Little Hope, Chapter 1

“Little Hope Lindberger, how many times do I have to tell you to put away those skeletons? You know how I feel about having them all over the house. The ones seated together over there by the window look like they’re having tea!” 

How absurd, Little Hope thought to herself. Everybody knows skeletons can’t drink. “They’re not having tea, Momma. They’re having a symposium.” 

Little Hope Lindberger was her name alright, or at least that’s what everybody’d call her. Her real name was Hope Ann Lindberger, and by the first grade she’d told everybody in Greenfield she was going to change it someday. Hope was also her mother’s name, which is why everyone from her grandmother on down called her Little Hope. 

Her mother went simply by Hope. When Little Hope’s father was in a playful mood, he’d tease his wife by calling her “My One and Only Hope!” Years before Little Hope was born, when her grandmother was exasperated with her daughter because of something boneheaded she had done, she’d refer to her disparagingly as “Our Great Hope.” “Well, Our Great Hope has done it again!” she used to exclaim before launching into the details of her daughter Hope’s misadventures. Little Hope loved hearing stories about those days long ago.

Ann was her grandmother’s name. For as long as Little Hope could remember, she had called her “Grandm’Ann,” not “Grandma Ann.” She liked the efficiency of eliding words, and to her whole family’s chagrin she practiced elision at every opportunity even though she sometimes had trouble remembering or pronouncing the word “elision” itself. 

“Man is right,” her mother’d say under her breath from time to time when Little Hope mentioned her grandmother by name. “Spot her early enough in the morning and you just might catch a glimpse of her mustache.” Little Hope would laugh every time her mother’d say that, but she’d also feel as though she was somehow betraying her grandmother’s trust by indulging her mother in such jabs. At the end of the day, Little Hope reasoned, she was helping maintain the balance of power between two important and necessary people in her life.

As for the family name Lindberger, it burdened Little Hope just as she assumed it had everyone else who’d been sentenced to carry it forward. She’d tried everything imaginable, from pronunciation to education, but her schoolmates would nevertheless continue to equate her family name with the smelly homonymic Limberger cheese and tease her about it. “People will hear what they want to hear,” her grandmother would always insist. But Little Hope herself would counter-insist: Lindberger was the name she was going to change. 

At least she wasn’t a Lively-Lindberger like her mother, Little Hope would sometimes think to herself in consolation. Lively was her mother’s maiden name. On holidays, around her grandparents’ dining room table,  the post-meal conversation would inevitably drift to that moment during Little Hope’s parents’ wedding reception when her father’s Best Man ceremoniously presented the wedding couple a tray of cheeses, some of them standing on end, hilariously brought to life with googly eyes and pipe cleaners for arms and legs. Her grandmother would always feign exasperation during that storytelling but eventually join everyone else around the table in boisterous laughter. 

Although conflicted about her family name, Little Hope could never resist the good humor and warmth radiating post-meal from the holiday table and would eventually join in the laughter, too. What a fun time, she’d think.