“Amen, sir.”
“A little girl like that, living protected as she has, isn’t going to get up and waltz down the aisle to walk with any man, eloquent as his plea might be. If you don’t know that, you don’t know dogs bark!”
“I know that now, sir.”
“Performers get up and perform, but shy little girls who aren’t selling mayonnaise for a living are reluctant to step forward. Now you have to make up your mind whether what you want is a snappy saleswoman a head taller than you are or a shy young miss your same size…. Seems to me all through the banquet you were veering toward the former.”
“Reverend, my heart follows after the meek—”
Reverend La Belle cut him off with “Don’t give me a lot of crap, Little Lion. If you want to become affianced to my granddaughter, you better act that way before I bust ass!”
From inside the ballroom the band began to play “Happy Birthday.”
I put on my shoes, got my shell out, and dragged it through the swinging doors to the kitchen, after the singing began.
Waiters stepped around me, stacking the dinner dishes near the dishwasher, while I waited and watched through a crack in the door leading into the ballroom.
Dora and Little Lion were carrying a three-tiered cake across the ballroom floor to the front table. The candles were flickering as they went slowly along, the silver platter between them, headed toward Little Little, who was seated at the end of the table.
While everyone sang chorus after chorus, Little Little crawled down from her chair and walked across to meet them.
There was applause, then cheers and whistles.
Little Little looked out at everyone all smiles, her long yellow hair hanging down to brush the light blue dress, her light green eyes sparkling. The band began to play “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as the cake came toward her.
Then Dora, The Dancing Lettuce Leaf, appeared to begin to dance, but stumbled instead, tipping the tray sufficiently to deliver the gooey white coconut cake directly to Little Little, all down the front of her.
What was left landed at her feet, as the tray spun around the floor like a top, before it flopped flat.
There was a loud, communal Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The dwarf who had sat beside me in church jumped down to stamp out a few burning candles with his feet.
Little Little began to run. She ran down the length of the ballroom floor, heading straight toward the kitchen.
She stumbled in past me, tripped over my roach shell, and landed on the linoleum, where she sat with pieces of cake, and sticky frosting, and a single candle stuck to her.
“Has anyone got a match?” I said, and a waiter handed me an oven match.
I struck it, reached down and removed the candle from the front of Little Little, wiped the wick clean with my fingers, and lit it.
“Make a wish,” I said.
22: Little Little La Belle
“… AND THAT WAS THE Ramones singing ‘Baby, I Love You.’ This is WLAB in beautiful La Belle, and we’ll be with you for another two hours spinning your favorite tunes. The time is seven-ten, and the temperatures rising to the thirties on this first day of November.”
Cowboy is smoking before breakfast again. I hear the scratch of a match and catch my first whiff of tobacco as I roll over on top of a book I’d been reading before I fell asleep.
“Are your spirits laggin’? Come to The Pink Dragon and watch the steel ball fall into the lucky hole that’ll win you a vacation trip for two to beautiful Hawaii, or a brand-new Toyota! These are just a few of the rewards awaiting you at La Belle’s newest fun spot on Genesee Street, where there are sixty-one pin tables and over a hundred prizes! Yes, pachinko is here in La Belle, and The Pink Dragon himself will be on hand afternoons to welcome you! They say dragons are lucky.…”
“Turn it down, Cowboy!”
“Does he like being The Pink Dragon better or Roy Roachers?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I’ve never asked him.”
I sit up in bed and rub the sleep from my eyes. I toss The Tin Drum on the night table, remembering where I’d left off the night before. Oskar, the dwarf hero, went to see a Christmas play, Tom Thumb. Only you never saw Tom Thumb onstage. You just heard his voice and saw people chasing after him. He sits inside a horse’s ear, crawls in a mousehole and a snail shell. He gets in a cow’s stomach and a wolf’s stomach.
At the end of the play, when Tom Thumb names all the places he’s been and says, “Now I’m coming home to you,” Oskar’s mother hides her nose in her handkerchief, and then can’t stop hugging him all through the holidays.
Sounds like my mother when she’s minty.
Cowboy is pulling on her jeans and cussing about basketball practice keeping her from seeing The Pink Dragon in action.
“Don’t you see enough of him?” I ask her.
“You don’t seem to,” she says.
I am remembering that it is Friday, the day Miss Grossman hands back our writing assignments.
I am betting that no matter what Calpurnia Dove has written, my true story of a dwarf named Lia Graf will be the one Miss Grossman reads in class.
Weeks of research have gone into it. It has everything: bathos, pathos, even Hitler.
Lia Graf, whose real name was Schwartz, was a world-famous twenty-seven-inch dwarf who’d appeared with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. When she was twenty years old she’d even sat on the lap of the richest man in America, J. P. Morgan, while he was testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. Wearing a blue satin dress and a bright-red straw hat, she perched there as photographers snapped their picture. Someone had put her up to it, in an attempt to embarrass Morgan, but he rose to the occasion and told her he
