Dwarf: A Memoir (11 page)

Fuming, I swallowed the angry lump in my throat, slid off my chair, and waddled down
the narrow hallway that led to my bedroom. Before I slammed my door, I yelled back:
“And I hate your hair!”

Refusing to use my blue plastic stool to get onto the bed, I clawed my way up, hot
tears streaming down my cheeks by the time I threw myself into the pillow. A few minutes
later there was a knock on my door.

“Tiffie?” Mom paused. “Tiffie, can I come in?”

I didn’t answer.

Quietly, she pushed the door open. She moved my stuffed animals aside and sat next
to me on the bed but didn’t say a word. That’s always been the beauty of my relationship
with my mom. We could fight one moment and be perfectly normal the next.

“Why isn’t Dad here?” I asked, sobbing.

“He has things in Massachusetts to take care of. You know that.”

“Can I call him?” I asked.

“Of course you can call him.” She got up and retrieved the phone for me.

“Daddy,” I sobbed over the line, “I miss you. I want to come home.”

A year or so later, I got what I wanted. Mom didn’t reenlist for reasons I didn’t
fully understand. I still don’t (she’s incredibly private about it), though I suspect
it had something to do with me. At the time, I was just happy we were leaving. But
every time I hear my mother tell someone, “I’d give my right arm to go back in,” I
feel a little more guilty and responsible for it all.

Back home in Douglas, life was nothing like I’d hoped it would be. Everyone had moved
on. Even though I grew up with those kids, when I returned, I felt like I didn’t know
them at all, and they didn’t know me. They had shared memories and inside jokes I
had no way of understanding. I wondered if Evelyn felt the same way at her new school
in London. Luckily, I still had Katie, Bruiser, and my old closet with shelves that
I could actually reach. But that was about to change. Again.

For my thirteenth birthday, I wanted nothing more than new clothes. So Dad took me
out on a birthday shopping spree. Inside the massive expanse of Filene’s department
store, I was surrounded by more “Sarahs” who looked nothing like me. I thought back
to my days with my dad at the Fair when nothing mattered
but which Barbie I would pick. Now I had to look like the Sarahs of the world.

“Are you hungry?” Dad asked me after a couple of hours of sorting through tops and
skirts and dresses. Shortly thereafter, we plopped down on plastic chairs in the food
court.

“Dad, what makes a girl pretty?” I asked.

“I suppose it’s different for everyone,” he said thoughtfully.

“I don’t think my hips are pretty— they’re wide,” I said between bites of sweet-and-sour
chicken with fried rice.

“You ever see this expression?” Dad asked, forming the shape of an hourglass in the
air with his hands. “There’s nothing wrong with wide hips.”

“I’ve never seen that,” I told him.

“Oh. Well, don’t worry about what someone else thinks is pretty. Worry about what
makes you happy. Pretty will come through being happy.”

This was the best piece of advice my dad had ever given me.

As we pulled into the driveway after our shopping trip, something on the front walkway
caught my eye. As I made my way up to the front door, I was shocked to see that it
was a For Sale sign. Through the screen door, I watched Mom talking to a man at our
dining room table, both of them signing papers. The man wore cowboy boots that poked
out from beneath his stonewashed jeans. I looked at my dad, who remained stoic as
he watched them.

Not Texas,
I thought wildly.
Not again!

“Tiffie,” Mom began as I walked into the house, “this is Randy Carpenter. He’s our
Realtor.” Randy smiled and shook my hand.

“Are we leaving again?” I asked, feeling frantic.

“We’re going to stay with Papa for a while in Marlborough.”

As I stood there trying to process the shock of a move in
progress that no one had told me about— and one that Dad didn’t seem to be involved
in— Mom smiled at me.

“Did you have fun shopping, Miss Teenager?” she asked, as if nothing had just happened.
“We have cake for you!”

