Clown Girl (5 page)

In clown clothes you walk a thin tightrope, teetering between lust and fear, coulrophiles and coulrophobes. In that narrow band what I aimed for was the laughter of children. OK, more recently what I aimed for was a quick paycheck, a ticket out of Baloneytown. But I wasn’t in it for the groupies.

On the next shelf down there was a stack of library books.
Your Baby, Your Body: Watch It Grow!
These were books I didn’t need anymore: my body, my baby. Both had stopped growing. The books were overdue, and the library books were the only thing with a due date now.

I’d write my own book of miscarriage:
What to Expect When You Expected to be Expecting, Until It All Went South
. I unclipped the squirting daisy from my shirt and put the daisy on the shelf, next to the plastic jug.

Below the shelves, on the floor, was a collection of bowling shoes, loafers, painted Keds, and curled wing tips, everything in a size eleven or larger, specially chosen for clowning. And then there was one pair of Rex’s old tennis shoes, absolute boats, his real size. Rex’s shoes bent and crinkled where his toe knuckles had worn against the seam, as though Rex still stood there, invisible, feet in the shoes.

The room overflowed with drawings of Rex in charcoal on paper, in pen and ink, and in pencil. A red clay bust stared down at me from the top shelf of my doorless closet. “Honey, I’m home,” I said to the clay bust. Rex. The bust didn’t blink. Every image I made of him—drawings, paintings, and sculptures—they all had the same faint smile, like the
Mona Lisa
, Rex’s sly secret. I said, “Don’t be mad, I still love you,” then lifted the head, turned it upside down, pulled a sock from under the neck and tucked a day’s wages inside.

I turned on a radio to block the murmur of Herman and Italia, and sat on the edge of the bed. Chance crowded against my ribs.

I dialed the number for the clown hostel in San Francisco, where nobody ever answered.

“Yello, yello, yello, kiddos!” the answering machine sang. “We’re off to the races, but if you leave your name and number, we’ll make sure your birthday party’s a smash to remember. Ha, ha! Don’t tell the folks!” A horn honked three times, followed by the beep.

“Rex, it’s Nita,” I said into the answering machine. “Are you there? I need to hear your voice. Call me, OK?” I started to hang up, then put the phone back to my ear and added, “I’ve been in the hospital, Rex.” He’d want to know.

I picked up one of Rex’s velvet shirts, ran the fabric across my neck, and smelled the smoke of old fire tricks. Clown College was one way to move ahead, but there were others. We could join
Clowns Sans Frontières
—Clowns Without Borders—sworn to cheer the children in war-torn countries, practice tricks around land mines, juggle in food and medical supplies. I didn’t plan to do corporate gigs forever. No, I wanted to make a difference in the world: another clown for peace. I unbuttoned my shirt. The satin slipped from my shoulders, a silky caress. I unfastened the polka-dot bra. The flurry of photos and cards fell out: St. Julian, my Clown Union card, my parents, and Rex. Family past and future.

In the early days after Rex left, when I was still pregnant, sometimes I’d imagine that he never came back and there was a romance to the idea of abandonment, the loss of a great love. At least it was familiar terrain—I’d lost my parents young, knew the way things went. But this time, I’d raise Rex’s child. Later the kid would ask, “Mom, what was Daddy like?” I’d tap a circus poster glued to a crumbling city wall or unfold a worn program. “He was the strongest man I’ve ever met,” I’d say. “He was gorgeous, and could make me laugh…” I’d tell stories of Rex Galore until Rex was mythic.

But instead, it seemed, I’d tell Rex the story of how the baby abandoned us.

Herman and Italia laughed together in the kitchen, and the sound was like two mismatched dancers. I turned up my radio, then eased out of the striped pants, the sweaty polyester.

When we met, Rex was a model. I was a student, late for drawing class. He was already naked on a pedestal, posed on a draped white sheet. He had the knotted biceps of a gymnast, the rock-solid terrain of a dancer’s thighs. It was winter. He was pale except for a blue lined tattoo of fish that swam around one arm.

Ta da! Magic.

We were a silent movie, Rex and me, that first day, in a class full of students. His eyes shifted toward me, then away, then back. I looked down as I set up my easel. I started to draw, and looked up. Our eyes met. I dropped my charcoal and stepped forward to pick the charcoal up—stepped closer to the pedestal where Rex stood, naked. He watched as I stepped in. I looked up and at the same time bent down, and with one hand groped for the charcoal stick on the floor. Then Rex was a whole geography that loomed over me, the lines of his muscles, shape of his bones, curls in his hair, and I wanted to move to that country, that continent. He was the Man in the Moon, the Eiffel Tower, Apollo, Dionysus. I didn’t have to put Rex on a pedestal, because he was already there. Posed.

