When I told her my name, she said, “If you’re going to swim, you have to wear your cap. It’s a rule.”
“Well, I’ll just hold on here for a while. I’m from New York.”
“Your hair is touching the water.”
“It always gets a little wet anyway.”
“It shouldn’t touch the water. It’s against the rules.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My hair isn’t touching the water because I can stand at this end,” she answered.
We looked at each other for a moment, and I heard the shouts of the other kids and the soft rock being pumped through the loudspeakers. I saw her dark eyes hardening ever so slightly although the smile stayed on her mouth.
“Maybe I should get out and put my cap back on,” I said.
“I’d say so.” She moved out of my way so I could climb the ladder.
As I reached for the rung she said, “I’m four foot one. I can stand at this end.”
She wasn’t finished.
“You’d better not swim down at this end if you can’t touch bottom.”
“I’m a good swimmer.”
“But I’m really not one of you,” she said. “You’d better go meet the others.”
She was the first one like me I’d ever talked to.
Later, as I made friends with the others, they told me her name was Eloise Ficklin, and she never made friends with TADpoles who were perfectly formed.
“She’s a repudiator, that’s what we call her kind.”
“I call her mean.”
“She hates coming to these conventions but her parents make her come. She wants to pass, to pretend she’s just short, so she picks out TADpoles who aren’t like her at all, and claims she’s helping out. The more you’re like her, the less she’ll like you.”
My grandfather said to me that night, “Well, you have learned something about prejudice today, Little Little. The person at the top of the ladder doesn’t pick on the one way at the bottom. He picks on the one on the rung next to him. The fellow way at the bottom picks on the fellow on the ground. There’s always someone to look down on, if looking down on someone is your style.”
“I really hate her,” I said. “No one’s ever treated me that way, and I’d never treat anyone that way.”
“Oh, you may get around to it,” my grandfather said. “No one looks up all the time. When things get tough, your eyes drop, Little Little. Just remember to raise them back up before you’ve lost your direction.”
“What about having an enemy? Is that looking down on someone?”
“Enemies you look square in the eye, as you do friends. You don’t make too much of them or too little. You see them for what they are.”
“Then Eloise Ficklin is my first enemy.”
“Sounds like you made a good choice,” my grandfather said.
That night I prayed to God to get Eloise Ficklin. But if He did, He didn’t do any permanent damage.
Eloise Ficklin now stars on television as Dora, The Dancing Lettuce Leaf, in the commercial for Melody Mayonnaise.
5: Sydney Cinnamon
AT TWIN OAKS, AFTER you finished grade school on the grounds, you were mainstreamed to Wilton High School.
That was where I met Coach Korn and Digger Starr.
Before I worked up my act as The Roach, and became the mascot of the Wilton Bombers, I would hang around the football field on fall afternoons.
Every September, Coach Korn would say the same thing to prospective team members.
“Suppose I tell you to run into a brick wall. If you run through it, you’re a fullback. If you bounce back, you’re a halfback. If you stop and walk around it, you’re a quarterback!”
Digger was a fullback, a freshman when I met him. He was a lovesick fourteen-year-old, big and blond, and mean when he was drinking beer. What Digger remembered most about me from those days was that I became The Roach, and fans came to the game as much to see me perform at halftime as to see The Bombers play.
What I remembered about Digger was an afternoon in Sip-A-Soda, in Wilton, when he got mad at me for telling him not to open a can of beer in there or we’d get tossed out. Digger lifted me up and carried me back to the storeroom. He set me on a high shelf next to gallons of Coke syrup. I was there three hours until the manager found me and helped me down.
But there were happier times, too, when I was tagging after Digger, feeling protected by him, cruising by Laura Gwen’s house with him in his car, listening to his confidences about her, which always began, “Sydney, you’re the only one I’d ever tell this to and I’ll break your tiny neck if you tell anyone else!”
We had been pals enough for me to want to see him again.
That Friday night we all ate Chinese food in the front of the trailer, Stouffer’s Beef Chop Suey with Rice, boiled up in the plastic pouches by Laura Gwen.
I was catching up on their news while we sat in front of the TV, hoping as always for a glimpse of Dora, The Dancing Lettuce Leaf.
Laura Gwen had put on weight the same as Digger, but you could see distant traces of the pretty cheerleader she’d been. She still had the same dimpled face and soft blond curly hair, light green eyes looking a little more tired that night. She snapped at Digger for calling me “Roach.”
I told her I didn’t mind it.
“Well, I mind it. I would hate to be called Roach.”
“Why? They’ve been around 300 million years, so they’re survivors.”
“They’re filthy things!” Laura Gwen said.
“They aren’t. People are,” I said. “Roaches drag people’s dirt around, not their own.”
“Can we eat this here chop suey without talking about roaches?” Digger complained.
“Then don’t call him Roach. Call him Sydney,” Laura Gwen
