Little Minnie
I was a lion tamer. Rode on the back of firetrucks with dalmatians. Struck matches to light cigars that exploded. Jumped off a thirty-foot diving board and transformed into a life-size doll in mid-air. The director had wondered out loud: But what if she took the dive herself? Someone reminded him that I couldn’t swim. I was four and I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know my real name yet. They called me Little Minnie.
Little Minnie was a sensation. She stood next to the mayor of Los Angeles at electoral rallies, went on tour with a celebrity beagle, presided over famous boxing matches. There were Little Minnie watches and face towels. Little Minnie dolls with hard faces and glass eyes that rolled backward. A hundred-and-thirty-four Little Minnie films between 1921 and 1926. She was a princess on a pea, an orphan who got into the jam jar, a bandit. She fit into any scenario that demanded a girl be wry and daring. She wore plaid dresses and balanced straw in the gaps of loose baby teeth. She socked grown men in the jaw and had a wink that could melt titanium. Little Minnie was good that way. So good that she became the first toddler-millionaire. But that ended, and so did being little, when I was nine. That’s when I went back to my real life as Veronica Earl, the youngest has-been there ever was.
***
Now, I’m 61. A divorcée, a widow and a retired librarian in that order. I live in an apartment where everything, including a singular house plant, is the same shade of fleshy beige. I’ve tried every fad diet under the sun, even one where you just eat peas straight out of the freezer, and I keep telling myself I’m going to scrapbook, or at the very least look at my growing stack of National Geographics. Routines don’t look good on me, I suppose. The only one I seem to be able to stick to is my monthly drive into the Sierra Nevada. That’s where Mom lives, up a dirt road called Lookout Point, in a cabin that used to belong to a fire scout. She bought it at auction for a thousand dollars and it came with everything inside: the squeaky orange futon, the cupboard of stale nutmeg, the propane stove and radio. At first, she could drive down to the little village at the bottom of the mountain to buy filtered water. But last year, she drove her pick-up into a boulder, so now I deliver groceries and spread soft cheese on ribs of celery for her. She’ll lick the cheese out of the cavity and graze the fibers with her teeth, giving the illusion that she is chewing. She’s stubborn this way. She won’t go to a dentist and she won’t move.
“Don’t you want to live somewhere with television?” I ask.
“I’ve never watched television and don’t plan to start.”
“That’s not true. You liked Bonanza. Remember? You said Hoss reminds you of Dad.”
Mom groans like a catbird and abandons the conversation. She hobbles into the kitchen to reorganize a drawer that only contains three rusty can openers, and I slink in behind her to make sure she doesn’t get tetanus. Of course, she could get tetanus on the days I’m not there, so my presence feels futile. I’ve tried to remedy this by inventing new house projects. First, I threw out the contents of the fire scout’s medicine cabinet, mostly loose Band-Aids, but also, weirdly, several half-eaten bags of almonds. Now, after tending to wood rot and tossing around ant traps, the only thing left to do is thin out Mom’s belongings. I don’t know if I’m doing it for her sake or my own.
“When did you crochet?” I ask, holding up a bag of loose Granny squares.
“Oh?” Mom looks at me blankly, then goes back to exhaling hot air on a spoon and polishing it with her nightgown. I sigh and stick my hand under her bed, pulling out a leather-bound album that only has five photos, all of Mom in her thirties or forties, somewhere with snow-capped mountains and beer steins.
“Did you go to Switzerland?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Shoved in the very back, behind a shopping bag full of blouses with the tags still on them and another shopping bag full of other shopping bags, I discover an old hat box striped like a candy cane. I expect to find some outrageous feathered turban, but instead unearth the world’s largest archive of Little Minnie:
The Cutest Kid In Town Just Got Cuter! Little Minnie Unites With Beanie the Beagle In GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
Little Minnie IS Little Red Riding Hood
The New Little Minnie Doll With Outfits from the Motion Picture TA-DA!
There she is, on advertisements and lobby cards, mouth like a Life Savers candy, eyes like gorgeous lumps of coal. Hidden underneath is a reel of film. THE GREAT STEAMBOAT MYSTERY, REEL 1 OF 3.
