by Chris Adrian
The house was similarly transformed in steps into a party palace. A white tent rose in the front yard, sheltering a half-dozen tables draped in white with centerpieces of orange flowers surrounding a candle that would not stay lit because of the wet wind. A band set up on the porch, a plastic parquet dance floor unfolding in squares in front of them as they tuned their instruments. The dining-room table grew to twice its real length, extensions hidden under a pool-sized expanse of tablecloth. Serving stations popped up in the corners of the living room. A bar appeared in the wide hall, complete with a giant silver mirror that Jemma compulsively smudged with her fingers before it was lifted into place. A puppet theater rose on the other side of the basement from the moonwalk. Jemma watched the puppets rehearsing—up to four of them operated at once by a woman who could braid hair with her feet—a princess and a dragon, a knight and a witch, all throwing out their arms and singing “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La.”
By the time Jemma was trying unsuccessfully to zip up her mother’s dress, the clown had arrived. He drove up in a yellow Volkswagen big enough to hold fifty clowns. Jemma watched him emerge from the car, first the requisite big red shoe, distinguished with a coontail at the heel, then hair the very same cornflower blue as her dress, eyes ringed in bruisy purple and green, a hooked nose like a dangling chili that hung straight across the huge lips, painted in a despairing frown. His thin neck, chalk white, disappeared into a Mad-Hatter collar, green on top of an orange shirt. His red frock coat had tails as long as a wedding train; five feet after his bottom they ended in motorized-ferret tail-bearers that chased after him and made figure eights. Green pedal pushers vanished into socks of every color, half the spectrum on the left foot, half on the right. Last to emerge was the other shoe, a surprise black. He removed two giant valises from under the hood of the car and came high-stepping up the walk, revealing under that black shoe the painted image of a squashed kitty.
“Jesus Christ,” her mother said.
“I told you,” said Calvin, watching with them at the window. He hated clowns, and had lobbied hard against summoning one to this party. He was making gestures through the window at him, shaking his fist as if to cast paper, rock, or scissors, but instead flashing strange finger symbols, and muttering under his breath, but Jemma was close enough to hear. “Adonai! Father strike him down!”
“The clown is here!” their father said, coming up behind them and putting a hand on Jemma’s shoulder. “It’s your birthday clown!”
“What were you thinking?” their mother asked their father. “Where did you get that thing? Weren’t there any normal clowns?”
“What?” their father asked, looking genuinely perplexed. “Funny hair, funny nose, great big shoes. It’s not a pony, is it?”
“It’s scaring me already,” said their mother. It had almost arrived at the doorstep when it suddenly dropped its bags and did a sort of disco move, pointing down at the ground and then sweeping arm, hand, and finger up in an arc to point straight up at the sky. Then it fell back onto the thick wet grass, the softest lawn on the hill, and began to shake violently. “Oh God, is it having a seizure?” their mother asked, and then answered her own question. “It’s having a seizure!” Their father rushed out, joined shortly by their Uncle Ned, not a real uncle but a friend and colleague of their father. A crowd gathered, puppet lady and moonwalk techs and bartender and servers all in a semicircle, some asking aloud if this was part of the act, because it wasn’t very funny. “Why did you get an epileptic clown?” their mother asked, brandishing the sterling cake cutter she’d confiscated from a well-meaning but ignorant teenager, who would later be carving out the roast, before he could shove it into the big, sad mouth.
“Like I was supposed to know? Like, what, the ones with blue hair seize on rainy days?”
“Stay calm, everybody,” said Uncle Ned. “The clown’s going to be fine.” He was removing the trembling shoes, for reasons that did not become apparent until after the ambulance had come and gone, carting the clown away down the south side of the hill just as the first guests were beginning to arrive up the north side. A trauma surgeon, he was cool in a crisis, and used to being the only person who knew what to do. Just as Jemma’s mother was most keenly lamenting both the arrival of the clown and its departure, and Jemma’s father was leaving another message with the answering service at the clown agency, Uncle Ned appeared in the shoes, having plundered from the valises and the Volkswagen a traditional round nose, a rainbow afro, and a pair of hairy yellow overalls. “Hey kids!” he said in his sharp, commanding voice, not the least bit goofy and not even particularly friendly.
