Chris Sumberg
Sherrie guides the station wagon into the heart of the curve, the look of terror on her face at odds with the multi-colored layer of Jolly-Boy™ Clown Make-Up, the glossy polyester mustache, the Santa-cap and the bright orange wig. She swerves the inside pocket of the curve, turning the wheel a little too hard, and my head-bells, balanced on the tips of three stuffed red-and-green prongs, jingle and then clatter once loudly against the glass. Pressed against the window, they subside into quiet buzzing. “Hey, c’mon, “I tell her, “relax.”
We work at the drugstore. (God, that sounds inane.) A man named Tom Swandell, a middle-aged military type, with black V05ed hair (thinning but twirled into a lacquered bouffant), is our supervisor.
And that’s an essential point to working at the Chattahatchee Andrew Johnson Boulevard Valu-Bi!, because otherwise, working at a drugstore is just meaningless. It’s not small or stupid or working class or a failure to live up to expectations or a shrinking job market; it’s just meaningless — without someone like Tom Swandell overseeing you. You see, every damned day he will take a half-assed promenade in the back office where Sherrie stocks orders and I do the books — and he will throw down a sheaf of papers on her desk and say, “We’ll be needing these processed by this afternoon, Sherrie.” Slipping out the door, he’ll give me a superior “Hello, Ed” in passing — evenly, like you might acknowledge a barely-within-grace child. Then he’ll lift his chin and tilt his head back — keeping an eye on us as he departs — while an invisible rope drags him backwards out of this area where the worthless people are corralled. I’m a college grad (yes, with a worthless degree — but a degree), and Tom Swandell is just some middle-aged loser who’s worked his way up, in probably thirty years, from bagger to store manager, and I find his attitude a little hard to take. (Of course, if I look at it coolly, I suppose he feels threatened by me, by the degree, even a worthless one. But it’s not easy to remember that when he’s lifting that chin and squinting down at me from the corners of his pig-eyes.)
Well, even if I find him hard to take, I don’t let on. I even say: “Hello, Tom,” right back at him. Nice and even.
Sherrie just cries.
Sherrie. She’s the sort of person everyone made fun of in high school, for no reason at all — like her hair was oily, or her proto-breasts tilted at angles in her proto-bra, or she never understood sex jokes, or whatever. And I’m not saying I don’t care about that or don’t sympathize. And I’m not saying I’m better than her. But that’s just the way it is sometimes.
So she always cries after Swandell has left the room. She’s scared of him. She’s been here quite some time, not as long as him, but quite some time. I guess she’s really scared of what would happen to her if she lost this job. Maybe she’s got that right. I don’t know.
But I like her. I always tell her: “Forget him; he’s an asshole,” which he is. Some people are just assholes. (Not at root maybe, but what difference does that make, qualitatively?) Sometimes, after these cries, she’ll tell me that she’s about to take her high school equivalency test, and she’s mentioned technical college to me as a possibility, after passing the test. She has a few college catalogs on her desk which she flips through during lunch break sometimes, dreamily, like they are catalogs for trips to Tahiti.
But I doubt she could pass the test. I know it sounds cold and cruel. I just doubt that she could ever get through the test, or all the work leading up to it. She’s just not the type, not, I don’t know — lucky? (No, that’s bullshit.) Just not realistic, or applied. I don’t know. She could do something, I think. But this drugstore is all she knows. It’s her whole world. She’s not dumb, but…
That’s not the point anyway. The point is, the reason I’m in the car with the bells on my head: she didn’t need to be applied, because she was driven to act. Years and years of flipping through the college catalog, taking crap from some balding bouffant-Nazi. She was like this dog. Someone kept hitting her, and then one day, seemingly out of the blue, she looked out at the road and figured: “What do I have to lose?”
About two weeks ago she looked over at me furtively and whispered in a hoarse, movie jailbreak voice: “I know a way we could get out of this shithole.”
It was a leading statement. I looked up from a receipt for seventeen cases of Super-Groh® Vitamin Powder so I could ask, just to be polite: “Oh, yeah? How’s that?” We’d been working together for two years, and I knew her well; I expected either “Avon,” “Amway,” or “Telemarketing from the comfort of your own home.”