“Mom!” I shriek. “This is dangerous!”
“Wah?” She pads over to where I’m sitting and tries to grab the reel.
“It’s nitrate! This could burst into flames!”
Mom scrunches her nose at my hysteria. She peers into my lap and pulls a publicity still from the middle of the pile. Little Minnie as a weightlifter, holding a phony barbell.
“Little Minnie,” she sighs.
“I didn’t know you kept all this stuff.”
She strokes the photograph on the cheek. Her face softens, giving slack to the eyebrow pencil and lip liner that exaggerates her features. “She was a very cute baby.”
Funny, how familiar this all seems. Something about the tufts of the wool rug, or the shadow of Mom’s hair wound up in tight curlers. Something about her towering above in a quilted housecoat, me on the ground in lacy ankle socks.
“She didn’t always behave,” Mom continues. “She could be a bad, bad girl.”
Yes, I’ve been here before: Withering under her bittersweet look of pride and utter disappointment, fighting against my urge to crawl under her bed and never come out.
***
Mom always says that heterochromia ruined her acting career because it made her look wonky on film. She claims that’s why she only got roles positioned in profile, like a laundress hanging clothes out the window or a bar maiden sweeping a saloon. Besides, if she had known that acting was just imitation housework, maybe she wouldn’t have run away at 17. What irony, to leave a dirty, fly-invested alfalfa farm only to end up on the facsimiles of dirty, fly-invested alfalfa farms. Somehow, the replicas were worse than the real things. She was fed rotten apples that had been rejected by the horses, clothed in petticoats that smelled like green potatoes, forced to share dressing rooms with vile girls who would prod her with prop pitchforks. Mom often told me these stories while brushing my hair. They filled her with enough fury that I feared I might go bald. But every now and then, she would gently cup my bangs while recalling a particular on-screen ranch hand. With his sun-freckles and broad thumbs, he reminded Mom of the boys back home.
“What was his name?” I’d ask, to prolong the reprieve to my head.
Mom always insisted that he didn’t have one. She said he changed it with every picture –– Rusty, Rowdy, Sandy, Bruce.
“Bruce?”
“I meant Spruce. Oak, Asher, Cedar, Birch…”
Whoever he was, he became my father, then fled to Broadway a few months after I was born. Apparently, lassoing had been holding him back from his true calling: tap dance.
Soon after, Mom approached her wits end with background work because the conditions were so dreadful and she wasn’t getting any sleep because I wanted milk more than an average baby, according to the books Mom read to figure out what was wrong with me, but she couldn’t give up the work or else she couldn’t afford my formula so she kept at it with these God-awful westerns and started leaving me with our neighbor, Mrs. Swanson, but then Mrs. Swanson broke her hip and Mom was out of childcare and I was now eating solid foods, jars and jars of applesauce, an unfathomable amount of prunes, so Mom had no choice but to march onto set with a wicker stroller and persuade a script clerk to keep an eye on me at the very same moment that the heads of the studio, Jack Parquet Sr. and Jack Parquet Jr., marched onto set themselves to yell at a producer who failed to secure a baby for a pivotal scene.
I was too young to know what was said, but knowing the Parquets, it probably went something like: “We don’t want no fucking bundle of rags! We need a fucking baby with a fucking bottle!”
And then, evidently, the producer spotted me across the room and said: “There’s your fucking baby!”
That could have been the beginning and end of my film career, a crawl-on part in The Desert Kid (in a scene that involved a gun-slinging chimpanzee, I am told) but apparently, Jack Parquet Sr. was immediately smitten. While the crew reset tumbleweeds between takes, he would lean over my stroller and sing “Hey Diddle Diddle” over and over. He loved the way my tongue would dart out whenever I giggled, and he loved that the more he sang to me, the more I seemed to understand the story. Jack Parquet Jr. hadn’t been so clever a child, that’s for sure.
