Big Girl Small Read online

  PRAISE FOR RACHEL DEWOSKIN AND BIG GIRL SMALL

  ‘Plays out with the intensity of a song. Every word counts. This is one of those novels about love that we turn to in order to live with an ongoing condition, the slow burn and the long haul, the bolt that hits, stops, hits again.’

  DAVID LEVITHAN

  ‘Big Girl Small is the most engaging novel I’ve read in many years. DeWoskin has aimed the book at all the pleasure centres: it’s sad, funny, quirkily suspenseful, and—most of all—beautiful.’

  DARIN STRAUSS, author of

  More Than It Hurts You

  ‘Big Girl Small examines the crucial moment when we either listen to what the world says and stay small or dare to sing out at the top of our lungs.’

  NICOLA KEEGAN, author of Swimming

  ‘DeWoskin’s daring third book takes on sexual politics, physical beauty, pity, and violence, and succeeds in giving readers a nuanced and provocative treatment.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘I loved reading Big Girl Small as much as I loved watching The Breakfast Club for the first time. Is Rachel DeWoskin our new John Hughes?’

  ISABEL GILLIES, author of

  Happens Every Day

  ‘Rachel DeWoskin handles the story with the sensitivity of a scalpel and a humour that leaves the reader howling. I was delighted and moved.’

  HELEN SIMONSON, author of

  Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

  Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about her inadvertent notoriety as the star of a Chinese soap opera, and a novel, Repeat After Me. She lives in New York City and Beijing and is at work on her fourth book, Statutory.

  racheldewoskin.com

  textpublishing.com.au

  racheldewoskin.com

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Rachel DeWoskin 2011

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following: “We Belong Together” by Rickie Lee Jones. Copyright ©1981 by Rickie Lee Jones. Reprinted by permission of Rickie Lee Jones. Runaways by Elizabeth Swados. Reprinted by permission of Samuel French, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2011

  Cover design by WH Chong

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: DeWoskin, Rachel.

  Title: Big Girl Small / Rachel DeWoskin.

  Edition: 1st ed.

  ISBN: 9781921758249 (pbk.)

  Subjects: Teenage girls--Fiction.

  Dwarfs--Fiction.

  Dewey Number: 813.6

  Primary print isbn: 9781921758249

  Ebook isbn: 9781921834646

  For my spectacular daughters, Dalin and Light

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Acknowledgments

  1 When people make you feel small, it means they shrink you down close to nothing, diminish you, make you feel like shit. In fact, small and shit are like equivalent words in English. It makes sense, in a way. Not that small and shit are the same, I mean, but that Americans might think that. Take The Wizard of Oz, for example, an American classic everyone loves more than anything even though there’s a whole “Munchkinland” of embarrassed people, half of them dressed in pink rompers and licking lollipops even though they’re thirty years old. They don’t even have names in the credits; it just says at the end, “Munchkins played by ‘The Singer Midgets.’ ” Judy Garland apparently loved gay people, was even something of an activist, but she spread rumors about how the “midgets” were so raucous, fucking each other all the time and drinking bourbon on the set. People love those stories because it’s so much fun to think of tiny people having sex. There was even an urban myth about how one of the dwarfs hanged himself—everyone said you could see him swinging in the back of the shot—but it turns out it was actually an emu. Right. A bird they got to make the forest look “magical.” And what with the five-inch TVs everyone had in those days, the two-pixel bird spreading its dirty wings apparently called to mind a dead dwarf. In other words, people wanted it bad enough to believe that’s what it was. Magical, my ass. I know that small and shit are the same because I’m sixteen years old and three feet nine inches tall.

  Judy Garland was sixteen too, when she made Wizard of Oz, but I’m betting she must have felt like she was nine feet tall, getting to be a movie star and all. I should have known better than to try for stardom myself, because even though my mom sang me “Thumbelina” every night of my life, she also took me to Saturday Night Live once when we were in New York on a family vacation, and it happened that the night I was there they had dozens of little people falling off choral risers as one of their skits. My mom almost died of horror, weeping in the audience. Everyone around us thought she was touched, that all those idiots on stage must have been, like, her other kids. Like they were my beautiful Munchkin brothers or something, even though my mom’s average-size and so are my two brothers. They’d even have average lives, if only they didn’t have me. My mother’s idea has always been to try to make me feel close to perfect, but how close can that be, considering I look like she snatched me from some dollhouse.

  Nothing on Saturday Night Live is ever funny, but the night we went was especially bad. One of the little people even got hurt falling off those risers, but no one thought anything of it, except my mom, who made a point of waiting for an hour after the show was done, to ask was he okay. I was furious, because everyone who walked by us kept saying “Good show” to me.

  I would never be in anything of the sort, by the way, because my parents don’t believe in circus humiliation. That’s what my college essay was going to be on, freak shows and the Hottentot Venus. Most people don’t know that much about her, except that she was famous for having a butt so big the Victorians couldn’t believe it. So they made her into an attraction people could pay money to stare at and grope. I bet you didn’t know, for example, that her name was Saartjie, or “Little Sarah,” or that she even had a name. The “Little” in her name is the cute, endearing version of the word, not the literal little. Or even worse, belittle, which, by combining be and little, means “to make fun of.” I think I would have included that definition as, like, the denouement of my essay, after the climax, where I planned to mention that after her nightmare carnival

  life, Little Sarah died at twenty-six and they preserved her ass on display in a Paris museum. She was orphaned in a commando raid in South Africa; otherwise maybe none of those terrible things would have happened to her.