My face was hot. Something inside me tickled.

He knew I looked with more than an interest in light and shadow, contour and planes. When it was break, Rex reached for his robe. We, students, were the audience, he was the show. He pulled the belt of his robe around his hips, ran a hand over his dark hair, stepped off the pedestal, and turned to me.

Then I was part of his show. Other students pretended not to watch. I brushed charcoal from my hands. My hands were hot, and the coal stuck in a black dust.

Rex walked around the edge of my drawing board to look at my charcoal drawing of him naked—Yikes! There it was: penis, dick, cock, peter, willy, wanker, forced meats, soda jerk. Call it what you want, but it’s the hardest part of a naked man to sketch. A penis always looks too big or too fat, except for when it looks too small. Too oceanographic, a sea creature. I know, I’ve worked at it long and hard, and working at drafting a dick only makes it worse; too much study and the organ is like something from the Art of the Insane, pure fixation. Carefully done, the lines of a penis grow overly detailed, painful in their stiffness, until you’ve drawn the penis like a second figure alongside the larger body. It’s a tiny man, to stand for all men. A dick.

Hidden or blurred, it’s as though the artist is afraid of seeing something clearly, afraid to look straight on, to take the bull by the horn, as they say. I’m sure Michelangelo gave his famous David sculpture those massive, oversized hands not so much to convey the power of God working through David, but more to distract from the meager proportions of David’s sculpted dick.

Rex was tall, and more than proportionate. The first time I drew him I worked to make his penis look real: a dark cluster of charcoal lines, curling hairs, deep shadows. Obsessive. Inspired. I didn’t expect the model to step from his pedestal and see that my eyes had traced every line, curve, and fold. He nodded. Maybe he liked the way I handled his dick. Who knows? He broke through the silent movie then and said, “Take your break outside?” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his bathrobe pocket.

I didn’t smoke, but said, “Sure, OK.” He pulled on unlaced, paint-stained work boots, no socks. I followed him into the hall, downstairs, and out of the building. It was raining out and we stood under the building’s overhang, apart from other smokers. Rex stood in his bathrobe, naked underneath, as though that was normal.

“Those your pins?” he asked.

I folded my hands over my chest, felt myself blush.

He nodded toward the building, the classroom. Ah, pins! Of course. My juggling pins were in a backpack. They were too long for the pack and the silver, black, and white ends poked out the top as three round knobs.

“You juggle?” His breath was a white trail of smoke, teeth yellowed and perfectly square.

“A little. Just learning pins.” I was nervous. Pins are harder than balls—the narrow side of each pin’ll slap your wrist with every catch. I held out my arm and pulled back one striped sleeve to show where my arm was decorated with blooming black, red, and blue flowers. Each bruise marked the hit of a juggling pin.

Rex laughed. “Battle scars.” He said, “I’d be into team juggling, if you’re up for it. Fastest way to learn is with a partner.”

A date. He asked me on a juggling date! That’s when he told me his name: Rex Galore. Rex, the Clown Prince! The Princely Clown of the After-hours Club Circuit, a movement artist. Of course I’d seen the posters for his shows. Rex had the best graphics in town. He was a different breed of clown—no kids’ parties, no Food Fairs. No smiling, kowtowing, apple-polishing slapstick; Rex said slap was dead. Instead of the fool, Rex was an acrobat. He could juggle toasters and blenders, live kittens even. He could walk on stilts and ride a unicycle.

I rolled down my sleeve. “That’d be nice,” I said. “I’m Nita.”

“I know,” he said.

Did he really, or was it all bluster? It didn’t matter. By then, I was already the clown groupie, the fetishist: love.

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your soul mate you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation. I say, the Buddhists don’t have a clue. When I met Rex I was awash in nerves, because, why not? He was everything I believed in and he came right to me. He asked me out. Why settle for less?

Back in the classroom he stepped out of the boots, ran his fingers through the length of his hair, shook off the robe, and there was his body again: all muscle. He climbed on his pedestal. My statue, my date, the sexiest man in town. An older woman student leaned over and whispered, “That’s the way to pick’em. With a preview. Now you know what you’re getting.”

As though anything were ever that easy or true.

In the mudroom, the afternoon sun came in through the windows and warmed the floor and the wall behind the bed. The room was a terrarium of dog breath, turpentine, and sweat. I sang something I’d been working on, part of a skit:

Beef Brisket

what is it?