Soon enough, Little Minnie Comedies were being produced somewhere between the speeds of light and sound. Mom bought us a mansion, clothed us in matching fur coats, fell madly in love with one of my co-stars, George Chatham. They were dating when he died in a sailboat accident, which left Mom bedridden for weeks. I knew not to bother her, even when we ran out of toilet paper. But then, I got a splinter in my left foot that I couldn’t ignore and timidly knocked on her door to see if she could get it out with her good tweezers. Instead, she whipped a book at my head. Then came the screaming. The times she slapped my cheek with a glove when I’d flub a scene. The jealousy she felt when I developed a friendship with Rosemary Gooden, who played Little Minnie’s schoolteacher in a few shorts. When Rosemary didn’t come back to set one day, I cried and cried and out came Mom’s glove.
I used to suppress memories like these. There were so many good things to remember instead, so many good people who lovingly strapped angel wings to my shoulders and brought me chilled apple juice on command. It was magical. Now, it feels even more magical that I can remember it all so well. The good and the bad, and the older Little Minnie got, the more bad there was. What six-year-old has back pain? What seven-year-old needs to rub cold radishes under her eyes to make them less puffy? What eight-year-old has to have her nipples taped down so it doesn’t look like she’s developing breasts? I had lost the ability to do somersaults and couldn’t spin on a tire swing without getting nauseous. I was becoming less malleable. I didn’t want to do dumb things, like have my skirt fly up to expose my bloomers. And I didn’t want to die.
When I heard the title Fracas on the Farm, I thought maybe Little Minnie would get stuck in the hen house. What a laugh riot! Little Minnie, sitting on an egg. Instead, she has to escape from a burning barn by jumping out of a window onto a pile of hay. The fire would be real and live, just like my stunt.
“Fucking no!” I yelled. The Parquets had rubbed off on me.
I locked myself in my dressing room and refused to come out. Mom banged on the door.
“Can’t they just use a doll?” I pleaded.
Mom burst in and charged at me with her pointy red manicure. “Don’t be difficult! You’ve always been such a bad, bad girl.” I squealed as she wrapped her arms around me and hauled me off to the barn that had been constructed for this scene. She stood at the bottom of the ladder to prevent me from climbing back down and watched as a team of hidden firestarters drew torches to open gas lines, as the inferno licked the walls, as I started to back away in the wrong direction, as the firemen readied their hoses in case of catastrophe, as I coughed, as I cried, as I leapt into the haystack, as the hay shoved its way up my nostrils, as I passed out from smoke inhalation. When I woke up in the hospital, I was alone.
Instead, Mom was in Jack Parquet Sr.’s office. Maybe that’s why she had been so hellbent about me doing the fire stunt. Maybe she thought a sublime performance would prevent such a meeting, that the Parquets would change their mind and decide not to retire Little Minnie after all, that Little Minnie could live forever. But no. There were too many new, brilliant babies that needed to be embraced.
Mom and I both had a difficult time adjusting to that. We both needed to reinvent ourselves. She did this by dating a yachtsman named Pierre whose French accent came and went, and so did he, and when he was finally gone, so was half my fortune. Mom spent the other half on luxury cruises and long stays at health spas, while I tried to make a career as Veronica Earl. Maybe I could become a teenage detective, or the middle daughter in period drama. But Veronica Earl was very plain and very unaccustomed to having to talk.
On my seventeenth birthday, Mom asked: “What happened to you?” It was rhetorical. She just wanted the cruelty of her emphasis –– what happened to you? –– to sock me in the gut. I wanted to ask her the same kinds of questions. Why she applied blue eyeshadow all the way up to her brows. Why her hands always trembled. Why, the previous week, she had stolen my house key and watched as I climbed the trellis to break into my own bedroom window. But I didn’t want to know the answers.
I left home the next day. I eloped with a young screenwriter, put myself through night school, got divorced from the young screenwriter, married a dermatologist, decided not to have children with the dermatologist, mourned the dermatologist’s early death from congestive heart failure, ate red velvet cake at my retirement party from the Kern County Library, started collecting National Geographics and never spoke to Mom again, until I got a call asking if I was Marnie Earl’s daughter. There had been some sort of accident.
***
The fire scout left behind a small, wooden piano so dreadfully out of tune that I try not to walk near it, lest my footsteps cause a key to jangle. Even before I get to the door, I hear Mom playing it with her two index fingers. Plonk, plunk, plenk. The melody is vaguely recognizable through the dissonance.
