But no one tries to pick up Cowboy anymore. She doesn’t have to put up with the compulsion some have to sweep someone little off her feet and swing her around like a doll.
My Grandfather La Belle is the worst offender.
“Well well well well, how’s my little lady?” he barked out, and there I was again, in midair, along with the flags and practice balls and balloons.
Then he set me down on the wooden bench while he turned to Cowboy and said, “Hello there.” She ducked his kiss and ran with Mock to sit beside our mother.
Grandfather La Belle has trouble dealing with Cowboy. He seldom says her name when he talks to her. She is too androgynous for him. She has overstayed her time in the tomboy stage. When he visits our house he no longer goes out to the backyard with her for a game of catch, as he used to. He treats the fact she likes to discuss the plays and scores of most ball games as though that interest was like a red baby rash that should have disappeared from view long ago.
But I remain his darling.
He was ready to pick me up again when I jumped down from the bench, out of reach. He moved over and petted my coat instead, crooning, “What a treat that you came to the game with us, Little Little!”
“Who read my poem in today’s Examiner?” my mother called out.
My grandmother turned to her and said it was lovely, just lovely, that autumn was exactly like God had a paintbrush in his hand.
“I wrote it in a day,” my mother said.
My father said to my grandfather, “Guess who walked right up to that Roach fellow and started a conversation?”
“Riddre Riddre,” Mock Hiroyuki answered my father’s question without being asked it.
My father continued talking to my grandfather. “I turn my back and she’s off talking to that Roach character.”
“I like him,” I said. “I like him a lot.”
“Who read my poem in today’s Examiner?” my mother called out.
Cowboy gave me a look and I gave her one. As Cowboy would put it, things were “a little minty.”
My grandmother, who is willing to go along with anything, even when it means going back over the same thing, said sweetly, “It was a lovely poem, Ava, just a lovely analogy…. God’s paintbrush and the autumn leaves.”
“I wrote it in a day,” my mother said.
“Congratulations!” my grandfather thundered, but he turned and frowned hard at my father.
Cowboy says I hear things out of the corner of my ears the same way people see things out of the corner of their eyes, while they’re watching other things.
What I heard, while I was making small talk with Cowboy and Mock, was a mention of Little Lion between my father and grandfather.
I tuned in to this:
“… fine young man, from a very fine family,” said my grandfather.
“I think he has a case on himself,” said my father.
“You don’t even know him, Larry.”
“You don’t either.”
“I know about him. There’s not a finer young man in all of TADpole.”
“Why does he wear white all the time?”
“You wore white when you were a young man.”
“Not all the time.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with wearing white. What kind of an objection is that? You might say he drinks, or he smokes marijuana, or he steals, or he has a filthy mouth, and someone might listen to you, but who’s going to listen to someone complain a young man wears white all the time?”
“I don’t care what he wears,” my father said.
“You just criticized him because he wears white all the time.”
“It’s no concern of mine.”
“I hope Ava is, because Ava is going downhill in a hand bucket!”
“She’s in her change of life,” said my father.
“She’s in the bottle is what she’s in. She’s been going through a lot these many years.”
“Well, we all have.”
“No, we all haven’t! You’ve had your work. She’s been the one to bear the brunt of it…. The best thing in the world for Ava would be to see Little Little married. Then she’d be free. Cowboy doesn’t present the same problem, but Cowboy’s got her things to work out, too. It’d be a blessing for Cowboy, as well.”
The Bombers band marched out on the field for the pregame warm-up.
Cheerleaders followed behind, some cartwheeling, others pitching flaming batons four feet in the air and catching them.
When the band played “La Cucaracha,” the cry went up for “ROACH!”
11: Sydney Cinnamon
EVEN THOUGH THEY PLAYED my theme song again and again, and began to chant ROACH! ROACH! ROACH!, I would not appear until the half. I knew I had strength for only one smashing performance on that hot Indian summer afternoon, and I saved myself until then.
But a small collection of my groupies gathered outside the gym, and as the game got under way, I went out to talk to them.
“Hey, aren’t you going to watch the game?”
“We came to see you, Roach!”
They were a motley crew, some of them familiar by now. One tall, skinny, black-haired girl, with enormous black-frame glasses that made her small face look buglike behind them, pushed a tiny bouquet of buttercups at me, which she’d tied together with red yarn.
“I picked them myself, Roach,” she said.
A boy with buck teeth handed me a small red balloon and asked me to autograph his sneaker. His sister had homemade fudge for me.
While I was signing “Good-luck wishes from The Roach!” across their pieces of paper, and asking them where they were from, what their names were, Mr. Palmer stopped by with a flashy blond on his arm. He was hurrying to the game, but he wanted to remind me we were having dinner that night with Mr. Hiroyuki. He gave my cheek a pinch, and called over his shoulder as he hurried toward the bleachers, “Remember that your appearance at the party tomorrow is a surprise! Don’t shoot your mouth off
