Little Little (3 page)

I had a chance to look at her before she spotted me. Aside from Dora, who appeared on national television as The Dancing Lettuce Leaf in the Melody Mayonnaise commercials, she was the most beautiful dwarf I’d ever seen.

I’d only seen Dora on the tube, watching sometimes for hours to catch a glimpse of her, so Little Little La Belle was the most beautiful dwarf I’d ever seen in person.

If I had conjured up an ideal female out of my imagination, I couldn’t have surpassed what I saw standing by
COTTON CANDY
in the late afternoon sunlight. She had long blond hair that shined and spilled down past her shoulders, and unlike the girls at Leprechaun Village she wore a dress instead of pants. She had long legs for someone so tiny, and she was thin and still tanned from summer.

The great disadvantage of being The Roach was that, without my shell, few people knew that was who I was. Some of my groupies who waited for me regularly when I made appearances had come to know me without it, but mostly I was an anonymous dwarf.

I think I am by nature a performer, and away from the hot lights of local TV stations, or the crowds at some place like The Golden Dragon (in long lines to receive one free fortune cookie in honor of its opening), I am not pushy. I see my hump reflected in watery patterns of store windows and pull my sweater down where it rides up in back, and cover my buck fang with my hand. I have my downs.

They pass. I am normally noisy, dancing to my radio and tapes in my room over Palmer Pest Control, cracking jokes and amiable around people, and in my daydreams stepping before the footlights like Michael Dunn, who played the dwarf in the movie
Ship of Fools.
Sometimes I see myself beating a tiny tin drum like Oskar in Günter Grass’s book … and sometimes in my act I sing under my shell, imagining myself singing windowpanes to pieces as Oskar did. I am a closet tenor who dreams of stepping out of his closet, and out from under the shell, to thrill the crowds with “Danny Boy.”

When Little Little La Belle finally did look in my direction, she looked hard and directly at me, and that was when I might have nodded, waved, smiled. I froze instead. I stayed so still she might have mistaken me for one of those wooden trolls people buy at garden centers and stick on their lawns. Except I was standing in the middle of a cement sidewalk outside of the penny arcade.

I could feel my face get red, and I looked away, demonstrating at least that my head moved.

By the time I glanced up at her again, she had started walking in the opposite direction.

I followed, not at a fast pace, but I went in the same direction she was going.

I knew she’d take a second look. We dwarfs come upon each other about as often as fish nest in trees, unless we’re all working together someplace. I planned a friendly wave that I couldn’t seem to bring my arms to execute, so when she sneaked a glance over her shoulder through her long golden hair, I merely trudged along in line with her, my arms paralyzed.

She walked faster. I didn’t want to charge after her in hot pursuit like some dwarf rapist on the loose. I finally stood near the 62
-MPH
roller coaster, as stopped in my tracks as it was.

When I was at Leprechaun Village, after a day’s work (we emptied ashtrays, brought pillows down poolside, paged people wanted on the telephone, ran errands, and got drinks from the bar) every night I would watch Opportunity Knox get dressed for a date. He was popular not only with other dwarfs but with normal-sized females as well. One night he slipped off for a very secret rendezvous with a guest, the wife of an Italian count, who gave him a gold signet ring inscribed
Amoretta.
That same night I had trudged along to a local movie with a group of employees, envying his luck.

“It isn’t luck, Sydney!” he’d insist. “Fate loves the fearless! Happiness hates the timid! Are you going to miss the plum because you’re afraid to shake the tree? Are you always going to be the anvil, and never the hammer?”

I stood there remembering that, doing hypnosis on Little Little La Belle’s back as she walked along:
You will look my way again!

It took her around twenty seconds to register my message, to turn and take another look, and I got ready for my one little puff of a gesture. There was no small effort involved, either, with my hump, which was the reason I’d perfected the stunt years ago, so that my feet went off the ground like flying.

She gave a look and I gave back: a cartwheel.

