Touch of the Clown (9 page)

We are playing ball in the back yard when Daddy finally appears at the kitchen door. “Barbara,” he says, “we have five videos to take back. You and Livvy go for a little walk and tell them we want a two-day extension on the others.”

“I'm tired of walking,” Livvy says.

“What do you mean?” Daddy has come out
onto the back porch, shielding his eyes against the afternoon sun.

I catch Livvy's eye and shake my finger at her.

“It won't hurt you both to get a little exercise. My, this heat is something. I think we'll just have cold cuts and potato chips for supper.”

“And chocolate cake,” Livvy sings out.

“Chocolate cake. But do your errand first. There's a dollar for each of you to buy some-thing you want.”

“Yippee!” Livvy dances around, clapping her hands.

The second day of the workshop, Cosmo gathers us in a circle again. One of the girls with day-glo color in her hair–fuchsia, she told us in the washroom–has detached herself from the other two and positioned herself as close to the bald boy–Scott–as it is possible to be without actually touching him. The girl who had bright red hair yesterday is neon green today. Her name is Cloud. “My best time,” she told us yesterday, “was when I went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert with my girlfriend and we met these guys, like real cool, who thought we were about three years older than we really were.”

The boy with his hair in a ponytail, Roger (but say it Roh-zhay, he announced yesterday), is wearing cut-off jeans and sits cross-legged, his tan legs gleaming in the overhead light.

“Do you think he shaves them?” Jessica-Marie nudges me with her elbow. I wonder if she has somehow read my mind.

“This afternoon,” Cosmo says, “I want to spend just a bit of time on the whole business of where clowns come from.” He is dressed all in black today, loose-fitting cotton and black slipon shoes like the Chinese wear. He begins by asking us all where we first saw a clown.

“M-Me,” Nathan says, “I got put into a barrel by a clown when I was about three years old. It was at a rodeo and the b-barrel had a really stinky smell and I started howling my head off. My mom socked him, I think. She didn't like for anyone to make me cry unless it was her.”

Nathan is beside me, leaning back on his elbows, the rest of his body slung forward. He has a rumpled look, as if he's slept in his clothes.

Most of the kids say the circus or the Exhibition parade. I have never been to either. Some years there were circus tickets given to us at school, but we still had to be taken. At first Daddy was too busy working weekend afternoons and evenings, and then, when he quit work, he never wanted to leave the house unless it was to cash his welfare check, go for pizza or do the shopping. “Watch
The Greatest Show on Earth”
he would say. “It's better than going to the circus and running to the bathroom every
ten minutes with little miss you-know-who.”

“Jimmy Stewart,” I tell the group. “The clown in
The Greatest Show on Earth.
It's an old movie my dad taped off the late show.”

“Ah, yes,” Cosmo says, bringing out a little wicker suitcase. “The wanted man, the misfit hiding behind a false nose and greasepaint. Probably one of the more interesting aspects of the clown–the painted face, the mask–and one we'll be working with later today.” With the cover sprung open, we can see the suitcase is filled with clippings, brochures, magazine photos.

I think of the cardboard box hidden way back under the sewing machine at home. Mama's collection is in it. She has every picture of Jimmy Dean that she could find when she was a teenager. “I would trade Elvis pictures for Jimmy Dean,” she'd tell me when we spread the pictures out on the sewing-room floor. “Wasn't he hand-some? I had twice as many as Marilyn Marsden.” Sometimes I take them out and look at them when Livvy isn't around. She ripped the heads off six Jimmy Deans one time, so I'm careful to keep the box hidden. James Dean is sad, though. Even when he's smiling.

“Pierrot,” Cosmo says, holding up a clipping of a figure with a painted white face and a sad expression like James Dean, in clothes something like Cosmo's own, black with white pompom buttons. There are pictures of the other Italian clown figures, Harlequin and his girl-friend Columbine, and her scheming father Pantaloon. There is a scene of the jester and the king from King Lear. “The clown was important in a world where even the rich and the powerful lived close to death, close to the changing tides of fortune,” Cosmo says.

