me live his, I wouldn’t. I’d rather this be me than have to watch it
be him, even though he’s a boy. Because if I had to watch him go through this, that would kill me. I don’t know why I feel that way about Sam and not my parents. Maybe because he’s little and they’re grown-ups.
The horror show didn’t start right away at Darcy, by the way. I was the happiest I’d ever been before I became the unhappiest. I think people are all that way; if you have the capacity to experience huge, engulfing joy, then you can also feel its equal and opposite level of pain. My diary entries are like the lines on a graph, shooting up and up toward Thanksgiving and then rocketing off the page by Christmas. Of course it’s not a very useful graph for drawing conclusions, since I didn’t record them plummeting; they just disappear entirely.
My parents were nervous the summer before I started at D’Arts, talking in whispers and then changing the subject when I’d come in after swimming at Fuller Pool with Meghan, my best dwarf friend, who I met at an LPA convention in Florida four years ago. Those are where little people from all over the place get together and become friends. Our parents met there, too, and liked each other—they’re all average-size, although Meghan has a little-person older brother, too, and an average-size older sister. She comes every other summer for a week, and then I go to her place in Northern California.
Whenever Meghan and I are together, we talk about how much we wish we lived in the same place. She’s an achon too, so we look alike and everyone thinks we’re sisters and that’s okay, even though we hate it when people assume we’re sisters with, like, every other random dwarf in the universe. At that first LPA conference where I met Meghan, there were tons of teenagers, but she and I were the only two twelve-year-old girls. The next year, there were a bunch of younger guys, but no guys our age, and when we were fourteen, there were, like, no teenagers at all. It’s random. Last year, I met a guy named Joel who was kind of okay, and we danced a few times and even went swimming late at night, but I was embarrassed that all the grown-ups there seemed to think that dwarf teenagers should get married right away in case no one else ever agrees to marry us. I mean, I danced with the guy like three times and tons of people were pulling my parents aside like, “I think they’re a great couple, don’t you?”
My parents, good on most things, said, “We’re glad Judy seems to be making friends and having fun,” and left it at that. They’re not the types to try to match-make.
And even though they spent the whole summer worrying, my mom and dad gamely dropped me off on the first morning at Darcy, trying their best to comment cheerily on the “fabulous” student murals decorating the walls, and the “creative” vibe of the place. They kept up their tradition of staring the welcoming stare at anyone who ogled me, although I was finally like, “People are staring at me because my parents are at school with me. Please leave immediately.” I told them I already looked like a six-year-old, could they please not make matters more unbearable by staying. But they didn’t listen, and sat through the whole morning of meetings and orientations, including a private twenty- minute chat with the principal, Mr. Grames, and a school counselor named Mrs. O’Henry: “We have access to world-class medical facilities and are committed to our students’ physical and psychological well-being, Judy. I hope you’ll contact me right away with any concerns or if you need anything at all.”
At lunchtime, they swept me away from the possible horrors of the cafeteria: my legs dangling from a bench, no one to sit with, some movie-worthy bully slapping my sloppy joe tray into the air and stealing my milk money. They took me off “campus” to Zingerman’s, where we all ate turkey Reubens. I chewed four pieces of spearmint Eclipse on the walk back and spat them out in the trashcan at the back entrance to the school. My parents insisted on walking to the door to drop me off, and tried to kiss and smother me as if I were leaving for a hundred years instead of three more hours of high school. But I fought them off and they left. I was desperately relieved to see them go.
