“Slow down and stop shouting!”
“If Pablo Picasso had a wart on his finger, he wouldn’t be the world-famous painter in your eyes, he’d be that fellow with the wart on his finger who paints! You are all caught up in and bogged down in p.f.! Sydney Cinnamon has one of the best minds of anyone who’s ever sat down at our dinner table and all you see is the tooth that sticks out!”
“That’s not all I see,” my mother says.
“The hump, the tooth that sticks out, the twisted leg—you never see anyone’s real worth!”
“But he can go right down to Dr. Rosten and get that tooth fixed in an afternoon, honey, that’s all I’m saying. That tooth is something he can correct.”
“Why should he?”
“Stop getting yourself into such a snit right after breakfast,” my mother says. “It’s not good for the digestion, and don’t go past my stop.”
“I hope there’s nobody in your Creative Crafts Coffee Klatch with a mole on her nose or anything disgusting like that,” I say.
“There isn’t,” she says. “And thank you for the ride. Next time I’ll think a long time before I decide to share a little feeling with you I might have about improving someone’s appearance.”
“Promises. Promises,” I tell her, stopping the car. “Sayonara.”
“Don’t go to the pachinko parlor after school, either,” she says, getting out. “It’s bad enough that The Pink Dragon is at our table every Friday night. Oh, I’m used to him and that isn’t a complaint—he’s welcome—but a pachinko parlor is no place for a little girl.”
She gives me a smile before she shuts the car door. “Oh, honey, I know you’re a big girl now. But you’re our Little Little and we love you so much!”
I cross my eyes and blow her a kiss.
“Your eyes could snap and stay that way forever,” she tells me. “Then what would you do?”
“Then what would you do?”
The morning drags unbearably, and I cannot concentrate on Newton’s three laws of motion in science or Gibbon’s version of the fall of Rome in history. Even the special assembly, “Marijuana Can Wreck Your Mind,” makes me squirm impatiently in my seat, although the school has come up with an ex-con who murdered two men as the lecturer.
On my way out of the auditorium I pass Calpurnia Dove and notice that she is wearing a new pink sweater with a matching skirt and the same color knee-high socks.
At lunch, Sydney Cinnamon has saved me a seat in the back of the cafeteria. He is excited about a book he’s reading called Freddy’s Story.
“Listen to this,” he says, wiping away crumbs of tuna fish sandwich from his mouth. “This is when Winesap, the historian, has just finished a lecture on all the Bigfoot creatures that have been sighted all over America. He’s being approached by another historian named Agaard, and he says—”
“Sydney,” I sigh, “I’d rather read the book myself.”
“Just listen to this,” he insists the way he always insists. “Agaard comes up to Winesap and he says, ‘I have a son home who is a monster.’” Sydney grins over at me. “Isn’t that a neat beginning?”
“Neat,” I agree.
“Then Agaard invites Winesap home to meet his son, who’s eight foot tall!”
“I’ll borrow it when you’re finished,” I say.
Then he starts to tell me about more new things he’s bought for his apartment, behind the pachinko parlor. Whenever I go there, he shows me something new he’s bought. Once he surprised me with a miniature water bed he’d had custom-made. We stretched out on it and listened to tapes of The Bee Gees, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Haydn’s Surprise symphony, drinking white wine from new crystal goblets, while he told me Haydn’s wife was so mean she used his manuscripts as curlpapers.
He is always enthusiastic about something, but today I am not a good listener.
I am saved from pretending that I am by a quartet of freshmen who surround Sydney Cinnamon to ask for autographs.
“Roy or The Dragon?” he asks them.
“Both!” they chorus in unison.
I finish the date-and-nut sandwich Mrs. Hootman has made me for lunch and count the minutes to English class: one hundred and three.
Finally we are filing into Miss Grossman’s room, where she has written across the blackboard in yellow chalk:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easier who have learned to dance.
—Alexander Pope
After all of us are in our seats, Miss Grossman begins handing back everyone’s story but the one she’ll read.
My mind is still reeling with the sight of my own before me on my desk, marked A+, when Miss Grossman speaks.
“And now,” she says, “I want you all to be still and listen to this.”
Sickly, I sneak a glance across at Calpurnia Dove, who just as sickly meets my eye, her story clutched in her fingers.
Miss Grossman begins:
“‘Sydney,’ Mr. Palmer said, you are on your way to becoming the most famous dwarf in the country, no small thanks to me. And now I have a favor to ask you.’
“Those words, spoken on an ordinary August day, in the offices of Palmer Pest Control, were the beginning of my new life….”
While she continues to read, after I have recovered from the punch of shock to my insides, I turn around in my seat and stare at Sydney Cinnamon.
He smiles at me, his light blue eyes very bright, and gives a helpless shrug to his shoulders.
I decide that my mother is right.
That tooth of his sticks out too far.
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a
