Little Little Read Free Page A

anymore. I had favorite places, too, and one of them was Stardust Park.
    Immediately after I checked into The Stardust Inn that hot Friday afternoon in September, I walked down to the park, even though I knew it was closed because it was off season.
    Stardust Park was only thirty miles from The Twin Oaks Orphans’ Home.
    When I was at Twin Oaks, I lived in Miss Lake’s cottage, where most of the handicapped lived. There were ramps for wheelchairs there instead of stairs, and sinks and closets and drinking fountains, et cetera, were lower to accommodate us.
    All the kids who lived in Miss Lake’s called it Mistakes.
    There was every kind of kid to be expected there, but I was the only dwarf.
    Stardust Park in the summer was a miniature Disneyland, filled with all the things you’d find in one of those places, from a 62 -MPH roller coaster to a ten-foot walking chicken.
    I was taken there one time with some others from Mistakes, just as the sun was rising in the early morning sky.
    We always went to public places before the public was allowed in.
    Some of the employees who ran the rides and sold the souvenirs were sitting around having their morning coffee.
    Even though they were supposed to be prepared for the visit from Twin Oaks, they didn’t look it. Their heads whirled around as we filed past them, and I said under my breath, “MyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?”
    I always said what everyone watching us was thinking when we came into view. OhmyGoddoyouseewhatIsee?
    There was me, and there was Wheels Potter, who had no legs and got about on a board with roller-skate wheels attached to it. There was Bighead Langhorn, whose head was the size of an enormous pumpkin set on a skinny body just a little taller than mine. There was Wires Kaplan, with his hearing aid and his thick glasses and his bum leg. There was Cloud, the one-armed albino, in his dark glasses with his massive head of curly white hair the texture of steel wool. There was Pill Suchanek, whose mother had taken some drug before Pill was born that threw her whole body out of whack and left her with flippers for arms. There were a few in wheelchairs and one on crutches, all led by a teacher we nicknamed Robot, because his first name was Robert and his only facial expression was a smile, his only mood cheerful.
    I paid very little attention to The Underground City or the ten-foot chicken, the 62 -MPH roller coaster, The Space Shuttle, The Early American Village, or Winter Wonderland.
    I had gone on that expedition expressly to see Gnomeland.
    Age eleven, I had never seen another dwarf, except on television or in drawings and photographs.
    When I entered Gnomeland, I could not believe my eyes. It didn’t matter to me that they were all dressed in cute little costumes with bells attached to stocking caps and felt shoes on their feet, that the men wore fake white beards and some of the men and women wore cone-shaped red hats.
    I laughed aloud at the buttons some wore proclaiming THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE GNOME.
    I saw some with humps and some without, some wizened and ugly and some not, some old, some young—they all looked good to me.
    I imagined (or I didn’t) that they were all smiling at me especially, as though we all shared a fantastic secret.
    Still, shyly, I stayed by Robot, who must have read my bashfulness as some sort of reluctance.
    “Are you bothered by this, Sydney?”
    “Bothered?”
    “By this … commercialization?”
    “I’m not bothered,” I told him, not really sure what he was talking about. I added, “Anything but,” longing to speak to one of them, to get my nerve up to say something.
    But all I managed was a futile tug at the arm of Robot’s coat when he said all right, next was the boat ride through The Underground City.
    “Come on, Sydney!” Robot called as I fell behind. “Get ready to row row row your boat!”
    A hunchback dwarf with a fat cigar in his mouth stood at a microphone singing, “You’re gnomebody ’til somebody loves