Back on my feet, I saw she was still watching me, and with one arm across my stomach, and one behind me an inch from my hump, I bowed low.

W
HEN I WAS GROWING
up, it was my Grandfather La Belle who gave me names like Richard Gibson, famous painter and most famous miniaturist in all the world … Toulouse-Lautrec, whose paintings were priceless and in every major museum … Attila the Hun, who led an army of half a million across Europe … Croesus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, from whom we get the expression “rich as Croesus” … and Richebourg, a spy in the French Revolution. On and on.

“All little people!” he would bellow. “All famous!”

When I asked him where the female dwarfs were, he said they were buried in history along with other notable ladies. He said they were there all right, he just didn’t happen to know about them.

He’d done a lot of research in the La Belle library and seemed always to have new names for me of other important dwarfs, with one omission.

“Why don’t you ever tell me about Tom Thumb?” I asked him.

“Oh, Tom Thumb,” he answered disdainfully.

“I’ve been reading a lot about him. He was very successful. He was a general and—”

“He was a general of nothing! He was given the title General by a fellow who had a circus. P. T. Barnum! He wasn’t a real general.”

“But he was the most famous dwarf in the world, wasn’t he?”

“He was paraded around.”

“He met Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington and the Prince of Wales. He even met President Lincoln.”

“He might have done all that without being a dwarf.”

“How?”

“How?”
my grandfather said. “By using what he had up here”—tapping his forehead with his finger—“instead of letting someone exploit him!”

“What does ‘exploit’ mean, Grandfather?”

“It means to utilize for profit. This Barnum fellow made a lot of money satisfying the public’s curiosity about what someone different looks like. He turned Tom Thumb into a sideshow!”

“Didn’t he pay him?”

“Oh, he paid him. But that’s no way to live your life, Little Little, and he’s no example to follow!”

Long after I needed to be burped, my grandfather would hold me in his arm tightly, jiggling me up and down the way you do a baby, and reciting into my ear:

If you can’t be a pine on top of the hill,

Be a scrub in the valley—but be

The best little scrub by the side of the rill;

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

They were soothing words to hear being danced around my room, until I grew old enough to think them over and decide that the idea of being a bush wasn’t all that appealing, and for me, anyway, not the answer, even if I was best bush.

Except for Calpurnia Dove, I am the best writer in Miss Grossman’s English class. Miss Grossman usually chooses to read aloud either something I have written or something Calpurnia has written. We are always neck and neck in the race.

When something Calpurnia wrote is read, I decide Miss Grossman is only being nice to her because Calpurnia is black, and mine is really better. Something tells me that when what I wrote is read, Calpurnia Dove decides Miss Grossman is only being nice to me because I’m a dwarf, and hers is really better.

There are not many black families in La Belle, or in Cayuta County. We are even uncertain about calling them “blacks” and still slip back at times to “Negro,” “colored,” worse.

Our downtown restaurants have more blacks waiting on tables than sitting at tables to be waited on, and more blacks than that in the kitchen with their hands in the dishwater.

What black teenagers there are in La Belle go mostly to Commercial High, to learn trades or business skills. Of the few that go to La Belle High, one is always elected to some office, unanimously. But that high honor rarely gets one of them a seat saved at noon in the cafeteria among the whites, or even a particularly warm hello.

Calpurnia Dove is the treasurer of our senior class, the only senior in the whole school who’s black.

That Friday afternoon on my big birthday weekend, the assignment for Miss Grossman’s class had been to write a short story.

I’d written one called “The Wistful Wheel,” about a wheel who longed to travel alone, but always had to be attached to something to move.

When I read it to Cowboy, she said, “This isn’t about a wheel. It’s about you, Little Little. You always hated traveling with the family.”

I hadn’t intended it to be about me, but maybe Cowboy was right. Maybe Miss Grossman was right, too, about what a fantasy was. She said when you wrote a fantasy you were like a spider spinning a web from your own insides.