“Clowns,” she answered.
And it was then that she outlined her idea. She’d been watching the Channel 2 NewsSquad the night before, and they’d featured an alleged “human interest story” on a woman who regularly visited nursing homes. The kicker was: she would be dressed as a clown. She was a sort of a clown contractor. (I guess that’s what’s called “niche marketing.”) But, the newsman had implied, the real business was in private parties.
“They make a lot of money.”
“Oh yeah?”
I had a vision of a small bedpan making the rounds, old drooling birthday boys throwing in wheat pennies they’d found out by the railroad tracks.
“Oh yeahhh — you can make a hundred, two hundred dollars a party for being a clown.”
“Two hundred?”
She smiled, a smile of absolute knowledge, validated beyond dispute by some bozo off the Eleven O’clock News.
But her eyes were a little dreamy.
I riffled some receipts without saying anything.
“My Aunt Sandy told me there’s even a book about it. Saw it on Oprah. She told me all you have to do is clear the initial investment—you know, the costume and the balloons—like everyone’s supposed to get a balloon for a gift,” softly: “and then you start making the money.” She rolled the tip of her tongue around her lips, and then smacked them. “Yup.”
Then she giggled — dementedly, I thought.
A few weeks after that, which is to say about three days ago, Sherrie tippy-toed over to my desk. She was in a state of suppressed excitement. Unusually excited. I expected to hear something like: “I done got pregnant ‘n’ it’s gonna be triplets,” or “I won a florescent clock-radio at Penni-Mart last night,” or even, yes, it could happen, “I passed my GED.”
“I made the — initial investment.”
She was so excited she was gulping air.
“What?”
“I made the initial investment. …Clowns!”
She told me as well that she had also, through her fine-tuned business cunning (gathered through eight years of ordering ear swabs for a bag o’ shit drugstore), even acquired an extra costume — a jester suit — thrown in by the theatrical supplier for next to nothing (considering its income-generating value), a mere eighty-five dollars. She said all this about the extra costume very, very casually, as if I couldn’t see that she might also define it as a second costume, not some sort of back-up costume.
“Even I’d like to wear it. It’s more of a costume party outfit, not a clown thing. I mean, it doesn’t look stupid.”
“Uh-huhn. Well, that’s nice. I think this is gonna be a good move for you.”
That’s all I said. I just politely cut her off before she could get going. I simply hunched over my desk and began riffling through receipts for twelve cases of Gleame™ Christmas Tree Tinsel. Unfortunately, the figures were already done — and she knew it. She bulled ahead.
“God, it’s going to be the best fun, makin’ all that money. There’s almost too much for one person. I mean there’s a lot of work to it —”
“Mn. I’m sure you’ll do all right. I mean, if anyone can — ”
“But it’s gotta be the easiest job on earth. Just hand out balloons, smile. I can smile. Anyone can smile. I still think, you know, because you need to carry the helium tank and all the stuff, and you want to do it right, it’s like, I would say a two-person job — ”
This led into some overt pleading and gesturing, like something from an old woman-in-danger movie — The Perils of Sherrie-line. Yet, at the same time, she managed to paint a very rosy picture of jester life — a picture painted mainly in green. She went on until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Look, Sherrie, no offense, I don’t want to be a clown.”
“Jester. It’s a great — ”
“No. Thank you. It’s just not for me. Anyway, why don’t you just get Jimmy to do it?”
Jimmy was her husband. I’d met him once, a tired, stocky guy in his mid-twenties, silent like someone who had conceded the next forty years of his life. He worked in a bread factory, all day long wearing a plastic cap and stuffing slices of white into body bags.
“Jimmy,” said Sherrie, “doesn’t know.”
“What?”
“ — Yet,” said Sherrie, “yet.”
She gave me a look that let me know that he might get upset about the three hundred and fifty dollars worth of initial investment — most of their life savings, I’d have wagered — that she’d spent without his knowledge.
