Little Little (2 page)

“So long, Sydney,” Mr. Palmer said in the doorway. “See you in September. In La Belle.”

YOU ARE INVITED TO A PARTY

Get out your drum and fife and fiddle,

We’re giving a party for Little Little,

On a September weekend here in La Belle,

Reserve a room at The Lakeside Motel,

There’ll be lots to do on Sat. and Sun.

A banquet, a movie, and other fun.

It’s a TADpole party for our little queen,

It’s a birthday party, she’ll be eighteen!

—Ava Hancock La Belle

Once when my sister, Cowboy, was little, she asked me why I wasn’t “throwed away” when I was born.

“I wasn’t throwed away,” I told her, “because no one knew then that I was different.”

“Wasn’t you littler than anybody?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You was funny-looking, though, wasn’t you?”

“I never looked better,” I said.

That is a fact. I was a normal baby, even a big one—nine pounds and two ounces at birth. I had my mother’s golden hair and my father’s light green eyes.

I don’t think my sister ever stops asking herself that question, though we are thick as thieves now and united against a world that is barking mad.

Still, it has been a blight on Cowboy’s life that the town dwarf is her older sister.

My mother has this thing about certain words and one of them is “pee.”

She says don’t say pee. I say I hate the word “urinate,” it’s so official-sounding for something you do with your pants down. Why do you have to use either word? she asks me. Say I have to go to the bathroom if you have to say anything, or say you’d like to wash up. My father says just say excuse me. Or just say I’ll be right back.

You
could
say something fun, my father says, like I have to spend a penny, or see a man about a dog. My mother brightens at this prospect and says when
I
was in high school I said I have to use the Kitty Litter or I have to tinkle. Now they start together enthusiastically, their eyes shining with the pleasure of finding a way to avoid saying I have to pee or I have to urinate….
Où est le WC?
I have to use the head. I’m going to the john. I’ve got to see Mrs. Jones. I have to powder my nose. I have to pay a visit to the ladies’. I have an errand. I’m going to the little girls’. I have to make wee-wee. I have to go to the loo. On and on.

Another word my mother cannot stand is “dwarf.”

“Don’t say ‘dwarf,’” my mother says. “Call yourself a little person or a midget or a diminutive. Anything but ‘dwarf.’”

That’s why I prefer to call myself a dwarf.

“You picture someone with a hump when you hear the word ‘dwarf,’” my mother whines at me.

I tell her, “One person’s picture is another person’s child. There are probably people who picture cone-headed gnomes when they hear the words ‘little person’ or ‘midget’ or ‘diminutive.’”

“No, no, no, a little person or a midget or a diminutive is just a very small person, like you, Little Little, perfectly formed and perfectly beautiful.”

“If I’m so perfect, what does it matter what I call myself?”

“Well, Little Little, your mouth isn’t perfect.”

“What’s wrong with my mouth?”

“It’s always open, seems to me, and there’s always something sassy coming out of it.”

My mother has been trying for nearly eighteen years to have a sense of humor about it. She treats Life as though it were some great force even larger than God. God gets the credit for everything good that happens, but anything bad or bewildering that happens causes her to exclaim, “Well what is Life going to do to us next!”

Giving birth to someone like me is a little like falling off a horse. The very best thing you can do is get right back on one as quickly as possible, so you lose your fear of horses. Which explains why my sister was hustled into being very soon after my mother’s reeling head was just beginning to assimilate the knowledge I’d never stand taller on two feet than the family dog did on four.

At five months I weighed fifteen pounds and two ounces and was two feet one inch tall. At the end of a year my weight and height were exactly the same.

Cowboy was born when I was two, and though I grew a little more, at ten I stopped growing. Cowboy was eight and towering over me. I stood, and still stand, three feet three inches tall.

My real name is Belle La Belle, but I have always been called Little Little by everyone, even teachers.

Cowboy’s real name is Emily, and only teachers ever call her that.

Cowboy was supposed to have been the long-awaited boy, Larry La Belle, Jr.

All the things my father planned to do with the long-awaited boy were done instead with Cowboy.

