Authors: M. E. Kerr
I remembered Mr. Gruberg, who drove me back to the Inn so I didn’t have to get a taxi. He was leaving The Palace anyway, he said, and said he had to laugh when he saw Larry La Belle just pick up his little girl and carry her off kicking and pounding with her little fists.
“Oh, no offense,” he said, “I know you didn’t feel so hot about it. I’d like to be able to take my own kid in hand that way, though. Well, don’t worry, young fella, you are a
young
fella, aren’t you. How old?”
“Seventeen,” I said.
“Don’t worry, because there are other fish in the sea.”
“Not in my sea there aren’t,” I said.
“In any sea,” he said emphatically.
I didn’t want to chance soiling his seat, so I didn’t stand on it but rode beside him watching the tops of trees and blinking traffic lights. I thought of a short story called “Godman’s Master” by Margaret Laurence. It was about a dwarf who had been made to live inside a box all his life while his master pretended that inside the box was an oracle. The dwarf would make pronouncements through a hole, and sometimes he would cough, this tiny cough that sounded like a butterfly had cleared its throat. After a man rescued him from the box, he insisted to the dwarf that there was much more to freedom than just not living in a box.
The dwarf had answered, “You would not think so if you’d ever lived in a box.”
“Mr. Gruberg,” I said, “you and I don’t swim in the same sea.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Last summer I met a lot of little people. The town was filled with them because of her, you know, she’s getting to the marrying age I heard was the reason. So I observed little people pretty well. They’d come down to see the shows.”
He smiled down at me. “I kept a pile of telephone books to boost them up high enough to see the screen.”
I thanked him for the ride to the Inn, and walked through a lobby swarming with people, although it was two in the morning. They were some of “the Faithful” Little Lion had described to me, looking for rooms, which were scarce that weekend in La Belle, looking for a glimpse of Little Lion, crowded into the coffee shop for late-night snacks after coming off the road.
Crowds always made me nervous. My toes got stepped on and I got jostled about in them, so I hurried through the lobby to the elevator.
Just as I was standing on tiptoe to fit my key into the lock, I heard my telephone ringing. It rang insistently while I worked the key, pushed open the door with my shoulders, and tried to locate the phone in the dark. It kept ringing while I dragged the desk chair across under the light switch, and just as I got up on the seat, the telephone stopped ringing.
It could have been Mr. Palmer, Digger, Little Lion, but I sat on the bed with my feet hanging down the side, wondering if Little Little had tried to call me.
When I finally crawled under the covers and fell asleep, I dreamed her father chased me down a winding corridor, caught me, slapped me into a box, and began pounding nails into its side.
He called at me through a hole, “Good-bye, butterfly.”
“Sydney,” Mr. Palmer said, “the banquet begins at four. You’ll enter the ballroom at around five-fifteen with the birthday cake. The band will play your theme song right after they play ‘Happy birthday.’ Sydney?”
“Yes,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of toast. “I’m listening.”
“I’ll drive you there, and right after your performance we’ll head for Wilton. Mr. Hiroyuki was crazy about you, Sydney. We had an early breakfast and he brought along a model of the Roach Ranch…. Do you want to go hear Little Lion with me?”
“I have something I have to do first with Digger Starr,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock. “I have to hurry, Mr. Palmer. I’ll go to church with Digger.”
“I thought up a name for you, Sydney, to use in our first commercial. How does Roy Roachers sound? You’ll be in chaps and a sky piece.”
“What’s a sky piece?”
“A cowboy hat, Sydney! They call them sky pieces in Texas. You’ll have a new line. We’re throwing out ‘You’ll be the death of me.’ Instead, you’ll swagger out in your chaps and sky piece, ready to draw your pistol, and you’ll say: ‘Name your poison!’ Then ‘Roach Ranch’ will flash across the screen and you’ll keel over. Like it?”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“It’s dynamite, Sydney!”
“I’m in a hurry, Mr. Palmer.”
“Sydney,” he said, “don’t be late. Have your shell down in the lobby so we can leave there at four-forty-five sharp. This is an important event where Hiroyuki’s concerned, and remember to keep it secret. It’s a surprise!”
“Oh, it’ll be a surprise,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll see you in church, Sydney.”
