New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 2

by Grant Bailie

Robert, in fact, was a very small man. He was small in each of his individual components and in the sum total of all of his parts. He weighed little and wore clothes that he bought in the children’s sections of stores. He inhabited that difficult space between merely being short and being short enough to have a namable physical condition; he was not a dwarf or a midget or a little person. He was completely proportional, but small.

Growing up, as far as he had taken that process, his parents had hoped for some sudden spurt — some overnight beanstalk miracle that would alleviate their fears. Like all parents, they had hoped to see in their only son an adult who was in some way an enhanced reflection of their own adult selves: slightly taller, slightly more intelligent, slightly more successful.

They were normal sized people, who had done reasonably well in their life, having each worked their way up the ladder of their respective professions and acquired a bit more than the usual amount of comfort and objects.

Robert had been the culmination of a considerable amount of effort on their part. Through one or the other’s reproductive inadequacies — or more likely, the combination of both — conception had proved a difficult task. Books were read and doctors consulted and the act itself became a complicated procedure of dates and temperatures and carefully calculated angles.

But after several years of increasingly pleasureless and workman-like attempts, the desired results were finally achieved and a little less than nine months later Robert was born.

He had been from the start a happy and gentle child, given nearly from the point of his birth to beatific expressions on his cherubic face that were not always the result of gas.

He was breastfed for exactly the prescribed amount of time, and even the mobile that hung over his crib had been the result of a ten-year long study by a team of Swedish pediatricians and graphic designers.

He rolled over, he crawled, he toddled. He walked, he cooed, he spoke.

His first words were dog, cat, bird and sun. His parents waited patiently for him to mention them.

Eventually he did, said the usual “Mom,” then “Dad,” and then he was the tender youth, sitting in the green grass of the back yard, endlessly amused by dandelion fluff and a dragonfly buzzing overhead.

At four, he was stung by his first bee. His parents were both, in a sense, heartbroken. That nature itself could rise up from the tranquility of their lawn to cause Robert the first stab of pain that was not the product of his own doing — he’d had his diaper rashes and bumped heads by then — struck them both as profoundly unjust, and his mother cried herself to sleep in his father’s arms that night.

The years passed and he grew but not enough. He was the smallest boy in every classroom picture. He sat and then stood smiling with his crooked haircut and missing teeth in the front row. He gained his teeth but lost his smile. His classmates towered over him and the photographer of his picture for the senior yearbook had found it necessary to place a phone book beneath him on the chair.

He went to college only for one year, felt the stares, as he walked down the hallway with an impossible load of books. He knew these looks were more from confusion than derision — he was small, but not quite small enough. What was he? He was Robert, a little man, but not a little person.

He left school and while his parents blinked their teary eyes, he packed his meager belongings into a small and rusting car and moved to an apartment in the city. The car broke down within the first month.

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