“I got him,” Calvin said to Jemma as they watched the guests arrive. “Did you see it? I got him.” For the rest of the night he would try to cast seizures at various adults and children and fail, but never accept that his gesturing fingers had only been coincidentally related to the clown’s affliction.
Along with last-minute lessons in extracting a foreign body from a choking victim, and instruction on how to throw herself, belly-first, against the edge of the couch in case she found herself choking in an empty room, Jemma’s mother demonstrated demure postures for Jemma to assume during the party. Her mother, who’d been celebrated herself at parties as a child, said, “You must be in the party but not of the party. Everything will revolve around you, but you mustn’t be frightened when strange people want to hug you, or take your picture while you open a present.” Jemma listened, nodded dutifully; she was obedient, not like her brother, and tried at that age to do good as she understood it. She tried to pose demurely at her mother’s side, receiving the guests. She tried not to loll her tongue out droolingly at the pile of presents she wanted so desperately, not to open, but to climb. She tried not to think about the cake, as big as her whole body, a great J, or the colored cream roses, and how she wanted to make it clear to every person that walked in the door that as birthday girl she had every right to the most rose-afflicted piece of that cake, that if she wanted to she could eat a piece that was all icing and no flesh. She tried not to think of the moonwalk beckoning from downstairs, inviting her to muss her hair, wrinkle her dress, bounce from her knees to her feet to her knees again. She was demure for less than ten minutes.
That was long enough. Her mother had been edging them toward the dance floor as the last guests arrived; at a certain distance it simply sucked her in. “In the party, but not of it,” she whispered to Jemma as a walrusy man swept her onto the porch. Seconds later, Jemma was shoeless in the moonwalk, and of it, bouncing on feet, hands, knees, bottom, head, in a turbulent sea of kids. Her socks dropped in twin bunches to the lowest portion of her ankles. She lost her hair ribbon and her hair frizzed up.
Still shoeless, she watched the puppet show, an interpretation of Hansel and Gretel, delightful for the real candy house that came leaning out of the theater on a long stick, swaying back and forth to be attacked by the audience, the roof shingled with jelly beans meant to picked off at every performance. The witch gave an extended monologue, an apologia for witches, who she maintained were much misunderstood. It was an ovenless show; at the end the children and the witch danced swayingly together and sang an ode to the goddess while a dragon swung above them in a dental-floss harness. The puppets bowed to silence, and there was no applause until the house came leaning out for an encore sweep.
Uncle Ned, less skilled but more traditional than the puppet lady, went over better. He walked unconvincingly against the wind, strummed tunelessly on a ukulele and sang “Camptown Races,” flinging out chorus-girl kicks with every doo-dah, and made huffy, buzzing noises with five kazoos stuck in his mouth, all these efforts received rather coldly. But his balloon animals endeared him to the crowd. He twisted and bent them at random, proclaiming the abstract shapes giraffe, camel, cheetah, aardvark, platypus. He offered up a bonobo, but there were no takers, not even Jemma or her brother. “It’s just a thing,” said a little redheaded girl, who Jemma was quite sure she’d never seen before in her life
, of the foot-long, U-shaped chain of balloon sausage. She folded her arms across her spectacular party dress, fancier than Jemma’s, and noticed obsessively by Jemma’s mother, who would ask if this was not like showing up at a wedding in a dress fancier than the bride’s.
“Oh,” said Uncle Ned, clutching the sausage to his chest. “You’ve caught me. Clever as a pony, aren’t you? Well, tain’t no bonobo, certainly. Tain’t no chimp or ape. It is not an orangutan. Neither is it a potato, a piranha, or persnickety Penelope Poekelman, my first wife. What this is, Suzy… is that your name? Well, it’s a good name, and it would suit you fine. Suzy, what I’m holding here in my hands, what I’ll now bring closer to you, closer now, soon it will be touching you, is an exactly-to-scale model of a drippy, stinky, slimy little-girl… intestine!” The redhead screamed, the children cheered. “They’re full of poop,” Uncle Ned added unnecessarily. He sang as he worked, and no child went home that night without a string of intestines to hang around his neck.