She has gone through many stages.

The one in which she earned her nickname went on from the time she was four until she was eleven. She rode horseback before her feet were long enough to reach the stirrups, and rode her bicycle as though it were a stallion, jumping off it after she flew into our front yard, letting it clatter ahead and crash into the garage wall, while she walked coolly away from it as though it were standing patiently saddled awaiting her return. Inside our house, I was always the Indian, being pursued by her and lassoed, our mother screaming after her not to wear her hat in the house, not to pull the rope too tight around my neck, “REMOVE THOSE SPURS YOU’LL SCRATCH THE FURNITURE!”

Long after she was out of chaps and boots, she had a thing for horses (and still does, though it does her no good, my father won’t buy her one). She went on for a while to her sports stage. Anything that bounced or could be thrown and caught was all she cared about. She spent long hours in the den with my father in the blue light of the boob tube cheering on men with first names like Bucky and Buzz, her dinner served on a tray the same as my father’s.

The death and suicide stage came in her early teens and was a disguised way of protesting having to have anything to do with me outside our home. She took to her bed rather than have to wait for me in front of school, or sit with me in the cafeteria, or say I was her sister.

Now it is hard to tell which one of us is most strange, me or Cowboy, though a dwarf will always look stranger anywhere.

Cowboy doesn’t wear her ten-gallon hat and chaps to school anymore, but in other ways she lives up to her name. She is tall enough to be sought out by the La Belle High girls’ basketball team (the only ones at school who seek her out) and walks as though she just got off the horse she wishes she owned. She spits sometimes, swears she doesn’t, but she stops and hawks into the gutters—I’ve seen her do it. And she smokes Camel cigarettes with no hands. A Camel dangles from her mouth at all times away from home and school, and she lopes around like some tall farm boy coming in from the wheat fields. Her hair is all tight curls, to her shoulders, and tangled, never combed. She claims a comb won’t go through it. Whatever she says comes out of the corner of her mouth. Her shy smiles are always tipped and she rarely shows teeth when smiling. I imagine that she smells of hay and manure, not a bad smell but a musky one my mother says is all in my head: “No one else smells Cowboy, Little Little.”

Cowboy likes to laugh with her hands in her pockets and her head thrown back, and when she’s not relaxed she cracks her knuckles.

“When is Life going to straighten you around!” my mother cries at her, and hugs her, says, “Oh, Cowboy, you are
something,
aren’t you?”

Our little town in the Finger Lakes, upstate New York, has been partially saved from economic disaster by the arrival of the Twinkle Traps plant, which is Japanese-owned. And Cowboy has been saved from being ostracized by nearly everyone except the girls’ basketball team, by glomming onto Mock Hiroyuki, a Japanese boy her same age, fifteen, new to our town and the country’s customs.

Cowboy is now in her Japanese stage.

She enters our house calling out
“Kon-nici-wa,”
and leaves with
“Sayonara!”

If we ever need Cowboy for anything, we know she is at the Hiroyukis’.

I
WAS ALWAYS A
sentimental fellow. My eyes teared at the memories of old times and leaked at the sounds of old songs recalling past days with friends I never saw anymore. I had favorite places, too, and one of them was Stardust Park.

Immediately after I checked into The Stardust Inn that hot Friday afternoon in September, I walked down to the park, even though I knew it was closed because it was off season.

Stardust Park was only thirty miles from The Twin Oaks Orphans’ Home.

When I was at Twin Oaks, I lived in Miss Lake’s cottage, where most of the handicapped lived. There were ramps for wheelchairs there instead of stairs, and sinks and closets and drinking fountains, et cetera, were lower to accommodate us.

All the kids who lived in Miss Lake’s called it Mistakes.

There was every kind of kid to be expected there, but I was the only dwarf.

Stardust Park in the summer was a miniature Disneyland, filled with all the things you’d find in one of those places, from a 62
-MPH
roller coaster to a ten-foot walking chicken.

I was taken there one time with some others from Mistakes, just as the sun was rising in the early morning sky.

