Touch of the Clown

by Glen Huser

  TOUCH OF THE CLOWN

  TOUCH OF THE CLOWN

  Glen Huser

  My appreciation to my family and friends who read the first drafts of Touch of the Clown and offered many helpful comments. A special thanks to my editor, Shelley Tanaka, for her insightful suggestions throughout the revision process.

  Copyright © 1999 by Glen Huser

  Reprinted 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Reprography Collective), Toronto, Ontario.

  Groundwood Books / Douglas & Mclntyre Ltd.

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 500, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Huser, Glen, 1943-

  Touch of the clown

  A Groundwood book.

  ISBN 0-88899-343-9 (bound) ISBN 0-88899-357-9 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8565.U823T68 1999 jC813’.54 C98-932840-6

  PZ7.H87To 1999

  Cover illustration: Janet Wilson

  Design: Michael Solomon

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For Ian

  – and in memory of David

  CHAPTER ONE

  Summer holidays are the worst times. I know they’re supposed to be great, and I remember a long time ago when I finished grade one and we went to Alberta Beach for the summer and it was great, but that was the last time, that summer when Mama was still alive and Olivia de Havilland was waiting to be born.

  Mama and I made dill-pickle sandwiches and filled big glass sealers with lemonade and ice. We took our beach towels and comic books and word-search puzzles and a little radio and sunscreen down to the beach and stayed there some-times all day, just loafing and laughing and wading in the water or wandering out on the long pier to let the breeze blow on us and cool us off.

  Mama had a big picture of Jimmy Dean on her towel, the one that her girlfriend Marilyn Marsden sent her from L.A.

  “I sure do like to cozy up to Jimmy on a hot summer day,” Mama would laugh. “Marilyn and I were just crazy about him when we were teenagers. Rub my legs with oil again, will you, honey? And I’ll do your back.” My towel had Care Bears on it, but it hadn’t come from L.A., just from Woolco.

  Mama would lie on her back and let her fingers make little circles on her tummy. “If anyone asks you, you just tell them that I swallowed a beach ball,” she would whoop with laughter, showing all of her big, crooked teeth.

  You might wonder where my dad and Grandma Kobleimer were while we were at the beach all day. Once in awhile they would wander down for maybe twenty minutes before Daddy would say he could feel himself breaking out in a heat rash and Grandma would say something about only mad dogs and Englishmen going out in the noonday sun. Then they’d head back to the cottage, close the living-room drapes and search for movies on the TV.

  That was seven years ago when I was six.

  That good summer.

  I would lie on the beach under the sun and even then I could do a word search faster than Mama.

  “You whiz-kid,” she would say. “You little bright button. Where’d you find that big long word? I’ve been looking for fifteen minutes.”

  We’d finish our word searches and read our comics, and then we’d have a tell-me time.

  “Tell me how you met Daddy,” I might say, even though I knew the story already.

  “Well,” Mama would say, holding the word in her mouth like you would a peppermint candy, “we were both working in a little old theater downtown.”

  “You were the popcorn lady.”

  “I was the popcorn lady and your daddy was the ticket-taker and sometimes an usher. When there weren’t many people in the audience and it was the final show, we’d slip into the back row and watch the last feature, and one time he took my hand in his. The show was The Wizard of Oz on a rerun, I think.”

  Or I might say, “Tell me how I got my name.”

  “Well,” again rolling the word around in her mouth, “your daddy and I made a deal. He would get to name any girls we would have, and I would get to name the boys. When you came along he said, ‘I’m going to name this little one Barbara Stanwyck.’ You see, Barbara Stanwyck was always his favorite actress. He used to drag me miles to see a Barbara Stanwyck movie, or we’d stay up half the night if one was coming on the Late Late Show. So that’s how you got your name. Barbara Stanwyck Kobleimer. Now, if this beach ball turns out to be a boy, I’m going to name him James Dean, and we’ll call him Jimmy, of course.”

  Sometimes I look at Livvy and think what it would have been like if she had been a little boy with no health problems, and Mama had lived. Jimmy Dean and Mama and I would go to the beach and build sand castles and walk out on the long pier where you can look down and the water is so clear you can see the wave patterns in the sand and the water weeds doing their slow, slow dance. And then we would lie on our beach towels and do word searches. Words with double letters are easy to find–forwards, backwards, or going on a slant. Words like HAPPINESS. You just look for any two p’s together and figure it out from there. I would show Jimmy Dean how to do it.

  Today it is extra hot, and with the door closed and the blinds down so there won’t be any glare on the TV, the air inside is heavy and sticky. Daddy’s face is covered with little beads of sweat, which he clears away every few minutes with a hand towel. Grandma doesn’t sweat as much, maybe because she covers the parts of her that show with powder. But I know the heat is getting to her, too. She has a small electric fan on top of her ornament shelf, with its airstream aimed at her face. It blows along the rows of little bluish curls on her head.