Soon, our house in Douglas was sold— because, I learned, Mom wanted to live closer
to Papa— and I felt uprooted all over again. Along with my friends, my sense of ease
in the world had vanished. I hated struggling to put in my own earrings, barely able
to reach my own ears. I hated not being able to reach the perfume bottles on my dresser
or the forks in the drawer. I was too stubborn to ask for help, and the process of
finagling clever tricks to function during my day didn’t make me feel like MacGyver
anymore. It was just frustrating. I was no longer in my house where I could find whatever
I needed and make the space work for me. In Papa’s house, I didn’t feel right about
rummaging through his things to find household items I could use as tools.

On nights while Mom worked, Papa and I often made our favorite meal together: linguine
with white clam sauce. As we cooked, Sinatra and Dean Martin played softly, and we
shook our hips to “New York, New York.” While Papa moved about the kitchen, gathering
ingredients, I dragged my stool around with me.

One night, like an hourglass that had run out of sand, time had run out on my patience.
I woke up after midnight with a mean craving for Oreos and milk. Quietly, and careful
not to wake my mom and Papa, I followed the glow of the night-light down the hall
to the kitchen. The Oreos were close by on the shelf, and I could reach them easily.
The milk would be more of a problem.

As softly as I could, I opened the refrigerator and placed my stool up against the
shelves. The milk was on the fourth shelf. As I had done so many times before, I stepped
up and felt the ribbed
plastic underneath my bare feet. Closer and closer, I carefully moved my toes to the
smooth edge and squeezed my butt for balance. The bright bulb felt hot on my eyes
as I gazed up at the milk.

I stretched my tiny arms up as far as I could and stood on my tiptoes until I felt
the plastic gallon container against my fingertips. I squeezed hard with both hands
and pulled it closer, inch by inch. I lifted my body higher with my toes. I had it.

I almost had it.

I
would
have had it if I could have held the jug tightly with my hands, but its width and
weight were too much for my small arms.

Then I lost my grip.

The milk jug somersaulted down to the floor and hit the tile with a thud. The lid
popped off and bounced under the cabinets. I was too shocked to notice that my feet
had begun to slip as well. Suddenly my stool shot out from under me and I went crashing
down to the floor.

I landed hard on top of the jug and rolled over onto the cold milk still pouring out.
I was drenched. The milk flowed around my head, soaking my nightgown and my hair.
I lay there staring hard at the ceiling. The adrenaline coursed through my veins,
and my nose tingled like I was about to cry. This was an accident that never should
have happened. I wanted cookies and milk, but instead I got a harsh message, loud
and clear. I was not finished with my bone-lengthening surgeries.

“What are you
doing
?” Mom yelled as she barreled down the stairs. Papa swung open the door from his bedroom
and met her in the kitchen. I looked up at them from the floor but didn’t answer.
I was busy picturing Sarah reaching into her refrigerator and easily, effortlessly,
pouring herself milk without falling and scaring her entire family.

“You’re lucky that wasn’t glass!” Papa boomed. “Did you hurt yourself?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t physically hurt, but I was so frustrated by
my own body. How could I start high school when I couldn’t even get my own drink?
What kind of teenager was I? What kind of woman would I be? Inside, I ached. I wanted
to scream and slam my fists on the floor. I was angry with the fridge, angry at the
milk, and angry at whoever had placed it on the fourth shelf. But above all, I was
angry with my stubby arms. I stood up slowly with the help of my Papa’s strong forearm
and shot my mom a look that said it all.

I wanted longer arms and I didn’t want to waste any time.

We were in Dr. Shapiro’s office within days. “There’s no use crying over spilled milk,”
he joked.

But it was more than that. I had been challenged, and I had lost. And any surgery
that minimized the chances of that happening again would be well worth it.

“We could probably get two inches in your arms by lengthening the humerus,” Dr. Shapiro
said encouragingly. “You will be amazed at what two inches can give you.”

Something told me he was right, and I decided that it would be well worth it to have
the surgery on my arms.

You’re Obviously a Dwarf

As a teenager, with my mother and one of her patients from UMass Memorial Medical
Center (our Pontiac Grand Prix is parked in the background).

