Clown Girl (26 page)
It was true. I didn’t need help for the first time in ages.
At the sound of my voice, Jerrod blinked, maybe startled, then smiled, and closed his paper. He pushed the paper wrapper with his sandwich on it an inch farther away. “Sniffles?”
I said, “Nita.”
He said, “You need a…?”
Then I laughed. “No, that’s my name. Really, I don’t need anything.” I didn’t.
He pulled a chair over, gave it a pat. I took a seat. He said, “I didn’t recognize you right off. You threw me.”
“That’s OK. I don’t recognize myself, just now.” In the guise of myself, I was somebody else, somebody I hadn’t been in years. And as the great clown question goes, if that’s me in the mirror, then who am I? I was new, unmasked.
It was a fine, though dangerous, way to walk through the world: accountable.
If life were a Chaplin film the frame I lived in would’ve closed like an aperture at this moment, shrunk to a small circle or maybe even a heart shape, until it was just Jerrod and me, our faces lit, ready to live happily ever after. Ah, zounds! If only it were that simple. Instead, we sat under the flickering beer light on our separate chairs, close together but apart, cop and clown, clown and cop, out of costume though still a little guarded and a little exposed, as though the cop and the clown were there in both of us. I kept breathing, and had to hold on, to relax, to teach myself new tricks. The bartender slid a glass of beer on the table. I took a sip.
Jerrod, half-shy, held back a smile. He said, “Well, I couldn’t have picked you out of a lineup, after all.”
I wiped a bit of beer from my lip, then said, “That’s OK. Maybe you’ll never have to.”
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Copyright ©2006 Monica Drake
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Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-0-979-01888-6
1. Clowns—Fiction.
2. Women performance artists—Fiction.
I. Title.
pS3604.R354C55 2007
813’.54-DC22
2006020248
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