Maybe the Moon

of Babylon. Mom could be prissy, sure, but she had a streak of real wildness too, a latent individualism that redeemed her at the most unexpected moments. She grew up in the desert, after all, in the only Jewish family for miles around. Circumstances alone must have forced her to make up some of the rules as she went along.
    Given the same baggage, Aunt Edie went totally bourgeois, joining forces with Betty Crocker and Barry Goldwater to build alife her neighbors could understand. She married a restaurant manager and had three large-economy-sized children, who grew up torturing cats and puking at the Burger King and regarding Baker as the center of the civilized world. When I came into the picture—and my father, in turn, went out—Aunt Edie made such a prolonged display of sympathy that Mom broke with her completely, resolving to cope with the future on her own. She rented a new duplex on the other side of town, dyed her hair honey blond, and worked overtime at the power company to buy me my own set of encyclopedias. (I was reading voraciously by the time I was four.) To hear Mom tell it, Aunt Edie actually envied her sister’s newfound freedom, but she never copped to it, ever. Not even when Mom and I moved to Hollywood and began sending home pictures of the celebrities we’d met.
    Mom used to insist that Aunt Edie wasn’t a wicked person, just a frightened one. So frightened, apparently, that whenever she visited her gynecologist, she took a special bag with her to wear on her head during cervical examinations. The theory, according to Mom, was that Aunt Edie’s dignity wouldn’t be compromised if she didn’t actually see the doctor while he was looking up her pussy. Mom swore to the absolute truth of this and permitted herself a brief disloyal giggle before swearing me to secrecy. “I mean it now, Cady. Edie would be mortified if she knew that you knew.”
    Ever since then I haven’t been able to look at Aunt Edie without thinking of that damn bag. I don’t know whether it was paper or what, so I make up my own versions. Sometimes I see it as a pointy quilted thing with nose holes—a head cozy, if you will—or made of creamy linen and elaborately monogrammed, like her favorite handbag. Even at Mom’s funeral, when Aunt Edie came decked out in the world’s soberest navy-blue suit, I flashed on her in the stirrups again, her head shrouded in a matching navy bag, those skinny Nancy Reagan legs propped open like pruning shears. The image simply refuses to die. It was Mom’s final revenge on her sibling.
    Actually, I’m the final revenge. When Mom phoned Aunt Edieto report that I’d landed the lead—sort of—in Philip Blenheim’s new fantasy film, it was the sweetest of victories, the ultimate payback for twenty years of simpering, uninvited pity. Mom never actually voiced her resentment, but her real message to her sister was there in the subtext of my success: See what you can do when you refuse to be frightened .
    I hope I’m not making Mom sound like some sort of pushy stage mother, because she wasn’t. The dreams of stardom were all mine; Mom simply adapted to them. She was baffled and often repelled by much of what I love about show business, but she knew what I wanted more than anyone on earth, and she did more than anyone to see that I got it.
    I read a book once that said that the bond between a little person and her (or his) mother is one of the most inviolable in nature. Since the child remains child-sized for life, the weaning process is sometimes postponed and dependencies can develop that persist until death. When Mom was still alive, I worried about this a lot, terrified of becoming her permanent baby.
    Now that she’s gone, I just miss her.

    Before I forget: Lya Graf.
    Mom learned about her years ago, when she first started reading up on little people. Lya Graf was a Ringling Brothers performer in the late twenties and early thirties—a figure of great charm, from all reports, and only twenty-one inches tall. (“Almost a foot shorter than you,” Mom would remind me tartly, just to keep me from getting too swell-headed.) One day on a promotional tour, Lya visited the floor of the Senate in Washington. As luck would have it, J. P. Morgan was there at the same time, about to testify before the Senate Banking Committee. A canny photographer, recognizing a great photo op, deposited the dainty Lya on the not-so-dainty lap of the famous financier, and the resulting shot made front