Walking back in, I felt less sure of myself, though. The halls were bulging with kids hugging each other, throwing books into their lockers, slinging on fashionable backpacks, singing, leaping. It was like that old movie Fame, the one that has no plot at all and is just a montage of beautiful people in tights, alternately weeping and fucking and frolicking. I chewed more gum. One girl was crying, and an absolute soap star of a high school boy was hugging her. I thought Spring Awakening, just knew they serenaded each other and danced through fields together on the weekends. Their life was definitely a rock musical, and they were probably engaged, or at least “going steady.” I felt sick, tried to focus on the student murals my parents had pretended to admire: swirling, spotted, punked-out zebras in rainbow colors, kids dancing, and a Greek goddess with her hair trailing all the way from one end of an orange hallway to the other. The lockers are all painted by students, too; one of the big bonuses of the place is that you’re allowed to decorate the outside of your locker, not just the inside like at most regular schools. It’s a big competition, of course, and there are stories of the most famous lockers ever, like Sophie Armaria’s. She graduated ten years ago but people still reminisce about how she painted herself naked on her locker, in thick, glistening oil, so that the combination dial was one of her nipples. The school didn’t know what to do. Did they “censor” her or celebrate her artistic freedom? Grown-ups are so idiotic. I mean, who cares? Finally they asked her (I’m not joking) to paint a bikini on the thing. She refused, and Darcy put some tape over the locker’s privates. Unbelievable. Sophie, apparently even more deeply in love with herself than ever before, wrote “CENSORED!” in black lettering on the tape. When I first started, people were obsessed with a senior named Amanda Fulton’s locker; she created a mosaic on it out of beads and glass tiles and photographs of her friends. She spent, like, her whole four years at D’Arts working on the thing. The photos look all 3-D, because she framed them and then broke the glass, so each face had at least a few shards of glass over it. It was incredibly cool, actually. I wish I were Amanda Fulton. Or at least one of her friends, framed for eternity (well, four years of high school) on that locker. Some kids who can’t think of anything better pretend to be above the whole thing and paint their lockers black. Others “tag” them with fake street graffiti. The truth is, the whole scene is a little fake, but I spent the whole post-lunch orientation meeting contemplating how I could amaze everyone with my locker decorations. Maybe I’d do something with tissue paper—make an enormous garden, blooming out into the hallway. Or a mint farm with boxes of Eclipse gum. Of course then everyone would steal it and chew it up. Maybe I would use marbles somehow. Was there a way to fasten marbles to a vertical metal surface? It was good I had this to think about, since otherwise the orientation was nothing but an excruciating, dwarf-peek-sneaking affair about “sensitivity to race and gender issues.”
In other words, “We do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, or national or ethnic origin, so you shouldn’t shout racial epithets at the two black people allowed in or refuse to pick the dwarf for your kickball team.” Everyone kept looking over at me, especially these girls I later figured out were Amanda Fulton and Carrie Shultz. They were dressed alike in superexpensive jeans, with all the seams sewn on the outside, and button-up blouses buttoned down enough that their black lacy bras were just visible. I tugged at the jeans my mom and I had bought in the children’s department at Nordstrom’s for my first day—they were the most expensive ones I’d ever had, $118. My mom had splurged, the whole time marveling with me over the fact that people would spend more than a hundred dollars on jeans for a six- or seven-year-old, who would presumably grow out of them in a month or two. Then we were both quiet, maybe thinking I’d never grow out of them, and what the hell, we might as well spend thousands of dollars on designer jeans for me. I had on boots with heels, too, orthopedic but full of the effort to look stylish, a black T-shirt, and a dark pink cardigan. The truth is, in the mirror that morning, I’d felt pretty cute. I have good hair
, is the thing—light brown with blond streaks in it, and a pretty good face, too. I don’t have the mushed nose, broad forehead look, and my eyes aren’t too wide apart. I have long eyelashes, which are darker than my hair even when I don’t put mascara on. And my mouth is round and cute, with straight white teeth. Lots of people in Ann Arbor are used to me, by the way. It’s not like I have no friends, it’s just that I stupidly decided to leave my high school and go to Darcy so I could become famous and make everyone be like, “Remember Judy? We never thought she’d be the next—whatever, Peter Dinklage.”
But that first day at Darcy, I kept thinking of my friends, starting the year at Huron, only several miles away. Why had I left devils I knew for ones I didn’t? I wanted to go to Darcy desperately, that’s the funny thing. Darcy Arts is Ann Arbor’s private school answer to LaGuardia High. It’s for talented performing arts kids, so everyone wants to go. If you live in Ann Arbor, getting into D’Arts is almost like winning American Idol. Not to mention getting in for free. D’Arts has this friendly pretense that its scholarships aren’t need-based, so if you get one, everyone’s supposed to be like, “Wow, she’s even more talented than the rest of us stars.” But I needed the money, so everyone else who has a scholarship probably did too. My parents aren’t poor or anything, but D’Arts costs almost as much as college (everyone there is always mentioning that). And I guess poor kids do have to be even more talented, because there must be more of us applying than kids who can pay. By the way, you’re allowed to call it “D’Arts” only if you go—who wouldn’t want that? And I know I keep mentioning American Idol. It’s not my dream or anything, it’s just an example of giving teenagers a shot at what they want most in the universe. The stakes are very high, is my point.
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