She came to a sad end in a Nazi concentration camp, doomed not only because she was a Jew but also because she was a dwarf. The Nazis were embarked on a program to destroy all people who were physically abnormal.
It was Sydney Cinnamon who told me about her and helped me do the research in the La Belle library.
It was Sydney Cinnamon who got me to check out The Tin Drum, too.
Today I dress carefully in a blue wool number Mrs. Hootman made for me, as I plan to be the center of attention at approximately two o’clock in the afternoon.
At breakfast my father complains about having to go to a Lions’ Club luncheon, which means trying to park on Genesee Street, impossible because of all the $%#& congestion caused by The Pink Dragon.
“Wait until the geisha girls get here!” says my mother, who is thumbing through the latest edition of The TADpole Tattler.
“Cowboy, don’t wear your hat at the breakfast table!” my father snaps.
“Don’t wear it at the lunch table or the dinner table, either,” says my mother. “Someday you’re going to wake up and that hat’s going to be missing.”
Then my mother’s face lights up and she says, “Little Little, listen to this! You remember that sweet little tyke from Mineola who dropped into your birthday party unexpectedly and I was worried that we didn’t have enough beef Wellington?”
“Naomi Katz,” I said. “What about her?”
“She and Roderick Wentworth are hosting a joint New Year’s Eve party to be held down in Miami, Florida. Oh, how I would love to go to Florida!”
“Too bad you’re not a TADpole,” Cowboy says.
“The PODs are invited, too,” says my mother, “and Roderick Wentworth is p.f. and planning to be a CPA.”
“Wow!” Cowboy says. “A p.f. CPA!”
“I’m not directing this conversation to you, Cowboy.”
“Don’t direct it to me, either,” I say. “Roderick Wentworth has chronic halitosis.”
“Something that can be corrected,” says my mother.
“Did you tell Mrs. Hootman we’re having company for dinner?” I ask her.
“I told her,” says my mother.
My father looks up and asks, “Who?”
“Oh, guess,” says my mother. “Just guess.”
“He’s more like a permanent fixture around here,” says my father. “I see him around here as often as I see the oven in the kitchen and the walnut sgabello in the hall!”
“And Mock,” I say. “You see him as often as you see Mock Hiroyuki.”
“That’s not by choice, either,” he mumbles into his fried eggs.
“Well, it’s not my choice to spend all winter locked into snow country,” my mother says. “I would love a Florida vacation, and here we have the golden opportunity right in front of us. You know the Wentworths, Larry. He’s in mobile homes.”
“Little Little says his breath smells.”
“I’m talking about his father! His father’s in mobile homes!”
On and on.
Cowboy is riding to school on the back of Mock’s new moped. My mother is bumming a ride to her Creative Crafts Coffee Klatch with me. Her car is in Ace Garage. She backed it into an oak tree at the end of our driveway, and saved the tiny red glass pieces of the smashed taillight, telling me she’d use them in a collage she is planning to make. A truly imaginative person, she says, can always find the beauty.
As I drive her down Lake Road, she says in another month we won’t even be able to see the lake over the snowdrifts, and that there’s a hotel in Miami that runs an elevator outside the building, with an angel for an elevator operator, “wings and all.”
“I don’t want to leave school,” I say; “my English class is just getting interesting.”
“I wonder if that’s the real reason you don’t want to leave, Little Little.”
“Well, it’s one of them.”
“And the other?”
“There are a lot of others. I like snow, besides.”
“Snow? You like snow? All I do is worry about you falling in some snowdrift and you sit up there on your little seat and tell me you like it?”
We ride along in silence for a while until she musters up the courage to come to the real point.
“Little Lion was a mistake,” she says, “but you correct a mistake, you don’t compound it with another one.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning don’t get all caught up with this Cinnamon character.”
“Boy,” I say. “He’s not a character.”
“Well, he’s running around as a dragon one minute and appearing as a roach cowboy on the television the next—you don’t think of him as a boy, you think of him as a character.”
“I think of him as a boy.”
“He’s been to dinner three Friday nights in a row, honey.”
“Mock has, too.”
“Oh, Mock … Mock’s just a friend. Cowboy’s young, and Mock’s young, not at a point where they’re supposed to be planning what they’d like to do with their lives. Honey, all I’m saying to you is that I’d give my eyes to see you walk down the aisle on the arm of some nice, serious young man who wants to make something out of himself.
“How could you see me do that without your eyes?” I say.
“I might as well talk to that telephone pole up ahead,” she says. “But I know one thing I would do, if I were you, Little Little.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, if you’re going to be seeing him for whatever little interlude it takes you to get tired of him, you ought to speak to him about his tooth. Now, that’s something that can be corrected. That tooth of his sticks out too far.”
“Can’t you ever get past that thing you have about physical appearances?” I said. “If Mozart had a pimple on his nose, you wouldn’t even be able to hear his music. You’d just be sitting there wishing you could squeeze the pimple!”
“I would never squeeze anyone else’s pimple, Little Little!”
“You know what I mean,” I tell her, yelling. “If Shakespeare had a hair coming out of his nose, you wouldn’t hear a word of one of his plays—you’d be wondering why he didn’t take a