There are other pictures. Cosmo shows them to us one by one, as if they were his family album. Nathan, I can see, is watching me again, rather than Cosmo. He has a puzzled look, as if he's trying to figure out what I am thinking. He lounges back in the middle of the sprawl of clippings.

“Maybe the clown is a mirror,” Cosmo is saying, but he seems to have lost us. It's as if he is, in fact, looking into a mirror. “A mirror,” he says again, “into which we look, not straight on, but kind of out of the corner of our eye.”

Cloud, checking the spikes in her hair, gives an audible little sigh and Cosmo shakes himself
like someone working his way out of a dream. “But enough reflection,” he grins at us. “Clowning is all about movement and action and expression. For the next half hour I want you to work with a partner, just to bounce ideas off one another. Try some little bits of action, mime moves, business that might possibly be built into a clown character.”

Partners. As Cosmo goes on with instructions for the exercise, I look around. Nathan wiggles an eyebrow my way, but Jessica-Marie is already tapping me on the shoulder. “You want to work together? I think I'm going to be somebody who's awesomely clumsy. I'm already pretty good at it.”

“Sure,” I say, giving Nathan an I'm-sorry look.

As it turns out, Nathan and his partner, Cloud, attach themselves to Jessica-Marie and me. Cosmo has said we can go anywhere close by to practice, and the four of us end up in a park across from the theater. Both Cloud and Nathan are smokers, and Jessica-Marie is an out-doors freak, making sure she is upwind from the nicotine addicts.

Nathan decides to be a character who mimics
whatever he sees, flapping his arms like a seagull, bouncing up and down like a puppy. Cloud thinks he's hysterical. The crazier he gets, the more she shrieks with laughter, taking breaks to drag on her cigarette or re-apply her vampire-red lipstick.

Jessica-Marie has decided to add compulsive eating to her clumsy routine, consuming everything in sight: leaves, paper plates, an abandoned running shoe. She is pretty funny, and we're all giggling by the time she has finished plucking bits of velcro from between her teeth.

I pretend I'm afraid of just about everything in the world. When I open a discarded pizza box, it's like the
Nightmare on Elm Street
has been waiting inside. When I see my reflection in a mirror, I nearly faint from the shock. Nathan gives me a high five when I've done a few minutes of this.

Cloud mainly just wants to smoke and watch us. Finally she decides she will be someone who goes around acting like a three-year-old. Nathan lets her hang onto him as if he were her older brother.

It is a warm afternoon and people come and go in the park. A crew is setting up a stage and
some tents. One of the workmen applauds as we finish our routines. We all turn and give him the actor's stage bow. Nathan bums a cigarette off Cloud for a quick smoke before we head back. Cloud lights up one as well.

“So, Cloud, you gonna be a clown when you grow up?” Jessica-Marie has flopped down on the grass.

“Fun-nee.” Cloud makes a face at her. “I think I'll be kind of a model-actress, you know, some modeling in ads, and maybe act in a series. My mom thinks I should go on the stage.” She says the words as if she's bitten into something that tasted bad. “So she has me taking ballet and going to the fine arts high school and every-thing, but I don't want to go to university and study Shakespeare. Yuck.” She says yuck the same way Livvy does. “She's enroled me in every drama workshop that's come along since I was twelve years old.”

“F-For the last two years, th-then,” Nathan teases.

“Fun-nee. I happen to be seventeen.” She blows a little series of smoke rings.

“Wow,” says Jessica-Marie, watching the small donuts of smoke drift away and disappear.
“You got hidden talents.”

“Of course I could've got out of this work-shop if I'd wanted to. All I'd have had to do was tell my dad the instructor has AIDS and that would've been it. He freaks out when you say AIDS.”

I watch Cloud's mouth as it keeps moving, words and smoke drifting out and hovering around us, but my mind has stopped. I close my eyes and see the young man Ms. Billings had in as a guest speaker in our health class. Adam something, looking like one of those prisoners they found in the concentration camps at the end of World War II, like a skeleton, his hair cropped. But he smiled and told us about living with AIDS and what you could do to try not to get it.

Cosmo.

Nathan is tapping me on the arm. “T-Time we got back,” he says.

