Touch of the Clown (3 page)

“And I'll take Bingo.” Livvy takes a few tentative, limping steps and makes a little song of moans and ows mixed in with a bit of “Bingo is my ball-o.”

“Olivia de Havilland and Barbara Stanwyck.” Cosmo shakes his head. He is carrying Mehitabel in front of him. One wheel is all twisted. “Here we are,” he says. We stop in front of an old three-story house with a verandah and an outside stairway leading up to the second and third floors.

The yard is crowded with bushes and flowers, a bird bath and a patio table with a broken umbrella, half of its flowered vinyl stretched over spokes, the other half caved in as if something has tried to land on it.

Cosmo leans the wounded Mehitabel against the table. “You guys park yourselves here and I'll go and get some warm water and a washcloth and some Band-Aids. You be okay for a couple of minutes, Olivia?”

“Livvy?” I can see she is on the verge of tears again, now that she's had a chance to sit down and take an inventory of her injuries.

“Livvy.” Cosmo tries out the name while he rummages for a key. “We'll get you all fixed up in just a jiffy–a little washeroo, some glow-inthe-dark Band-Aids. Would you like something to drink?”

“Oh, goodee,” Livvy slips into her baby talk and claps her hands together, forgetting they are bruised and scraped. “Ow, ooo.” Tears well in her eyes.

“Where do you want to sit, Livvy? The patio chair or the bench?” It is enough to divert her attention. I search in the survival bag and bring out the scrapbook and crayons. “Why don't you draw a picture of Bingo ball?”

“I want to draw a picture of Cosmo and Bingo and those other balls.” She has her tongue between her teeth as she starts to color on a blank page. She is still creating the picture when
Cosmo returns carrying a tray with an ice-cream pail of warm water, a washcloth and a towel, and a smaller tray with drinks in tall glasses.

“Mmm. Yum-yum.” Livvy abandons the picture when she sees the lemonade.

Cosmo has turned the scribbler toward him so he can see the drawing. “Wow.” He makes big eyes at Olivia. “Maybe we should rename her Olivia da Vinci. Now let's take a look at these wounds.”

He is very gentle, sponging off the dried blood. With the blood washed away, we can see the actual damage: the gash on Livvy's forehead, a scrape on one arm, scraped hands, and one knee skinned. It takes two glow-in-the-dark Band-Aids to cover the knee, one on her forehead, one on each hand and three on her scraped arm. Livvy seems to gather strength with each patch. She is enchanted with the Band-Aids, twisting her arm back and forth, admiring her knee.

We sit at the patio table. The sidewalk is beginning to be busy with people going home from work. They look at the three of us sipping tall glasses of lemonade, with little trickles of moisture running along the sides of the glasses.
A small, quiet picnic in the middle of rush hour.

“Hey, buddy,” a bearded man lurches against the picket fence. “That lemon gin?”

“Not a chance,” Cosmo laughs.

“You gotta cigarette, man?”

“Don't smoke.”

“Well, this ain't my idea of a party.” He grins and tips a greasy baseball cap to us before weaving off down the sidewalk.

“Par-tee,” Livvy purrs. “I love parties.”

“The patient is recovering,” Cosmo whispers to me. “Now tell me about yourselves, Miss Barbara and Miss Olivia. I know you're on summer vacation, but what grade are you going into this fall?”

Livvy mugs a smile at him and holds up two fingers.

“She's going into grade two,” I say, “and I'm going into grade eight.” What else can I tell him? “We live with Dad and Grandma over on the street with the churches. We were just coming from the park.” And then I make a bold move. “Are you an actor?” I ask.

“Actor, magician, dancer, juggler, clown,” Cosmo laughs, “and sometimes a waiter.”

“A waiter?”

“Yeah. Waiting for jobs.” The afternoon sun makes his hair look like soft gold. It is short hair, thinning on top. “Sometimes waiting on tables.'

“A clown!” Livvy shouts.

“Yes, Miss Olivia de Havilland Kobleimer. A clown. In fact, right now I'm doing clown work-shops downtown. I'll be finishing this first one next week.”

“A clown!”

“Yes. That is, when I'm not running down little kids on my bicycle.”

His arms move a lot when he talks, and the bandage swoops and darts like a bird on his wrist. I can see there are bruises along his arms, and I think he must have been hurt more than we thought when he ran into Livvy.

