Around the neck of the giraffe, he’d tied the envelope with a card inside.
I long for you, it said.
18: Little Little La Belle
“TANOSHII TANJOBI, RIDDRE RIDDRE,” Cowboy had whispered at me early that morning, kneeling beside my little bed in her pajamas. “That’s ‘Happy Birthday’ in—”
“Japanese!” I finished the sentence for her and pulled my covers over my head. “Go away! I’m not speaking to anyone in this family!”
“I’m the one who shouldn’t be speaking to you,” she said. “I have to wear a dress today because of you!”
“Go a-way,” I said. “I don’t care what you wear!”
Name the one thing Cowboy hated most, next to not owning a horse, and it would have to be wearing a dress.
“I have to wear a dress and panty hose and pumps and go to church!” she said. “All because of you!”
I stayed under the covers and listened to her rattling hangers in her closet across the room. I was mad at her because of something she’d said the night before.
The first thing my father’d done when he’d brought me home was unplug the telephone in our room and take it with him.
Cowboy had held her sides laughing after he’d stormed out of the room, and then asked me what had inspired me to run off with Dwarf Longnose anyway?
That was a reference to a book that went way back to our childhood.
Cowboy had brought the book home from the library when she was around five years old. She had selected it herself, along with some others, from Kiddy Corner, telling my mother she’d found a book about me.
Dwarf Longnose was a children’s book about Jacob, the shoemaker’s son. An evil fairy had used an enchanted herb to change Jacob into a dwarf with a hunched back and a long nose. Jacob’s family had thrown him out, and Jacob had become a successful chef in a duke’s palace. A goose helped him find the herb to turn him back to normal.
“This is not a book about Little Little!” my mother had yelled at Cowboy. “Don’t you ever bring a book like this home again!”
“Little Little doesn’t have a hunched back”—my father.
“Or a long nose!” my mother said. “Cowboy, you are just as mean as you can be! Look at the pictures in this book! Is that what you think your sister looks like?”
My father had the book removed from the La Belle library, and poor Cowboy never dared check out another library book.
In one of her suicide attempts, when she swallowed down a combination of Dristan and Midol, then ran into the living room to say good-bye to our parents, she sobbed out all the injustices she’d suffered through as my sister. Bringing home that book and catching hell for it was at the top of her list.
We’d laughed about it later, and when my mother began giving parties last summer for the TADpoles, always checking out ahead of time who was p.f. and who wasn’t, we’d giggled to each other that the only way Dwarf Longnose would get invited would be if he had royal blood or wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or the chef who had the in with the goose.
I thought about all that and decided not to give Cowboy a hard time over the remark, so I sat up in bed in time to see her run the left leg of her panty hose because she hadn’t cut her big toenail.
“*&%$#@!” Cowboy said.
“I told you to cut your toenails. They’re so long they’re curling over.”
“If they were curling over, I wouldn’t have run my stocking, Little Little…. Tanoshii tanjobi.”
“Stick to English.”
“There’s a whole tableful of gifts for you downstairs, and Little Lion sent white roses.”
Cowboy ripped off the panty hose and went across to her bureau drawer to rummage through it for another pair. The long ash at the end of her cigarette dropped into the sock pile she’d shoved aside. The white bra she had on, with the little red bow at the V, had nothing filling it. My mother made her wear the bra when she wore a dress. That was one of my mother’s convictions: a bra goes with a dress, just as gloves went with church and something red was worn on Christmas.
“Well, what’s he like?” Cowboy said.
“You’d like him,” I said. “He doesn’t have a long nose, he has a long tooth. And he reads really depressing stuff. On the way to The Palace last night he told me about this short story called ‘The Dwarf’ by Ray Bradbury.” I got out of bed and looked in my closet for something to wear. “This dwarf keeps going to this house of mirrors in this carnival so he can see himself reflected with a tall body. One day they trick him and change the mirror to one that makes everything look really tiny, and he’s so shocked he tries to kill himself.”
“Neat!” Cowboy said.
“He uses a pistol, though, not Dristan or Midol.”
“Well, most men don’t have Midol around,” Cowboy said. She gave me a wink.
The ash at the end of her Camel was almost an inch long. There were cigarette ashes everywhere in our room, inside drawers, on the rug, on the floor, on the tables, everywhere Cowboy’d passed. Our nearsighted mother never seemed to see them, and Mrs. Hootman never mentioned them because she thought I was the smoker, being the older.
She’d clean them away cheerfully, then catch me up in her arms and hug me, while she whispered into my ear, “You know you can get away with murder, don’t you, Little Missy? But you have to be careful of those teeny-tiny lungs of yours, you know.”
This time while Cowboy pushed her leg through the panty hose she curled her big toe under.
“I’m not going to wear white,” I said, picking out a pink dress. “I’m not going to look like
