I watched myself in the wall of mirrors at the end of Mr. Palmer’s office. I thought of the time I had visited Stardust Park. I was eleven then. Yet very little about my physical appearance had changed in those six years.
Three foot four and a half, still … the same hump, not bigger, not smaller. Legs too short for my body. My face could pass for normal. Light blue eyes, fair teeth except for one that hung like a fang longer than the others, bucking out from the row, sandy-colored hair, good skin … but the rest of me was like God’d gone mad when He started making me from the neck down.
“So long, Sydney,” Mr. Palmer said in the doorway. “See you in September. In La Belle.”
2: Little Little La Belle
YOU ARE INVITED TO A PARTY
Get out your drum and fife and fiddle,
We’re giving a party for Little Little,
On a September weekend here in La Belle,
Reserve a room at The Lakeside Motel,
There’ll be lots to do on Sat. and Sun.
A banquet, a movie, and other fun.
It’s a TADpole party for our little queen,
It’s a birthday party, she’ll be eighteen!
—Ava Hancock La Belle
Once when my sister, Cowboy, was little, she asked me why I wasn’t “throwed away” when I was born.
“I wasn’t throwed away,” I told her, “because no one knew then that I was different.”
“Wasn’t you littler than anybody?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You was funny-looking, though, wasn’t you?”
“I never looked better,” I said.
That is a fact. I was a normal baby, even a big one—nine pounds and two ounces at birth. I had my mother’s golden hair and my father’s light green eyes.
I don’t think my sister ever stops asking herself that question, though we are thick as thieves now and united against a world that is barking mad.
Still, it has been a blight on Cowboy’s life that the town dwarf is her older sister.
My mother has this thing about certain words and one of them is “pee.”
She says don’t say pee. I say I hate the word “urinate,” it’s so official-sounding for something you do with your pants down. Why do you have to use either word? she asks me. Say I have to go to the bathroom if you have to say anything, or say you’d like to wash up. My father says just say excuse me. Or just say I’ll be right back.
You could say something fun, my father says, like I have to spend a penny, or see a man about a dog. My mother brightens at this prospect and says when I was in high school I said I have to use the Kitty Litter or I have to tinkle. Now they start together enthusiastically, their eyes shining with the pleasure of finding a way to avoid saying I have to pee or I have to urinate…. Où est le WC? I have to use the head. I’m going to the john. I’ve got to see Mrs. Jones. I have to powder my nose. I have to pay a visit to the ladies’. I have an errand. I’m going to the little girls’. I have to make wee-wee. I have to go to the loo. On and on.
Another word my mother cannot stand is “dwarf.”
“Don’t say ‘dwarf,’” my mother says. “Call yourself a little person or a midget or a diminutive. Anything but ‘dwarf.’”
That’s why I prefer to call myself a dwarf.
“You picture someone with a hump when you hear the word ‘dwarf,’” my mother whines at me.
I tell her, “One person’s picture is another person’s child. There are probably people who picture cone-headed gnomes when they hear the words ‘little person’ or ‘midget’ or ‘diminutive.’”
“No, no, no, a little person or a midget or a diminutive is just a very small person, like you, Little Little, perfectly formed and perfectly beautiful.”
“If I’m so perfect, what does it matter what I call myself?”
“Well, Little Little, your mouth isn’t perfect.”
“What’s wrong with my mouth?”
“It’s always open, seems to me, and there’s always something sassy coming out of it.”
My mother has been trying for nearly eighteen years to have a sense of humor about it. She treats Life as though it were some great force even larger than God. God gets the credit for everything good that happens, but anything bad or bewildering that happens causes her to exclaim, “Well what is Life going to do to us next!”
Giving birth to someone like me is a little like falling off a horse. The very best thing you can do is get right back on one as quickly as possible, so you lose your fear of horses. Which explains why my sister was hustled into being very soon after my mother’s reeling head was just beginning to assimilate the knowledge I’d never stand taller on two feet than the family dog did on four.
At five months I weighed fifteen pounds and two ounces and was two feet one inch tall. At the end of a year my weight and height were exactly the same.
Cowboy was born when I was two, and though I grew a little more, at ten I stopped growing. Cowboy was eight and towering over me. I stood, and still stand, three feet three inches tall.
My real name is Belle La Belle, but I have always been called Little Little by everyone, even teachers.
Cowboy’s real name is Emily, and only teachers ever call her that.
Cowboy was supposed to have been the long-awaited boy, Larry La Belle, Jr.
All the things my father planned to do with the long-awaited boy were done instead with Cowboy.
She has gone through many stages.
The one in which she earned her nickname went on from the time she was four until she was eleven. She rode horseback before her feet were long enough to reach the stirrups, and rode her bicycle as though it were a stallion, jumping off it
