I could feel my face get red, and I looked away, demonstrating at least that my head moved.
By the time I glanced up at her again, she had started walking in the opposite direction.
I followed, not at a fast pace, but I went in the same direction she was going.
I knew she’d take a second look. We dwarfs come upon each other about as often as fish nest in trees, unless we’re all working together someplace. I planned a friendly wave that I couldn’t seem to bring my arms to execute, so when she sneaked a glance over her shoulder through her long golden hair, I merely trudged along in line with her, my arms paralyzed.
She walked faster. I didn’t want to charge after her in hot pursuit like some dwarf rapist on the loose. I finally stood near the 62-MPH roller coaster, as stopped in my tracks as it was.
When I was at Leprechaun Village, after a day’s work (we emptied ashtrays, brought pillows down poolside, paged people wanted on the telephone, ran errands, and got drinks from the bar) every night I would watch Opportunity Knox get dressed for a date. He was popular not only with other dwarfs but with normal-sized females as well. One night he slipped off for a very secret rendezvous with a guest, the wife of an Italian count, who gave him a gold signet ring inscribed Amoretta. That same night I had trudged along to a local movie with a group of employees, envying his luck.
“It isn’t luck, Sydney!” he’d insist. “Fate loves the fearless! Happiness hates the timid! Are you going to miss the plum because you’re afraid to shake the tree? Are you always going to be the anvil, and never the hammer?”
I stood there remembering that, doing hypnosis on Little Little La Belle’s back as she walked along: You will look my way again!
It took her around twenty seconds to register my message, to turn and take another look, and I got ready for my one little puff of a gesture. There was no small effort involved, either, with my hump, which was the reason I’d perfected the stunt years ago, so that my feet went off the ground like flying.
She gave a look and I gave back: a cartwheel.
Back on my feet, I saw she was still watching me, and with one arm across my stomach, and one behind me an inch from my hump, I bowed low.
4: Little Little La Belle
WHEN I WAS GROWING up, it was my Grandfather La Belle who gave me names like Richard Gibson, famous painter and most famous miniaturist in all the world … Toulouse-Lautrec, whose paintings were priceless and in every major museum … Attila the Hun, who led an army of half a million across Europe … Croesus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, from whom we get the expression “rich as Croesus” … and Richebourg, a spy in the French Revolution. On and on.
“All little people!” he would bellow. “All famous!”
When I asked him where the female dwarfs were, he said they were buried in history along with other notable ladies. He said they were there all right, he just didn’t happen to know about them.
He’d done a lot of research in the La Belle library and seemed always to have new names for me of other important dwarfs, with one omission.
“Why don’t you ever tell me about Tom Thumb?” I asked him.
“Oh, Tom Thumb,” he answered disdainfully.
“I’ve been reading a lot about him. He was very successful. He was a general and—”
“He was a general of nothing! He was given the title General by a fellow who had a circus. P. T. Barnum! He wasn’t a real general.”
“But he was the most famous dwarf in the world, wasn’t he?”
“He was paraded around.”
“He met Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington and the Prince of Wales. He even met President Lincoln.”
“He might have done all that without being a dwarf.”
“How?”
“How?” my grandfather said. “By using what he had up here”—tapping his forehead with his finger—“instead of letting someone exploit him!”
“What does ‘exploit’ mean, Grandfather?”
“It means to utilize for profit. This Barnum fellow made a lot of money satisfying the public’s curiosity about what someone different looks like. He turned Tom Thumb into a sideshow!”
“Didn’t he pay him?”
“Oh, he paid him. But that’s no way to live your life, Little Little, and he’s no example to follow!”
Long after I needed to be burped, my grandfather would hold me in his arm tightly, jiggling me up and down the way you do a baby, and reciting into my ear:
If you can’t be a pine on top of the hill,
Be a scrub in the valley—but be
The best little scrub by the side of the rill;
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
They were soothing words to hear being danced around my room, until I grew old enough to think them over and decide that the idea of being a bush wasn’t all that appealing, and for me, anyway, not the answer, even if I was best bush.
Except for Calpurnia Dove, I am the best writer in Miss Grossman’s English class. Miss Grossman usually chooses to read aloud either something I have written or something Calpurnia has written. We are always neck and neck in the race.
When something Calpurnia wrote is read, I decide Miss Grossman is only being nice to her because Calpurnia is black, and mine is really better. Something tells me that when what I wrote is read, Calpurnia Dove decides Miss Grossman is only being nice to me because I’m a dwarf, and hers is really better.
There