I see the kids leaving the art gallery, and holler across at Livvy.

“Hey, Barbara,” she calls back from the corner, “guess what!”

“What?” I say. We all wait for her on the corner.

“You know Walden, the one I was painting with. Well, he said I was stinky so I painted his dog's face blue, and he got mad at me and hit me, and I punched him and I knocked the blue paint over and it got on my shorts. So that's how come I'm wearing my red shorts, but I didn't have an accident.”

“What did Bella say?”

“She got mad at both of us. Walden and I both had blue paint on us. She said we looked like the war guys in some place where they paint themselves blue when they go out fighting. Then she started laughing.”

Inside the theater, Livvy's story ends abruptly when she sees Cosmo handing out cold drinks along with crackers and cheese.

“Mm,” she says, “me hungry.” Livvy finishes off the tray of crackers as we begin sharing what we came up with before the break. Then I see her curl up on the seat-steps, using someone's backpack as a pillow.

When we are through sharing, Cosmo has us make a circle again. He is sitting cross-legged along with us. Using his little wicker suitcase as a table, he has opened a makeup box.

“Next week,” Cosmo says, “we are going to
begin creating our own individual masks. This week, I want to look at face paint and what can be done with that.” His fingers sift through an assortment of bottles and tubes, greasepaint sticks, makeup pencils and brushes, toothpicks, Q-tips and tissues. There is gold and silver in little bottles like druggists use for medicine. Cloud looks more interested than she has all day.

“A clown takes great pride in the way he creates his face with paint,” Cosmo says. “Some have actually registered their designs–kind of like a copyright.”

He has taken the white grease pencil and begun working it along his forehead just below his hairline. “First I am making my face totally white with a greasepaint stick called Clown White. White, of course, shows up from a distance.”

As Cosmo makes his face whiter and whiter, I feel like he is beginning to disappear. I'm glad when he takes a black pencil and draws a line where the clown white meets his unpainted skin, stopping the white from spreading any farther.

“White,” Cosmo says, “picks up the light, and it creates something of a blank page on which we can write any expression in the eye-brows,
the eyes, the outline of the mouth.”

Looking into the mirror on the lid of the makeup case, Cosmo carefully arcs two black lines somewhere above his actual eyebrows. He uses black eyeliner around his eyes, adding a little vertical line at the top and bottom of each. “These will make the eyes seem wider,” he says. “And now the lips.” He draws around them, exaggerating the curves of the upper lip, drawing the edges up into a smile. With a tube of lip-stick, he applies red inside the line.

I remember Mama painting her mouth red just as Cosmo is doing, painting it red and then seeing how it stretched in a wide smile, checking the mirror to see if any of the red had escaped onto her teeth. “Me, too,” I would beg, and she would paint my lips carefully, saying, “There you are, my little movie star.”

Cosmo gestures at someone working in the lighting booth, and the room darkens, with just a spotlight on his face. Music comes softly through the sound system. A violin, I think, quiet, drifting music that seems to follow Cosmo around the stage as he strikes different poses. At one point, out of nowhere, he plucks a red flower and holds it as if it were the most precious thing
in the world. And then it's gone, and a wash of sadness comes over the white face. The clown figure collapses, and the spotlight vanishes.

When it comes on again, he is behind Nathan, and the rest of us watch as Cosmo wipes his finger through the white of his cheek and uses the greasepaint to make a mark on Nathan's cheek. He does it to each of us in turn. Livvy has crept into the circle, and he puts a little streak of white on her face, too.

“The touch of the clown,” Cosmo says in a voice so soft it is almost a whisper. “We pass it on from one to another. It was given to me by my clown-master. A little smudge of Clown White. It enters our pores and we are changed forever. We see the world in a different way. People see us in a different way.”

And then he very carefully re-packs his makeup kit and closes the lid. With the spotlight still following him, he gives a little wave and exits. The lights in the theater come up.

For a couple of seconds everything is quiet, and then everybody begins talking at once, gathering up backpacks, heading out. Nathan comes over where Livvy and I are getting our things together.

“N-Nothing new for me,” he grins. “My ancestors have been painting their f-faces for centuries.”