M
ARLBOROUGH HIGH SCHOOL
was a massive, three-story brick building. It was imposing to everyone, but especially
to me at an even four feet tall. I attended eighth grade in the building due to overcrowding
in the middle school. Black panther paw prints lined the outdoor walkway and two sets
of double doors opened into a large, open foyer at the front of the building. Bright
orange railings lined the stairs and second-and third-floor walkways, and there were
rumors that the design of the school was modeled after
a state penitentiary. I don’t know how true this was, but I do know that Mrs. Carlson,
one of the headmasters, acted a lot like a warden as she stood out in the first-floor
hallway, ordering us into our classrooms.

As in every high school, Marlborough had its cliques. Stephanie, Jessica, Clarissa,
and Kelly were the ambassadors of the “in” crowd. I wanted terribly to belong, but
since I didn’t, I remember taking pride in the fact that Mike Gould, the guy that
all those girls wanted, would call
me
after school each day.

Mike went to Northborough, a high school in the next town over. All the girls flocked
to him for as long as I can remember, no matter what school they attended. They all
loved him and wished he’d love them back. He was the boy everyone wanted at their
party, because he
made
the party, just by entering the room. With deep brown eyes, chestnut hair, and a
perfect smile— accessorized with a pair of round dimples— Mike was the portrait of
what it’s like to be exceptional. If it weren’t for his slight lisp, he probably would
have been
too
perfect, but on a guy like this, even a minor speech impediment was cute. He knew
all the popular people from all the neighboring high schools: the Southborough ninth-grade
girls, Westborough’s eleventh-grade babes, and the Hudson twelfth-grade hotties. He
dated them all briefly and left them pining. He was a legend and a bad boy who loved
to ride dirt bikes, and I had the luck to call him my best friend.

Every day after school, the phone would ring and I knew his soft, sweet voice would
be on the other end.

The greeting was always the same.

“Hey, what’s up?”

And I always looked forward to telling him.

Our friendship started completely by accident, in the summer of 1994, just after my
mom and I moved out of Papa’s house and
into a saltbox-style home of our own where Dad moved in with us for good. I was fourteen,
I had never had a date or a boyfriend, and Mike was in the middle of an adolescent
love triangle with my friends Jen and Megan.

“I’m done! He has to choose— it’s me or Megan!” I remember Jen announcing dramatically
one day at my house. She came over often and I’d get to hear about her latest saga.
Jen was into cropped shirts, lip gloss, eyeliner, blue eye shadow, and boys who owned
beepers. She was a nice, normal, and frivolous distraction from the seriousness of
surgery I often faced. That afternoon, she reached for the phone and thrust it in
my direction after dialing Mike’s number, disregarding my mom’s strict policy against
calling boys.

“Find out how he feels about me,” she ordered.

“He won’t know who I am,” I said softly.

This would be the first time I had ever spoken to a boy on the phone. Nothing compared
to the nervousness I felt that day as I gripped our cordless phone— not needles, not
hospitals, not operating tables. Mike and I had never actually met, but his reputation
preceded him. I was scared.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jen reassured me. “Just tell him you’re my friend.”

So I did. The call was easier than I thought, and that night Mike picked neither Jen
nor Megan to date. Instead he went out with Christine, a girl from the tortured, teenage-angsty
crowd at my school. Within the next few days, Jen had found a new boy to obsess over.
He even had a beeper. Megan, on the other hand, didn’t get over Mike quite so quickly,
and I happily lent her my ear for it.

A few days later, I got a surprise phone call. Mike called
me
to talk. It had been business as usual that afternoon, turning
the pins in my forearms and cleaning them for the second time of the day, when the
phone rang. (The fixator devices attached to my arms looked like long, horizontal
remote controls— and the process was not nearly as painful as lengthening my legs.)
I was shocked to find out that Mike was interested to know who I was and wanted to
know why he’d never seen me before. It really bothered him. He knew everyone there
was to know— how had little me escaped him?