“Not p.f. enough,” my mother said.
“I’m tired of p.f.,” I said. “I’m not p.f.”
“You are so p.f.,” said my mother. “You’re little but you’re p.f.”
“There was a boy there on a board,” my father said. “That’s what we mean, Little Little.”
“If you don’t like going to school in La Belle,” my mother said, “pick out any regular boarding school in the country, cost is no consideration, and go there!”
“And have my classmates’ parents drive off saying, ‘Did you see that poor little dwarf? It’s a nice enough place but that dwarf could be depressing.’”
“In the first place you are not a dwarf,” my mother said, “and in the second place little people who are p.f. don’t depress anyone! They don’t!”
“I’m not for the boarding school idea at all,” my father said.
“Well, you won’t let go!” said my mother. “Even if it’s for her own good, you won’t let go.”
“She doesn’t want to go to boarding school,” my father said.
“She’s never thought about it,” my mother said.
“Why should she?”—my father.
There was always a point in these conversations when I began to be referred to as “she” or “her,” as though I wasn’t there in person, but very much there as their permanent, unsolvable problem.
If Cowboy was a cat she would carry Mock Hiroyuki like a kitten, by his neck, she was so protective of him.
When he announced he had to go home to get ready for the game that afternoon, Cowboy walked him up to Lake Road, to wait while he thumbed a ride.
Mock Hiroyuki is the closest Cowboy has ever come to playing with a doll, and their relationship made my family nervous.
When I went back to the solarium, even though Cowboy and Mock were at least a half a mile from the house, my mother whispered to me, “What is it she sees in that boy?”
She was sitting in the white wicker chair, thumbing through the newspaper. “How can she spend so much time with him?”
“Maybe the Hiroyukis wonder how he can spend so much time with Cowboy.”
“According to your father, the Hiroyukis are too busy trying to set up something called a pachinko parlor downtown, a place full of pinball machines. Now, that’s all this town needs!”
“This town is like me trying to pretend I’m tall,” I said. “Why doesn’t it just face the fact it’s different?”
“And let pinball machines in right in the downtown?” my mother said. “Would you like to live in a town with a Japanese pinball machine parlor right across from The Soda Shoppe? I wouldn’t.”
Then she started in on the Hiroyukis, on a trap plant being one thing and a pachinko parlor being quite another, on give some people an inch and they take a mile, and the next thing you know there’s a sukiyaki restaurant next to the pachinko parlor, and after that the geisha girls arrive.
I went and sat in my white wicker rocking chair, which is my size and has white duck pillows tied to it and faces the white duck couch where my mother moved to, to spread out the newspaper, rambling on about what the Japanese wanted to do to La Belle.
Once Cowboy and I found all the love letters my mother and father had written to each other. My father signed all of his “Always and all ways, Larry,” and she enclosed poems she wrote in hers. One was called “Larry, Our Love Is Sputnik.” (Launched the same night / Reaching for outer space and finding itself a baby moon / A satellite of earth / Where other lovers wait and / Play it safe and never / Dance with stars.)
Cowboy and I had gotten out the World Almanac to look up the date the Russians launched Sputnik, which was before my mother and father got married.
I often looked at my mother and tried to imagine her swept off her feet by any emotion. But I couldn’t, any more than I could imagine her when she was my age and planning to be a famous poet.
In one letter my father wrote, You’ll be the brilliant lawyer’s wife and I’ll be the brilliant poetess’s husband. Oh, Ava, my life—what a life we’ll have!
I’d think again of the Sadistic Oracle sweeping down on him as he was bent over the sheet of blue stationery that letter was written on.
“You want to know what it’s really going to be like, Larry? You’ll flunk your bar exam and go into the boot business. She’ll write doggerel for the local paper.”
I said to Cowboy, “The perfect couple about to live the perfect life. Then I came along.”
“It hasn’t got anything to do with you,” Cowboy said. “It’s growing up. If you could grow up and become something besides an adult, it wouldn’t be so bad. Nothing good begins with ‘adult.’ There’s adult, adulterate, adultery—”
And we’d laugh, but I was never totally convinced I hadn’t ruined their life.
“Well, look at it this way, then,” Cowboy would argue. “They ruined yours. It was the combination of the two of them that made you what you are, wasn’t it? If you’d had other parents you might not be what you are.” Then she’d always rush to add, “Not that what you are is bad.”
My mother finally found her poem in The Examiner, across from an editorial urging that the city dump be cleared and made into an airport.
“Honey!” she said. “Turn the sound down a little on the TV so I can read you my poem. They printed the one about autumn!”
I went across and stood on the stool to turn the sound down.
Then I sat on the stool and waited for her to read me her poem.
“Here goes, Little Little,” she said, and her face was flushed with pleasure.
She said, “Are you ready?”
AUTUMN
God takes his paintbrush to the leaves,
Splashing them like an artist painting
Rich reds
