Clown Girl

by Monica Drake

  THE NEXT MORNING, THE HOSPITAL CURTAIN WAS PULLED back from around my bed with a sharp scrape of metal rings on a metal bar. “Breakfast,” a man sang. He put a tray on a tiny table across my waist and powered up the bed until I was sitting. “Wake up. Let’s get some lights on.”

  I said, “I like it dim.” The room was a quiet cave, a hiding place, time immaterial.

  He snapped on a light as though he hadn’t heard me, then said, “Or maybe this one, over here,” and flicked on another beaming fluorescent.

  “Off is good,” I said.

  “Or maybe a reading lamp,” and he turned on a third, out of my reach. Soon the whole room was blasting bright, and it was clear who ran the show.

  A dietician’s note on the side of the breakfast tray read, “Low fat, low sodium, no caffeine.” I saw between the lines, into their code: Low patience, low humor, no tolerance. Clown.

  The man pulled open the blinds with a clatter. My view was an alley. He left me in the glow of every light, my own electric sun.

  I stabbed a plastic spork into the sponge of pancake, lifted it, and the heavy dough fell off the stubby tines. I tried again. Halfway to my mouth, pancake dropped to the front of my robe in a sticky smooch. I picked the food up with my fingers, syrup trailing, and licked the empty spork; the grease slick of margarine on the back of the rounded plastic was a non-food I hadn’t tasted in years.

  Mid-lick of the spork, a cardiologist ducked into my room. He reached to shake my hand, and blew into the steam on a Styrofoam cup of coffee held in his other hand. I reached back with sticky fingers, breakfast rocking like a raft on the ocean of my lap.

  “Well, yes,” the cardiologist said, and drew his hand away. “Nice to meet you.” He searched for a place to set his coffee on the bedside table, then reached for my thin paper napkin and wiped his fingers. Napkin stuck to his fingers in shredded tufts like an old man’s ear hair. He sat on the edge of my bed and puzzled over my chart like it was the Sunday Times.

  “Don’t take it personally,” he said, finally. “The long delay yesterday, the difficulty with diagnosis. We go by statistics, judge by likelihood. Thin women, young as you are, generally don’t have heart trouble.” He slid a pen from his front pocket. Made a note.

  Thin women. Clown women. Skinny girls like me.

  Not heart attacks, no. Skinny women have other problems. They double over, pelvis in knots, and drop stillborn babies in public places—bloody, tiny, and blue. Women have anxiety attacks, not heart attacks; they worry too much, burst into tears, faint. Ta da!

  Crazy.

  “It seems your mitral valve wasn’t closing properly,” he said, and made a hand gesture like a quacking duck. His thumb snapped against his fingers. His pen, still in hand, pointed up through the duck’s beak like an oversized cigar. “That made your aortal valve work overtime. Maybe a lack of potassium. Do you eat regularly?” The duck flattened, and swirled down to my plate of pancakes.

  I shrugged.

  He said, “What’d you have for lunch yesterday?”

  “I worked through lunch. A gig,” I said. “I had a latex ham sandwich. It makes pig sounds, squeals under pressure.”

  He didn’t laugh but only nodded, made a note, then tugged at an invisible beard on the tip of his chin. I said “It’s a prop, right? For the joke: how’s a ham sandwich like a stoolie?”

  “What else, what else?” He waved a hand in circles, like a traffic cop asking me to pull forward.

  “Exploding bonbons, smoking gum. A self-refilling pitcher of white fake milk. That’s a sight gag that wins every time. I’m trying to cut back on the fake milk, but it’s hard. Audiences love it, Doc. I can’t give it up.”

  He made another note. Without looking at me, he said, “What about real food?”

  Real food made me want to vomit. For weeks, I had no interest. My pelvis was an empty room, food an unwelcome guest. Instead of answering, I asked, “You think caffeine could’ve brought this on?” It read decaf only all over the dietician’s card on the side of my breakfast tray.

  The cardiologist looked up from the notes he was writing. “You know, that’d be an interesting experiment. We could get you all jacked up on caffeine, see what happens. But for now, try to eat a little more. Start with your breakfast.” He tapped my tray. “It’s good stuff.”

