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.
Mr. Palmer got this lopsided smile on his face and said, “Sydney, all the waiters are busy. Why don’t you go over to the hatcheck girl and get some matches for the lady?”
“Oh, I can wait for the waiter,” the woman said.
“He’ll be glad to get you some,” Mr. Palmer said. “Sydney?”
I knew he was setting me up. I could feel my face get red.
“Please, Sydney?” Mr. Palmer gave me a wink.
Okay, so I gave in, got down off the crate, and started away from the table.
I heard the woman exclaim, “Oh my! I never—” and Mr. Palmer chuckle and tell her, “You didn’t want to miss that, did you?”
When I brought the matches back to the table, the woman leaned down and accepted a light. “Well, this takes the cake!” she said, all smiles and purring. “He’s just as adorable as he can be!”
“He’s my new television star,” said Mr. Palmer. “I’m Albert Palmer. Palmer Pest Control.”
“Isn’t he something,” she said.
“Give her your line, Sydney,” said Mr. Palmer.
I said, “My what?”
“Your line,” he said. He laughed and reached down and pinched my cheek. “This little fellow plays a certain little insect which shall remain nameless in this fine restaurant. After a cloud of Palmer Pest Control repellent he says—go ahead, Sydney.”
“You’ll be the death of me,” I said.
Mr. Palmer laughed harder and the woman clapped her hands together with delight.
“Well, you”—she finally talked directly to me, instead of calling me “he”—“are as cute as a bug in a rug!”
“Speaking of bugs in rugs,” Mr. Palmer said, reaching for his business card from the pocket inside his jacket, then winding up like a pitcher about to throw a ball, “my card!” slapping it down on the table.
The woman let it sit there and reached out for me with her long arm, hooking me in toward her.
“Speaking of adorable little bugs in rugs,” she crooned, and leaned down in a halo of perfume to plant a wet kiss on my cheek.
Mr. Palmer chuckled. “I bet that’s the first time you ever kissed a roach!”
So much for show business.
8: Little Little La Belle
WHEN I GOT BACK from Stardustburger, Cowboy was sitting on the floor in our solarium, next to Mock Hiroyuki, helping my mother make out place cards for my birthday banquet.
Mock Hiroyuki has thick black hair, as straight as Cowboy’s is tangled, and he is much shorter than my sister. He always sits so close to her he seems like a tiny kangaroo who has tumbled out of his mother’s pouch and is clinging as close as possible to her.
Because his l’s come out like r’s, he says “harro.”
He said, “Harro, Riddre Riddre.”
My mother, with her thing about certain words, tried for the longest time to do something about the way the word “sit” came out of Mock Hiroyuki’s mouth. The Japanese have no si sound; si becomes shi.
“Then just avoid the word ‘sit’ altogether, Mock,” my mother finally suggested. “Just say I’ll take a chair over there.”
“You can say I’ll be seated,” my father said.
“Or, I’d like to get a load off my feet,” said my mother.
“How about I’d like to park my carcass?” said my father.
On and on.
My mother was complaining that “with all these place cards to print out, I haven’t even had time to see if my poem was printed in today’s paper. Did you pick up a copy of The Examiner, Little Little?”
I told her there was a copy in the hall.
“And where have you been?” she said. “Driving around in your car, as usual. Oh, honey, you can’t live in that car!”
“I don’t.”
“You do, and I know why you do, but Daddy didn’t get you that car for you to hide in!”
Cowboy said in an aside to Mock Hiroyuki, “When she’s in the car, nobody knows if she’s big
