Little Little (6 page)

It was our own idea to move in together. My little things are on one side of the room—the neat side—and her big things and big mess are across from me.

Cowboy sank her large hands into the pockets of her jeans and paced in her Nikes, smoking a Camel.

“When do you plan to tell Mom and Dad?”

“They’ll get the good news from him.”

“Oh no!” Cowboy groaned. “He’s actually going to ask for your wee little hand?”

“Something like that.”

“I couldn’t marry a Goody Two-shoes. I couldn’t be a minister’s wife.”

My Grandfather La Belle had discovered Little Lion at a conference on Christian Views of Eschatology. Which is another way of saying death. (My mother says crossed over, or passed on. No one dies in my mother’s head. They just go on to their next appointment, somewhere the living are not.)

My Grandfather La Belle immediately invited Little Lion to a TADpole party my mother gave last July Fourth.

Little Lion is nineteen, three feet five and a half inches tall, redheaded, and freckled, a catch, who proposed to me in bold script across a sheet of stationery with
“WALK WITH ME”—LITTLE LION ENTERPRISES
across the top:

Though you have worn my ring only two months, Little Little, my love, we must take long steps to catch up in this world
—
Hallelujah! I have faith enough for two and enough passion to turn your head around! I would like to announce our engagement at your big birthday celebration. I’ll be coming direct from another appearance on
The Powerful Hour
(wait until you see my new white double-breasted suit
—
it’ll blow you away!)…. Also, let me speak to your parents privately before you say anything. That’s traditional. The Bible teaches (Proverbs 22:28) “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” … How I wish my dear parents were alive to meet you! You remind me of my own sainted mother, darling one!

Little presents began arriving, each one with a Little Lion card attached across which he would write: “Love! Hallelujah!”

Among them was a book called
Shadow of a Broken Man,
by George Chesbro. The hero of the book was Mongo, a dwarf, who was a professor of criminology and a private detective who’d once been in the circus.

“The TADpoles should read this book,” Little Lion wrote. “Here’s a dwarf who got out of the freak show and made something of himself!”

I kept the book in my car library, along with other books Little Lion sent. Most of them weren’t novels, and nearly all of them were about overcoming obstacles.

“Doesn’t he ever read anything depressing?” Cowboy asked me once. “It’d get me down if I had to read about rising above it all the time!”

That morning in our room, Cowboy said she hoped I wasn’t just talking myself into him.

“Well, isn’t that what everyone wants, what last summer was all about? Getting me married?”

“Not necessarily overnight, Little Little.”

“Still, that’s what it was all about.”

Cowboy didn’t deny it.

“When Mom hears the news she’ll be overjoyed,” I said.

Cowboy didn’t deny that, either.

“I couldn’t find anybody better,” I said.

“At least he’s p.f.,” said Cowboy. “That’ll set her heart to beating.”

I said, “You like Little Lion, don’t you? Didn’t you like him when you met him?” I weighed the possibilities of telling my sister I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, watching an ash as long as my first finger dangle at the end of her cigarette before it fell to the rug atop other cigarette ashes. That alone didn’t impress me that Cowboy had good judgment.

Cowboy said, “The Japanese consider it bad luck to shorten your last name. Did you know that, Little Little?”

I said sayonara to any heart-to-heart talk with Cowboy, and went across to my bureau for my car keys.

On my way to Stardustburger, at the beginning of Stardust Park, I saw the same dwarf I’d seen there the day before.

He was walking along by himself, head down, kicking the autumn leaves.

I drove past him slowly, wishing I had the nerve to pull over and ask him if he wanted a ride somewhere.

I remembered the way Little Lion walked. He bounced. Everything about Little Lion was buoyant. I could almost feel a charge of energy when I touched the envelopes his letters arrived in, as though an even more miniature Knox Lionel were inside, racing up and down the loops of the script. His letters were always fat ones, with little fat hearts dotting the
i’
s. His handwriting was like he was: running boldly all over the place.

Sometimes late at night I imagined us somewhere in a little house raising kids who grew larger and larger, filled with his energy, breaking the furniture as they grew, their heads crashing through the ceilings, their arms holding us over their heads, laughing. “Hallelujah!”