  He had the sort of personality that would let a body live a long time—inquisitive, delighted, and unconscionable. He was money and science, old skin and thinning hair and rings worn into grooves below his knuckles like metal around wood. He cleared his throat and said, “Your chart shows you were admitted through the ER not too long back.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “What’s this about a miscarriage?” he asked. He smoothed a frazzled eyebrow with the side of his thumb.

  Miscarriage! The word made it sound like I dropped my juggling pins or fumbled a football instead of floundered my way through the blood and cramps of lost life. I said, “Let’s talk about the exploding bonbons again. I’ve got this great act. I call it the Girl Scout Shuffle.”

  “D&C performed,” he read. “It’s been…” he counted out the days. “Almost two weeks. Are you still bleeding?”

  “What do you think, it was twins? Died a week apart?”

  “I assure you, it doesn’t work that way.” Then he asked again, “Tell me, are you bleeding?”

  “You tell me—when are my fluids no longer your business?” I was barely bleeding. Nothing to mention. There was no dead baby cradled between my hips. Not anymore.

  He said, “Dear, we’re in the body-fluid business. You don’t have a fever…cramps?”

  I said, “I came in for help a while back, and that’s over now. I’m here again, sure, but it’s a new show. Act One.” I didn’t even want to think about the last round in the ER: pregnant, then not pregnant, and the drama was over. Curtains closed. There would be no tiny Mr. Galore. No miniature Rex. No granddaughter to my lost mother, grandson to my once-present dad, our tightly pruned bonsai of a family tree.

  Soon enough I’d tell Rex about the trip to the ER, but I’d tell him when he came home. And until I told Rex, why tell anyone else? I was two months pregnant when the blood started. Rex was one week out of town.

  The cardiologist nodded and wrote on his chart. “Any pain now? Bloating?”

  I shook my head, a slow side to side.

  “In a miscarriage, you can lose a lot of blood. Become anemic, have complications. Maybe we should get someone in here to do a pelvic.”

  I said, “It was my heart this time, right? A whole different issue, different tissue.” I didn’t have claws digging into my sciatic nerve or the wrenching in my gut. I wasn’t sifting through blood clots brown and gelatinous as chicken liver, looking for the blue tint of the birth sac. “You can’t reach my heart through my hoo-ha—and you’re not the first man I’ve warned that way.”

  “Your hoo-ha?”

  “No pelvic,” I said. I looked around for a balloon to tie, a way to ease my nerves. “Can I have one of those rubber gloves?” I’d make the five fingers into a tiny Madonna of the Rocks.

  The cardiologist nodded, a meaningless gesture, and didn’t hand me a glove. He said, “OK, well. There is one more test I’d like your help with.” He lifted my sticky hand, looked at my fingernails. Each nail was painted a different color, like a box of crayons.

  “For clowning,” I said.

  He put my hand back on the bedspread carefully, as though my hand were breakable. “We’d like to check your adrenals.” He patted the back of my hand. His own hand was laced with a rope of veins, like rivers drawn on a map.

  A nurse came in with a paper bag. She said, “Excuse me. Your friends brought this.”

  “Friends?” I repeated, hopeful, and took the bag from her. Rex was my friend. He topped the list, my only friend at times.

  Inside the bag was one juggling ball and an envelope of twenties. No rubber chicken. In blue pen, on the outside of the envelope, it said, They doc
ked you for leav’n early. Otherwise, it’s all here.—Crack.

  Matey and Crack. They were co-workers, not friends. I put the bag beside the bed.

  The doctor wrote a note on a prescription pad. “The adrenal test is simple. And it’s precise. But we need you to collect twenty-four hours of urine.” He gave me the note. “Take this down to the lab, they’ll explain the process. You’re heart seems OK. Today’s EKG looks good.”

  Still, I could point to a place in the front of my skull where my head was full of the hum of bees, an incessant and displacing rattle that moved in over thoughts I might’ve had. If this were a clown act, I’d hold a hand to one ear. Bees would fly out the other side.

  I asked the cardiologist why an electrocardiogram was called an EKG, instead of an ECG.

  He said, “Nazis. Nazis invented the machine.”

  After he left, I found a napkin on my breakfast tray and wrote that down: EKG = Nazis.

  3.

