Clown Girl - Monica Drake [25]
“What is this?” She pulled the flyers from my hand. “Missing Chicken. Plucky. Aw, real sweet. Now forget about it.” She threw the flyers on the couch and slapped a party-store bowler hat and a bamboo cane against my chest. The hat was made of plastic covered in a thin spray of fuzz like faux felted wool. “Got your suit, sister?”
I had on the big wool pants, and my thighs were sweaty from walking in the summer evening. The air-conditioned hotel was cold as a walk-in fridge. I shivered in my own cooling sweat. I already had on a pair of men’s wing tips, one black, one brown, both size massive. The suit coat was compressed, tight in my shoulder bag. I pulled the coat out of the bag and shook it.
“Right,” Crack said. “Put it on.”
I rested the cane against my leg, pulled on the coat. The shoulders pinched and the sleeves ended half a foot before my arms did.
“Perfect,” Crack said.
The coat had the Goodwill seal of hobo authenticity in mingled cigar smoke and rancid sweat. I could barely move my arms as I collected my flyers, shoved them in the pink bag. If I moved too fast, the coat would rip in two. I said, “All this for a prom gig? That’s a little small-time for what you said. The big bucks.” Prom was teenagers, once a year at best.
“If prom was our gig, I’d shoot myself,” Crack said. “Then again, why shoot myself when I’ve got you two?” She turned on her heel and waved a hand, speaking clown sign language, directing Matey and me to follow.
In the ladies’ room there was a counter of sinks a mile long lined with a mirror on one side and prom girls on the other. Every prom girl was cloned across that counter, all of them in pastels, with big hair and bigger plans. They leaned in close, as though to kiss themselves as they painted their eyes and lips with tiny brushes. The air was a sickening war between the bathroom’s sanitizer and an army of cheap perfume. Crack, in her black suit and white shirt, pushed dresses aside and wedged her way into the line. Prom girls cackled and fluttered, hens in a henhouse.
“Hey,” a hen girl clucked. She had lipstick on her top lip but not yet on the bottom, one bright red lip, the other dry and pale. “You can’t be in here. This is the women’s room.”
Crack tipped her hairpiece. “You must be the housemother, yes?” She grabbed her own boobs through her oversized, rumpled men’s dress shirt. “Want to go over my credentials, cupcake?”
Matey moved in behind the girl, hands flat on her flat chest. She stuck her tongue out to one side and let her eyes roll. “Me next, me next!” She pressed up behind the prom queen.
The girl backed off, wobbly in high heels, and found a place between her friends, body guards in tulle and crepe. Matey and I wedged into the girl’s spot. I tipped my plastic bowler and smiled, clown sign language for Sorry. To say, We’re all friends here.
To Crack I hissed, “What is this, West Side Story? You give these birds reason to hate us.”
Crack said, “Aw, you’re going soft.” She snapped open her hot pink shoulder bag. The shoulder bags were the matching part of our costumes, bought at Ross to look like a team and to hold props while we worked. She poured trays of makeup on the counter, along with triangular sponge applicators, makeup pencils, tampons, a kazoo, and a washcloth. Our makeup came in kits like grade school watercolors. Each color was a small round cake. A paintbrush snapped in place to the side.
Crack spread white makeup on her cheek. She said, “Chaplin. Hop to it,” and she looked at me. “Well, step on it, Sniff. Get your Chaplin on, girl.”
“All of us?” I asked. “So, we’re all the same?”
Matey nodded, twisted sideways and crowded in beside me in the mirror. “We’re all Chaplin.”
I said, “We’re all Chaplin. Bejesus. That’s so redundant. Like three Mickey Mouses in the Macy’s parade, or three promotional Snow Whites at the same video store.”
“Or ten prom queens in the same john,” Matey said, loud. Painted eyes flickered our way and glared in the mirror.
“What’s redundancy got to do with the price of eggs?” Crack said. “Fetishism is the key. Tap into