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