While I was in my car eating my Morning Muffin, I watched the dwarf go inside Stardustburger.

I saw others watching him along with me, one big truck driver whirling around with a grin, nudging another man and pointing.

The dwarf skittered through the door, not looking in any direction but straight down.

He didn’t see me, I don’t think, but I decided to send him some sign that I was around, that he wasn’t the only one that morning.

A
FTER I WOKE UP
in The Stardust Inn, I stood on a chair by the window and looked out at the lake, and what seemed like the beginning of another hot September day.

The heat from the lights in a TV studio was nothing compared to the heat of the sun under my shell, when I was performing out in the open. My commercials took less time to shoot, too, and I didn’t use up that much energy.

I hadn’t done my halftime act for a while, and I felt that I needed some kind of warm-up, so I decided to walk down to Stardustburger for breakfast, instead of ordering it served in my room.

I didn’t even have to ask where Opportunity was staying when he arrived in La Belle, but I did, and they told me at the desk he was expected sometime Sunday morning.

I left this note for him:

Dear Opportunity, Did anyone ever tell you that as Little Lion, in your white suit, you look like Pillsbury’s Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy? I’ve come up from my thicket, too, and my little ass is also going first class. When you get in, call Room 807 for a reunion with another ex-Leprechaun. Guess who?

At Stardustburger I ordered a Morning Muffin and a Dr Pepper, after I managed to get myself up on a stool at the counter.

When the waitress brought my order, she put a paperback book beside it.

“This was sent in to you by Little Little La Belle,” she said.

“Where is she?”

“She always eats in her car … out there.”

I whirled around on my stool in time to see a blue Volvo pull away.

“You one of those TADs?” the waitress asked me.

“What’s a TAD?”

“I don’t know what it stands for, but we had a whole lot of them here this past summer, invited by the La Belles. Little friends for her.”

I picked up the book. It was called
Shadow of a Broken Man.

What I liked best were the kind of books Cloud and I passed back and forth in Mistakes. I owe my reading tastes to Cloud, whose father was an alcoholic poet-in-residence at some small junior college. Cloud’s mother had gone mad one Christmas and Cloud’s father had written a poem about it called “No, No, Noel,” published in a poetry journal. Cloud never read books about normals. He said there was always a ring of untruth in them.

We shared dog-eared books that were underlined and dirty with the marks of eager fingers, as we got others in Mistakes to read them, too.

There was
Very Special People,
by Frederick Drimmer, featuring three-legged men, dwarfs, giants, and pinheads. There was
Freaks,
by Leslie Fiedler.
The Dwarf,
by Pär Lagerkvist.
Leo and Theodore
and
The Drunks
about Siamese twins, by Donald Newlove. There was
Freaks Amour,
by Tom De Haven, and
The Geeks,
by Craig Nova.
Memoirs of a Midget,
by Walter de la Mare, and
The Elephant Man,
by Ashley Montagu.

All such books were frowned on by Miss Lake.

“We will
not
dwell on our differences from other people!” she would screech at us if she came upon one of these books. “We will emphasize our similarities,
not
our dissimilarities! It does no good to wallow in it!”

“She’s a Sara Lee, so how does she know if it does good or not?” Cloud would complain.

It was Cloud who thought up the label Sara Lee for normals: Similar And Regular And Like Everyone Else.

All those at Twin Oaks who didn’t live in Mistakes were Sara Lees.

It was also Cloud who dreamed up Mistakes’ own version of Academy Awards night, with little clay Frankenstein statues we called Monsters to simulate Hollywood’s Oscars.

One year I won a Monster for “Least Likely to Be Adopted,” and grinned and blushed my way up to the makeshift podium outside Cloud’s closet, while everyone sang Cloud’s song, “I Gotta Be Me and Not Sara Lee.”

There was the year Wheels won a Monster for “Most Likely to Be Refused Service in a Restaurant,” and Wires Kaplan won a Monster for “Most Likely to Scare Little Children.”