More than she ate, Jemma looked at the food, and watched people eating. She plucked a dozen Vienna sausages from off their little beds of prosciutto and crostini and stuffed them one after another into her mouth, crouched behind the biggest couch in the living room, chewing and swallowing in a frenzy, and then she was done feasting. She was very fond of gray meats, Vienna sausages in particular, but number twelve, halfway eaten, became a chore to finish, and she felt a little sick after she had swallowed it down. There was yet room for cake, but she no longer wished to curve her hand into a paw and scoop icing into her mouth. She walked around, looking for her brother, who was running wild with the older set, the eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds who were dashing up and down the stairs, drawing shouts of “Whoa!” and “Slow down there!” from the adults they grazed. She did not find him, and almost forgot she was looking, her attention was drawn so irresistibly to the open mouths and the small, beautiful arrangements of food that went into them. She’d pause close by them, under the very shadow of the longest chins, and look up at them till they noticed her, and mostly they would mistake her interest in their eating for interest in their food, and offer her a bite, or stuff hastily and then show her empty hands. But she’d scoot away as soon as the eating was done. She saw a lady eat a cracker piled high with black caviar; they broke against her lips, most consumed, some sticking under her nose in a thin mustache, some bouncing off her chin to fall and scatter on the wood floor like pearls off the string. She saw a man consolidate tiny portions of beef tartar into his hand, dumping them out of little mango boats into his palm; when he had a mound the size of a tennis ball he bit into it, gobbling it all down in one rapid fress and then licking his palm like a fond dog. She saw a lady do her same Vienna-sausage trick. She saw her father take two giant shrimp, pink and wet from the biggest shrimp cocktail in Severna Forest history, four-dozen jumbo shrimp, an entire head of lettuce, and a liter of cocktail sauce all arranged among ice in the very same bowl Jemma had toppled into earlier that day. He stuffed them into his mouth, head-first, so the tail hung out in fangs from his lips. He dropped to his knees and growled, friendly and ferocious, at Jemma. She ran away.
She danced in contracting circles around the central table, closer and closer through the crowd until she stood with her eyes level with the edge of the hook in the J. A pink rose as big as her mouth was within reach, but before she could smudge it away her brother collided with her.
“Time to open the presents,” he said, grabbing her hand. His hair, like hers, was characteristically ahoo, sticking up in sweaty horns from dozens of places. He drew her toward the present pile, but halfway there her mother seized her other hand.
“Time to blow out the candles!” she said.
“Time to open the presents,” her brother insisted, tugging, so Jemma’s arms opened at the elbows and she was suspended between them.
“Who’s calling the shots here?” her mother asked. She gave one sharp pull and Jemma’s sweaty hand popped free of her brother’s sweaty hand. There were four rose-shaped candles, spaced close together in a little thicket midway up the body of the J. As they were lit someone turned down the lights. All over the room cameras were cocked and raised. Jemma leaned forward over the cake, not averse to falling into it. She knew it would be so soft. But her parents had her firmly by the arms. They leaned her over the candles after the song. She blew wetly on their count of three, her fierce concentration on the task of extinguishing every candle rewarded with success, but realizing too late she’d been so single-minded she’d forgotten to make the wish. She cut the first piece of cake, her mother’s hand over her own, wielding the silver knife, her mother’s strength smoothing Jemma’s stabbing motions into a straight line. Then she was carried, reaching back for cake, to the foot of the hill of presents.
