Greedy Little Eyes

by Billie Livingston

  I shut my eyelids tight. “I can hardly sit up, never mind do your makeup. It’s not my fault you got pissed out of your tree last night—go take that hangover remedy you claim is so brilliant.”

  “We don’t have any eggs.”

  He sat down on the couch beside me, took the black felt pen from the bib pocket of his polka-dotted overalls.

  “James. Don’t make me do this.”

  “Come on, it’ll only take a sec.” He picked up his template mask from the coffee table.

  “All right. But you’re doing the greasepaint yourself.”

  He kissed my hot cheek and, with hangover-hands, held the mask firmly against his features. I leaned in and carefully traced black around the outside, setting his face in relief. The symmetrical cut-outs allowed me to outline what would soon be rosy round cheeks, enormous eyes of cartoon blue and a giant red mouth: The face of Bulbous the Clown.

  Oh, and the tear. Mustn’t forget the tear.

  By dinnertime, my fever was down and I was starting to feel as if I might live. I had called Gerald back to say it would likely be best for the other employees if I stayed home until Monday and to apologize on my brother’s behalf, explaining that James wasn’t feeling well himself.

  “Yes,” Gerald said, with the smug courage afforded him by my brother’s absence, “the twenty-six-ounce flu, I’m sure.”

  Gerald and James did not get on well. They had had one or two classes together before James decided university was for sheep and shmucks and dropped out. He now referred to Gerald as a pencil-pushing little yutz. Gerald, having seen James tossed out of bars more than once (including an occasion when James had taken hold of Gerald’s wife’s breast, much to her surprise but seemingly not to her displeasure), had all the ammunition he needed. My brother embarrassed me and everybody knew it.

  A little after six, James stormed in, cussing and slamming the door, dropping his hockey bags, flailing at balloons, both flaccid and blown up, as he kicked his giant yellow clown shoes off his feet and down the hall.

  I blew my nose. “You don’t drive in those things, do you?”

  “No, I don’t drive in them for chrissake. How the hell could I drive in them? I couldn’t carry them from the car so I wore them into the house, that’s all.” He was tangled up in gloves and balloons and suspender straps. He yanked off his blue fuzzy wig and flopped to the floor, rolling and kicking, dragging himself free of his costume like some pale and terrible sea creature extricating itself from the shell. “Fuck!” he bellowed. “This city is such bullshit!”

  “Can you not yell at me.”

  “You have no idea what it’s like out there in the real world, outside of that pastel palace you work in where they steal people’s money and it’s all perfectly legal. I make people happy! But that’s illegal.” He stalked into the living room in his boxers and T-shirt and dropped into the armchair.

  I looked at him.

  “What?” he snapped.

  I blew my nose and faced the TV. The news was on. Turning the channel, I searched for something with a laugh track.

  James shoved his back into the chair. “All right, I’m sorry. But all you had to do today was be sick and watch Oprah while I was out trying to make a living, trying to be fun and playful, and the bastards told me today my permit was turned down. The type of permit I need doesn’t even exist any more. Bulbous the Clown is no longer welcome in Stanley Park.”

  “How come?”

  “They say I’m not a busker because I’m not really an entertainer. I don’t have a show; making balloon animals is not entertaining, it’s vending.”

  “Well, that’s sort of true, isn’t it? You sell balloons.”

  “Screw you, Clarisse. This is so typical—I’ve never gotten any support from you in any of my endeavours.”

  “Except for financial,” I croaked through phlegm, “and emotional, and—”

  “Well, stop sounding like a goddamn bureaucrat.”

  I went back to flipping channels. “I thought they told you ages ago they wouldn’t renew your permit.”

  “I assumed it was just a formality. I’ve been at that zoo for five years. The guy from the parks board or the aquarium or whatever the hell told me today I was supposed to be out of there last week, to pack my shit and go. Can you believe that? Those goddamn kids love me!”

  “Couldn’t you get a vending permit?”