I clutched at straws.
“Well, hey, how about your Aunt Sandy? She knew all about the clown book, right? She’d probably love to be a jester. She’d probably be complimented that you’d — ”
“Ed, she’s seventy-eight years old!”
I didn’t give in.
“Well, is she, uh, active?”
“Yes, for an old lady — but she has gout.”
“Gout?”
“Ed, pleease. Just once; I’m too scared to do it alone. I don’t know what to do.”
“Aw, God.”
“What am I gonna tell Jimmy?”
“Aw, God.”
“It’s Christmas. My sister Lisa, I told you, she just had this cutest little baby.”
“Aw, God.”
“I know you gotta care. Christmas is for children. And — ”
And what about the initial investment, and what about her nerves, and what about Jimmy, and what about her niece, and what about what about what about what about? Relentless. Relentless. Relentless.
Tom Swandell strolled into the room at this point, a sheaf of papers in hand. “Sherrie — if you could get to this.” Very subtle. Like a meathook in tapioca.
He looked at me as he left the room, but failed to say “hello, Ed.” I guess I was keeping the even-lesser minions from faithfully serving Valu-Bi! I looked back up at Sherrie.
She was crying, of course. Quietly. Snuffling. Just standing there. Her face was crumpled up, and she ran the back of her hand sloppily under her eyes, back and forth like a child. She just stood there beside me, like someone who’d lost everything, weeping.
There was a minute of silence, so deep I could hear myself inhale. It seemed inevitable.
“What does a fuckin’ jester have to do?” I asked.
A good question. One worth repeating. As we near the Candler manse, where the birthday party is being held — for some mindless super-fatted three-year-old, no doubt (Sherrie, typically, is uninformed although, with the help of a referral service, she did line the job up), I ask the question again. I already know the answer she will give (the only answer that she has), but it reassures me somehow.
“Just, I don’t know — tell jokes,” she says vaguely. “Just make them laugh.”
Okay. No sweat.
Her eyes dart around, the only sign of humanity in her ridiculous get-up. She looks as if she is being held prisoner within some sort of form-fitting psychedelic Bastille cage. Last night she kept calling me, every three minutes it seemed, asking if she should go as a clown, or as Santa Claus, or maybe as Charlie Chaplin. Joking around, I told her to cover all the bases, to go as everybody. At the time, I’d felt I was being as supportive as I needed to be; I was going to be spending Saturday in a stranger’s house dressed as a two-tone asshole (in a body-suit from the Garth Brooks Collection). What more did she want?
But she was falling apart. I can see now. She probably dropped out of high school before taking Speech.
“Or do some acting,” she says, “ — what’s it called? — Mime.”
“Sherrie, I can’t do mime — it takes hours of practice.”
A good line, but she doesn’t seem to hear me. We slide into the center of another curve (she’s driving like she’s surfing, plunging deep into the core of the wave — “tubing,” I think it’s called), and my bells clatter against the window. I try to remember some quality jokes for three-year-olds. Pants-pissing and farts are probably off — a little out of range for that young a crowd — but maybe boogers would be okay. Sherrie’s said that she’ll split the profits with me fifty-fifty — and Mrs. Candler is paying us $175. Even if the little ones don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, I can always play to the mother; she’s the one with the checkbook after all. So maybe keep it clean. Maybe riddles! — Say, kiddies, what’s black and white and red all over? Do you know? Do you? Oh, come on now, I bet you do! Perfect. Just pad it out.
I look at Sherrie. Her eyes are intense, focused, blinking more than shifting. She’s hunched over the wheel, staring down at the road itself, not at traffic. I can hear her inhaling, even over the roar of the car. As if she’s programmed, without a signal or a depression of brake, she spins the wheel, and we go through the brick gateposts of Concourse Estates, tires squealing.
Concourse Estates. Chattahatchee’s best. It’s a new-ish subdivision, every house a slight twist on its nearest neighbor — the same colors but in different places. The numbers are hidden, tucked discreetly on the houses themselves. The occupants are tucked discreetly in the houses. I imagine our car as viewed from this world. Every car in every driveway is a BMW or a Land Rover. We’re like Starsky and Hutch meet Barney and Roseanne. I suppress this thought. No one, thank God, is around to view us.