Her brother mined the mountain, passing boxes, flats, and lumpy ovals to her, running his hand over half the presents before selecting the next to be opened. Jemma oscillated between states of fierce concentration on the unwrapping (no ripper, she did it with care and precision beyond her years, and with respect for every little square of transparent tape) and utter cake-distraction; she could hear, beyond the circle of witnesses around her, exclamations over the quality of the cake, compliments to her mother who, when asked for her baking secret, said that the cake had been flavored with sweet clumsy child. Some of the witnesses had cake and were eating it as they watched her. Some went back for seconds and thirds before she was done with all the opening. She smiled dutifully over the presents, the bionic-woman dolls, the extensive bionic-woman wardrobe, the fembot beauty head whose face you could paint with makeup before you removed it to reveal the two-dimensional circuit board underneath. Jemma did not understand exactly what it meant to be bionic, and her brother would play with the dolls more than she would. Her favorite gifts were a pogo stick, a hula hoop, a saxophone that blew soap bubbles, and a pair of big tough yellow punching balloons. Jemma attached them to both her hands, trying and failing to punch them at the same time and feeling unaccountably mighty.
Sitters had infiltrated the crowd of witnesses long before the mountain was leveled. As soon as the last present was opened and murmured over, they began to whisk the children away to the homes where their parents would not return until after midnight. In the confusion of goodbye kisses and sometimes clutching, tearful hugs, no one heard Jemma’s complaint that she’d eaten no cake. On her way to bed she saw the ugly, decimated cake board, empty except for random smears of icing and a few crumbs. Her father mistook her crying for sadness at the end of the party. He hugged her and rocked her as he carried her up the stairs, acknowledging how sad it was that a party had to end, but what could you do about it? He did not understand the problem until Jemma was in her pajamas, teeth brushed and head on her pillow. “We’ll get you a new cake tomorrow,” he promised her, a whole cake just for herself. He would tie up her mother and Calvin, and lastly himself, and they would all be her observant prisoners as she ate the whole thing. It made her feel no better. She didn’t like the thought of people being tied up, and tomorrow was a thousand years away. Her father sang her a song, and put on a stuffed-animal play for her, but these did nothing to comfort her, for no matter what words her father sang, or what words the animals spoke, every song was a song of cake, and every utterance was in praise of cake, or a lament for cake lost.
When she had stopped crying, her father thought she had fallen asleep. He went back to the party, which by now had put away or transformed all its childish things; the puppet master was interpreting Ionesco; Uncle Ned was smooching a caterer in the basement bathroom; a thin layer of reefer smoke had gathered against the roof of the moonwalk, where there was no more jumping, only lying about in the mellow reduced gravity. For a little while Jemma was quiet, but no less agitated. Many times before she’d drifted off to the noise of a party below her. It usually made her feel comfortable and safe, the noise of voices speaking words she could not make out, the distant music; but not tonight. Instead of sleep ca
me worse misery, a more acute sense of absence of cake in her evening, the thought of the one nip of batter she’d taken a tease and a torture. Worse yet, she suddenly had to pee. She began to weep again, and called out to Monsieur Toilet, asking him please, please come, and to bring cake.
It seemed like forever before her brother came back to her. Forever she was alone and despondent in her pee, cursing her party, her presents, her four years, cursing everything but her lost cake. It was even forever that the candle-glow proceeded him, and flickered in her door, puzzling her. Understanding dawned forever; it took forever to make the transition from rock-bottom despair to topgallant delight, to see the piece of cake her brother was bringing to her.
To any eye but hers it would have appeared ugly. A side piece, with hardly a rose petal on it, half eaten by someone who had lacked a fork or been too excited to bother with one, it was marred with tooth marks, and lipstick stained the eaten edges of the white icing. A cigarette hole stood out plainly next to the candle.
“Follow me,” he said. “It’s time for your present.” He turned and marched solemnly out of the room. She thought he would take her downstairs, and didn’t even remember about the going until they got to his room. There were more candles burning there, stolen birthday candles stuck in upside-down styrofoam cups. There were six of them in an open circle, which, after he had entered it, Calvin closed with the cake.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“What does it look like? I’m getting ready to go. What? Why are you crying?”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“Sure you do.”
“I don’t want you to. I like you.”