  “I wish we could go and stay at the lake for awhile this summer,” I say, kind of casual, setting down their lunch trays. The macaroni and cheese is fresh and the toast isn’t burnt, and there’s little juice glasses with ice in them, in case they want their sherry over ice. I’ve been planning this all morning. “Maybe we could go to Alberta Beach and it wouldn’t be so hot there and Livvy and I could go to the beach by the long pier. I know Livvy would like it.”

  Daddy has a forkful of macaroni halfway to his mouth but he puts it down with a clatter on the plate.

  “Are you crazy?” he begins yelling. “You want to have Olivia at the beach, running every fifteen minutes to wash out her clothes in a public toilet? Is that your idea of fun? No, thank you, miss. We have a cross to bear but we’ll bear it close to an automatic washing machine and a gas dryer, if you please.”

  “Look what you’ve done,” Grandma hisses at me when Daddy’s left the room and banged into the bathroom. I can hear him, over the water running, beginning to cry.

  Livvy is hollering from downstairs, “Baaarbara, I need you,” which means she’s had an accident and needs to be changed.

  “You make your daddy feel real bad that he can’t take you any place for a holiday. You’ve made a grown man cry.”

  “Baaarbara.”

  “He’d be crying anyway by suppertime,” I mutter. “He always cries after he’s had a few glasses of sherry.”

  “What a thing to say.” Grandma seems to shrink into her easy chair, as if she’s getting ready to spring. “That man has made every sacrifice for his daughters and you have the unmitigated gall to throw into his face the small bi
t of solace he obtains from a drink to settle his nerves.”

  Grandma Kobleimer should work for the word-search people. I’ve never seen “unmitigated” or “solace” in any puzzle I’ve ever done. She could keep the word-search people busy for days.

  “Baaarbara, I need you.”

  “I’m coming.” I give Livvy an answering yell, heading for the basement stairs before Grandma can get her second wind.

  Livvy has already got herself out of her clothes, which lie in a heap on the floor by her feet.

  “You’d better get upstairs into a tub,” I say, picking up the clothes to rinse in the laundry sink. “You can put on your shorts and your Batman T-shirt when you get out.”

  “Oh, goood-ee.” Livvy does a little dance and claps her hands. I give her my you-don’t-need-to-act-like-a-little-baby look. Livvy likes to act, but I guess you can’t blame her. If I had her problem, I think I’d pretend I was someone else, too.

  I run hot water onto the clothes in the tub and watch the soiled water rise up before pulling the plug, rinsing them again and adding them to the pile of clothes already waiting to become a full load in the washing machine.

  Livvy has changed by the time I get back upstairs, and she lies on the rug, devouring her bowl of macaroni and cheese. Sometimes I think that if I were Livvy I would never eat anything and then the problem would just go away, but Livvy has a different outlook on things. She’d be quite happy pushing something in her mouth twenty-four hours a day.

  Daddy is back from the bathroom, but his face is still wet from tears, and he has poured the juice glass full of sherry. “Where’s the justice?” He dabs at the tears and sweat with the hand towel. “To lose her mother, and then lose a kidney. How does she stand a chance? We couldn’t go on a holiday even if we had the money.”

  “There is no justice,” Grandma nods over her own juice glass half filled with sherry. “No justice in the world. But I tell you, son, what you have to put up with, there’ll be a crown of stars waiting in heaven for you. How many men would do what you do? Stay home…”

  But at that moment the MGM lion roars on the TV and both of them pause, suddenly speechless as the title of a movie rolls across a Technicolor sky. Even Livvy stops for a moment, her spoonful of macaroni hovering in midair with a small trail of cheese sauce spilling onto the living-room rug.

  “I’m going out for awhile,” I announce. This is the safest time to make a getaway, just as a new movie is sucking them in.

  Livvy takes advantage of her already open mouth to begin a howl of protest, but I quickly say, “You come, too, Livvy. Hurry and finish your macaroni.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  We have always lived in Grandma Kobleimer’s house, an old house like the others on the street. It is a sad part of town where tired, homeless people sometimes lie down in the crabgrass along the back alleys or even on the boulevard, and it is sometimes hard to tell if they are sleeping or dead. Daddy says not to go near any people who are lying down outside and to run away fast if any strange person tries to come up to us. Most of the kids in my neighborhood can run fast when they need to. I’ve been trying to get Livvy to practice running but it’s not her favorite thing to do.

  “You want to go to the playground?” I ask her now as she hops from foot to foot, not sure about which direction to take.

  “The one with the curly slide?”

  “Sure,” I say. If you’ve seen one playground, you’ve seen them all. Fenceposts and rubber tires and metal pipes. A curly slide or a straight slide. Bad words written wherever there’s space enough to write something. “But if there’s a bunch of kids there, we’re not going.”

  “I’m not scared of kids.” Livvy begins skipping in circles.

  “Well, I am.”

  There’s no playground really close to where we live. You need to walk a few blocks to get to any of them. There are girls out already on some of the corners, in hot pants and high heels. The trick is to get Livvy past them without her stopping to chat. It means crossing the road a lot.

  Actually, before you start along any block, you look to see if there are people staggering or any tough kids on the watch for someone to be mean to. And whether or not there are girls on the corner.

