Touch of the Clown

by Glen Huser

“The kids tease her. Hold their noses. Call her names. Stinky. Livvy Le Pew.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Just kids.”

  Mr. Graydon sighs and shuts his eyes for a minute.

  “Livvy uses the F-word on them,” I add. “I’ve been telling her not to.”

  “Maybe she needs to.”

  I look at him sideways and notice he’s not smiling.

  “How about your dad? Has he been working lately?”

  “He needs to stay home to look after Livvy,” I tell him, “and he hasn’t been well.”

  “Oh.”

  “He has bad nerves. They tried to fix them in the hospital.”

  Mr. Graydon looks at me. “The nerves?”

  “He has medicine but it ran out.”

  “I see.”

  Sometimes when Mr. Graydon starts asking about things at home, I close off his voice. I read the posters on the wall behind him. Most of the posters have slogans. Things like “I will is more important than I.Q.” Or I look out the window and count the houses that have black roofs, and then the green.

  Ms. Billings, the drama teacher, doesn’t seem to be interested in our families. She’s too busy with other things. We do a unit on mime, lifting imaginary boxes, being mirrors of one another’s actions, playing robots and mannequins and marionettes.

  One day she asks me, “Are you taking dance somewhere?”

  I shake my head.

  “Pity,” I hear her say before she moves away to another group. Later, we try some dialogue from plays. She likes the way I speak. One noon hour during Drama Club she has us read parts from a play called I Remember Mama, about a new family in America, with a father and a mother and children, three girls and a boy.

  “You can read Katrin,” she says to me. “Of course she needs to be older in the play, but you sound older, Barbara.”

  If Livvy and I lived in the I Remember Mama world, we would be coming home to a house with supper simmering on the stove, and Mama sitting by the kitchen table, counting out the money Papa has brought home from work in a little envelope, and the people in the family would be joking and teasing one another and thinking about what it would be most important to spend the money on.

  Our kitchen is definitely not an I Remember Mama kitchen. There is no family chattering. Nothing is simmering on the stove. Through the doorway to the living room comes the sound of the television.

  I have told Livvy exactly what she can tell and what she can’t tell when we get home from Cosmo’s. “You can tell that you were hit by a bike and a man put some Band-Aids on the places where you got hurt. You can’t tell that the man did juggling for us and took us to his place and gave us lemonade. If you do tell, we may not be able to go and see him again. You must promise me Livvy.”

  Livvy promises.

  “Is that you, Barbara?” Daddy calls from the living room.

  “Mhmmm.”

  We’re no sooner in the house, of course, when Livvy barrels through into the living room.

  “Look, Dad-dee,” she dances in, trying to display all of her glow-in-the-dark Band-Aids at once. “I got hit by a bicycle.”

  Grandma’s friend, Mrs. Perth, is over drinking sherry with them and watching a black-and-white movie. Everybody starts clucking and talking at once. “Precious baby. You poor thing. Let’s see.” They even put the movie on Pause.

  “Barbara,” Daddy’s voice rises above the others. It is his thick afternoon-sherry voice. “Come in here.”

  I put my survival kit on a kitchen chair.

  “What happened to this child? Can’t you look after her for a few minutes without her getting run down?”

  I start to give the bare facts but no one is very interested. They are fussing over Livvy again.

  “I wouldn’t let kids of mine out on the streets today.” Mrs. Perth puts in her two cents’ worth. She looks as old as Grandma Kobleimer and I know her son Myron is older than Daddy. “There’s dopers’ needles for them to pick up and Lord knows what else. Put up a big fence and keep ‘em in the yard.”

  “Edna, you never said a truer word.” Grandma removes the cigarette she’s been sucking on. “These streets are getting so it’s not safe to set foot out. When Herb and I moved here in ‘48, kids played all over the place and nobody thought a thing about it. But now, it’s a different world…”

  “A bicycle accident could happen anywhere,” I say. As soon as the words are out I know that I should have kept them to myself and let Grandma go on for half an hour about how great things were in the good old days.