“What’s that song?” I ask.
Mom turns around, wide-eyed, and lungs at a candlestick on the sideboard. She holds it over her head like a dagger. I duck under the card table.
“Who are you?”
“It’s me –– Veronica.”
Her shoulders relax. She tosses the candlestick on the futon. “Ah.”
I tread lightly toward the piano to look at the sheet music on the stand. “The Rain Can’t Ruin My Day,” I read out loud.
“This was Little Minnie’s favorite song,” Mom says tenderly. “She used to sing it every day.”
I consider telling her that I actually hated the song for this very fact. It was the number that opened every performance of the Little Minnie Grand Tour of 1924 Featuring Beanie the Beagle. I would parade around stage with a polka-dotted umbrella before climbing into a large plastic tub, where a stagehand would drop a bucket of water on me, which meant that I would dance around in wet Mary Janes for another hour. But what’s the point of setting such an inoffensive record straight? So what, I once had cold toes, an earworm. What can I say now?
Instead, I hum the chorus. “Rain, oh rain, please go away, Little Minnie just wants to play. But rain, oh rain, if you stay, I won’t let you ruin my day,” I sing. “Here, I’ll play the right hand, you play the left.”
I sit on the bench next to her. My hand plunks as hers plonks. A few verses in, she rests her head on my shoulder. I can smell the dried apple-scented shampoo on her scalp and the bacterial funk of the Kleenexes stuffed in her pockets, dotted with dried orange boogers. I imagine her washing her own hair, blowing her own nose. Surely, these are good signs.
“Rain, oh rain, oh rain, oh rain…” She repeats in an endless loop.
“Come on, Mom. Nap time.”
I lead her to bed and roll the stockings down her legs. Her right calf is shiny like a red balloon.
“What’s happening here?” I ask.
“I’m fine.” She swats my hand away and pulls up the comforter.
“First thing tomorrow, I’m going to call a dermatologist I know. He used to work with Jim.”
But Mom isn’t listening. Her eyes are half closed, her mouth half open, dripping a tidy puddle of drool onto her pillow. “Rain, oh rain…” she mutters.
While she rests, I mop up a suspicious puddle of brown liquid near an electrical socket and find a new outbreak of flour beetles in the pantry, then drive to the village at the bottom of the mountain to replace the affected dry goods. In the dairy aisle, deciding between store brand butter and one made from French cows, I start thinking about popovers. Mom and I both loved the ones they served at the Parquet Commissary. I would slather mine with strawberry jam, she’d stuff hers with thick slabs of roast beef, and then she’d dust the crumbs off my lederhosen costume, dab the pectin from my upper lip, and sometimes even allow me to get a scoop of mint ice cream.
I pick up the French butter and wonder: How hard is it to make popovers, anyways?
Apparently, it’s pretty hard when you’re halfway up a mountain with no cookbooks and no popover pans (lousy fire scout). But after two hours and three false starts, I manage to produce a half dozen popovers that don’t pop but nevertheless release a perfect cloud of steam when split in half.
I put the tallest one on a plate and creep into Mom’s bedroom. “Mom,” I say, quietly.
She stirs. “Who are you?”
“Veronica,” I say.
“Who?”
“Veronica,” I say, a little louder.
“Oh, right. Where’d the other one go?”
“Who?”
“Little Minnie. We were just singing together.”