  I have parents, thankfully. And they always tried to keep me private. I don’t mean they hid me in a closet or anything, but they also didn’t let people take pictures of me when we traveled or touch me for money. And when people stared, even kids, my parents stared back, unblinking, but friendly-like. The thing is, you can’t blame kids for staring. Not only because I’m miniature, but also because I’m a little bit “disproportionate.” That’s wh
at they call it when the fit of your parts is in any way off the mainstream chart: “disproportionate.” Maybe your arms or legs are too stumpy or your torso is small and your head is huge. Or maybe you’re just you, like Saartjie Hottentot, and it’s only relative to everyone else that you’re disproportionate. Maybe someday they’ll think disproportionate dwarf is a rude expression and they’ll come up with a nicer way to put it. I think most people know now that Hottentot is considered a rude word. Maybe not, though. Most people are stupid as hell when it comes to things like which words are rude. And a lot of people, even once they find out which words hurt people, still like to use them. They think it’s smarmy and “PC” to have to say things kindly, or that it’s too much pressure not to be able to punish freaks with words like freak.

  Anyway, my parents would never even let me audition for American Idol, even though I can really sing, because they know Simon Cowell laughs at all the deformed people. It’s complicated, since my mom and dad would never admit that my “situation” qualifies, but they still have to protect me. Because of this quandary, they finally broke down and agreed to send me to a performing arts high school last fall for my junior year, which is what caused this whole hideous nightmare in the first place.

  Maybe my parents should have admitted that dwarfs are better off cloistered or hanging in some forest of Oz, and saved me the humiliation of having tried to pretend I’m fit to attend a flashy school. My parents are five feet six and six feet one, but they’re on every board of every dwarf association in the world, and they use the words little people like there was never any other way to put it. They take me to “little people” conferences and manage to blend right in. So maybe from their dreamy bubble, it seemed possible that my “stellar academic performance” and charming personality would earn me popularity and favor among the rest of the kids, that I’d be a beloved Lilliputian among the Brobdingnagians.

  That’s not how it turned out. I should say right here, though, that what happened is not my parents’ fault, and that I don’t blame them. They’re probably frantic right now, or dead from ulcers or heart attacks. I know they’re searching for me, and the thought of it makes me physically sick. I guess because I love them. But I can’t come out of here yet, don’t know when I’ll ever be able to rejoin the world.

  Because most of society, including Darcy Arts Academy, is nothing like my parents. You can get a sense of the difference if you take a look online. I’ll give you an example. Google “little people” and you get 8 million hits, most of which are for stumpy Fisher-Price figures with no legs. If you look up “small people,” you get under a million (but at least one of the first two is the charming lyric “short people got no reason to live,” preceding a story about tiny ancient people who hunted rats and lizards near the Java Sea). Call it predictable, but if you search “midget,” you get 21 million hits, about 20 million of which are YouTube videos of “midget fights,” “midget bowling,” or “midget Michael Jacksons.” There’s also the really nice website TinyEntertainer.com, with its “Rent a Midget” logo scrolling across the screen like breaking news ticker tape. And if you type in “midget girl,” you get [email protected]. Maybe up in the big world it’s difficult to understand why midgets might hate the word midget, but here, I’ll help. The Little People’s Association explains it like this:

  the term has fallen into disfavor and is considered offensive by most people of short stature. The term dates back to 1865, the height of the “freak show” era, and was generally applied only to short-statured persons who were displayed for public amusement, which is why it is considered so unacceptable today. Such terms as dwarf, little person, LP, and person of short stature are all acceptable, but most people would rather be referred to by their name than by a label.

  “Fallen into disfavor.” I love that. So everyone can call me Judy, even after I get a job as a hot porno midget escort, because there’s nowhere else for me to go from here. It’s funny how I’ve reached the bottom of something, but up is still not an option.

  My parents named me Judy accidentally, by the way, without realizing that Judy Garland was a dwarf mocker. Judy has always been my mom’s favorite name, and who doesn’t love that Klimt picture of Judith holding Holofernes’ head? Maybe someday there’ll be a picture of me holding Kyle Malanack’s head, although it’ll be a smudged newspaper photo, ripped digitally from the security camera of a parking garage or something. I doubt people will produce millions of prints for dorm rooms. Although maybe they will. Some kids love a villain.

  I was brilliant in school, by the way. You have to be smart as well as talented in some other, “artistic” way to get into Darcy. Maybe that will be the next story, when it breaks, when they find me here. The sequel. Lots of Darcy kids being like, “She seemed so, well, normal!” Except they’ll have to stop themselves: “I mean, not normal, but you know, sweet”—except they’ll have to stop themselves there, too, because I wasn’t sweet, exactly, was kind of sarcastic, for a doll of a girl. “Well,” they’ll have to concede, “after what happened to her, I mean, who wouldn’t lose it?” They all know what happened. It’s too horrible to contemplate, and I wish I didn’t know. What they should say is that I was too smart for my own good, that it would have been better to be an animal, not to know what I was missing, not to have been able to see my life. A little bit of ignorance would have saved me. What good is there in seeing your situation clearly if there’s no escape from it? I’d love to hear the story of my academic genius, if there were any way of interpreting it other than that I’ve had to overcompensate every second of my life.

  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.