Big Girl Small (2 page)

Here, news media, here’s a sound bite for when you find me: if you’re born saddled with a word like
Achondroplasia,
you learn to spell. If the first boy you dare love pulls the worst Stephen King
Carrie
prank in the history of dating, then you run and hide. Because who can love you after that? Maybe your parents. But how can you face them, when you’ve all spent so much time convincing each other that you’re normal?

All I’m saying is, if you’re me, and you can’t reach a gas pump, pay phone, or ATM, and your arms and legs are disproportionately short, and your mouth is too impossible to kiss without it becoming a public carnival, then you don’t get to be included in anything but the now obsolete, original meaning of the stupid word
normal
. Which, believe it or not, according to the
OED
, is
rare
.

So I’m the rare dwarf at the Motel Manor on the outskirts of Ypsi, close enough to my parents that they should have found me by now, and maybe in more danger than I can guess at. And you know what? I don’t care. I hope the story ends here. It’s fine if it does. I mean, that way I’ll be the dream come true of all those hopeful
Oz
watchers, waiting for a dwarf to hang.

Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing. Thumbelina dance,
Thumbelina sing. Thumbelina, it makes no difference if you’re very
small, for when your heart is full of love you’re nine feet tall.

2
The hot pink eighties were already over when my parents moved from St. Louis to Michigan with my older brother, Chad, and opened a restaurant called Judy’s Grill. It would be more touching if they’d named the restaurant after me instead of naming me after the restaurant, but whatever. I could pretend I was born before it opened, and was such an adorable baby that they couldn’t think of a better name for the place where they’d throw globs of meat on a grill, but in fact, Judy’s came first. My mother got pregnant the same spring they arrived, and stood behind the counter, with Chad in one of those mechanized swings that rocks a baby back and forth until he falls asleep watching animals rotate above his head. She poured coffee, served sizzling foods to customers just starting to become regulars, and loosened her apron ties more and more until she was too pregnant to work. Then she went to the hospital and had me. My dad found her sexy, even bloated with the fifty pounds she gained pregnant; there are pictures of him leering at her giant ankles, even one of him grabbing her Hottentot ass.

As for the birth, my mom was kind of a peasant about the whole thing. I mean, she spent only a week at home after I was born before she brought me to work, where she nursed me in the kitchen between shifts. Even though I had some medical problems, my mother stopped working only when I was actually being cut open like tropical fruit to have a trach put in because my tubes were too small to let me breathe right. I don’t remember that, by the way; it happened when I was a baby. But my mom remembers it like it happened ten minutes ago, because every time I cough, I can feel her start running from wherever she is in the house. When I was healthy, she always had me at Judy’s Grill with them. She was like the Chinese woman in that book
The Good Earth
that we read in eighth-grade English. The wife, I mean, who keeps getting knocked up over and over and going into the back room and giving birth by herself, gnawing off the umbilical cord and rushing back to work in the fields the next day like a slave, with the baby strapped to her back. My mom’s that type. Uncomplaining, I mean. I think it’s a point of pride with her. I’m a complainer, myself. But I guess my mom was also desperate to get back to work with my dad. She likes work. And she likes my dad. She never stops moving, racing, doing—except at night, when everything she’s had to do all day is done—and then she reads
New York Times
bestsellers. But not brand new ones. Older ones that she checks out of the Ann Arbor District Library. When she’s finished with them, she leaves them on my nightstand with the due-date cards sticking out like reminders that I have a deadline. Sometimes I read them. Not usually.

My dad thinks it’s cute that my mom keeps so busy. He’s busy too, but in a kind of understated way. He smokes a pipe and listens to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and on his most hip days, Cassandra Wilson, who he found out about by watching a PBS documentary about jazz. My dad is the kind of guy who will do whatever the rest of us want to do, which means when he’s not working or fixing things, he’s mostly watching Michigan football with Chad, wearing the “M Go Blue” sweatshirt my mom bought him at parents’ weekend. They’re very proud of Chad for going to U of M and being a swimmer and so handsome and well-adjusted and smart. And even if they weren’t, they’d still be the types to go to parents’ weekend as if they had traveled from two thousand miles away, even though we live ten minutes from campus.