A street sign just ahead is marked “Marble View.” The Candler house, 1141, is on this road. Sherrie inhales, a visible inhalation, her nostrils flaring, her face tight, eyes still on the road. Her arms surround the steering wheel, gripped tight. They’re quivering. We screech around the corner.
1141 appears around a slow curve that we take far too quickly (my bells rattling like mouse castanets). It is in line with all the suburban nothings that surround it — planks of red-stained wood jutting out at bizarre angles, scores of sliding glass doors, a red-stained porch that runs in fits-and-starts around it all. It rests up on top of a green, smooth, sloping lawn, almost like astro-turf, but maybe a little more soulless. Closer to the street, a small tree hunches near a red beamed fence. Aside from the tree and the fence, there are no other ornaments on the lawn. The Austere Look. Or maybe just the New Subdivision Look.
A jet-black driveway with whitewashed curbs curls in front of the house. As we drive up, a car at the top of the drive emits a couple of scrungy young kids, maybe thirteen or fourteen, onto the front walkway. A boy and a girl, and — by the way the boy swipes at her hair and the way the girl punches him, hard, in the kidneys — probably brother and sister. The boy is done up like a movie cyborg, I think, his (scrawny) chest up-and-out complemented with a slowly rotating head. The girl looks like Katy Perry — longish black hair and a tubular dress — but without the breast implants. They let themselves into the house. Our car eases up the slope and stops across from the door. I look after the kids. I’m having what might be called a premonition.
“A few jokes?”
“Or some mime,” she whispers. “Either.” Her hands are shaking. “I don’t know!” Jesus.
I pat her arm. “If they’re older than we thought, they’re probably all on dope. They won’t even notice us. And if they do notice us, it’s not like we’re ever gonna see them again.”
She shakes her head miserably, as if hypnotizing herself with the movement, and she makes a jittery humming noise — “N-n-n-h.” I feel like I’m talking to myself.
I get out of the car and slam the door shut. Through some b.b. holes in the window I say: “I’ll tell Mrs. Candler we’re here.”
“N-n-n-h…Okay.” She’s falling apart, humming a misery-mantra.
“Just relax, okay?”
She nods and inhales. She doesn’t look at me. She exhales — “n-n-n-h” and looks starkly out the windshield. I get the canister of helium out of the back of the station wagon.
I remember, vaguely, from the periodic table we had to study in tenth grade, that helium is the second lightest element in the world —but no one would ever guess that if they had to carry a tank of it around. I balance the canister against the side of my leg, holding it with both hands, and feeling like my fingernails are about to be yanked out with the weight. I gimp it across the driveway and up the front walk, the loose mortar in the brick cracks crunching up into the arches of my feet. I feel, for the first time in maybe three minutes or so, that all I’m wearing is this red and green Dr. Denton-type outfit which is made entirely out of thin tearable felt. I realize that I haven’t felt like this since probably high school, with those damned gym shorts — overly exposed, fearing both the class bully and the nubile cheerleader.
The front walk has been spray-cleaned recently, and the water soaks through the thin layer of felt that covers my feet. I have that soggy sock feeling only more so, as I’m dressed entirely in a sock. I lug the canister up the red wood steps, onto the red wood porch and deposit it on an ornate red wood swing that hangs to the right of the front door. The swing looks brand new, as if no one has ever sat in it. I can’t help but think, if I took this swing: a.) no one would even miss it, and b.) if I pawned it, I could take five weeks off from work.
Instead, I slop across a strip of red carpet, my toe-bells clanking flatly against it, and ring the bell as any conscientious jester might: “Shave and a haircut — two bits.” After a little bit of a wait, enough time to push some stray hairs back under my three-pronged cap, the red-wood door opens, shrieking against the red wood frame, and Mrs. Candler stands there, smiling gleefully “ — Oh!”
