“Where’s the birthday girl?” The clown lopes in through the front door, holding a frizzy rainbow-colored wig in his hand.
“The party’s downstairs,” the mother answers and walks toward the basement, assuming the clown is following. He has stopped in front of the sculpture in the hallway, a 5-foot-tall slender, naked woman made of bronze, now patinaed except on the points of each breast, the first place most curious viewers touch.
“You have this with kids around?” he asks.
“It’s art.”
“Of course it is.” The clown puts the wig over his head, pulls it into place.
“A gift from my husband’s parents,” she justifies.
The mother is impatient. The clown was almost an hour late. The kids are clamoring for his appearance. Her husband didn’t want to pay for “a stupid party gimmick,” but her daughter’s disappointment would come with its own cost, so she cajoled him into saying “yes,” and now she can anticipate her husband’s words of derision.
The clown is behind her, coming down the stairs with care. He is wearing elongated shoes that make each step treacherous.
“At least he looks the part,” the mother thinks.
The kids are getting cranky and hungry, but she didn’t want to serve the cake, a post-performance treat, until the clown arrived. She points to the door into the party room. The clown opens it and sticks his head in, to thunderous applause from the audience. The mother slips in behind him and sees her daughter, in her new green velvet dress, sitting cross-legged on the floor, clapping with glee.
The mother is troubled by an unexpected emotion: jealousy. She’s never had her own birthday party. Her young parents were sent to a sanitarium for tuberculosis when she was three, leaving her to grandparents who complained loudly about the additional mouth to feed. She only started to quietly celebrate when she realized every December 15th marked one year closer to her high school graduation and freedom, when she would buy a one-way bus ticket out of West Virginia to Washington D.C., and eventually meet and marry a lawyer whose parents collected art, took month-long vacations to places like Egypt, religiously observed cocktail hour and had a bottle of vintage Bordeaux with dinner most nights.
Her two children are her life — she’ll tell anyone who asks — but she’s sometimes frustrated that these brats can’t understand just how lucky they are.
The clown performs a few silly moves. He sits on the broken one-armed chair her mother relegated to the basement, leaning as if to rest his elbow but, finding no resistance, falls to the side, with an exaggerated tumble and quick jump to his feet, to a riotous response from the crowd. For his final act, he brings a flaccid purple balloon he’s pulled from his overalls pocket to his lips and fills it with air. Several loops and twists later, he approaches the birthday girl, hands her the inflated poodle, and bows his head as he backs out of the room.
The mother puts pieces of the chocolate layer cake on flowered paper plates and hands them to kids demanding their treat. She sees her daughter head upstairs with hers; she puts the spatula down and follows. The clown is coming out of the powder room, his brown hair matted from the wig he now holds in his left hand. He looks at the mother and daughter with a startled expression, waves and quickly walks out the front door.
“Where is he going? Doesn’t he want a piece of cake?” the daughter asks.
The mother sees the bewilderment in her daughter’s face, knowing that she imagines the clown’s only purpose is to entertain her and her friends. She finds her daughter’s disappointment intolerable; it gnaws at her instinct to protect but also her desire to inflict pain by puncturing the innocence that she, herself, helped create.
“To work at another party! Did you think you were his only one today?” the mother snaps, with a startling sense of shame and relief.
The girl is immobilized, staring at the front door, still holding the plate with the large piece of cake she wanted to share with the clown.
The mother realizes she’s pushed too far on a day that is even more precious to her than it is to her daughter. Here is her child who she so longed for, a daughter she promised herself she would not let down, as her sick parents had done to her.
“But he did say you were the most beautiful birthday girl he’s ever seen,” the mother adds. Her daughter smiles and smooths the green velvet with her free hand.
“Really?” she asks.
“Of course! Now let’s go enjoy your party guests.”
The mother puts her hand on her daughter’s back and shepherds her downstairs.
Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at a college and in jails in Vermont. She’s written a book and articles about drug policy, addiction and celebrity. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Bright Flash, BULL, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Emerge Literary, Peatsmoke and Tiny Molecules, among others.
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