Maybe the busy hum of Judy’s Grill was a relief for my mom, compared to life with me. She loves the grill with a pathological devotion; I wouldn’t be surprised if she squirted her own breast milk directly into people’s coffee mugs when she went back to work that first week after I was born. Maybe it was a happy, distracting refuge from the horrors of my babyhood. The grill is full of clutter, the smell of shimmering fries fresh out of the metal oil basket, the crunch of pepper grinders, chatter and smack of people eating. There’s nothing to eat in hospitals; even when there’s food there, it tastes like Lysol. And anyway, who has an appetite in a place where the walls look so much like the floor that you’re swimming even as you walk? The U of M hospital smells, looks, and tastes like an antiseptic nothing. Judy’s Grill is a hot red place.

No mom loves watching her tiny dwarf baby get strapped to a gurney, but my mom is pretty tough. My dad still talks about how she cleaned my trach tube every ten seconds for the whole year and a half I had the thing in. He apparently could barely handle it, not because it was gross, he swears, but because he was so freaked out that he’d do it wrong. My mom has always claimed that she had never loved anything the way she immediately loved me. Chad is expected to live with that part of the family lore—I mean, he got a fabulous life so why can’t I at least get to be our mom’s favorite? Plus, I’m a girl, and the way my mom tells it, she really wanted a girl “for herself,” the idea being that Chad was for my dad. And it’s true that Chad and my dad are perfect for each other. Chad’s as noisy and fun as my dad is quiet. He drags my dad out to play football in the backyard, scandalizes him with obscene jokes, and does a brilliant imitation of our mom: “Chad! Judy! Sam! I hear a riot! Someone’s about to get hurt! And it’s going to be Sam!” Her cute Midwestern accent, all nasal and young-sounding.

My mom grew up on a working farm, and she still lives on an animal clock, awake at the first flicker of light in the sky. She prefers chores when the air is still icy and silent, and makes us breakfast at dawn every morning before she and my dad take off for the Grill to feed dozens of other people all day. She also builds and fixes things—TVs, the roof on our house, the tiles in the bathroom. The only thing she leaves for my father to fix is the car, and she encourages him to do that as often as possible, even, I think, when it’s not broken. For their anniversary once, she bought him a board with wheels on it so he can jack the car up a bit and roll underneath it. I think she finds mechanics sexy, and my dad is game. I mean, he fixes the car sometimes, or at least pretends to. Fills it with oil or something. My mom keeps a framed picture of him on her nightstand, even though if she wanted to, she could just look over at him, sleeping next to her. In the picture, he’s rolling out from under the car, grease on his hands and a monkey wrench held up victoriously above him like it’s a weapon.

But even though my mom likes my dad, what she loves most is the three of us. And she went all the way with the claim that she loved me unconditionally—by having another baby after me. I take my little brother, Sam, as proof that my parents weren’t scared off the project. And my mom was rewarded for her bravado, because Sam is the best person anyone has ever met. We all love him most. It’s hard to explain except to say that he’s a delicately wired twelve-year-old with buckteeth and braces, that he weighs less than sixty pounds, has no irony, and takes hip-hop classes on the weekends at the rec center. He wears his Levi’s so low they show his Hanes, and just generally tries so hard it’s heartbreaking.

I can almost imagine Ann Arbor back before me and Sam, when Chad was a little baby and my parents were all hopeful and young. The place would have had more boutiques and fewer strip malls, the same stadium and roads, but I always picture it as an old-fashioned college town, music pouring out the windows of Hill Auditorium, dancers in the shadows at Power Center, the Brown Jug lit up on campus, open all night. That’s where Michigan students sat drinking thin, pre-Starbucks coffee out of cream-colored diner mugs. Judy’s Grill is right across from the Brown Jug, on South University. My mom and dad chose a red color pattern, pizza parlor lanterns, booths, and gingham tablecloths. Eventually they even got a jukebox, and sometimes students hang out there when there are no tables at the Brown Jug, listening to the crappy oldies my parents picked—like Journey and REO Speedwagon.

Not to romanticize too much, though, because it’s usually old people in there, gumming meat loaf and sipping stew through straws. Retirees never put money in the jukebox, so my mom plays them “Happy Together” and the Beatles for free. They love it. And they love me; I’m like the everlasting infant mascot of Judy’s Grill.