***
Title: THE GREAT STEAMBOAT MYSTERY / Parquet Pictures, presented by Jack Parquet Sr. & Jack Parquet Jr. / directed by Hobart Williamson
Publication: c. 1925
Performers: George Chatham (Captain Bryce), Girl (Little Minnie), Eileen Rutherford (Lady April Van Hoven), Barbara Conant (Mrs. Duffy), Simon Hands (Bobby Ames)
Language: English
Description: “On a voyage around the Great Lakes, Captain Bryce finds an amnesiac girl floating on a raft and gives her shelter on board. But when the elegant Lady April discovers that a precious topaz ring is missing from her quarters, all fingers point to the mysterious girl as the culprit. Captain Bryce undertakes an informal investigation to exonerate his new charge, and in the process, roots out a ring of jewel thieves led by the unassuming Mrs. Duffy. In the end, the girl recalls that she was the only survivor of a yachting accident, and in fact, the daughter of Captain Bryce’s old naval buddy. Captain Bryce gladly adopts the orphaned girl and the two-set sail on a new adventure.” – AFI catalog, 1921-1930
Notes: “Little Minnie charms as the confused scamp, particularly in the scene where she spies on Mrs. Duffy through a porthole. This was George Chatham’s penultimate role and famously features him water-skiing behind the steamboat. According to an interview in the June 1925 issue of Screenland, Chatham suggested this scene to director Hobart Williamson, who loved the idea, even though it bore no consequence on the plot. No known copies of reel 1 exist. Reels 2 and 3 were discovered in the basement of a Benedictine convent in 1962.” – Jeremy Blum, Associate Archivist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Subject: Steamboats (comedy), Shipwrecks (comedy), Amnesia (comedy)
***
I drive slowly to Los Angeles. One bad bump and I’m toast. I imagine the headline: “Veronica Prescott née Veronica Earl née Little Minnie, dead at 61, burnt to an unrecognizable crisp by a Little Minnie film, and not even one of the better ones.”
Jeremy Blum is waiting for me in reception. He’s a bearded thirty-something with leather elbow-patches and an assertive, bookish cologne. “Nice to meet you Mrs. Prescott,” he enunciates. He looks at me like one looks at a potato salad that’s been languishing in the sun, a sort of polite detachment, a reach-then-recoil. Maybe he was expecting a well-coiffed patron of the arts, a dame in leopard print with petite earlobes sagging under the weight of clip-on earrings, rather than some frump in blue jeans and a second-hand t-shirt from the Bicentennial. He really doesn’t know who I am. My married name, “Prescott,” gives me anonymity. So does the fact that I stopped looking like Little Minnie decades ago.
“Well, it’s nice to be met,” I say.
“I can’t tell you how grateful we are for your donation. Very few Little Minnie films survived.”
“I know. What are we up to now –– nine features and 18 shorts?” He does a double take, but still, the recognition doesn’t set in. “What I meant to say was: I read about the fire at Parquet once.”
A tear emerges in the corner of his eye. “We lost so much as a culture that day.” He pauses to collect himself. “May I ask, where did you find the reel?”
“At my mom’s. In a hat box. So, I can’t speak to the condition.”
“Is she a lover of silent film?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Did she work in the industry?” His curiosity is getting the best of him.
“Only briefly. Do you know Lady of the Western Sun?”
“Why yes! It’s in our collection. It turned up at a rummage sale in Ontario just last year. Don’t tell me –– your mother was the Lady herself!”
“No, she was a passenger in a covered wagon.”
Jeremy grimaces affably and fidgets with the clasp of his watch, surely gifted to him by one of his dames. He glances down at the box I’m holding, then back up at me.
“Well, this is yours I suppose.” I thrust the box forward. “You know, I always liked the part where Little Minnie stole the first mate’s hat.”
“I don’t remember that scene.”
“Oh right, you wouldn’t. It’s at the very beginning of the film. She’s fresh off the raft and Captain Bryce is drying her off with a towel. Everyone’s feeling so sorry for the poor thing. But then, she runs wild across the dance floor, makes off with an ice cream parfait and commandeers the wheel. A classic Little Minnie routine if there ever was one.”
“So, you’ve watched this?” he asks.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Hm. Interesting.”
“Well,” he continues, slapping on a smile, “I should really get this to my colleagues in the nitrate vault. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
“Likewise.” When I get to the door, I turn around and wink.
“Wait ––”
But it’s too late.
Before driving home, I go to the library on campus to look up old tap dancers. In microfiche, I find a photograph of one named Bruce Washburn. He looks enough like me, except his thighs are ginormous, almost bovine. I pinch my leg to see if I’m secretly muscular. No such luck.
***
Mom’s rash evolved into a bad case of cellulitis. I tried to bring her to the hospital, but she refused to get in my car. I called an ambulance, but she bit the EMT. Finally, I convinced her doctor to make a house call. He prescribed a course of antibiotics and suggested that someone care for her 24/7 in case she develops a fever. Since our collective savings couldn’t buy a walnut, I’ve become her full-time nurse.