She’s a good-looking, sexy woman, in her forties I would say, tan and well- but not elegantly dressed, dressed like a well-off woman who’s throwing her kid a birthday party. She looks at me, her eyes running from my head-bells down to my toe-bells, and she claps both hands over her mouth. Her eyes are humorous. She snorts a laugh “Oh! — ” and doubles over slightly. She has fantastic breasts, and I cross my hands over my groin and think of something else.
“ — Oh! — Oh!” She continues to laugh, putting the hands over the mouth, and then holding herself. “It’s atrocious. Jimmy is going to fall apart.”
“Uhhh, well, we aim to please.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Come in, come in.” She is smiling in true amusement, looking at my toe-bells again, lying flat on the polished red wood floor.
“I’m sorry about the walkway — but I’ve got to say: It’s perfect!”
“Uh, great.” I smile professionally. “Um, I’m Ed Hafner. I’m Sherrie Sanders’ partner.” Partner? I extend a hand.
Her hand is quite warm through the felt, and her perfume, or bath powder, is jasmine, kind of light and sexy. I think of ice baths.
“Nice to meet you, Ed.”
“Um, Sherrie didn’t tell me too much about your son. He’s an older kid?”
“Oh, well, he’s thirteen. I’m not sure your, uh, partner may have understood what I was driving at when I talked to her.”
“ — Oh. Yeah, that could be.”
“What we — I’m — aiming for is sort of that, you know, um, meta-?, ah, post-modern? thing?”
The way she said it made it clear that she thought I wouldn’t have heard of the term “meta-” before, but I didn’t try to think about it. What else would you think of a grown man in a jester suit?
“So you want a sort of send-up of a clown party.”
“Oh, no, no, no, just do exactly your routine, whatever it is. Jimmy is such a — well, I think it’s the humor of the times — watching The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch and all those terrible old shows? He finds it terribly funny. His friends, well — well I think he’ll find it terribly funny.”
“Well, we can do that. We’ll just, uh, play it straight. Pretend he — or they — are, uh, just little kids. — Like, um, usual.”
“Oh wonderful. This is wonderful. I really appreciate this. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Hey, it’s my job.”
“Well! — I guess that’s right! I wonder, how do you become a clown — or a jester — anyway?”
“Well, in my case, I got talked into it — ha-ha!”
She laughs a little uncertainly at this, but it doesn’t matter; a gust of wind blows up — the front door is still open — and the bells behind my ears jingle like little Zen Buddhist temple bells. Mrs. Candler puts her hands to her mouth again.
“ — Oh! Would you mind if I put the fan on down in the rec room? It would be hysterical.”
“Sure, we use fans sometimes too,” I say, the ol’ reassuring veteran-jester. “ — Um, and while you’re doing that, we’ll go get our stuff together.”
She looks at me, puts a hand to her mouth again, giving me the once-over, shakes her head, “Perfect,” and moves toward what I assume is the rec room. From behind, I hear the slam of the car door.
“We’ll be right back,” I say.
She walks away and enters a room, hidden behind a sliding red-stained door. The sound of a song can be heard. Loud and distorted. — The Archies?!
Yes. I can hear “Sugar, ohhhh, honey-honey — you are my can-dee girrrl” clear as a bell. Matching Josie and The Pussycats on back-up vocals, I can hear a number of kids singing along cheerily, with a complete absence of irony (which, if I remember from high school, is the highest form of irony). There are also the sounds of thumping feet, creaking floorboards, “whoops,” and just a hint of breaking glass. The red wood door closes behind her and a world of retro-weirdness is cut off.
Tong-g-g! — an empty metallic sound comes from behind me. A soft, shaking, jittery voice — “N-n-n-h, hey-y-y.”
I turn. Sherrie stands in the doorway. She is visibly sweating. There are dark stains under her arms, and her make-up is oozing like the Valu-Bi! conception of the surreal. She looks like one of those awful “Sad Clown” prints that I used to have in my bedroom when I was seven, except that her eyes are dilated and darting around madly. She holds a limp sack of balloons, and her arms are wrapped around the helium canister as if it’s a huge religious talisman, an Easter Island rosary bead.
