Clown Girl - Monica Drake [47]
I was stretched out on the porch couch when Herman opened the front door. He rubbed his head, his sleepy hair. “You’re up early. What gives?”
I flipped the poster over to hide it. “Work. Clown gig.”
“Crying doesn’t become you. Makes your eyes puffy.” He ran the end of his thumb along the side of my face. I knocked his hand away. Unruffled, he asked, “Where you working today?”
“Photo shoot. Publicity.”
Herman laughed. “Oh shit. Bad day for that one, ’cause you’re looking like hell. But that old paint and spackle covers pretty well?”
I tucked the flyer close to my hip and went back to the mudroom, where I stood on the mattress Rex and I called our bed and checked out my face in the shard of green-tinted mirror duct-taped to the wall. Herman was right. My nose was sunburned and my skin was a map of red patches. My eyes were bloodshot, puffy, and shadowed. My lips were cracked. Every mirror asked the old existential clown question: If that’s me in the mirror, then who am I? I was a wreck. I could still hear Crack issue her order: Go all out. Show up looking good. Photos cost a lot of cabbage; we’ll do it once, that’s it. You read me?
Ah! Bless St. Julian for whiteface and war paint. I faced the mirror again and got to work. The room was quiet without Chance’s rapid, summer-hot panting, her sudden fits of scratching her toenails against the wooden floor. My stomach was an empty pit, my heart a pounding fist.
Go all out, see? In my book that meant call on High Clown style: big hair in a cloud of fried red plastic curls fluffed with a pick, two waxed spit curls tight over my ears. I’d wear a river of blue tinsel clipped in my wig. Big red lips, black arched brows, and of course I’d break out my best red rubber nose: classic.
I snapped the seal on the acupuncturist’s amber jar of Chinese pills, pulled the cork, and shook half a dozen of the white pills, smaller than BBs, into my palm. I swallowed three with a drink from a dusty glass of dog hair linted water beside the bed. I took another pill and let it rest on my tongue, where it melted fast as candy. When I didn’t feel anything, I popped three more. They rattled against my teeth. I bit down without breaking them, like biting on ball bearings, and rolled the pills under my tongue, where they melted into nothing.
A naked Rex watched from a scratchy ink drawing on the wall, with his ever-present secret smile. He peered in miniature as a sculpture on top of the bookshelf. He turned his back in a pencil sketch, showed an ear in oil paint, and held a hand open to the sky. I sat on the bed, the phone on my pillow.
I slid another pill on my tongue.
Rex was everywhere, but I couldn’t get him on the phone. I called one more time, and said into the clown hostel answering machine, “Rex? It’s Nita. There’s some trouble with Chance…she’s gone, Rex. She disappeared. Rex? Are you there?”
I slid on a pair of his striped pants, to keep Rex with me through the clown shoot. I needed the luck. They were Lycra acrobat pants, snug on Rex but loose on me and brushed my thighs in a band of wide stripes. I rolled a fat cuff at the hem and tied a pink scarf at the waist. Ta da! I put on my best ruffled collar with blue piping at the edges, over a striped satin shirt.
Stripes are key to clowning. That was a line from our edifying routine, Clowns in the Schools. The Clowns in the Schools shtick started in black leotards and plain face. Then Rex and I, we’d dress in front of the kids. Rex would pull on his skintight pants and say, “Stripes are the cloth of the outcast, the proud flag of clowns, prisoners, and artists.” He’d give a toothy smile.
“The dress of scalawags, rapscallions, and reprobates,” I’d chime in, as I stepped into a big striped tent of a dress. We’d rehearsed a hundred times.
We’d team juggle disks of face paint as Rex recited, “The best clown gear finds its place in tradition. History. It’s sacred in some communities, prized in many