Whenever our family went anywhere, we were always stared at because of me. There were always what Cowboy and I called “peepers” in the hotel dining room, or the motel lobbies. Wherever we went, we’d see them looking over the tops of their newspapers or menus, stealing glances when they thought we weren’t watching, sometimes just plain staring at us as though we’d just piled out of a flying saucer direct from Mars.

“Jeepers creepers, look at all the peepers,” Cowboy would remark.

She’d try her best to laugh it off, but she’d get red and start cracking her knuckles, and I’d wish I’d just eaten in my room, or not gone on the trip at all.

My mother’d purr, “You have to expect to be admired when you’re such an extraordinary little beauty, darling.”

But she’d knock back a double martini to get past it, and my father’s face would be fixed in a scowl, his angry eyes trying to meet with the peepers’ eyes to stare them down.

Except when we were all tooling along together in the car, I never really saw the sights when we went places. I saw the sightseers see me.

That afternoon in English class, I got my paper handed back along with all the others except for Calpurnia Dove’s. I saw her sitting at the front of the class empty-handed, biting her lips to keep from smiling, looking down at her desk so no one could see her eyes shining.

Miss Grossman had marked my paper A–. She wrote across the top of the first page:
Watch your spelling. But this is excellent. You know, going away to college is a way of traveling. You see a lot and you’re getting your first taste of independence, and you’re on your own. Did you ever think of that, Little Little?

Miss Grossman was the only person I knew who’d figured out a way of going to heaven without dying. You just went from high school to college.

If you were accepted by a college, Miss Grossman put your name up on her bulletin board with a gold star pasted next to it. You got a silver star for even sending in an application.

My father always told me, “It isn’t wrong to want to skip college. Just be sure you’re not passing it up for the wrong reason.”

“Just be sure,” my mother’d chime in, “you’re not trying to avoid the real world.”

“Of course I’m trying to avoid it,” I told her. “It’s real to you, but not to me.”

“There’s no way to avoid the real world,” my father could be counted on to point out in these conversations. “Not going to college is not going to stop the real world from being right outside the front door.”

“Then I’ll stay in the house,” I’d murmur back.

On and on.

Cowboy always said our mother faced the real world the same way someone handled a headache: she took something for it, from a bottle.

After we got our stories back and all read Miss Grossman’s comments, she said, “And now I’d like to read something for you that Calpurnia Dove wrote.”

It began:

The first time I was ever called nigger I was four years old and went home crying. Didn’t even know why I was, didn’t even know what “nigger” meant. Only knew it was bad. So my mother say oh they got around to saying that to you, did they, well get in the boat here along with the rest of us, you got a lot of company on the stormy sea, honey, ain’t one of us not been called that, ain’t one of us heard “nigger” for the last time, either.

I used to daydream that I was from an all-dwarf family. I would imagine my mother, father, grandparents, and Cowboy all shrunk to my size, living in a little house locked in against a larger world, laughing at them and cursing them, sharing their tyranny with other La Belles.

Although in various ways and straight out I was told by my mother I would not grow to be as tall as other people, it did not sink in until my little sister grew bigger than I was.

In every room of our house, there is a chair my size.

When Cowboy was very young, she would always try to sit in my chairs. For a time, my father added other small chairs to appease Cowboy, until she was too big to be comfortable in them.

When she stopped sitting in the little chairs around the house, I grabbed at them ecstatically, as though they were cake and the other hungry cake-eater in the house had suddenly dropped out of the contest.

Then came the day Cowboy no longer needed to be lifted to the drinking fountain outside Lathrop’s on Main Street, and no longer needed to stand on the box to wash her hands in the bathroom sink.

The picture was coming into focus.

My mother answered all my questions in tears, and my father never gave up the idea of measuring me by the long yellow tape measure fixed to the kitchen wall.

Cowboy, during this period, let me have things of hers she really wanted for herself.

When school let out that Friday afternoon, it was like a summer day and I took a walk in Stardust Park.

When I saw him outside the penny arcade, I thought he might be someone we’d invited to my party, who’d arrived a day early.