Donald Anderson
Stunted
The woman was so small—the height and size of a three-year-old—
that the clerk behind the Starbucks counter in the Cincinnati Airport
didn’t see her. When the clerk asked for my order, I, along with a
hand gesture, said, “I believe she was first.” Was I trying to pretend
it was normal for a grown person to be 30 inches tall? The clerk—
bless her heart—then leaned over the counter. To be fair, it was a
wide counter, though I don’t think higher than standard.
“Oh,” the clerk said. “What would you like?”
“A small latté,” the dwarf said.
The clerk, taller than I, was a thin black girl with straightened hair.
She was kind and probably some years younger than the white dwarf
below her.
When the clerk set the latté on the counter to reach for the money,
she inadvertently set the cup beyond the dwarf’s reach. The clerk
handed over the change, then asked for my order. I pointed at the
cup.
What was I feeling? Shame? Fear? Pride? Generosity? What I
knew for sure was that whatever the feeling was, it was anchored in
an awkward self-centeredness. What did this woman’s growth have
to do with me?
The clerk saw she had to push the latté closer, and she did. I
ordered a small latté. I didn’t want to give the impression that my
body could absorb more liquid than the dwarf’s. Besides, how to say
Starbucks's word for small: tall?
The woman had to reach as high as she could to remove the
plastic lid from her cup to add sugar. She’d moved down the counter,
sliding the capped cup toward the stirrers, the honey and sugars. I
was worried she’d pull the hot cup over onto her head—her uplifted
face—and had to resist helping. Craning, she managed to add raw
cane sugar, stir the coffee, and replace the lid. When she headed off
in her little beige London Fog, navy slacks, and kid’s clogs, I noticed
her hands were the size of a woman’s, strong and dexterous enough
to hold her latté and to maneuver her rolling luggage. If her clothes
were doll-size, her pull luggage wasn’t.
For her height and size her head was, as seems the case for
dwarves, disproportionate. Too large, of course, but in this case—her
case—only slightly. And her features were fine, not distorted. Her
long hair was tended and highlighted professionally with streaks of
blond.
I boarded my plane. Late that night, I told my wife about the little
woman and her latté.
“She had glorious hair—really—I have to say,” I say to Ellen. “A
little kid’s voice but a grown-up’s hair. Luxurious. And she was neat
and urbane in her kid’s clothes, her little purse.”
“You don’t have to feel bad for her,” my wife says. “Why do you
feel bad? You feel bad, don’t you? You do.”
“Well, God,” I say, “I think of Marnie racing her bike in that
mountain thing in Moab.” Marnie is one of our daughters. As the local
joke goes, you can tell she’s from Boulder, Colorado: She owns a
$500 car, but pedals a $3,000 bicycle made from space-age metals.
“When I saw the little woman walking away,” I say, “pulling that
suitcase her size, I thought about Marnie talking about her bike’s
composite frame, the composite shifters, titanium gears, step-in
pedals.”
I say: “Her feet lock into her pedals like ski boots. That little
woman will never ride a mountain bike. They don’t make good bikes
that small. She’d have to buy a tricycle for Christ’s sake—a Goddamn
Big Wheel or something. You know?”
“Why is this personal?” Ellen asks. “Is this personal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dwarves attend conferences. I’ve read about this,” Ellen says.
“They have dwarf stores for clothes and furniture. Car stuff. A lot
of dwarves drive cars.” Then: “Dwarfism is treated as a disability.
There are lobbies for this. ‘Little People’ lobbies. And: conferences.
She was probably on her way to a conference. They meet at these
places, fall in love, marry, have babies.”
“What kind of babies? Regular or small?”
“Regular,” she says.
“Why would they be regular? A bald guy’s son is usually bald. Big
noses run in families. A son of an alcoholic is an alcoholic risk. A fat
woman’s mother is generally large, right? You think I didn’t check out
your mother?”
My wife is a slender woman who smokes cigarettes. She walks
four miles a day. Power walks. To stay fit, is what she says, and to
keep on smoking. My wife buys cheap filtered menthols she stubs out
when half puffed. It stunts your growth, she says. I call her E
sometimes instead of Ellen.
“You should quit, E,” I say.
“You like tiny women,” she says, lighting up. She raises a kitchen
window and sticks her head close. She is a polite smoker insofar as
she keeps smoke out of people’s faces and houses, even her own.
“Why wouldn’t dwarves bear dwarves?” I ask. And when Ellen
doesn’t answer: “What would a dwarf do with a four-year-old who
could knock her over?”
Ellen blows smoke out the window then swivels her head.
“What makes you think all dwarves are actors or circus freaks?”