  “Barbara, my dear.” Grandma cuts each word amazingly icy and clear, considering how low the sherry bottle is. “That is really not the point. The point is that you and Olivia should not be out roaming the streets. And,” she sucks on her king-size Matinee for a couple of seconds, “it maybe isn’t my place to comment, but I don’t recall you checking with your daddy about taking Livvy anywhere. Of course, I could be wrong.”

  “Where the hell were you kids?” Daddy gets half out of his armchair, but he’s dizzy and slumps back into it.

  “I got a ball.” Livvy is still dancing around, waving her Band-Aids. “Bingo is his name-o.”

  “Barbara.” Grandma’s voice is getting louder. “I believe your father asked you a question.”

  “We were just at the park.”

  “Them parks ain’t fit for human habitation.” Mrs. Perth slurps her sherry, and the creases of flesh in her old neck wobble. “I wouldn’t let kids of mine in them for a minute ‘less an adult was there in a supervision capacity.’

  “Did I say you could go to the park?” Daddy screams. “When are you going to learn some responsibility?”

  “Kids.” Mrs. Perth shakes her head.

  “It was just to the park,” I say. “We always go to the park.”

  “Are you sassing your father, missy?” Grandma Kobleimer is struggling to get up with her walker.

  “I’m not sassing…”

  “See, Bingo’s got stars on him, and Cosmo…”

  I look daggers at Livvy.

  “Oh, oh.” Livvy suddenly stops her dancing around. “I gotta go bathroom,” she says in her baby voice.

  “You mean you already went.” Daddy is screaming everything now. “The two of you are going to put me back into the hospital.”

  “Your poor father.” Grandma Kobleimer has raised herself up and her hands are clasped on the walker like the talons of some big bird. “He is this close.” She releases the walker with one hand to show a teeny space between her thumb and index finger. “This close to a nervous break-down.”

  For once it is almost a relief that Livvy has had one of her accidents. “Better go to the bath-room, Livvy.”

  “Don’t think this is finished, missy.” Grandma moves her walker along a well-worn route to the bathroom. “I need some time in there first,” she says.

  “It’s okay. I’ll take her downstairs. I’ll soak the clothes and then give her a bath.”

  “But my Band-Aids will come off.” Livvy starts crying.

  “We’ll just run a small tub.” I tell Livvy to stop her sobbing as I get her out of her clothes. Along with the clothes in the survival bag, there’s enough now to do a wash, I think. “You can keep your Band-Aids from getting wet. Then, when you’re ready for bed, we can turn out the light and see them glow in the dark.”

  By the time I have her back upstairs for her bath, Daddy and Grandma and Mrs. Perth are sitting in the silver glow of the black-and-white movie in a kind of trance.

  I check the fridge. There is half a loaf of bread and a package of baloney.

  “Baloney sandwiches?” I holler.

  No one answers except Livvy. “I want mustard and pickles on mine.”

  “There are no pickles.”

  “Pooh.”

  I poke my head into the living room. On the TV, an actress in a Cleopatra headdress is lounging on her barge as it drifts down the Nile. “Baloney sandwiches for everyone?”

&
nbsp; “Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely.” Mrs. Perth flashes her false teeth.

  “Mm. Fine,” Daddy sighs. “It’s too warm to cook anyway.”

  “You know, they used to say we could have been sisters,” Grandma sighs. “Claudette Colbert and me.”

  In the kitchen, Livvy slathers mustard on half the slices, and we cut the sandwiches into triangles. “Like the pyramids of Egypt,” I tell her. “It’ll go with their Cleopatra movie.”

  Livvy and I take our sandwiches out onto the porch to eat. When we’re finished, we play catch for awhile in the backyard.

  We try to juggle Bingo and a couple of old tennis balls we found. But Livvy is starting to yawn. “Come on, pumpkin,” I say. “If you go to bed right away, I’ll read to you.”

  “Can I have a snack?”

  “Snack first, and then right to bed.”

  “I’m having a snack,” she announces to the video zombies when we’re back inside.

  “There’s a bag of chips on the cupboard,” Daddy says.

  “I wish we had lemonade.” Livvy is sitting up on the kitchen counter, going into little contortions as she tries to see if all of her Band-Aids are still in place.