  Livvy hasn’t figured this out yet. She doesn’t know what can happen. I’ve been beaten up twice. The first time was when I was in grade three and I was going to the store to get Froot Loops and milk. Three junior-high girls stopped me and said, “Hey, kid, got any spare change?” I didn’t even know what spare change meant, and of course my mouth seized up and just a funny little croaking noise came out. My fist clamped tighter around the five dollars Grandma had given me along with a big lecture about how I wasn’t to lose any of the money that was left.

  “Whatcha got in your hand, kid?” One of the girls could see my knuckles were turning white hanging onto something, so two of them held me and the third one pried my fingers open.

  “Now that’s not nice,” the biggest one laughed. “Didn’t your momma tell you about sharing? I guess we’re just gonna have to learn you a lesson.”

  Of course, by that time, I was howling my head off.

  “Shut up, or we’ll give you something to cry about,” said the girl who had a tattoo of a skull and a snake on her arm. Before they ran off with the five dollars, this one knocked me down onto the sidewalk and kicked my legs. I lay there for a long time crying before I got up, scraped bits of gravel off my knees and hands, and limped home.

  Daddy and Grandma were furious and they did a lot of yelling about what was the world coming to, and where were the police when you needed them, but they never phoned in a complaint. Neither of them really liked to have any-thing to do with the police.

  After that, I knew you had to be suspicious of just about everyone who’s bigger than you when you’re on the sidewalk, except for old ladies with white hair.

  But last year, the second time I got beaten up, I didn’t have a chance. Two boys came bombing out of the pool hall just as I was going by with a bagful of videos to return to the video store. They grabbed the videos, and one twisted my arm really hard and said to give him any money I had. It turned out I only had twenty-seven cents in my pocket, and when they saw how it was such a little bit, the one twisted my arm even harder until I thought it would crack.

  “Aw, let her be,” said the guy with my bag of videos. “She’s just a kid.” He even smiled at me, big chipped teeth showing through a faceful of pimples.

  The other one just kind of snarled, like a dog, and grabbed me by my cheek and pinched really hard before letting me go. By that time I’d found my voice and was screaming as loud as I could. They ran off. My arm hurt so bad I thought I was going to die, and I sat down on a bus-stop bench and cried until it felt a little bit better.

  Then I was afraid to go home because of the videos. There were two new releases and four from the three-day rental shelves.

  Daddy and Grandma were already in a bad mood when I finally straggled in. Livvy had had a major accident while I was out and they’d had to clean her up. This time they did call the police, but it didn’t help anything, and we had to pay $215.00 to the video store, which took all of our grocery money for one month.

  “I don’t know why you can’t be trusted to go four blocks by yourself,” Daddy yelled at me, as if it were my fault I got mugged.

  So today Livvy and I cross the street four times just to be on the safe side before we get to the park with the curly slide.

  Livvy is good for about two hours at the playground if she doesn’t have an accident. I push her on the swings a bit and say “hey,” and wave when she hollers, “Baarbra, look at me!” as she works her way along monkey bars or climbs up into the little wooden tower. But mostly I sit at the picnic table with my survival bag, the straw beach bag Mama used to take with us to Alberta Beach. Some of the straw is coming loose, but I glue the pieces back with my white school glue.

  In the bag I have a change of clothing for Livvy, my word-search mag
azine, a library book, and a scribbler that’s good for playing X’s and O’s with Livvy or for making notes to myself, a box of crayons and an old scrapbook from grade five, which Livvy uses when she feels like making pictures. There are a few other things, too, which I carry for good luck: a little pink glass bottle that once held some of Mama’s perfume, a letter from Marilyn Marsden from L.A. that says, “I hope sometime you can come and visit me. Your mama always wanted to come, and now that she isn’t with us, you need to come for her.” I know the letter by heart. This is only part of it.

  My library book today is called Looking at the Moon. It is about a big family at a beach, and they live in a cottage that has a whole bunch of rooms, and there’s a boathouse and a pier. Norah, the girl in the story, isn’t really part of the family. She’s been sent from England to get away from the war. When you read the book you’re supposed to be thinking about Norah and how she’s falling in love and it’s not working out very well, but I keep thinking about the beach and the trees alongside it, and the clear water, and the sounds of children shouting, and seagulls dipping and diving like kites.

  In this family, a cook makes the meals and I imagine things like oatmeal porridge and bacon and eggs and pancakes. I want to be Norah with her sore heart and her worries about the war and her family back in England.

  “Baarbraaa–look what I found.” Livvy is dancing over from the playground equipment. She’s holding a rubber ball in her hand. It is a faded grayish-green covered with a pattern of stars.

  “Look, starshine,” she says. At one time the stars must have been covered with glitter paint. Most of the glitter has worn off, but here and there a little fleck catches the sunlight.

  “Play ball with me,” Livvy begs, dancing around, throwing the ball up in the air, trying to catch it, chasing it across the grass and the gravel.

  “Okay,” I say, “but we’ve got to go soon.” A cluster of teenagers moving across the field toward the playground makes me decide to leave even sooner. I throw the word search and Looking at the Moon into the survival bag. “We can play catch on the way home.”