“I think that?”
“Do you?”
I say that every few years you read in the paper about dwarf
tossing or such. “You don’t remember Cuomo signing legislation
banning dwarf tossing and dwarf bowling in New York bars?” We’d
lived in New York for a few years.
“Dwarf bowling?” E says.
“Yes.”
“Bowling?”
“They strap them on skateboards and fire them down the lane.”
Then: “As I understand it, they do wear helmets and the pins are
plastic.”
I clamp shut because I suddenly remember seeing on TV some little
folks wrapped in Velcro clothes. They were hung like pictures on
Velcro walls. I don’t recall whether they were tossed at the walls,
but, in any event, I don’t bring it up.
“Bars and bowling alleys,” E says. “I take it they throw dwarves in
bars.”
“Liquor’s involved,” I say. “It would have to be, right?”
“You tell me,” E says.
“Some dwarves have sued for the right to be tossed and bowled.”
I nod my head to enforce the point.
“Claiming what—the right to make a living?”
“So, maybe there should be a right? I mean, who stops 300-
pound blubber boys from squashing skinnier backs and wide-outs?
Why isn’t that illegal? Pitchers fire balls at batters’ heads. We’re not
talking hockey or Tyson eating Holyfield’s ear. Consenting dwarves,” I
say, “wear sturdy little helmets and padding, and when they’re
tossed, they land on mattresses—no, usually a pile of them.”
“Consenting? Did you say consenting?”
“I did.” Then: “I say if a man wants to juggle hatchets, let him do
it.”
“Where would you draw the line,” E asks, “chainsaws, grenades,
white phosphorus? White phosphorus,” she says, “reacts rapidly with
oxygen, catching fire at 10 to 15 degrees above room temperature.
Dangerous enough, Ace?”
My wife takes a drag on her cigarette. She blows smoke into the
room then shoots me a look. It’s the look I imagined on the writer
Annie Dillard’s face a few years back.
I’ve never met Ms. Dillard, but have taken pleasure in her work and
had just finished her book, For The Time Being. It’s hardly a book in an
obvious sense of unity and purpose. It is a loose yet rich federation
about human abnormalities, sand, clouds, numbers, China, Israel,
God, evil, archaeology, and life-size Chinese clay soldiers and their
horses—thousands of them sculpted for, then buried with the Emperor
Qin to honor and protect him for the past two thousand years. The
clay soldiers and their mounts were a whole new idea. It had been
the practice to bury an emperor’s living army with him when he
passed.
In the book, Dillard not only covers a variety of human
abnormalities—noting, in particular, mentally deficient bird-headed
dwarves—but a variety of human cruelties as well, such stunted acts
as the flaying of the 85-year-old Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah. The
Romans, more than 100 years before Christ, stripped the Rabbi’s living
flesh to its bones with horse currycombs, all the while the Rabbi
singing Shema, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
When I talk about the look on the writer’s face, I’m thinking of a look
that must have accompanied a one-sentence paragraph three-
quarters of the way into the book. Dillard, a smoker notes: Do you
think I don’t know cigarettes are fatal?
In her book, for every heartening note such as 17th-century Jews
who so respected books that when books wore out, they were buried
like a person, there is a person like Joseph Stalin who took the long
view: “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” Or
Mao who told Nehru that the atomic bomb was nothing to be afraid
of. Or a Ted Bundy who, with an invested sense of chilled proportion,
is able to explain his serial killings: “I mean, there are so many
people.”
When I finally get into bed, Ellen is asleep. I lie on my back, eyes
wide. What I see is my dwarf careening down a boulder trail in Utah.
It’s a full-size bike. There are metal extenders strapped to her feet
and locked into her pedals. At times, as she flies down the trail, she’s
airborne. In this picture I’m painting, my dwarf is unhelmeted, her
streaked locks like some nation’s flag. But, as my eyes adjust to the
bedroom’s dark, my picture dissolves. I’m past 60 and I lie on my back
thinking about college some 40 years before and the fraternity I
joined. It was a group known for drinking and reliable and current
exam files. The president of the fraternity didn’t live in the house on
Greek Row. He bought one of his own, a three-story deal where he
lived with eight roommates who covered his mortgage each month. I
was one of the renters. “Grog” Greer was, during his junior and
senior year, the Bareback Bronco Riding Champion in collegiate rodeo.
He was better known, though, for the annual Frat Bash, which
featured competitive dwarf tossing.
[First published in The North American Review, 2005]
Donald Anderson © 2005. All rights reserved.