  “No! They only want parks board popcorn vendors. What’s left for those kids? They got rid of the pony rides, they got rid of Squirrelman, the jugglers. It’s nothin’ but a whale jail now.”

  “What about the kids’ parties? You make better money at those anyway, don’t you?”

  He glared at the bright yellow socks bagging around his ankles. “I hate those parties. Always some shit-assed brat sitting on my shoes, yankin’ on my balls. The mothers are always bitches. Except for that one.” He laughed. “And one of her friends.”

  That one was a pretty young weather girl from a local station who had hired James for her son’s fifth birthday. Midway through the celebration, James pulled her into a closet. Apparently she nearly had herself into his big clown pants when one of the kids found some matches and started a fire; her husband came home early and the closet door jammed. Despite a big song and dance about a balloon surprise that needed a two-person set-up, James got punted down the steps. He did get gigs from three of the weather girl’s friends though.

  “Anyways,” James said, “I got a plan. I called up a bunch of newspapers and TV stations and this buddy of mine who works Queen Elizabeth Park as GoGo the Clown. We’re gonna go out tonight, toss back a couple and iron out the details, but man I got somethin’ good cooked up. They can’t kill me off when they say. I’ll say when I die, and tomorrow’s my goddamn funeral in the park. There’ll be an outpouring of emotion like y’never seen!” He jumped up and headed for the stairs.

  “Hey, can you take your junk with you, please?”

  He paused over his hockey bags and clown suit heaped at the front door, then started toward the stairs again, until I added, “And the hydro bill—I need your half today.”

  “Can’t do it. They really hooped me this afternoon.” He came back and heaved the hockey bags over his shoulders, wincing dramatically under the weight.

  “James, I can’t carry you this month. We just got our third warning and they’re going to cut us off. I need a hundred and fifty.”

  “I told you, you should get a raise. Or a different job.”

  I glared at him.

  “Okay, I’ll pay it. Give me the address and I’ll drop it off.”

  “Sure. You give me the cash or we’ll be eating cold spaghetti from a can tomorrow.”

  “Jeez, you can be a tight-ass. They’re not going to cut off our hydro.” He groaned, dropped his bags and rummaged in his overalls, scooping a handful of two-dollar coins before he tossed me a cloth sack with the rest. “There should be around a hundred-fifty bucks there. A hundred anyway.”

  The next morning, Gerald called to see how I was. Part of me felt guilty. I was about ready to get out of my pyjamas, and well enough that I could imagine being back at work. But I was still a little dizzy and I sneezed onto the mouthpiece. Gerald said he’d better let me go. Once he’d hung up, I searched under the kitchen sink for the Lysol spray, misting the receiver and wiping it down.

  An alarm clock went off upstairs. I tried to remember the last time James had set his alarm—for a morning wake-up, that is. He’d happily set it for midnight so he wouldn’t miss a party, but 10 a.m.? It was against everything he stood for.

  Half an hour later, I heard him crashing down the stairs, hockey bags banging into the walls. His face wasn’t made up and he wasn’t in his gear yet. “I’m going over to my buddy’s to get ready. Watch the news today! Bulbous the Clown’s gonna rock this town, baby!”

  As he left he slammed the door behind him.

  July had been cool and rainy, but the day warmed up and in the afternoon I sat on the ba
ck porch reading. It was the first I’d been out in three days, other than to mail a cheque for the hydro bill, which wasn’t actually due until the following week. There had been a hundred and seven dollars in James’s pouch, which, after the hydro, left just enough to cover his share of the phone bill.

  Shortly after four, I heard the doorbell and leaned around the back of my lawn lounger to look through the house. The bell rang again. Likely a Jehovah’s Witness. Or kids. Or someone wanting a donation—maybe for cancer, I thought. With a twinge of guilt, I hoisted myself up, grabbing my wallet on the way. By the time I got to the front door, the porch was empty. I wandered through the kitchen back to the porch and noticed someone in the yard: an old man, small and curved, in a rumpled suit. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched him move around the yard, bending to look at small purple flowers whose names I’d never learned, running his hand across the heads of the tallest snapdragons.