  Livvy has two beds in her room, bunkbeds side by side. She goes to bed in whichever one is the driest and least smelly. We turn off the lights and pull the blinds down. Her Band-Aids glow faintly, and I hear her sigh with satisfaction. She has a little lamp with dinosaurs grazing around the shade. Mama brought it home one day on her way back from the doctor’s. “This was in the window in a Goodwill store,” she said. “Can you believe it? All these wonderful dinosaurs?”

  When I switch on the light and the dinosaurs glow, I can hear her voice reading me a bedtime story. Livvy was too small to listen. As she slept, she made little baby breathing sounds while Mama read. “You read to her,” Mama would say, “when you’re older. You’re such a good reader.”

  Tonight Livvy is asleep before I can finish the next chapter of Charlotte’s Web.

  When I go down to take my bath, Cleopatra has finished, and regular TV is chattering away on low volume. Mrs. Perth has fallen asleep and is snoring softly. Daddy has reached his crying stage, his cheeks shiny with tears. Grandma sits with her eyes open, but they don’t seem to focus anymore. She sits motionless, most of her cigarette turned to ash, about to fall onto the rug. I hold an ashtray under it and give it a little tap. I hear her voice, no longer loud and demanding.

  “Mildred,” she says. “Mildred, you should be in bed.” Mildred is her daughter who died thirty years ago.

  “Your grandma is living in the years gone by,” Daddy sniffles. “It’s amazing I’m not in the mental hospital with your mama gone, and Grandma slipping away into senile dementia, and Olivia having such problems. Lesser people…” the words lap fuzzily against one another, “lesser people would have just given up. Not many men do what I do. Barbara, honey…”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “See if there’s another Branvin in the cupboard. I just don’t feel like I can get up.” I have estimated that Daddy has added ten pounds to his weight with each year since Mama died. He was a big man then, and now he must be close to three hundred pounds.

  “Daddy,” I say, my voice pleading.

  “Well, don’t get it then,” he snaps. “Lord knows I don’t ask much of you but when I do it’s ‘Oooh, Dad-dee, don’t touch a drink…’” His voice is getting higher and louder. “The pain is more than I can bear, but does anyone care? Oh, yes, it’s a different story when the checks come in and Miss Barbara wants a new coat and shoes…” He is yelling at the top of his voice now, stirring Mrs. Perth, pulling Grandma up to the surface of some dream-lake she’s swimming in.

  I go to the cupboard and bring out the last bottle of sherry and bang it onto the coffee table.

  “Well, theeank yeeou,” Daddy says, “for the great big favor. Remind me to light a candle for you the next time I’m in church.” He winks at Mrs. Perth. “You want a little snort, Edna, before you head for home? That’s if Miss Barbara S. Kobleimer has no violent objections.”

  “I’m going to have a bath,” I say, closing the bathroom door on the end of my sentence.

  When I sink into the water, I am surprised to find that I have begun to cry. I am suddenly tired beyond belief. I just want to close my eyes and float. If I close my eyes, maybe I can make myself believe I am in the water at Alberta Beach and Mama is saying, “Don’t go out too deep, honey. Don’t go out beyond your death–” I used to think she said “death” when, of course, she said “depth.” When she died, I asked someone, “Did Mama go out beyond her death?” But they didn’t understand and said, “No, your sweet mama had a bad cancer running all around inside her. She’s out of pain now.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ms. Billings, our drama teacher, also has to teach health. She fills up her health classes with videos on maturation, drug and alcohol abuse. When she runs out of videos, she brings in guest speakers. A nurse from the medical center. A social worker from the school board office. The police.

  “Make it a rule not to trust anyone,” the police tell us. “You’d be surprised at the smooth talk people might try on you. And it’s best not to be by yourself.” But does Livvy really count as a second person? It’s true she can yell louder than any other kid in our neighborhood. I heard them once at the playground having a screaming competition. No contest.

  Plus Cosmo has given us his phone number and told us to tell Daddy and Grandma where we are. He doesn’t know that we’ve told Daddy we’re just going to the playground for awhile.

  I’ve explained it all to Livvy, about not saying where we’re really going. Actually I think she’s not too sure what we are doing. She keeps talking about a curly slide.