Oh, wouldn’t you like to know…

Still naked, I unzipped the suitcase Rex used to hold costumes and let clothes spill out.
Beefbrisket, just ee-ee-t it…
I ran my hands through his clothes, pressed fabric to my skin. Turpentine was as good as Rex’s cologne because it was the scent of the classroom where we met. I touched a dab of turpentine to the fabric, then lay on my bed with the costumes beside me like a warm body. That cop? He was helpful, sure. And he was handsome. But a man like that was white bread next to the richness of art, and love. Rex. Chance drew close against my shoulder from the other side and for a moment, in the smell of turpentine, it was as though Rex, Chance, and I were together again, the three of us. Family.

Until Herman knocked on the door. “Hey,” he said, his voice sharp. “I smell turp from the kitchen. Clean it up, ventilate, or you’re out of here.” He pushed an unpaid phone bill under the locked door. The envelope came toward me with a shimmy and a hiss, all warning and demand.

5.

Plucky, Come Home!

IN THE BACK OF REX’S PROP-ROOM AMBULANCE, I GATHERED pens and paper and made a sign:
Missing: Rubber Chicken
. I sketched the chicken’s long rubber neck, her fallen-over comb, dangling legs, and splayed toes. I inked in the black lines of a heart on her chest, her defining characteristic, like a birthmark or a scar.

The ambulance’s two back doors hung open to let a breeze in. Outside a mechanical xylophone blasted the hard notes of “Home on the Range,” as One-Night Stan the Ice- Cream Man trawled nearby. I perched on a pile of costumes with the shades pulled, wearing a sun hat with a big brim and a cluster of silk flowers in front. The only thing wrong with the hat was two holes cut in the top meant to accommodate rabbit ears back when the hat was part of a show.

Below the rubber chicken picture, on my sign, I wrote,
Name: Plucky. Height: 15”. Value: Sentimental
. Then I wrote:
Reward: $$$
.

I tore off the part about a reward. What could I offer? If the rubber-chicken thief were a King’s Row kid, my reward would be a bad joke next to the punk’s allowance. I crunched the scrap in my hand.

But I wanted Plucky back. Plucky belonged with Rex and me. We’d had good times together. I wrote it again, in the space that was left:
Reward
. Then crossed it off. I couldn’t give money away.

But who would return a rubber chicken without incentive? Plucky would end up tossed in an entryway, left in a backyard, or given to charity. I wrote it one more time, above the black cross-off mark:
Reward
, followed by only one dollar sign. I’d pay for that chicken’s safe return because she was mine, ours, the first and now the only child of our union, the memento of sex, evidence of sex, Rex Galore.

Rex and me, our second date wasn’t a date so much as it was a show. He invited me for a night onstage. We were juggling together, pins in the air, moving hand to hand with a good rhythm going, when he invited me to work with him, to be a moving table, a prop stand in his fire-juggling act.
Put fire in the show, audiences love it.
That’s what Rex always said:
Burn shit up
. I was wary. It was so much, so soon, I said, “You don’t think we’re rushing things?”

He said, “I’m ready.”

With the way the pins spun smoothly between us, six in the air, I knew I was ready too. I saw my future: if the date were an audition, I’d nail it.

The night of his show I wore a legless tabletop strapped to my back, in a nightclub, and underneath that board I swayed to Rex’s dance. The crowd was sauced. Somebody yelled, “Prestidigiate!” An empty plastic pitcher flew onto the stage. The pitcher spun, beer speckled my face, and I laughed out loud. The energy was nothing like the hollow garages of art gigs, the scream of birthday parties, or the dead air in the corporate scene.

Rex rapped on my tabletop and the sound amplified in my ears. Rex was amplified, bigger than life, his name chanted by strangers, his soundtrack a crazy mess of Ska, tribal, and Cambodian pop. His feet were bare and strong, legs muscled. That was all I could see from down low. His hands hit the floor between his feet and his legs scissored up and out of view. His curly hair dropped to the stage, damp with sweat. Dionysus, Pan. Bacchus, Shazam. My Wonder Twin. He was a god, a gymnast, a laugh riot, a dream.

Rex piled bottles on the table of my back. He balanced fire wands on the bottles and the flames reflected in mirrors at the edges of the stage. I was in the middle of a bonfire, a forest fire, a burning building. Magic. Everyone looked at the flaming pyramid of bottles on my back. My knees rubbed hard against the uneven floor of the stage. Rex rode a unicycle. His single wheel circled as I shuffled.

If Rex asked me to eat glass, I would’ve done it.

Later, in the quiet of the dressing room, he closed the door. I stood. My legs trembled, knees stiff with exertion, exhilaration, and nerves. Rex said, “You’re a natural.” He unstrapped the table, lifted it from my back, and set it aside.