  I started down the steps, paused, and then took them as quick as I could. “Daddy?”

  He kept moving around the edge of the lawn, touching the flowers.

  “Daddy!”

  He turned finally and smiled. “Hello. Are you here to see me?”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked softly as I came near and draped my arm across his back.

  “Suzette. Oh, look at you, you’ve grown your hair again. A woman with long hair is—”

  “Daddy, it’s me. Clarisse.” I steered him toward the house.

  “Who?”

  We walked up the steps. “Clarisse. I’m your daughter.”

  He giggled and told me he didn’t have a daughter.

  “Yes, you do, you big silly. This is your house and I’m Clarisse, your little girl, except I’m big now, remember?”

  “Where’s Suzette?”

  I brought him through the door. “Suzette passed away.”

  “What?”

  I sat him at the kitchen table.

  “Suzette died, Daddy.”

  “No, that’s not true.” His eyes pleaded with me until they shone.

  I felt sick. For him she was still alive and I had killed her in three words. Why hadn’t I said she was at the movies, or she’d gone on a cruise? I touched his sleeve. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  “Who would want to kill Suzette?” He began to sob.

  This was something else again now, a reference to an aunt I’d never met who had been murdered back in Quebec when she was a teenager—a memory from before I was born.

  “Nobody hurt Suzette. Remember? She got breast cancer. She didn’t hurt; we got her good drugs and we told her jokes and she was happy right up till the end.” Then I started to cry, too.

  Old enough to be our grandmother, my father’s sister, Suzette, had moved into the house after my mother died and raised us herself. According to Suzette, my father was numb the first two or three years of our lives, mumbling day after day to his sister about his wife’s youth, how he’d had twenty-five years’ more time on this earth than she did, how he should have called an ambulance right away.

  I came first, Suzette told me, at seven o’clock in the evening, slipping toward the birth canal as my mother’s cervix dilated in an unexpected yawn. No time to get a doctor, no time for much of anything. She’d been arguing for a natural birth all along and now her babies were coming and there was nothing anyone could do to thwart her plans.

  My mother had been lying on the couch listening as Aunt Suzette read aloud from an old Nora Ephron essay about Ayn Rand. Suzette hollered down the hall to my father, “See, I told you, Marcel, it’s Ayn Rand, pronounced ine not anne—Ayn rhymes with pine! It says so right here.” She shook her head at my mother. “He never listens to me. He’s always so sure he’s right.”

  My mother screamed. Suzette laughed until her eyes bugged in realization. She called out to my father, who bellowed, “All right, I get it, I’m wrong!” But Mother continued to scream as the ocean in which my brother and I had been floating for eight months and two weeks chopped and heaved around us, then drained in a rush, leaving us heaped on each other, clammy and agitated in her belly.

  Finally my father rushed in and, seeing his young wife, the flooded couch, he picked up the phone. My mother cried and laughed at once and told him to put it down, said she could feel us wrestling with each other, trying to wriggle free—we would be out any minute. My father announced that he was going to call an ambulance anyway, but before he could do much of anything my soft head began to nose from her body.

  Suzette says I hesitated as though making sure it was the best move, then came all at once in a slippery rush. When they saw what was coming after me it became clear from whom I was rushing. What they feared might be a deformity was actually James’s hand; his red fingers had an iron grip on my ankle. The fingers could not be pried loose and it was thought, at first, that we were conjoined. Suzette shouted for my father to cut the cord, to make sure I was breathing, while she worked to free James, fearing for my brother’s neck—with an arm and shoulder coming first, his head might snap sideways.

  There was no laughter now; my mother’s screams grew to a cataclysmic pitch. My father called the ambulance while Aunt Suzette tried to pry James’s fingers from my ankle, to no avail. She then reached her small hand inside and manipulated his head and shoulders, tried to make them slide out together. Squealing, she pulled her hand from my mother, claiming something had bitten her. Till the day she died she would not be persuaded that my brother had no teeth.