“Now, tell me what you're going to be when you grow up,” he says.

“I'm going to be a fireman,” says Livvy through the long slurping sounds she is making at the end of her lemonade.

Usually when people ask me this, I say life-guard. I can see myself at a big sandy public beach, sitting high up under the sun in a life-guard chair, and down below me are kids splashing and building sandcastles, and people lying
on the beach sun tanning, some of them reading, some of them doing word searches. But now, when Cosmo asks me, I surprise myself.

“An actress,” I say.

“Well, kid,” Cosmo chuckles, “you got the right name for it.”

An actress. Livvy is chattering away to Cosmo about the trip her grade one class took to the firehall last spring and, for a minute, I let what I've said soak into me. Is it something a person could actually put down as a career choice on those little personal inventory sheets our school counselor, Mr. Graydon, makes us fill out? Dentist. Gas-station attendant. Actress.

“You might like to get involved in the work-shop that's starting in a couple of weeks. It's for kids fifteen and up, but it's not full and I could probably squeeze you in.”

For no reason, I feel my face flushing.

“Seriously, think about it,” Cosmo says.

The rush hour seems to be winding down. Fewer people on the sidewalk, mothers calling kids in to supper, traffic thinning.

“Maybe I should come home with you. In case your dad or your grandma have any questions about the accident,” Cosmo proposes as I
check to make sure everything is in place in the survival bag.

“We'll be okay. Thanks,” I add.

Livvy is chasing Bingo around the yard. “Come here, you stupid ball!” she shrieks.

“Yes, I guess Miss Olivia de Havilland is going to live after all. But here, before you put your scribbler away, let me write my phone number down. If it's okay with your folks, maybe you and Livvy can pop over when I get home from work tomorrow–no, make that the day after tomorrow–and I'll give you a brochure on the clown workshop. Have to pick some up from the office. Any time after four.”

“Sure,” I say. “I'll check.”

I think about the clown workshop all the way home while Livvy sings her Bingo song. The more I think about it, the more I think it is something I want to do.

The school that Livvy and I go to offers a drama option in grade seven.

“I'll put you down for it,” Mr. Graydon told me at the start of last year. Mr. Graydon has me come into his office often. He has an old sofa chair by his window, where you can look out and see the rooftops of buildings for blocks around. “When I listened to you doing that reader's theater part in Mrs. Femeruks class last year, I made a mental note to make sure you get into Ms. Billings' drama class this year.”

I am always surprised at how much he knows about me. Mr. Graydon keeps a little bowl of pretzels on his desk. He likes to give visitors to the counselor's office a pretzel or two. In addition to the pretzels, he gives me compliments.
When he starts, I count the church spires. You can see four in the winter, but only two in September when the leaves are still on the trees.

“I understand you've read your way around the world,” he tells me. “A book for each of twenty different countries. Mrs. Mattingley says you take out three or four books a week. Do you do anything else for recreation?”

“Watch movies,” I say. “Daddy and Grandma like movies.”

“What about you?”

“Sure,” I say. “Who wouldn't?”

Another time he asks me about Livvy. “Hows she doing at home? She's been having lots of accidents at school.”

“She has…a few accidents at home, too.” I feel my face going red.

“Of course it helps that you've been keeping a change of clothes in the nurse's office.” Mr. Graydon passes me the pretzels. “Take a few,” he says.

Livvy's problem is not one of my favorite subjects. Sometimes I wish she could have some-thing clean and simple like scoliosis or acute sight loss. I've read books where girls had these diseases. They were handicaps that everyone
understood. Then I feel guilty. After all, there are times when Livvy can go for several days with no accidents at all, just as if she were a normal person. Just as if she'd never had one kidney removed, never had a bathroom problem.

The doctors can't seem to decide how to fix Livvy. They put her on special diets. They give Daddy bottles of pills for her to take and charts to keep. But Daddy loses track. I tried to make Livvy take the last bottle of medicine until it was finished. Livvy kept spitting the pills out, muttering, “Yuckee, yuckee.” For awhile we had diapers for her to wear, but Livvy made such a fuss about putting them on that we quit trying.

Mr. Graydon watches me chew the pretzels.

“And how is she getting along? Livvy?”

“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.