“It was all you,” I said.

“Not at all!” His big hands reached forward to massage my shoulders. I closed my eyes and groaned. “Tough work, isn’t it?” He let his hands slide down my shoulders to the collar of my black catsuit, lowered the zipper in back. The cloth peeled away, cool air brushed my skin and my shoulders stretched larger, free of the fabric. “Goosebumps,” Rex said and ran a finger down my spine, his voice a quiet growl. His skin smelled hot, flammable as white gas. He touched a calloused finger to my collarbone, then ran his finger down over my breast and pushed the suit lower. Bottles rolled over the floor between smoking batons. Sweat-marked Lycra clung tight as hands against my thighs, my hips.

We dropped onto a sagging couch buried in costumes, and around us the costumes smelled like every show there’d ever been, every date, every human body: smoke, perfume, and cologne layered over the musty mix of Goodwill and basement mildew, cat piss, the hot animal ripeness of nerves and sweat. This was our opening night. Rex was on top of me, his weight and smell, and the clothes underneath us were like a hundred people there, a bed of empty arms and torn pant legs.

My clown makeup smeared across the white spaces of Rex’s clown face and made a print on his skin.

I pushed him back an inch, said, “Your lipstick’s smeared, dahlink.”

When he smiled, his cracked makeup deepened the creases in his face until he was a marionette, a dusty doll, an outdated mannequin.

He leaned forward, bit my belly. With gentle bites he moved along my ribs, up, until he found the white of my breasts, until I was covered in patches of red, smeared chalk white, and blue-black like bruises. Rex Galore and I blended, designs merged and morphed. Forget P.T. Barnum—sex was the greatest show on earth, and Rex and me, we were a tangle and I was lost in the perfume of white gas, smoke, and sweat. I couldn’t breathe. I was buried alive. Did I care? Only for an encore.

Rex undid his fly. The catsuit was a pile of darkness on the floor.

I whispered, “Do you have a rubber?”

He laughed, hushed, a laughing whisper, as though his parents were in the next room, and reached one arm past my head to a nightstand there. “A rubber chicken.” He shook the dancing chicken in the air. “Will that do?”

I laughed back, ran a finger along the bumps of the fake chicken skin. “Ribbed and beaked for her pleasure, even. Want me to leave you two alone?”

He threw the chicken on the floor and bit my neck and I giggled and he said, “Never,” and he was everywhere then. The couch was a sinking place and I disappeared into the orgy of costumes, the smell of nervous strangers, makeup, and smoke, my naked body buried in the perfume of human need.

I took the rubber chicken home. Plucky was my mascot, the souvenir of our date. Later, much later, there was the conception of our child. And now the miscarriage, unexpected, though I should’ve expected it because, why not?—family slid through my fingers the same as the old silicone banana-peel trick. After the D & C, after the suctioning away of our tiny fetus, I drew the black heart on Plucky’s rubber breast in the place where a chicken might have a heart, over the ridges of implied feathers. Indelible ink.

Now she’d been nabbed by a kid too young to know what love means, what a chicken might mean. Too young to know that a rubber chicken can carry all of love in one indelible ink heart.

On my sign, I wrote
Missing: One Rubber Chicken, One Lover, One Unborn Child
. Missing: my whole life. I tore the ragged sheet in half, picked up another and started again. Swollen Sacred Hearts, shrunken wise men, and bloated angels bobbed at my feet, the fruits of my labor. On the shopworn dedication page of
Balloon Tying for Christ
it said, “With appreciation and gratitude for my wife and six lovely children who have borne with me through twelve long years of deprivations while completing this work.” Such martyrs!
Balloon Tying for Christ
was maybe all of seventeen pages long, with one blank page at the end. The tricks inside, by corporate accounting, were worth hundreds of dollars. Matey, Crack, and me, that’s what we earned when high-end work came in. But work didn’t always come. We had to promote, and deliver. That book was my cash cow.

One-Night Stan’s ice-cream truck, the neighborhood drug mobile, still played nearby. Drugs, ice cream, balloon toys and prayer—these are the things you sell when there’s nothing else left.

Over the sound of the ice-cream song, a loud rattle out in the street grew louder. I looked out the ambulance’s back doors. There was a man down the block walking a loping shuffle to the music of his own loose-wheeled lawn mower. I pulled a green balloon from my pocket. In Herman’s yard, Chance circled, dazed and restless. Sunlight rippled on her fur. I blew up the balloon with a new kind of dizziness after the hospital, and tied a knot at the stem too soon, leaving a long stretch of uninflated balloon tail. I twisted one section for a head to make Jesus-on-the-Cross in Easter green, massaged the rubber to minimize the tail, and twisted dangling balloon legs into place.