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"Whose very earliest recollections do not
include the request Tell Me a Story? The
human race needs stories. We need all the
experience we can get."
include the request Tell Me a Story? The
human race needs stories. We need all the
experience we can get."
Overpass
When I dream, I am a boy with my father in my uncle’s car, an old
Chrysler with FluidDrive. It is unclear where we are headed in my
uncle’s blue car, but in the dream we are crossing Kansas. My father
shakes me awake to see, in the distance, an overpass. My father,
wobbled by the construction, wants me to see it. The overpass grows
until we pass beneath it. My father threatens to stop my uncle’s car.
What he does is accelerate. There is a scent of something. I know
because it’s hot and the windows are rolled down. “Get your head in
here,” my father shouts, still mashing the gas. Then he softens,
sends me to the back seat to look through that window.
The overpass has been perfectly constructed except that there are
no roads to it—the bridge connects air. Each time I turn, my father’s
still glaring at this shoreless bridge in his mirror. He doesn’t complain
I’m blocking his view.
In time the bridge drops below the horizon. My father backs off on
the gas. He calls me back to the front seat. He explains the bridge
disappears because the earth is not flat, but round. “Even Kansas,”
he says. He seems surprised himself.
My guess is the bridge is real—that I saw it with my father. That if
I were to drive along long enough in Kansas, I’d sight it. Somewhere
near Junction City, say, or Salina, or Wilson Lake, or Hays. The bridge
would arrive. Or I would.
The perfect pointless construction astraddle a road, triumphantly
idle: a sundial centered for a nation, an altar, a permanent needle of
a compass facing north, an Andy Warhol joke, an unfinished road from
home.
[First published in The North American Review, 2001]
Donald Anderson © 2001. All rights reserved.
When I dream, I am a boy with my father in my uncle’s car, an old
Chrysler with FluidDrive. It is unclear where we are headed in my
uncle’s blue car, but in the dream we are crossing Kansas. My father
shakes me awake to see, in the distance, an overpass. My father,
wobbled by the construction, wants me to see it. The overpass grows
until we pass beneath it. My father threatens to stop my uncle’s car.
What he does is accelerate. There is a scent of something. I know
because it’s hot and the windows are rolled down. “Get your head in
here,” my father shouts, still mashing the gas. Then he softens,
sends me to the back seat to look through that window.
The overpass has been perfectly constructed except that there are
no roads to it—the bridge connects air. Each time I turn, my father’s
still glaring at this shoreless bridge in his mirror. He doesn’t complain
I’m blocking his view.
In time the bridge drops below the horizon. My father backs off on
the gas. He calls me back to the front seat. He explains the bridge
disappears because the earth is not flat, but round. “Even Kansas,”
he says. He seems surprised himself.
My guess is the bridge is real—that I saw it with my father. That if
I were to drive along long enough in Kansas, I’d sight it. Somewhere
near Junction City, say, or Salina, or Wilson Lake, or Hays. The bridge
would arrive. Or I would.
The perfect pointless construction astraddle a road, triumphantly
idle: a sundial centered for a nation, an altar, a permanent needle of
a compass facing north, an Andy Warhol joke, an unfinished road from
home.
[First published in The North American Review, 2001]
Donald Anderson © 2001. All rights reserved.
Legal Limit
Driving from Denver, I’m boxed in on the Interstate. To my front is half
a long mobile home; to my left a brand-new concrete-gray cement
truck, barreling south. Pulling to my rear and filling my own truck’s
mirror is a GMC four-wheel-drive from Texas. Its interior is wedged
with hunters. I count them: six. There is some sort of rigged rifle rack
behind the second seat, and I spot sleeping bags and piled gear, and
what look to be tents, or parachutes. Two deer are strapped to the
roof that gives with the weight. The men sport three-day beards,
flannel shirts, and Blaze Orange vests. Each of the shirts is a version
of red. Dome lights on—maybe even a Coleman lantern—the faces
seem both front- and back-lit, like a ’40s flick. Somebody is smoking.
Two of the men wear hats. The dead deer are strapped with white
rope.
In this state, in this season, only male deer are shot, antlers the
proof. The trigger finger of my right hand throbs. There is, I see, blood
clotted beneath the cuticle. The hunters flash their lights, but no exit is
at hand, my front and left still blocked by a cement truck and
someone's severed home. The hunters flourish Colorado beer cans,
wave at me to move. Unable to not, I check for weapons, peer for six.
The roofed deer do not budge. The one to my mirror left rests formally
on his side, the other more nearly on his back, forelegs bent and up,
head turned, exposing belly.
