Clown Girl. Monica Drake

Her makeup cracked around her eyes; her eyes were puffy. I felt a flicker of sadness, but the sadness wasn’t really about Matey. It was bigger than that. I leaned into the mirror, drew on my own lips, and joined every last prom queen in line doing almost the same. We were a sad parade of longing, those lip painters and me, humans trying our hardest. Mostly, I felt the missing life of my tiny baby, my tiny Rexie, who never even made it into this crappy world.

      Baby Rexie never had a chance to be a sucker, a chump, a prince, an S&M clown. Whatever he or she might’ve been. And then I thought of my parents, who also died too young, but far older than baby Rex. I was the center, the hinge pin of a family not made to last.

      “You guys go to prom?” Matey asked.

      One mirror down, a round girl in a baby-blue dress plucked a fine hair from her brow. Her chin already sagged. I could see her as an old lady. How had any of us made it this far?

      Crack said, “Prom? Ba! But this one, our Vassar girl, she probably went.”

      Me. Vassar? Prom? I shook my head and looked down, away from the mirror. I organized my makeup stack, to give myself a moment.

      “Me neither,” Matey said. “I was shooting up, prom night. Learning bad habits.” She knocked on the bathroom counter like knocking on wood for luck.

      I said, “Is there luck in Formica?” I gave a knock myself. Blinked damp lashes.

      The girl in blue packed up her tiny purse: lipstick, lip liner, eye shadow, perfume, keys, tampons, chewing gum, and little slips of packaged condoms.

      Matey said, “Hey, that’s a better trick than clowns in a tiny car. Give us your secret, Cheesecake.”

      Crack said, “You must be one-eighth clown, maybe a grand-ma on the Cherokee side? You got the clown nose.” Behind Crack, Matey pretended to squeeze her own nose, as though it were bulbous, and said, “Honk, honk!”

      The prom queen took her tiny purse, cut a wide arc around us, and skedaddled toward the door.

      We three Chaplins looked back into the mirror. I finished with the thin, pale Chaplin lips, then drew on the famous mustache. Wide eyebrows and a mustache—that’s enough to change a whole face. One clown training manual says, These particular three dots of color alone will divert the eye from the normal visage and render the individual almost unidentifiable.

      “I worked as a fry cook prom night. Flat broke. Minimum wage was its own bad habit.”

      That made Crack bark out a single-note laugh in appreciation. She liked money jokes. What I didn’t say was that I was already an emancipated minor—emancipated by the state and by an accident on the old California Highway One, before that highway crumbled, where it curved through the redwoods in tight hairpin turns along the edge of the ocean’s rocky cliffs. I ran a circle of black around my eyes and said, “Every real job I ever had, I wore a polyester suit.”

      “Shit, don’t I know it,” Crack said. “Either a polyester suit or a thong and platforms.”

      None of us worked for minimum wage anymore. As clowns, as long as work came in, we were paid in stacks of twenties. Cash on the spot was Crack’s rule. After another night’s pay, I’d be that much closer to Rex again, that much closer to building, or rebuilding, the family I didn’t have.

      Our assignment was to wait huddled in a narrow white hallway, outside some corporate office cocktail party, until we heard the antique stylings of “The Entertainer,” electronically remixed. At least it wasn’t “Send in the Clowns,” impossible to dance to. We dropped our pink bags in a corner.

      “When the player piano starts, that’s our cue, see?” Crack said. “Matey, you’ll go first. Bust out your best Chaplin waddle. We’ll be right behind you. One at a time we all fall down, get up, circle back, and exit. Strike fast, no garnish, got it?”

      “Got it, Boss,” Matey said, and crouched near the door. She was good at falls. Before the clown gigs she worked grocery stores for insurance money, pulling what they call Slip and Falls in damp aisles, taking out injury claims.

      “Walk and fall? That’s it?” I said.

      Crack pulled a cigar from her suit-coat pocket. Twirled it in her fingers. “Listen, Sniff, let’s keep this one simple as our clientele. They get what they asked for.”

      We came between appetizers and the entrée as an elaborate dinner bell, a fancy signal to corporate employee-guests: move from drinks to the dining hall. Soon enough, the music started, then a strobe light cut in. Crack didn’t say there’d be a strobe light. Anybody can do Chaplin in a strobe, but the things make me sick.

      Matey took off, feet splayed and cane swinging. Crack followed Matey, with me a ways behind. We waddled like penguins while the flickering strobe made us into a stop-action film.

      More than that, the strobe made me queasy. It was like being hit in the head.

      Matey smacked into the back of a chair and stepped on the crossbar. The chair flipped backward under her foot. Matey sailed forward over the top. She was in the air, diving, cane flailing out to the side. On the way down she rolled into a somersault, all in the agitated, panicked heartbeat of the strobe. In that light the world was a fragmented place—a hand to a mouth, a spilled drink, a turned head—everyone diced into bits of existence.