Then came the day Cowboy no longer needed to be lifted to the drinking fountain outside Lathrop’s on Main Street, and no longer needed to stand on the box to wash her hands in the bathroom sink.
The picture was coming into focus.
My mother answered all my questions in tears, and my father never gave up the idea of measuring me by the long yellow tape measure fixed to the kitchen wall.
Cowboy, during this period, let me have things of hers she really wanted for herself.
When school let out that Friday afternoon, it was like a summer day and I took a walk in Stardust Park.
When I saw him outside the penny arcade, I thought he might be someone we’d invited to my party, who’d arrived a day early.
I took a good look at him. My mother’d describe him as “not p.f.,” which was her way of saying someone was not “perfectly formed.”
That morning, at breakfast, my mother’d said, “We have all p.f.’s coming to your party except for Jarvis Allen and Lydia Schwartz, and neither one of them bothers me. They’re both from lovely families and Lydia’s so cheerful about her little lame leg…. Jarvis plans to study law, which I told your father is remarkable.”
“What’s remarkable about it?” I said.
“He’ll be getting down all those heavy books,” my mother said.
“Law books, Little Little,” said my father.
“He’s going to be a lawyer like his father,” said my mother. “They’ll be Allen & Son.”
“He’s setting a fine example,” said my father.
Whoever the dwarf was in Stardust Park, he wasn’t Jarvis Allen or Lydia Schwartz.
I walked in the other direction, thinking of Calpurnia Dove’s boat on the stormy sea, wondering why I went the other way and not toward him.
He made me think in those few seconds of Gnomeland.
It was in the park for only one summer.
That was the summer I was twelve, and it was the only summer my parents did not take Cowboy and me to the park.
I remember one night at the beginning of the summer, overhearing my father and my grandfather.
“She’s got to see her own kind someday, Larry,” my grandfather said.
“Not that way,” my father said. “Not on exhibit like freaks.”
“I agree, but—”
“But what!” and my father’s voice was raised and angry. “I want them out of there! How did they get in there in the first place?”
The next year they were gone.
I had the feeling the dwarf in the park was following me, and I decided if he was, I’d wait for him. I’d speak to him. I looked back once and he was standing by the roller coaster.
I realized I was relieved. I always was timid when it came to meeting anyone new.
But I did glance back a second time, and watched, astonished, while he did a cartwheel, and then, on his feet, gave me a lavish bow.
I laughed out loud but doubted that he saw or heard it from that distance.
That same summer Gnomeland was at Stardust Park, my grandfather took me to Pennsylvania.
We were approaching a motel and I was seated beside him in his black Lincoln, strapped to my kiddyride, about to have a “surprise”—his only explanation for this weekend trip in the dead of August.
My grandfather, Reverend Warren La Belle, is a cream puff whose soft sweet center isn’t immediately visible. If you know him, you know it’s there, but he is a big man with craggy features and bushy eyebrows, who barks out his sermons and frowns his way through most days.
He isn’t a man you question about a surprise he’s planned, and I didn’t ask any questions as we took that unusual journey together.
The first thing I saw was a red-white-and-blue banner over the coned roof of The Pennsylvania Dutch Inn, saying:
WELCOME TADPOLES AND PODS!
“What are ‘TADpoles and PODs,’ Grandfather?” I finally ventured. We were driving up a circular road, heading toward the parking space behind the motel.
“You’ll see, Little Little.”
Then, coming into view, coming out of cars and around the sides of cars, falling from the heavens for all I knew, were others like me, redheaded, blond, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, straight, twisted, beautiful, ugly, in-between: a world of me.
My grandfather parked and turned off the ignition. “We’re at a convention, Little Little. ‘TAD’ stands for ‘The American Diminutives,’ and TADpoles are the children.”
“And ‘PODs’?”
“Parents Of Diminutives.” He looked down at me, watching me watch out the car window.
“Where did they all come from?” I said.
“Their homes. Same as you.”
Then he put his hand over mine. “Your mother and your father were against this, Little Little. You know how they are where you’re concerned. They’d keep you under glass, if they could, to protect you. Your mother, particularly. She’s afraid you’ll see others who aren’t in as good shape as you are and it’ll upset you. Well, I see people my size lame and twisted, too, and so should you. This isn’t a perfect world, Little Little, far from it. We’re all mixed in together. Right now you’ve got the world in miniature, in more ways than one. Want to have a look?”
The pool at the motel had been drained of most of its water, since the only guests that weekend were TADpoles and PODs. The deep end was only about four feet, and the shallow end one foot.
My grandfather made himself at home with the PODs after I changed into my bathing suit. I could hear him behind me, up on the lawn, his deep voice pontificating and his laughter thundering louder than anyone’s.
I looked around shyly and finally spotted a girl playing with a large red rubber ball, in the water by the swimming-pool ladder, down at the deep end. She was a most amazing-looking girl with the kind of gossamer blond hair angels have, perfect skin tanned from the sun, and dancing dark eyes that flashed with her wide, white smile.
I was as vain about my swimming as I was about