  Hide and Seek; or, Love in the Ruins

  I WALKED HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL DRESSED IN THE mismatched stripes of yesterday’s sweaty news. The squirting daisy was pinned to my lapel. The wolf whistle rattled in my pocket. I carried the pink vinyl bag of tricks over my shoulder, and the hospital had added a few new props: an empty jug and a urine collection tray. The jug was orange plastic, as though ready to hold a quart of generic orange juice. The urine tray was white, shaped like a giant lucky horseshoe, meant to fit over a toilet seat. The middle of the horseshoe formed the actual tray, marked with measurements, ounces and cubic centimeters, and plenty of’em! It was pointed on one edge, like the mouth of a pitcher, for easy pouring—fresh-squeezed urine right from bladder to tray to jug. Voilà! I tucked it under my arm.

  The jug and the tray were a pair, a duo, a working team like Matey, Crack and me. Together they made up my new urine collection kit and waited for that third player, the piss itself.

  The world was brilliant, gleaming and hard, bathed in sun. It was a welcome-home party after the death rattle of the hospital. But my head hummed and my skin was fragile; I needed the world to be gentle. Rather than brilliant, bumbling and soft would do. I needed a feather bed, a velvet curtain, a high-wire net. Luxury. Mostly, I needed the of Rex, a prescription dose of his fine love act.

  I still felt the buzzing inside my skull, that swarm of bees, the drone of insects lodged between me and clear thoughts. But I didn’t feel faint. I swung my empty urine collection jug and it was light as a balloon. The first tinkle of the morning, according to the lab man’s plan, would be free to swim its way from the toilet to the ocean. The rest of the day, all the piss I could piddle would go in the jug, up until the first round of the second morning. The jug had to be kept cold, on ice or in the fridge, from the first collection until it came back to the lab. It sounded so simple! Deceptively simple. I tucked the tray over my shoulder, gave the jug a toss. The jug blocked the sun as it twirled in the air, then I caught it between the clap of my palms.

  The neighborhood that only one day before was the King’s Row Street Fair was now nearly empty, sidewalks still bright with broken balloons and trampled confetti. A woman with a cloud of pale blue hair carried a miniature terrier, bows in the dog’s fur. Her turquoise and pink makeup told the rest of the story: no way was I the only clown on the block.

  I stopped at a juice cart. The drinks were pricey. When it was my turn, I said, “Green Drink. The biggest you’ve got. For the health of it.”

  The juice guy said, “Toilet seat part of the act?” A raspberry was caught in his goatee. His lips glowed orange from an overdose of carrot juice.

  Now who was head clown?

  “It’s not a toilet seat.” I adjusted the urine tray over my shoulder.

  “Looks like a toilet seat,” he said. “What’s your shtick?”

  I took a straw, tapped it against my hat. “Urine. My shtick is urinating. Right now, I’m a little light on inspiration.”

  He gave me three-fifty worth of fresh-squeezed Green Drink. I kept walking.

  The hanging flowerpots, nylon street flags, and painted bus stops of King’s Row district gave way to a narrow band of neighborhood where the streets were a river of orange and black lettering: For Sale, For Rent, Will Build to Suit. Every car, house, building, and bicycle. A wheelbarrow, For Sale. A stack of tires. Even dahlias, cut from the yard, For Sale.

  For-Salesville marked the hopeful margin between ampedup gentrification and the economic downslide of my stomping grounds: Baloneytown. That’s what they called my neck of the woods, where baloney was all the steak anybody could afford.

  Between For-Salesville and Baloneytown there were two city blocks, and on those blocks were two sprawling, gutted warehouses. One building was in pieces—a lone storefront, the old Mor4Les Variety, now tied to no store but just all joists and rebar and bricks in piles. The other building had a broken-out wall in front, nothing but dust and darkness inside. Both ruins were marked For Sale, Keep Out, with a giant fine for trespassing. Graffiti on the brick and plaster walls showed how many hadn’t kept out, had risked the fine instead.

  I’d risked the fine a few times myself.

  The empty lot was its own back stage, the outdoor air a wilderness hidden from the street between open walls. I came to those two buildings now like old friends.

