Rose’s nose kept falling off.
It was a nice one, not just a foam ball but polished rubber on an elastic cord. Jerry gave it to her the second she booked her first gig. Hadn’t wrapped it or anything, just produced it from behind her ear like he’d been ready the moment his teen sister made it big. So mundane, and so unexpected—but Jerry was a natural. How many other surprises had he stowed away in his pockets, waiting for just the right occasion?
She hid her tears as he slipped the band over her head. The elastic was too long. The red ball kept bopping around her lips. That was okay; they had time to tighten it. Only, between forty minutes for her face paint, half an hour for her curls, fifteen minutes for stuffing and lacing up her shoes, another half hour for loading the car, plus another cumulative hour for all those little to-dos like double-checking the helium tank and spring-loading the trick flowers, they didn’t have much time for nose-tightening after all. Rose sat in the back seat fiddling with the string until Jerry plucked it from her hands and tied off an inch of elastic. “Now, how does that smell?” he joked. She flashed a thumbs up, feeling too sick to answer.
Now, standing on the sidewalk with her parents’ Volkswagen idling behind her, she was sure that the trick flowers had never made it into her bag. Her shoelaces were uneven, her hair was in her face, and her nose was still falling off.
She waved weakly to her family. Her father responded with an encouraging honk before starting up the engine. The last she saw of them was Jerry, grinning from the back window.
When the yellow Beetle was out of sight, she waddled up the path to the door. It was a proper house, with window boxes containing actual, live flowers. The lawn was green, the siding was white, the trim was black and the curtains were navy, with nary a polka dot in sight. She rang the doorbell. The doorbell made a ringing sound, instead of squawking or honking or vibrating your fingers numb.
The door opened on a pretty blond woman. One hand held a pink pom-pom; the other a glass half full of red wine. She scanned Rose with all the kindness of an airport security screening. “You must be the surprise,” she sighed, and emptied the glass.
Rose gathered up a deep breath and a mile-wide smile. “Ellie Stracci’telli, at yer service, ma’am!” she squeaked, and stuck out a cartoonishly gloved hand. Her legs braced to tip backwards into a pratfall when the woman reached for it to shake.
But the blond woman just swished her mouthful of wine around, and concluded with a few brusque swallows. “Come on, then,” she said, and led the way into the house.
Someday you’ll do parade floats, Jerry told her. Fairgrounds, even a festival—but a clown’s first home is a party. She’d been there for his first party, because it was her own: her sixth birthday, the backyard of their cruddy apartment buzzing with half her kindergarten class. Their parents had spent all month coaching Jerry. Ten years later Rose still remembered him circling the kids atop dad’s unicycle, colorful scarves streaming from his sleeves. For the big finish, he inflated a series of long balloons, sneaking helium puffs before tying each one. His voice rose higher and higher, and Rose laughed so hard her nose bled. She didn’t notice his hands working the latex, stretching, massaging, knotting, until finally he knelt before her with a perfect elephant. Her favorite. It was the only thing Rose’s class could talk about come Monday morning.
So maybe it felt unfair. Jerry’s first time had been for his kid sister, their parents shining with pride from the back row. Here she was alone, debuting her act for a stranger.
She quashed the thought. That was not a clowning attitude, and there was no such thing as a stranger. Everything Rose needed to know about the birthday girl hid in the decorations. That was Jerry’s lesson one: assess your surroundings. The pom-pom that mom casually dumped in the foyer was the first of many: strung up with white streamers over the entryway, dotting the elegant end tables in the hall. Cheerleader theme, Rose reasoned, some kid being groomed for tryouts eight years in advance. Mom seemed the type to freeze-frame her high school glory days. An odd choice to include a clown, but she could work with it. At the end of her act, she’d whip them into a birthday chant—“Give me an H! Give me an A! Give me a P! Give me another P! Give me…oh no, I can’t remember what comes next! Will ya help me out?”—and kids would cackle and mom would leave a good tip. Between the acrobatics and the colorful costumes, her school’s cheer squad was only a few steps removed from clowning anyway.
The hall opened up into a farmhouse-style kitchen, brightly lit by an enormous picture window behind the sink. Tidy countertops, vintage gas range, light blue-green cabinets to match the stools at the breakfast bar. Mom set down her glass and reached for the wine rack. “I don’t want to hear it,” she warned as she pulled down a bottle of red.
Unsure what to reply, Rose pantomimed zipping her lips. But the woman wasn’t talking to her. A man sat at the other end of the counter, dressed so unassumingly in a teal button-up and blue suspenders that he blended right into the cabinets. He watched the blond woman rummage for a corkscrew in silence. Then his eyes found Rose.
“You’re here!” he cried. “Fabulous! Did you find the place okay? Do you need anything? Bathroom? Something to eat?” The woman popped open the cork and a sour wine smell spilled out. “A drink?” the man added.
