Clown Girl - Monica Drake [21]
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When he smiled, his cracked makeup deepened the creases in his face until he was a marionette, a dusty doll, an outdated mannequin.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