  The Ruins—they were the ruins of our courtship, the blossoming, Rex Galore and me. One night, in the middle of the Perseid meteor shower, he and I lay on a blanket on a cement slab there and watched stars fall. Meteors marked the sky like sequins on a cheap dress hitting the dance floor. Rex whispered, “Let’s go on a crime spree. Break the rules, shake things up.” His breath was soft with wine.

  “You’re my crime spree,” I whispered back. “You’re enough. My bad habit, my finest act.” I ran a hand over the sweaty muscles of his shoulder.

  Now, with nobody around, I sipped Green Drink and walked through the Ruins and it was like walking through the Parthenon, the Acropolis, Stonehenge, or the Pyramids. It was another country, an ancient place. Stray fire bricks sat in a chipped pile, red and fat and softly rounded. A midden. A kitchen. An old faucet handle rested in the dirt, a piece of cast metal now out of work. I was an archaeologist in the kicked-up dust.

  A flight of cement stairs led to the narrow platform of an old loading dock. Graffiti danced over a broad stretch of the wall. The words were stylized and unreadable, a jagged and foreign alphabet. I sat on the loading dock with my legs dangling, drinking Green Drink in the sun. A strand of morning glory made its way up through a crack and curled into ringlets. Heaven. When Rex came home, we’d picnic in the Ruins again.

  Beside the gap of a framed-in window on the next wall over, the faded paint of an old card-room advertisement was a ghost image, the trace of a sign with nothing left to sell, now shy as the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. Left alone, even graffiti would weather to this same soft glow, like gang members growing old.

  Spray-paint cans lay scattered, the remains of an unsanctioned street fair, an aerosol-fueled Dionysian bash. I picked up a can of spray paint, shook the can and felt the ball inside rattle back and forth. I pushed the button. A spit of blood red paint disappeared into the air.

  “Hey there,” a voice called, behind me. I turned. Saw the blue uniform, a heavy step on the uneven ground. A cop lumbered toward me, weighted down with his belt of tools, his bulletproof shoes.

  I threw the can on the ground. Red paint marked my finger.

  I was caught red-handed, red-fingered in a debauch of paint cans, evidence against me documented in the swirl of graffiti. Who would believe a clown? Time to disappear. I swung my bag over my shoulder, grabbed the orange jug and Green Drink, and jumped off the loading dock to the worn ground below. Green Drink spilled out the straw of my lidded plastic cup; ten cents worth hit the ground.

  I ran.

  One hand was a fist where I gripped the orange jug handle, and my fist pumped out in front, then back, elbows in close. The bigger-than-big shoes caught in the ru
bble; it was like running in slow motion, in soft sand. Green Drink sloshed another twenty cents on the ground. Then thirty cents, and more with each swing of the arm. My head buzzed with the hum of bees, my heart pounded but my sweat was cold. The hospital—I didn’t want to end up there again. Trespassing fines, vandalism fines—more bills I couldn’t pay! I ran faster, a dollar’s worth of Green Drink lying in my wake.

  “Wait up,” the cop said.

  No way.

  His breathing was heavy, his belt jangled. He said, “I want to talk to you.”

  Right. I’d heard that before. I turned a corner, behind a pillar, then went down into a window well that ran the length of the building, a sort of culvert lined with corrugated aluminum. I ducked low, below ground level. This was the closest I could find to offstage. Finally. Bent over double, I gasped for air. When I looked up over the edge the cop was standing still, turned the other way. I waited for my chance, then climbed out the far end of the window well and went around the next corner.

  I listened for the cop’s breath. His belt. Footsteps. Nothing. I jogged a slow jog back to the front of the building, hugged the wall, and peered around the corner. No cop. Over my shoulder, the street was empty. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. My hands hummed, far away, one wrapped around the Green Drink cup, the other with the urine jug. I edged along the wall, bricks rough against my clothes, and looked back through the empty hole of a window. There he was. The cop, in the Ruins, kicked a paint can. Examined evidence.

  Hidden behind the wall, I looked out through the glassless window. The cop put a hand to his head, ruffled his hair. The sun caught his hair in a golden shimmer. My heart was so loud, I felt nearly deaf.

  “Sniffles?” the cop called. He turned a slow waltz in the empty lot. His voice was lost on the wind, lost behind my heartbeat.

  He took one step forward, then two. Said it again.

  Sniffles? Had he really called my clown name? He bent and picked something up.