Miss Lake detested this dark humor and would not tolerate any use in her presence of our nicknames for each other: Pill, Wires, Wheels, Gimp, and my own nickname in those days: Quasimodo, who was the hero of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Cloud was the entrepreneur of Mistakes, and once tried to rent himself out as a lucky piece upon hearing that in certain places down South people kidnapped albinos and took them home since they believed a captured one brought success. He also told me certain people said it was lucky to touch a hunchback’s hump, and one Saturday afternoon positioned me outside Big Market in downtown Wilton, with a sign saying
TUCH MY HUMP FOR LUCK $1
. While the others from Mistakes went to see a disaster movie, Cloud and I were in business, until someone reported us to Miss Lake.

“Why would you do that to yourself, Sydney?” she complained as we all drove back to Twin Oaks in her car. “You didn’t even spell ‘touch’ right.”

“Cloud made the sign,” I said, and Cloud passed me six dollars in the backseat of the car, my share in our venture. He whispered to me, “We should have charged more. We could have cleaned up.”

“Don’t
call Albert ‘Cloud,’ Sydney,” said Miss Lake. “His name is
Albert
Werman.”

“I like ‘Cloud,’” Cloud said. “Before I came to Twin Oaks they used to call me Albert Worm, or just plain Wormy.”

“And ‘touch,’” Miss Lake continued dauntlessly, “has an
o
in it.”

I stayed in Stardustburger long after I’d finished my Morning Muffin and Dr Pepper, sipping coffee and reading
Shadow of a Broken Man.

It was about a dwarf detective named Mongo.

Some of it I liked a lot. I liked the part where Mongo described how his normal brother carried him on his shoulders when Mongo was a kid, “through a tortured childhood brimming with jeers and cruel jokes.”

It made me glad I’d grown up at Twin Oaks, in Mistakes.

If my mother hadn’t decided to dump me when I was born, I could have wound up the only one different in some small town, and gone through what Mongo described.

The only thing I knew about being left at the orphanage was that my mother signed me over to them. I was not even sure Cinnamon was my last name. For all I know they could have been making cinnamon buns for lunch in the kitchen at Twin Oaks when I was dropped off there, and that was how I came by the name. I wasn’t even sure of the Sydney. Maybe he was the taxi driver who brought me to the door, or a groundsman who found me on the steps balled up in a blanket. No one I asked seemed to know any more than I did.

Whoever my mother was, I imagined her leaving me there in tears and never getting over it. I also added to that fantasy her death of a broken heart at an early age.

I recognize that there’s a possibility this lady caught a fast cab direct from the delivery room of the hospital, dumped the brat with the hump on the doorstep, and went to the nearest roadhouse calling for a celebration: “Champagne for everybody! Whew, was that kid a creep and a half!”

But I can think what I want about this mother of mine, can’t I? I can invent her out of my own imagination, which is not, I’ve grown to appreciate from listening to some stories about real mothers, all that big a disadvantage.

I’ve given my father a suitable escape route, too, pronouncing him dead before I was even born.

I read on about Mongo until I felt hungry customers coming into Stardustburger for lunch, breathing in my hair, wanting my stool at the counter.

Finally I paid up and slipped down off my stool.

I held the book under my arm tightly (it would come to me in wondrous waves that Little Little La Belle had sent it in there to me). I didn’t even mind when a little girl standing in line between her mother’s legs began glaring at me. Okay, I’d give her two seconds to come out with something, but it was four, and I was almost out the door as she shouted, “Is that an elf, Ma?”

Someone else spoke up. “No, sweetheart, that’s a shrimp cocktail!”

On my way to The Stardust Inn, I thought about what the waitress had said, that Little Little La Belle always ate in her car.

I hadn’t thought of the idea that driving a car you could look like anyone else. It was the same in certain restaurants with long tablecloths and something under you to give you height.

Once, in Syracuse, New York, in this fancy restaurant where Mr. Palmer took me after we’d signed the contract for the commercials, a woman seated next to me on the banquette had asked me for a match.

I was sitting on a wooden crate that tomato paste had been shipped in, atop a corduroy desk chair pad from the manager’s office. It was a makeshift arrangement the manager apologized about; the children’s seat was already in use.

The woman hadn’t noticed.

“I don’t smoke,” I told her.