Rose unzipped her lips. “Thanks, sir, but I’m too young for grapes that old. You got anything fresher?”
He snorted and slapped a hand to his lips. “That’s funny. How old are you?”
“You hired a…clown child?” the blonde woman interrupted. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
“Clowns are no laughing matter!” Rose quipped, and the man stifled another giggle. She was finding her stride now that she had a willing audience. She crossed her eyes and stuck out her bottom lip. “Are you saying I look funny?”
The woman gathered up her glass and bottle. “Go tell the girls, I guess. I need some air.”
The kitchen relaxed the moment the back door slammed. Rose made a show of rolling her eyes from the door to the seated man. She hummed and hawed and scratched her head until—lightbulb—she pointed towards the backyard. “Your wife?”
“Ex-wife,” the man corrected. “Soon to be. But we haven’t…” He gestured deeper into the house, where signs of party seemed to lead. “Don’t bring it up, please. Greg.” He stuck out his hand.
“Ellie Stracci’telli at your service,” Rose said gamely, and stuck out hers.
Their fingers barely touched before she tipped backwards on her heels, hitting the hallway floor with her jumbo shoes sticking up in the air. Her nose came loose and whipped against her cheek. Greg guffawed. “Oh no,” he managed between wheezes. “Oh, dear. Are you all right? That was—” He broke down in another fit of laughter. “God, what a rush!”
Rose pushed her nose back on and dramatically dusted herself off. “I’m always falling for something!”
“Oh, isn’t that just…rich!” Greg beamed. He danced back and forth on his toes, electrified by the excitement. “I knew you’d be good. Cara said it was silly, but I told her, that’s the whole point!”
Cara—the soon-to-be-ex with the superglued scowl. “Why, silly is my middle name,” Rose promised, and produced her business card. “One of them, anyway.”
Greg took the card. “Ellie Silly-Fusilli Rigatoni Stracci’telli,” he read, shaking his head in disbelief. “You are a professional, I can tell. Save a little for the spotlight, will you?” He pocketed the card and touched Rose lightly on the arm. “The girls are going to love you. They’re in the den, watching whatever kids watch these days. Why don’t you set up in the dining room, and I’ll tell them entertainment in ten?”
He led her into a dining room as neat as the kitchen, where an extravagant cake waited on the sideboard. “All yours,” Greg said, waving at a rustic picnic table in the center of the room. “Move whatever you want. I’ll give you some privacy.”
He slipped into the next room. The open door broadcast a throng of excited voices, then cut them off again as it shut. Any clown could recognize that sound in her sleep. It was the sound of a party.
Alone in the dining room, Rose’s heart beat down her ribcage. A picnic table—indoors!
She situated herself behind the table, dragging the two benches to form an audience seating area in front. As she laid out props, she calmed her nerves rehearsing a report to Jerry. “A loveless marriage,” she’d explain, setting the stage. “He’s obviously too good for her.They were college sweethearts, but when the baby couldn’t fix their marriage she turned to alcohol. By the end of my act they were laughing like newlyweds again.”
She was surprised not to see more parents. They must all be in the den with the kids. At most of Jerry’s birthday gigs, parents hosted their own gossipy adult parties in the kitchen, only emerging for skinned knees or shed tears. Occasionally they watched his act, interjecting their own jokes. That was the worst. Nothing tamped down a good time like a bunch of disillusioned grownups.
The kids would be perfect, though. There were no bad kids—only clowns who weren’t up to the challenge.
She ran through her checklist. Helium tank primed, juggling balls within reach, trick flowers in a bouquet on the table. Everything ready, with a few minutes to spare. It did little to help the butterfly circus in her stomach. She pressed on her nose more tightly. As long as the elastic didn’t give, she would be fine. And if it did, that was her next gag. For the truest clowns, every new discovery could be embraced, tripped over, and mined for comedic gold.
Her eyes landed on the sideboard. The cake was larger than any she had ever blown out the candles on, but undeniably uglier. Fondant zebra-stripes rimmed the base, with megaphones and pom-poms piped around a cursive memo: Happy 16th Birthday Eloise!
Rose frowned. That couldn’t be right. She was sixteen herself.
“Oh my god,” said a voice from the doorway. “Rose Jackson?”
***
“I just want to apologize again,” Greg said, again.
After eleven hellish minutes, the party moved to the backyard. Cara waited there with a cigarette and a photoshoot, all feather boas and big plastic sunglasses and a towering pink and black balloon arch. Rose had a safety pin holding up her pants that would have made short work of every last one of those balloons.
“If I had known you went to school together I never would have hired you.” Greg was leaning over the table in full father mode. “Scout’s honor. Eloise never mentioned any clowns in her class.” His face screwed up like he was holding in a fart. “Only class clowns,” he burst out.