“Maybe. But we’ll probably be a little late.”
“Not
probably,”
Digger complained when I told him the same thing down in the lobby. “We will be. Laura Gwen’s already in line outside the church along with a couple dozen dwarfs. I hope this doesn’t take too long, Sydney.”
“I tried to get them to deliver it,” I said as we walked toward Wicker Wonderland. “I talked to them on the phone but they don’t have anyone to take it out to Lake Road.”
The La Belles were probably already at church. I counted on that.
“You know what the cab fare’s going to be? They’ll soak you, Sydney.”
“Cost is no object,” I said, sounding like Mr. Palmer.
“We better make it to that church before Laura Gwen walks,” Digger said.
“She won’t walk,” I said. “Where would she go?”
“That’s what Little Lion calls coming to Jesus,” Digger said. “He calls it walking. He yells out for people to walk with him.”
Then Digger said, “What’s this all about, Roach?”
“It’s about a birthday present.”
“Well, me and Laura Gwen are always at your service. You keep that in mind, old buddy.” He grinned down at me and messed my newly combed hair with his large hand.
“Another thing,” he said as we arrived at Wicker Wonderland. “That time I stuck you up on the shelf in Sip-A-Soda? I came right back to get you down, you know.”
“Okay,” I said. I smoothed my hair back with my hand and waited for him to open the door.
“You was already down when I came back,” he said.
“After three hours I was.”
He bent over to hear me better, as he opened the door. “What’d you say?”
“I said I don’t hold grudges, Digger.”
If I did, I didn’t after Digger carried the ten-foot white wicker giraffe out to the taxi stand in front of The Stardust Inn.
Around the neck of the giraffe, he’d tied the envelope with a card inside.
I long for you,
it said.
“
T
ANOSHII TANJOBI
,
RIDDRE RIDDRE
,” Cowboy had whispered at me early that morning, kneeling beside my little bed in her pajamas. “That’s ‘Happy Birthday’ in—”
“Japanese!” I finished the sentence for her and pulled my covers over my head. “Go away! I’m not speaking to anyone in this family!”
“I’m the one who shouldn’t be speaking to you,” she said. “I have to wear a dress today because of you!”
“Go a-way,” I said. “
I
don’t care what you wear!”
Name the one thing Cowboy hated most, next to not owning a horse, and it would have to be wearing a dress.
“I have to wear a dress and panty hose and pumps and go to
church!”
she said. “All because of you!”
I stayed under the covers and listened to her rattling hangers in her closet across the room. I was mad at her because of something she’d said the night before.
The first thing my father’d done when he’d brought me home was unplug the telephone in our room and take it with him.
Cowboy had held her sides laughing after he’d stormed out of the room, and then asked me what had inspired me to run off with Dwarf Longnose anyway?
That was a reference to a book that went way back to our childhood.
Cowboy had brought the book home from the library when she was around five years old. She had selected it herself, along with some others, from Kiddy Corner, telling my mother she’d found a book about me.
Dwarf Longnose
was a children’s book about Jacob, the shoemaker’s son. An evil fairy had used an enchanted herb to change Jacob into a dwarf with a hunched back and a long nose. Jacob’s family had thrown him out, and Jacob had become a successful chef in a duke’s palace. A goose helped him find the herb to turn him back to normal.
“This is
not
a book about Little Little!” my mother had yelled at Cowboy. “Don’t you ever bring a book like this home again!”
“Little Little doesn’t have a hunched back”—my father.
“Or a long nose!” my mother said. “Cowboy, you are just as mean as you can be! Look at the pictures in this book! Is that what you think your sister looks like?”
My father had the book removed from the La Belle library, and poor Cowboy never dared check out another library book.
In one of her suicide attempts, when she swallowed down a combination of Dristan and Midol, then ran into the living room to say good-bye to our parents, she sobbed out all the injustices she’d suffered through as my sister. Bringing home that book and catching hell for it was at the top of her list.
We’d laughed about it later, and when my mother began giving parties last summer for the TADpoles, always checking out ahead of time who was p.f. and who wasn’t, we’d giggled to each other that the only way Dwarf Longnose would get invited would be if he had royal blood or wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or the chef who had the in with the goose.