Just as I found my focus, concentrated on my work, there was a rap against the ambulance. I jumped, startled, and knocked my hat half-off. A man grinned in at me. The man with the lawn mower. “Patient going to make it, Doc?” He was missing two front teeth. I tipped my sun hat back to look at him. He wore a tank top, dripped sweat, and had that red turkey neck from being out in the sun too long. Chance ate grass at the side of the road, eyes on the man. His lawn mower was rusted.

“What’s up?” I said, and stretched a new balloon.

“I’m good, I’m quick, I’ll do the whole lawn, front and back, for eight bucks.” He raised his voice to talk over the ice-cream truck’s song.

We eyed each other through the open back doors. I didn’t mind the grass long; it had a richness to it. A ribbon of tiny white flowers bloomed along a sunken channel where water, or maybe sewer, ran below. Speck-sized insects swarmed above the weeds like a burst of tiny bubbles. I tipped my sun hat down again. The silk flowers made the light scritch-scratch of tiny toenails against the straw like the mice that roamed Herman’s kitchen drawers.

“What makes you think I live in that house?” I said.

“Oh, I seen you’round. You’re the clown girl. I seen you out here in the overgrowed grass, with your little dog and that hula hoop you got.”

I moved in my own newly slowed time, behind the buzz in my head, my after-hospital pace. The sky, through my sunglasses, was a cherry-tinted blue. I took out a yellow balloon for the cross. Gave it a snap, blew it up. The man had a boil on his lip that was lighter than his skin, a swollen flash of white. He said, “What is that ‘Baloneyville Coop’ anyways?” He pointed at the wooden sign over Herman’s door.

I tied the knot at the end of the balloon. “It’s a Co-op,” I said. “There’s a space break in there.”

He let his head bounce in a nod, then said, “OK, whatever. That’s y’all’s business. Mine is mowin’, and I’d say your coop needs a little trim.” He laughed, like it was some kind of big joke. But he was right. Herman only had a push mower, a rusted reel of dull blade. Our backyard was as overgrown and choked as the front, with an aging apple tree in the center and a blackberry thicket along the fence line. It’d been my turn to mow Herman’s lawn for weeks—I was the bottleneck, the hold up. The grass grew longer every day. After the hospital, I needed to rest.

“Everybody needs a little trim, now and again,” the lawn mower man said with a grin.

I could pay this man to do my work, or pay for the return of Plucky. One or the other. I said, “I don’t own the house. Can’t hire you without asking.” I doubled the yellow balloon over, twisted the green Jesus around it.

The man drank from a plastic cup carried in a cup holder taped to the lawn mower’s handle. He ran a hand over his sweaty face. “OK, seven bucks. Can’t go lower,” he said.

Baloneytown was the neighborhood dealers, hookers, scamsters, and gangbangers came home to. It was where they grew up. Every corner was marked with a brick wall broken by a driver too strung out, trashed, or craving to stay on the road. Half the houses were red-tagged—windows plastered with red
Condemned
stickers—and the red-tagged houses were still lived in. You couldn’t trust anybody.

I picked up
Balloon Tying for Christ
and slid off the pile of clothes and out of the sauna of an ambulance. Costumes clung to my legs, a sea of velvet, satin, and Lycra. Standing up fast in the heat meant more of the swimming in my head, the warm hum of bees swarming, the blood resting around my lungs, around my stomach, nowhere near my brain. I saw a flash of blue against the inside of my eyes, felt faint, and caught the side of the ambulance for balance. I pressed my wrist against a cool, shaded bit of steel.

BALLOON JESUS BOBBED IN THE ROAD, ADRIFT ON HIS cross. In my dizziness, Jesus was a million miles away and still at my feet, a supplicant. My feet were miles away. I pressed my wrist to a new spot of shaded metal, hoping for anything cool.

In the middle of a wrist’s suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there’s an acupuncture point that says,
Get back to who you were meant to be
. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby’s skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you’d always be. I pressed my baby-heart-spot center into the shaded metal’s coolness, the pulse in my wrist talking to my whole body, to the hum in my head and the blue behind my eyes, saying
don’t faint now
.

The lawn mower man wiped his face with one sweaty arm. He said, “I do the lawn next door, and done this one, last time with a push mower. Now I got my own. Got an edger now too, and can come back with that tomorrow. I charge three bucks to edge her. Ten bucks total.”

I’d never seen him do anybody’s lawn, but when he said he did our lawn with a push mower that sounded about right. Whose turn was that? Herman’s? I bent for the fallen balloon Jesus. Lofted him, cross and all, into the ambulance.