Rose offered a weak smile. Is that the smile you show your mirror? Jerry would have criticized. Of course not. But this wasn’t the crowd you showed a clown act to either, Jerry, was it?
For a good minute Greg struggled to regain composure. Rose had watched him down not one, but two Bud Lights in succession as the act escaped her control. By the time she took a sweaty bow, he was giggling tipsily.
At least someone enjoyed her act. Never in Jerry’s resume of a thousand parties had she witnessed so miserable a gig. Elli Stracci’telli had planned to begin with a search for the birthday girl, but if the Miss America sash labeled Sweet Sixteen! hadn’t given it away, the face she recognized from Mrs. Arnold’s History class did. What were the odds? Eloise and her manicured friends were tenth-grade elite. Legends told of the parties they attended—homecoming bashes, soaked in stolen gin and six decibels from a police bust. Not one of them would have been caught sober near a birthday clown.
But even as Rose’s heart plummeted into her fourteen-inch shoes, Elli Stracc’telli forged on. After the cheerleading chant was met with silence, the quarter trick failed to impress, and the squirting flowers ruined so-and-so’s makeup, she broke out the helium. Balloon animals were a skill and an art. Surely these monsters would recognize that tying one was at least kinda cool.
The monsters never got the chance. Rose pulled the first bend too tight on a pony and the whole room jumped at the bang. Marlie from Advanced Algebra broke into tears. “I don’t like sudden noises!” she wailed as her friends dabbed vindictively with a Kleenex. Standing at her act’s premature end, an air pump in one hand and a busted latex rag in the other, Rose deflated. Her classmates chanted, “Pennywise! Pennywise! Who invited Pennywise!”
It was a cursed name in the clowning community. Jerry would not be proud.
“I’m sorry,” Greg said. “This must be really embarrassing for you.”
No fucking duh, thought Rose. A clown’s job was to embrace buffoonery. Shame and embarrassment weren’t in their vocabulary, to leave more room for unicycle lessons. But she had just stood there in petrified silence.
“Sorry you couldn’t get ahold of your parents,” Greg contributed, drumming a hand on the minibar. “I’d drive you home, but…partied a little too hard, I’m afraid. One of the girls could probably—” He bit his lower lip and wandered back to the fridge, rummaging for another beer.
Rose glanced at her watch. “My mom’s picking me up in thirty minutes. I can wait.” Sudden fear landed like lightning between her shoulders, and she looked at the back door. “How long is the photo shoot?”
“They’ll be out there all afternoon. I don’t know what it is about this age. All they want to do is take pictures of themselves. For the boys, I guess.” He waved a hand, all at once casual. “You want a beer?”
Rose looked at him sharply. I’m about that same age, she wanted to remind him.
But he knew that. And what was Jerry’s thing about turning down opportunities? So she said, “Sure.”
He made her laugh by popping the bottle open with his belt buckle, and then poured it into a Mickey Mouse glass. “Sparkling cider, if anyone asks,” he winked.
The beer tasted cold and sour, but it took her mind off of the chant echoing through her head. Pennywise! Pennywise! What moron had invited Pennywise, anyway? Elli Stracci’telli wasn’t the act for a cheerleading party. Never mind what clowns were supposed to do; from the moment the door opened she was doomed.
A clown’s first home was a party. Well, hers would be the next one. A room full of seven-year-olds, or better yet, six-year-olds. She would learn unicycle, so she could ride around with streamers in her hands. The happy children would laugh and clap and cry when she left, until the presents appeared and they forgot all about her. She wondered if she would be able to tie their balloons. The pony had gone wrong. She should have applied less pressure around the knot. All she needed was more practice.
“Big beer drinker, huh? I thought that might have been your first.”
Greg had barely touched his own bottle. But, somehow, her glass was half empty. Her tongue tasted bitter, and her teeth tingled. Won’t Jerry be proud! After her first gig went sour, here she sat sharing a drink backstage. Everyone had bad gigs. That was why things like beer waited just past the curtains.
“My parents don’t drink. But I’ve tried it before.” She took another gulp to demonstrate her ease. The liquid splashed against her nose and began to creep under the plastic. “Who planned this party, anyway?”
“Cara,” Greg admitted. “They’ve been talking about it for ages. Why are you taking that off?”
Somehow beer had pooled between her nose and the red ball. But now that she was trying to remove the stubborn thing, the elastic caught in her wig and wouldn’t come off. “Because I’m not much of a clown,” she answered, even if fighting to remove an unruly nose was making her feel an awful lot like one.
“Sure you are,” he insisted. “Leave it on. We paid you for an hour. At least keep the nose.”
Rose gave up on the nose. “She’s on the cheerleading team,” she heard herself saying. “Why would she want to have a cheerleading party? Show some layers. I’m not about to have a clown-themed party.”
Greg laughed. He dragged a stool over and sat down next to her. “What kind of parties do you like to have?”