I thought about all that and decided not to give Cowboy a hard time over the remark, so I sat up in bed in time to see her run the left leg of her panty hose because she hadn’t cut her big toenail.
“*&%$#@!” Cowboy said.
“I told you to cut your toenails. They’re so long they’re curling over.”
“If they were curling over, I wouldn’t have run my stocking, Little Little….
Tanoshii tanjobi.”
“Stick to English.”
“There’s a whole tableful of gifts for you downstairs, and Little Lion sent white roses.”
Cowboy ripped off the panty hose and went across to her bureau drawer to rummage through it for another pair. The long ash at the end of her cigarette dropped into the sock pile she’d shoved aside. The white bra she had on, with the little red bow at the V, had nothing filling it. My mother made her wear the bra when she wore a dress. That was one of my mother’s convictions: a bra goes with a dress, just as gloves went with church and something red was worn on Christmas.
“Well, what’s he like?” Cowboy said.
“You’d like him,” I said. “He doesn’t have a long nose, he has a long tooth. And he reads really depressing stuff. On the way to The Palace last night he told me about this short story called ‘The Dwarf’ by Ray Bradbury.” I got out of bed and looked in my closet for something to wear. “This dwarf keeps going to this house of mirrors in this carnival so he can see himself reflected with a tall body. One day they trick him and change the mirror to one that makes everything look really tiny, and he’s so shocked he tries to kill himself.”
“Neat!” Cowboy said.
“He uses a pistol, though, not Dristan or Midol.”
“Well, most men don’t have Midol around,” Cowboy said. She gave me a wink.
The ash at the end of her Camel was almost an inch long. There were cigarette ashes everywhere in our room, inside drawers, on the rug, on the floor, on the tables, everywhere Cowboy’d passed. Our nearsighted mother never seemed to see them, and Mrs. Hootman never mentioned them because she thought
I
was the smoker, being the older.
She’d clean them away cheerfully, then catch me up in her arms and hug me, while she whispered into my ear, “You
know
you can get away with murder, don’t you, Little Missy? But you have to be careful of those teeny-tiny lungs of yours, you know.”
This time while Cowboy pushed her leg through the panty hose she curled her big toe under.
“I’m not going to wear white,” I said, picking out a pink dress. “I’m not going to look like something off the top of a wedding cake when I get with Little Lion.”
“Which one do you like best?” Cowboy said.
“That’s a dumb question,” I said. “I just went to a movie with him.”
“Half a movie,” said Cowboy.
“He probably doesn’t ever want to see me again. If you were him and you were going to a movie with me and my father rushed down and carried me off caveman style and told him there was a taxi stand across the street, would you ever want to see me again?”
“I’d rise to the challenge,” said Cowboy. “I’d think of something dramatic to do. I’d wait until your birthday was underway and then I’d come dancing in under my shell, with my music playing ‘La Cu-ca-ra-cha’”—she did a little dance step in her panty hose—“‘la cu-ca-ra-cha,’ and crash your party in a burst of glory. Would that impress you?”
“ROACH! ROACH! ROACH!” I chanted the way the crowds had at the game, and Cowboy and I chased each other around the room, laughing.
“Well, it could happen,” Cowboy said. Off the floor of her closet, she fished a blue skirt that was always balled up there next to her hockey skates. She began brushing off the dustballs on it. “It’s your birthday. Anything can happen.”
“Cowboy?” I said. “Do you really like Little Lion?”
She was saved from answering by my mother’s voice calling out, “Where’s my birthday girl?” as she came up the stairs. Cowboy made a dive for the ashtray, emptying it into one of her Nike sneakers, whirling around, and raising the window. I grabbed the Johnson Wax Glade powder air freshener and aimed it at the ceiling where the smoke collected.
My mother sang out, “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you—”
“Don’t let her in here!” Cowboy said.
“How’m I going to keep her out?”
Cowboy gave me a shove. “Pretend you’re on your way to the bathroom!”
My mother opened the door and said, “Whew! Whew! Girls! Someone’s got on too much perfume.”
Cowboy said, “After God took his paintbrush to the leaves, he took his powder puff to our bedroom.”
“Cowboy,” said my mother, “I call that sassy.”