  My father hung up the phone, picked it up again, put it down. He knelt by my mother and looked up at the ceiling, praying for help, his atheist leanings set aside for the moment. His wife’s pelvis began to buck, guttural howls wailing from her body, as James’s head emerged in a tide of blood, his body lurching out, dragging the walls of his former home with him.

  Our mother died before the ambulance arrived, James still holding fast to my ankle and the uterus he refused to leave behind.

  My father blamed himself and he blamed James, who he believed embodied everything terrible he’d had to carve from his own soul before he was good enough to meet someone like our mother. For the first few years he wanted nothing to do with his son for fear he might try to beat his own demons out of the boy.

  On our sixth birthday, Aunt Suzette hired a clown named Cheeno for the party. Cheeno was clever and silly and made a dizzying array of balloon creations. Our friends all told us it was the best party ever as they traipsed down the sidewalk after it was over, balloon bracelets on their wrists, balloon swords in their hands. Cheeno stayed behind, and James and I were stunned to discover that it was our own mumbling, sad father under all that greasepaint.

  It was something of a turning point, this sort of whimsy. Prior to the birthday party, our father had been a ghost to us, a nine-to-five, depressed, alcoholic ghost who avoided us at all costs. Now we begged circuitously through Suzette for clown lessons, and suddenly James and I had something in common with this man we hardly knew.

  Daddy earnestly taught us how to twist and squeeze the long airy tubes into puppies and dragons and daisies. He showed us how a clown applies makeup using a template made especially for his or her face, how to trace each feature so that the clown-face was the same every time. We were enthralled. Nothing could break our focus from these magic secrets, secrets we kept from other children as though their release could mean the end of the world.

  Still, our clown lessons were about the only times we got near our father. Outside clowning, his sorrow never lifted. And if it’s true that depression is only anger turned inward, James grew into a more extroverted version of our father. There were no moody silences in James, just broken windows, schoolyard fights, stealing and cursing and yelling.

  The final blow-up came when we were twelve. James and I had been arguing all the way home from school, James yelling that I thought I was better than him, me saying I didn’t think any such thing. I did explain, however, that if he would just act more like
me in the first place, he wouldn’t get into the trouble he was always in.

  “Like getting suspended today, for example,” I threw at him as we came into the house. “What you did to that boy was extortion. You’re an extortionist.”

  Livid that I’d nailed him with an insult he’d never heard of, James told me to shut my trap and gave me a good shove. I turned and slapped him the way any decent movie heroine would. He tried to retaliate with a swing, but missed and called me a bitch.

  I replied with, “Asswipe!”

  He took another lunge but I knew his moves better than he did. His knuckles slammed into the wall and the look on his face sent me into paroxysms of laughter. Tears started to come as I cackled “Asswipe” again for its pleasing sibilance. James’s face shone like a blister. Seeing him lose control—the rage, the seething fury—always gave me a greater sense of accomplishment than anything else in my world.

  His eyes flicked sideways and filled with hope. I saw the baseball bat leaning against the wall and took off down the hall. He grabbed it and tore after me through the kitchen and back into the front room.

  His first swing took out a lamp. It was old with a faded shade and only worked now and then, but it had belonged to our mother. The shock of its body exploding against the bat, falling to the floor in pieces, stunned us into temporary paralysis, our mouths stuck in an O, our arms frozen mid-air.

  Aunt Suzette called down from upstairs. Our father called from the back porch.

  James moved first, his eyes darting up from the shattered lamp as he hissed, “It’s your fault—you’re dead!”

  I backed up. They were going to get him for this and he was going to get me first. He moved slowly, matching me step for step. We could hear my aunt coming down the stairs and our father coming through the kitchen, and we both leapt into motion, me rushing toward the bay window, James hurtling after me just as Suzette and Daddy’s shock pierced the room. Their voices worked like a cattle prod on James and he swung the bat, missing my head and smashing the window.