We always went to public places before the public was allowed in.

Some of the employees who ran the rides and sold the souvenirs were sitting around having their morning coffee.

Even though they were supposed to be prepared for the visit from Twin Oaks, they didn’t look it. Their heads whirled around as we filed past them, and I said under my breath, “MyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?”

I always said what everyone watching us was thinking when we came into view. OhmyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?

There was me, and there was Wheels Potter, who had no legs and got about on a board with roller-skate wheels attached to it. There was Bighead Langhorn, whose head was the size of an enormous pumpkin set on a skinny body just a little taller than mine. There was Wires Kaplan, with his hearing aid and his thick glasses and his bum leg. There was Cloud, the one-armed albino, in his dark glasses with his massive head of curly white hair the texture of steel wool. There was Pill Suchanek, whose mother had taken some drug before Pill was born that threw her whole body out of whack and left her with flippers for arms. There were a few in wheelchairs and one on crutches, all led by a teacher we nicknamed Robot, because his first name was Robert and his only facial expression was a smile, his only mood cheerful.

I paid very little attention to The Underground City or the ten-foot chicken, the 62
-MPH
roller coaster, The Space Shuttle, The Early American Village, or Winter Wonderland.

I had gone on that expedition expressly to see Gnomeland.

Age eleven, I had never seen another dwarf, except on television or in drawings and photographs.

When I entered Gnomeland, I could not believe my eyes. It didn’t matter to me that they were all dressed in cute little costumes with bells attached to stocking caps and felt shoes on their feet, that the men wore fake white beards and some of the men and women wore cone-shaped red hats.

I laughed aloud at the buttons some wore proclaiming THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE GNOME.

I saw some with humps and some without, some wizened and ugly and some not, some old, some young—they all looked good to me.

I imagined (or I didn’t) that they were all smiling at me especially, as though we all shared a fantastic secret.

Still, shyly, I stayed by Robot, who must have read my bashfulness as some sort of reluctance.

“Are you bothered by this, Sydney?”

“Bothered?”

“By this … commercialization?”

“I’m not bothered,” I told him, not really sure what he was talking about. I added, “Anything but,” longing to speak to one of them, to get my nerve up to say something.

But all I managed was a futile tug at the arm of Robot’s coat when he said all right, next was the boat ride through The Underground City.

“Come on, Sydney!” Robot called as I fell behind. “Get ready to row row row your boat!”

A hunchback dwarf with a fat cigar in his mouth stood at a microphone singing, “You’re gnomebody ’til somebody loves you….”

I believed that I had died and gone to heaven.

When I got back to Twin Oaks, I wrote to Gnomeland, asking how old you had to be to get a job there, and enclosed a stamped self-addressed envelope to be sure of an answer.

I remember you but stay in school,
a Mr. T. Kamitses wrote back.
Get an etucation. Anyways, this is the last year Gnomeland will be at Stardust Park, for our contrack was not renewed. Good luck!

I kept the letter. Even with its bad news and bad spelling it was the only communication I’d ever had with another like me.

Six years later, walking through Stardust Park, I thought about that day.

That day was the beginning of when I knew I’d make it.

Of course I knew she was Little Little La Belle the instant I saw her by the shuttered cotton candy stand.

I was walking along, looking for some sign of the trailer camp mentioned in this note awaiting me when I’d checked in at The Stardust Inn:

Hey, Roach, remember your old buddy Digger Starr? Me and Laura Given got married and now have twin daughters. I’m playing my last year for The Bombers. We got a trailer parked in the trailer camp near the park if you can make dinner Fri. night about 7. Our rig is the silver one with the babies yelling inside (ha! ha!) so show up for a special dinner in honor of the sellebrity. (You.) It will be swell to see you so show up from your old buddy, D.S.

If I had to go anywhere at night, I liked to figure out my route ahead of time. I looked for well-lighted bus stops and streets with stores along the route, figuring out any moves I might be forced to make by gangs of kids, or a dog, or a mugger.

If the trailer park was close to the Inn, I planned to take a taxi, and this was what I was working on when I saw her.