Little Little (16 page)

“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 table. 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.

“… A
ND 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.
…”

“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.