Again the hunters flash their lights, kiss my bumper. I edge to the
right, work the narrow shoulder, and the hunters swerve, saluting as
they pass. The passenger windows are mottled with blood—the deer
gutted but not hung? In tow is a low-slung trailer, stacked with four
more bucks and what my father pronounced “tarpauling.” One buck’s
legs have been chopped or sawed off.
I roll to a stop to draw a breath. Five feet in front the sign: NO
PARKING EMERGENCY ONLY. Despite the warning I perch on the
shoulder. I wait for Texas to roll closer to Texas, and for the home and
the truck to establish their positions. Why does it seem a stretch to
think of a cement truck as new and of a house as perfectly divided?
I ease back into traffic, the skin of the shoulder ice cracking. Once, I
was helping my father split wood, and in steadying the steel wedge for
him, had my hand smashed, when the wedge sprang sideways. The
tips of my fingers ballooned and my nails turned blue and purple, the
color of pulped things. With his right thumb my father struck a wooden
match to heat a straightened paper clip he then pressed through my
nails until each finger’s pooled blood erupted: geysers. He then re-
gloved my hand and we finished our work. When we stacked the
wood, I worked as though my hands were burned. The heated clip
had pierced my nails as though they were wax. How was it he was
carrying paper clips and matches?
Cars motor by. Considering the road and the weather, it makes
sense to drive below the limit. Near Larkspur, I depart the Interstate
to drive a parallel frontage road. It is a cloudless and full-moon night,
and with the snow and no traffic, I can drive without lights. Lowering
my window, I crane for the sound of unequal war, faint and persistent
from the hills.
[First published in The Michigan Quarterly Review, 2003]
Donald Anderson © 2003. All rights reserved.
Driving from Denver, I’m boxed in on the Interstate. To my front is half
a long mobile home; to my left a brand-new concrete-gray cement
truck, barreling south. Pulling to my rear and filling my own truck’s
mirror is a GMC four-wheel-drive from Texas. Its interior is wedged
with hunters. I count them: six. There is some sort of rigged rifle rack
behind the second seat, and I spot sleeping bags and piled gear, and
what look to be tents, or parachutes. Two deer are strapped to the
roof that gives with the weight. The men sport three-day beards,
flannel shirts, and Blaze Orange vests. Each of the shirts is a version
of red. Dome lights on—maybe even a Coleman lantern—the faces
seem both front- and back-lit, like a ’40s flick. Somebody is smoking.
Two of the men wear hats. The dead deer are strapped with white
rope.
In this state, in this season, only male deer are shot, antlers the
proof. The trigger finger of my right hand throbs. There is, I see, blood
clotted beneath the cuticle. The hunters flash their lights, but no exit is
at hand, my front and left still blocked by a cement truck and
someone's severed home. The hunters flourish Colorado beer cans,
wave at me to move. Unable to not, I check for weapons, peer for six.
The roofed deer do not budge. The one to my mirror left rests formally
on his side, the other more nearly on his back, forelegs bent and up,
head turned, exposing belly.
Again the hunters flash their lights, kiss my bumper. I edge to the
right, work the narrow shoulder, and the hunters swerve, saluting as
they pass. The passenger windows are mottled with blood—the deer
gutted but not hung? In tow is a low-slung trailer, stacked with four
more bucks and what my father pronounced “tarpauling.” One buck’s
legs have been chopped or sawed off.
I roll to a stop to draw a breath. Five feet in front the sign: NO
PARKING EMERGENCY ONLY. Despite the warning I perch on the
shoulder. I wait for Texas to roll closer to Texas, and for the home and
the truck to establish their positions. Why does it seem a stretch to
think of a cement truck as new and of a house as perfectly divided?
I ease back into traffic, the skin of the shoulder ice cracking. Once, I
was helping my father split wood, and in steadying the steel wedge for
him, had my hand smashed, when the wedge sprang sideways. The
tips of my fingers ballooned and my nails turned blue and purple, the
color of pulped things. With his right thumb my father struck a wooden
match to heat a straightened paper clip he then pressed through my
nails until each finger’s pooled blood erupted: geysers. He then re-
gloved my hand and we finished our work. When we stacked the
wood, I worked as though my hands were burned. The heated clip
had pierced my nails as though they were wax. How was it he was
carrying paper clips and matches?
Cars motor by. Considering the road and the weather, it makes
sense to drive below the limit. Near Larkspur, I depart the Interstate
to drive a parallel frontage road. It is a cloudless and full-moon night,
and with the snow and no traffic, I can drive without lights. Lowering
my window, I crane for the sound of unequal war, faint and persistent
from the hills.
[First published in The Michigan Quarterly Review, 2003]
Donald Anderson © 2003. All rights reserved.