  “Do you think Bingo will go down the curly slide faster than me?”

  “Livvy,” I remind her, “we’re not going to the park.”

  “Oh, pooh.”

  “We’re going to Cosmo’s. I thought you wanted to go to Cosmo’s.”

  “Will he make lemonade for us?”

  “I don’t know. But don’t ask. It’s not polite.”

  “I can if I want to.”

  “Don’t be a brat.”

  She sticks her tongue out at me. I knock Bingo out of her hand into some bushes, regretting it as soon as I hear her yelling some of the bad words she’s heard at the playground and see her down on her knees crawling around a hedge where litter has gathered in a little driftpile. “Don’t pick up things from the gutters and the alleys,” the nurse from the medical center had warned us. “Sometimes there’s used needles…”

  “I’ll get it,” I shout at Livvy.

  “No,” she yells at me. “Don’t touch Bingo. I got him. I don’t want you to touch him.”

  When we get to the landing at the top of Cosmo’s stairs, I let Livvy knock on the door, but no one answers. We lean over the balustrade and look down at the half-crumpled umbrella over the patio table. Red and pink dahlias stare up at us from the garden along the side fence. I can see Livvy is thinking about dropping Bingo over the railing.

  “Don’t”, I say.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “Were, too.”

  Livvy retreats into a wicker chair by Cosmo’s door. “Can we go to the park?” she grumbles.

  Beside the wicker chair there is a funny twisted plant that looks like a little pine tree growing out of a shiny black pot. Bamboo wind-chimes clatter from the eaves.

  “Here comes Cosmo now.” I see him half-jogging along the sidewalk. The rainbow colors seem to have rearranged themselves. He is wearing a green baseball cap, a sea-blue sweatshirt, pants the color of the marigolds lining the walk below us, and the green sneakers he wore yesterday.

  He looks up and sees us. “Hi, guys,” he hollers. “Sorry I’m late. Forgot I wouldn’t be able to take Mehitabel.”

  “Cosmo!” Livvy calls down to him. “Catch!” She throws Bingo down. He drops the gym bag he’s been carrying and rac
es out of his way to catch the ball. Triumphantly, he waves it in the air. Livvy gives me a smug look.

  “So, what are the Kobleimer sisters up to today?” Cosmo asks us when he reaches the landing. “Playing in traffic?”

  “No, silly,” Livvy laughs. “You want to come to the park with us, Cosmo?”

  “Hey, great idea! But let’s have a snack first. I’m famished.”

  “Yay!” Livvy shouts. “Lemonade!”

  “If Miss de Havilland would like lemonade, lemonade it shall be.” Cosmo reaches behind Livvy’s ear and pulls out a house key.

  “Hey! How’d you do that?”

  “Magic,” Cosmo says, giving the door a little kick where it sticks at the bottom. “Welcome to the Emerald City,” he says.

  The Wizard of Oz is one of the movies Daddy got on an introductory offer to a video club three years ago before he got cut off for not paying for the movies he kept ordering. We’ve probably watched it a hundred times. We know the Emerald City backwards and forwards.

  Cosmo’s kitchen looks like it has been stolen from Oz. The walls are a deep green and the windows are covered with green bamboo blinds that are halfway rolled up. The cupboards are still another shade of green, and the wall with a door leading into a living room is covered with pictures of green objects, all overlapping one another. It’s a photomontage. We made them in Mrs. Taylor’s grade seven art class except this one covers the whole wall.

  There is a little wooden table, also green, and two chairs that are the color of the inside part of a watermelon. Cosmo Farber moves around his kitchen with easy, graceful moves, like a dancer. He slides into the living room and puts on some music. It sounds like a piano making raindrops. Then he’s back in the kitchen, digging in his fridge. It’s a normal white fridge but it has two greenish fish–they must be magnets–swimming across the door.

  “So, Miss Olivia de Havilland Kobleimer,” he says, “how are those scrapes and bruises mending? You seem to have lost some of your Band-Aids.”

  “They came off when I was having a bath.”

  “She was pretty stiff yesterday, but today she’s been skipping all over the place.”

  “I hope you told your dad how sorry I was.” He is cutting a lemon and a lime into slices.