“Hey. Mrs. Candler is setting up a fan so my bells will jingle.”
She just looks at me, inhales, blinks, exhales: “ — N-n-n-h.”
“Look, it’s gonna be — just a little embarrassing, okay?”
“N-n-n-h.”
Psychic pain. I pat her arm. “But we’re gonna make some money, right? Cover the initial investment. Make a Christmas stash. Tell Swandell to kiss our ass! Right?!”
“I-I-I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“It’ll be over with in a second.”
“N-n-n-h.”
I guide her through the redwood dining room, down a couple of redwood steps to the redwood rec room door, and I knock.
The door opens — and it’s 1967. The commercial side of 1967. There’s one feeble black light, luminescent concert posters, a huge stack of vinyl, and The Monkees are doing “Daydream Believer.” About thirty young teenagers are swaying in little clumps, sub-sardonic romanticism, very dry. (“Ah, those were the golden years, eh, Paige? Ho-ho.” “I hear you, Dylan. Har-har.”) No one notices us. We simply observe, standing next to Mrs. Candler as she smiles beatifically. A fan near the door jingles my bells softly.
A couple swirls around and gets a sudden take on us…and their jaws drop. They quickly regain their composure. (“…Oh, a clown and a jester — obviously.”) Mrs. Candler smiles.
“N-n-n-h.”
“Jimmy!” Mrs. Candler shouts above Davy Jones and the boys.
“Huhn?!” says a kid about thirteen or so. He is swaying by the stereo, one of those expensive component in a pre-fab rack type of rip-offs. There’s a heap of gifts (I assume) behind him — a computer, some CD’s, posters. He turns and looks toward us, and his face lights up with a crazed smile.
“Oh, no!”
“Just like those clown posters!” chirps Mrs. Candler.
“Oh, God!” says someone, obviously enjoying this.
I can feel Sherrie shaking beside me.
“A sad clown!” says Jimmy.
Mrs. Candler makes a small face at him, as in: “Don’t be rude, darling; there are sad people clowning in India.”
Sherrie exhales audibly, “ — N-n-n-h!” and Mrs. Candler casts a quick look at her. I bop into the center of the room. Fuck these punks. I’ll never see them again. Fuck them all.
“Why, hello there, kiddies!”
As if programmed by an evil Mister Rogers, they say as one: “Why, hello there, Jester!”
“Say, kiddies, do you know what’s black and white and red all over?!”
“No, Jester. What is black and white and red all over?!”
“ — N-n-n-h — “
Sherrie is neurotically fumbling with a balloon, and she must turn it in a funny direction, because as the helium pours into it, it makes a high-pitched farting noise. I put a hand to my mouth and look grotesquely outraged: “Bad-d-d balloon,” I say.
“This is weird,” says the pre-op Katy Perry.
“You know, Jester, you’re pretty stupid,” says a boy wearing a camouflage pants-suit.
I jingle a head-bell at him. “Why, thank you, kiddie. It’s my job, dontcha know.”
“Well, whoa,” he replies. There are a few chortles.
I laugh charmingly: “Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.”
“ — N-n-n-h!”
Sherrie is fumbling with tying the balloon, one that’s tubular, something she was planning to contort into an interesting animal, but screw that. I snatch it away from her before she can tie it, and I hold it up: “Hot dog, kiddies!”
Jimmy laughs. “This is awful, Mom.”
“I thought you’d like it,” says Mrs. Candler, smiling broadly.
“Oo-oo, listen to this, kiddies!”
I put the balloon’s neck to my mouth and take a little helium in: “Hot dog!” I squeak.
“What’s happened to my jester voice?!”
“Whoa!” Jimmy shouts with real enthusiasm.
He rushes over to the helium canister — “Whoa! Let me have one of those!”
He grabs a balloon and takes a deep hit. Other people swarm around, descend on the canister.
“Whoa!” he squeaks. “Wh-wh-wh-wh!” He’s laughing madly, out of control, high-pitched like Tweety-Bird. Kids are surrounding the canister: “C’mon…c’mon…C’mon, faster, please!”