I find it impossible to sleep here. The futon sags under my butt. The wind rattles the pine walls and jostles the piano keys. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and think I see a figure, like maybe Mom is shuffling to the bathroom to flush her Doxycycline down the toilet, but sometimes, the figure has the contours of a well-dressed man. I’ll blink and the room will become empty again, except for the grainy silhouette of the fire scout’s taxidermy marmot. One day, I might get up and toss it into the woods where it belongs. But for now, I’m too lazy, already up to my ears in dusty shoes and old calendars with indecipherable scrawl, and when I’m not decluttering and deciphering, I’m busy baking coffee cakes. That’s pretty much all Mom eats because the streusel dissolves beautifully on her tongue. I used to buy them from the supermarket, but then I made the mistake of following a recipe on a bottle of cinnamon. Mom was so pleased with the taste that now I’m constantly fishing crystals of brown sugar out from under my fingernails. While today’s cake cools, I’ll read National Geographic at Mom’s bedside. It’s taken us days to get through a story about Minoan archaeology. She falls asleep just as I get into the section about the Mask of Agamemnon. When she wakes up, I’ll start at the beginning. Until then, I stay by her side, watching her lymph nodes bob up and down.
“Who are you?” she asks groggily.
“I’m Little Minnie,” I say.
“Of course, you are.” She smiles and sinks into her stack of pillows. “Remember the one where you and Georgie rode a tandem bike?”
“I got grease on my dress, so they put me in trousers. Pretty cute. Awful director. He wouldn’t let me blink. Such a stickler for perfection.”
“Georgie stuck out his legs in a perfect split. Made me roar. Oh Georgie.”
“He was a showboat, alright.”
“What’s the one where you chipped your way out of jail with a teaspoon?”
“Little Minnie At Large.”
We go on like this. A consortium of the world’s leading Little Minnie scholars. Don’t tell Jeremy Blum he was left off the guest list. Mom corrects me more than once (“no, Seven Seas was the one with the parrot”) but when she gets tired, her speech slurs.
“Little Minnie. Baby. I love.”
I tuck a stray hair behind her clammy ear. I dab sweat away from her hairline. I’ll call the doctor soon.
“Sometimes you were mean to Little Minnie,” I whisper.
Mom doesn’t say anything. What could she say now?
“You made me jump from a burning building. I still get scared when I smell a birthday candle. Jim used to put peppermint sticks in my cake so I could pretend-blow them out. You would’ve liked Jim. He could fix anything with a screwdriver. He spoke surprisingly good French. He didn’t know about Little Minnie until we’d been married for four years. I don’t know why. Well, maybe because of how it ended with Alvin. He wanted to write a musical about Little Minnie all grown up. She’d still crawl under chairs and tie shoelaces together. I don’t know, it just felt cheap. Is that really how he saw me? Jim wasn’t like that. He didn’t even like movies. He’d wear earplugs at the theater. He loved when I wore my hair in a low bun and was crazy about cheese pizza. He was so normal. It was a miracle that I could be with someone so normal. It was a miracle that I could be so normal. But I did. I did it all myself. Aren’t you proud? I think you should be. It was a good, plain, simple life. I just wished we traveled more before he got sick. We watched a show about Lake Lucerne once. The blues were unbelievable. It looked like a vat of gelatin that you could sink a spoon into. I wanted to skinny dip in it. I had never wanted to skinny dip in anything before. Jim was in on the plan too. We bought matching swimsuits for the sole purpose of taking them off. We were going to stay at an inn where they serve homemade apricot jam for breakfast. We were practicing our German, even though Jim said we could probably get by with his French. But then his symptoms got worse. His doctors told him to stay at home and he listened. He was such a doctor that way. Always listened to other doctors. Sometimes when I’m alone, I can still hear him wheezing on the other side of a wall. I can still smell him on our fleece blanket. That’s where we were at the end. In our apartment, holding each other under a blanket, looping and unlooping our fingers, so we never went to Lake Lucerne.”
Mom’s eyes flutter open. The blue one is cloudy, the brown one sharp. “What a beautiful place,” she says. “I think I’ve been there.”
