I look at those old photographs and imagine some sadistic oracle sweeping down on them during some golden moment, telling her she’ll end up so fat she’ll break chairs, and him he’ll father the town dwarf.
My mother was also Someone in her small town, a cheerleader and all-A student who dreamed of becoming a writer and everyone said looked like the movie star Grace Kelly. But in La Belle, New York, she was the outsider, and there were those who said Larry La Belle’s life took a complete turnaround because he married her.
So my mother always took pains to point out Lana Waite, and say, “Look, Larry, there’s your old girlfriend, Orca the Whale!”
I go to La Belle High with Wendy Waite, her daughter, who is the school fatty and one of the ones I give rides to after school. I pick my passengers carefully, although there are no lines in the school parking lot waiting for the opportunity to ride with me. Calpurnia Dove, my great rival, is one of my passengers, and Gerald Percy, the town sissy, darts past the jocks who call him “fag” to slide in beside me. I even give a lift at times to Dorsey Bobbin, who shows himself to girls summers in Puck Park behind the rosebushes until the police come, although in my backseat he huddles in a corner and says only, “Here’s my street,” when we come to it.
None of them are my friends, really. I don’t make friends, or like to go to other people’s homes where nothing is my size and everything is out of reach. In the halls at school and at lunch I pal around with Cowboy, and now with Mock Hiroyuki, who clings to Cowboy like Saran Wrap to your fingers, and says the letter l like r, so calls me “Riddre Riddre.”
After school, Cowboy reports to the gym, for her only moments as a school heroine, the tallest girl on the La Belle High basketball team. Mock waits just outside the gym door for her, composing haiku (“After I am dead / Come and cry over my tomb / Little cuckoo bird”).
When I’ve dropped everyone off at their corners, I hang out in my car. It is like my own little apartment on wheels. I have my own library in it. I have sweaters, a raincoat, extra shoes, lots of Flairs in various colors of ink, my three-subject notebook in which I write my stories, my glass globe of the world filled with dimes all the way to the Great Lakes, and a carton full of tapes: top ten, rock, golden oldies.
What I do a lot is drive around this town.
They all know me in this town.
I don’t know all of them, but they all know me.
They know my name and they tell the story about my father bringing his new bride back from college. They say what a handsome young couple they were, and how they built their new home on four acres of old La Belle land up on the side of Cayuta Lake called the Gold Coast, because so many of the rich in the town settled there. They describe the parties the young Larry La Belles threw, and how the moonlight sailing races started off from the yacht club, went the distance of the long lake, and wound up at the La Belle dock, festooned with brightly colored lanterns, music playing, a dance waiting, and a midnight buffet.
Oh, they were the special ones, they say, and then this beautiful blond little girl was born, as normal-looking in the beginning as any one of our children.
On and on.
People are not afraid of me the way they are of Willie Moat, who’s both crippled and crazy and calls out filthy words from his bedroom window on South Street. And they aren’t embarrassed to look at me, as they are when they see old Dr. Kimbrough’s widow lurching around town drunk, picking through city trash baskets with three hats on her head, and hundred-dollar bills tucked in her gloves she asks the bus driver to change.
I am as different as they are, but people smile at me. Just seeing me makes them smile, the way you smile at an amusing child.
I go someplace like Stardustburger, at the head of the lake near Stardust Park, and they all know my name, although I don’t know theirs. I go there a lot because I don’t have to get out of my car to be served.
I read and eat and sometimes smoke a cigarette.
And sometimes someone will shout at me from another car or truck, something like, “Hey, Little Little, aren’t you afraid that cigarette will stunt your growth?”
I give them the finger, the gesture my mother says she’d like to know where I learned and wishes I would please stop using.
“I’ll stop when they stop with their cracks,” I tell her.
“But they aren’t shouting obscenities at you, Little Little.”
“They aren’t shouting have a nice day, either.”
“Can’t you just stick your tongue out at them?” my mother asks.
“Shake your fist at them,” my father suggests.
“Just make a face,” says my mother.
“Hold your nose as though you smelled something bad”—my father.
“Raise one eyebrow”—my mother. “You know how to arch your eyebrow?”
I give them the finger.
La Belle is a town with a problem just the opposite of mine. It looks good on the outside but is isn’t that way inside.
You drive into this town and