“N-n-n-h.” Sherrie looks neurotic.
Jimmy hands a balloon to his mother, who happily inhales.
“Oh!” she squeaks, “Oh!” like a mouse having an orgasm. She doubles over and I think of ice and look at the red wood paneling.
And suddenly it seems like me and all the kids and Mrs. Candler are squeaking madly. Surreal. Fellini meets Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons. Squeak! Squeak! Squeak! Squeak! Jimmy puts on The Archies, and the room erupts like the Chipmunks on lithium: “Honey, squeak!, sugar-sugar. You are my can-dee squeeeeak…” People are laughing, dancing, stomping around, squeaking, squeaking.
“That was so stupid!” Mrs. Candler squeaks at me. “It was perfect!”
She is writing the check out for our performance and is taking hits off another balloon.
“But is your partner all right?” she squeaks. “She seemed, well, I don’t know — ”
She looks toward the front door.
Sherrie is in the car. After an extended squeaking period, I let the kids hit my head-bells a few times. (I encouraged them to close their eyes and make wishes, most of them perverted double-entendres. Such is the lot of the riddleless jester.) And that was the show. We’d left the rec room, but Sherrie just left the house, without a word. If I was a humorist I’d have called her the perfect mime. But.
“She’s fine,” I say. “She’s just used to a younger crowd. Kind of threw her, I guess.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Squeak-squeak.
“Oh, that’s okay.”
“But it was just wonderful!” she squeaks with a fresh hit. “And she was such a sad sad clown. — Oh!”
She puts a hand to her mouth and relives it.
“Perfect!”
She hands me a check for one hundred and seventy-five dollars. On the “Payment For______” line, she’s written “entertainment.” Well, that’s discreet anyway.
“Well — thanks,” I say.
She takes another balloon hit and swats my head-bells “ — Oh!” and moves back toward the rec room.
“Maybe next year we can do my husband’s birthday!”
“Sounds good!”
The door presses shut behind me. The station wagon’s motor is running. The helium is in the back seat.
I walk across the little strip of lawn, dampening my feet again (the toes so soggy that the little bells slop under my feet). I walk to the car door. In the glass, I catch my reflection. Christ. I open the door and get in. Sherrie breathes in deeply. She puts the car in gear and, before the door slams shut, we are moving down the driveway. We screech out onto Marble View.
After a few blocks, moving at a reckless unfocused speed, I say to her, pretending to just remember: “Oh, I got the check.”
I hold it out to her. “One seventy-five.”
The wind from around the windows flaps at it.
She doesn’t shift her gaze from the road. She looks dead ahead, both hands on the wheel — steadier hands now, but pale, tight skin. She is looking far down the road.
“I figure it should clear,” I say, “ha-ha.”
She doesn’t respond.
We pass by a few more blocks in silence.
“Look,” I say, “that was an unusual situation.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I don’t even know why you’re worrying about them. I mean, you were very nervous, right? You had like, uh, the worst-case scenario to deal with. And look how well you did. You came in there anyway when you didn’t want to — Same as me, right? — ha-ha.”
She doesn’t laugh.
“ — I mean — all things considered — we, you did great. You were fine.”
I continue lying, not knowing why I care.
“…Hey, and next time, it’ll be even easier. I’m not sure I’ll be, um, you know — “
She looks like she might cry.
“I mean, I’d be willing to do it. I could do it, you know? Until you get, uh, used to it, get your confidence and all, but — but, you know — ”
I can hear her breathing, the beginning of sobs, I know it.
“ — Hey, look, maybe we can go grab a coffee; it’ll make you feel better. We’ll hit a drive-through.”
But she doesn’t answer, fluid welling up in her right eye.
And I can almost see us from the outside — two damp fools in a rusted old heap — as our car accelerates, and we blend into the traffic on the highway.
# #
Chris Sumberg lives in East Tennessee. His work has been published in The Guardian, Chronogram, Urbanite, OrionOnline (Orion Magazine), RealPoetik, Binx Street, and other magazines and journals.