Sometimes I think the Grill must have been an absolute Norman Rockwell print before I arrived. And then wham! All of a sudden there was a spontaneous genetic mutation, maybe in her egg, maybe in one of my dad’s sperm. It’s too gross to contemplate that part, since we all know where it goes, but did a dwarf sperm swim up to an average-size egg and hit on it like, “I have other things to offer?” Or was the egg a little bit small? Anyway, there it was. Some famous doctor my parents once had examine me in a hotel room at a conference told them it’s usually the sperm’s fault when your baby’s a dwarf. I wonder if that made my dad feel guilty.

My mom knew she was pregnant right away because of the constant barfing, but they didn’t know about “that” until later, at twenty weeks, to be precise, when the docs noticed “foreshortened limbs” and something about my pelvis on the ultrasound screen. Maybe the technician at the U of M hospital was like, “Oh, let me get the doctor,” because apparently you can tell from an ultrasound if your baby is “of short stature,” which is pretty hilarious, because what unborn baby isn’t of short stature? I mean, foreshortened limbs? Anyway, then my parents were probably like, “Is everything okay, technician?” and she was like, “I’ll let the doctor explain,” and the rest of their lives were mapped out from that moment: my dad’s old-school-ness about the whole abortion thing, the baby they already had, how now his life would be affected by this shit, the deformed one taking up all the attention, the kinds of conversations they must have had, the final decision. Let’s keep her anyway! Or maybe it’s the way they present it now, like they didn’t even consider putting me back. That my mom heard about my dwarfism and loved me even more. More than anything, even Chad, her lanky, healthy toddler. But it wasn’t the Dark Ages. They had ultrasound technology, and when I first found out about that, in seventh-grade health class at Tappan Middle School, I started asking my parents all the time if they had considered a do-over, but that’s not the sort of question where you’ll ever get the straight answer you want. Anyway, now I’ve ruined their lives by ruining mine. So even if they didn’t regret having me then, maybe they do now. Health class is the same one where our teacher once said, “Do you girls want to know the only thing you need to stay out of trouble?” and we were all like, “What, Mr. Katz?” and he said, “A dime,” so we all looked at each other like, “What the hell is he talking about?” and he said, “Take the dime and put it between your knees and hold it there, and that way you’ll stay out of trouble.”

Speaking of trouble, I once read that parents of kids with childhood leukemia suffer more post-traumatic stress disorders and recurring nightmares than the kids themselves do. I can see why. Watching your kid suffer has to suck at least as much as suffering yourself. If my mom could give me her legs, I bet she would. And I’d take them, too, because I’m that kind of person. I’d rip them right off, and use them to tower above and hop over everyone like I was on pogo sticks. It’s a fact, even though it’s hypothetical, do you know what I mean? If she could, my mom would give her legs to me, and I would take them. And that’s why I can never go home again, because having to watch me die of misery over this Darcy scandal might be even more hideous for them than it is for me, if that’s possible. The funny thing is, I’m not a totally bad person, and I know it because if I could choose to make my little brother, Sam, live my life and me live his, I wouldn’t. I’d rather this be me than have to watch it be him, even though he’s a boy. Because if I had to watch him go through this, that would kill me. I don’t know why I feel that way about Sam and not my parents. Maybe because he’s little and they’re grown-ups.

The horror show didn’t start right away at Darcy, by the way. I was the happiest I’d ever been before I became the unhappiest. I think people are all that way; if you have the capacity to experience huge, engulfing joy, then you can also feel its equal and opposite level of pain. My diary entries are like the lines on a graph, shooting up and up toward Thanksgiving and then rocketing off the page by Christmas. Of course it’s not a very useful graph for drawing conclusions, since I didn’t record them plummeting; they just disappear entirely.

My parents were nervous the summer before I started at D’Arts, talking in whispers and then changing the subject when I’d come in after swimming at Fuller Pool with Meghan, my best dwarf friend, who I met at an LPA convention in Florida four years ago. Those are where little people from all over the place get together and become friends. Our parents met there, too, and liked each other—they’re all average-size, although Meghan has a little-person older brother, too, and an average-size older sister. She comes every other summer for a week, and then I go to her place in Northern California.