Parties were for other people. But now Rose thought maybe there was a kind for her, one she could never admit to her parents. “Quiet ones in kitchens. There’s warm pie and everybody wears whatever they want, and there’s no decorations except lots of flowers, all lining the walkway to the house.”
“Sure,” Greg agreed, as though she had just described the most natural party imaginable. “That’s what you like, I guess? Flowers? I think a good party gives a person exactly what they need. I had a party once—when I was a boy, I mean, my parents threw me a party, and they hired the most amazing clown. He was always losing things, and then finding them in totally unexpected places. You wouldn’t believe the fight when I said I wanted to plan the surprise for today.”
The elastic was getting tighter around her face. She must look like a mess. And there was still her gear in the other room to clean up. Maybe she would clean it up straight into the trash. What would Jerry think of that?
But she needed all that junk for the next gig. The one with the crying six-year-olds, that would make her into the real clown just like Jerry and her parents. And after that gig there would be another, and after that another, and if she was very, very lucky, there would be another hundred thousand lined up after that.
Greg was looking at her like he wanted something. He was sweating now, making his high forehead shine. Jerry sweats like that, she thought. It makes it hard for his face paint to stay on, so he has to use the expensive stuff and spend ages putting on a basecoat. Someday she would probably sweat like that too.
She wrapped her fingers around the glass but it never reached her lips. Her stomach roiled like a pogo stick routine. What had Greg said about a surprise? There had been enough surprises today. All she wanted was to go home.
“I’m gonna try my mom again.” The glass thunked back down to the table, horribly loud. She pushed her stool back to stand up. It slipped away from her like a banana peel.
Suddenly there was nothing beneath her. As the tile rushed up, her arms straightened to break the fall.
That’s not a safe way to catch yourself, she scolded herself with icy lucidity. What would Jerry say if you broke your wrists?
But it was Greg’s arm that caught her. The tiles hung there, dizzying on the floor. He’s touching me, she thought with mild alarm.
“Whoopsee!” His voice turned the air around her hazy. His fingers dug into her waist. Damp sweat crept all the way through the polka dots on her dress. “Hey, I liked your clown voice. Elli Stracci’telli’s clown voice, I mean,” he corrected, giggling. “Will you do it again? Please? For me?”
But the sound of ringing cut the air before she could wrestle her tongue into words. Her cell phone—her parents! She twisted away, pushing Greg off. He took a big step back.
She was flat on the cool, spotless tile, wriggling as she struggled to extract her phone from a labyrinth of pockets. Which one was it? At last the phone made it to her ear. “Are you outside?” she asked, the three words spilling out as one.
“Hello there, Rose,” her father’s voice said slowly. “I was expecting Elli to pick up!”
***
“Oh my god. Elli? Elli Stracci’telli?”
“It’s Rose,” she corrected flatly, before she even knew who had spoken.
Late August had chilled into an overeager October, and Rose Jackson was not in the business of being recognized. You didn’t visit your home town so that any old family friend could identify you on the spot, asking invasive questions like, what are you up to these days or why won’t Jerry return my calls? Even in the warmth of the coffee shop, she kept her collar popped and sunglasses on like she was dodging the paparazzi.
Yet here was this man’s voice, as strange as it was familiar, calling her by a name she had not used in years.
She had waited until ten to start last night’s drive, citing a work excuse, so she wouldn’t pull into her parent’s driveway until well after midnight. Moonlight made the faded pink siding appear a normal, suburban off-white. The garden was dead, but they still planted whoopee cushions under the mat. She knew to move them before sneaking inside.
In the morning her mother made a fuss in the kitchen—it’s not safe to drive after dark, not with how they’ve let the roads get, you should have woken us when you got in, so I could heat up the lasagna your father made, or are you not eating carbs?—while her father sat in the living room with a book of balloon animal templates. “See this one?” he’d say if she entered his orbit. “Real simple. Let me teach you. One hour for your old man?” And she had to shake her head and veer back to the kitchen.
Instead she walked around town, checking out the new school building, the warehouse that had replaced the movie theater, the rusted metal playground upgraded to shiny plastic. Other things didn’t change. The supermarket layout was a snapshot of the past, even if the labels were brighter and the prices were higher. No one recognized her. The fact of walking around familiar grocery aisles with her face hidden made her feel gleefully invisible. The best thing about your life becoming a history exhibit was that you got to stay behind the velvet ropes.
But some stupid impulse—we call that addiction, a voice snickered between her ears—had driven her into Sam’s Coffee. Nostalgia, she corrected herself. One cup, that was all, just to see if it had the same artificial hazelnut tang she used to guzzle in high school. And that was why she sat alone at a table for two, her dark glasses folded next to a half empty latte, when the man appeared behind her.
He was fatter and grayer, but happier, too. She didn’t recognize him. “That’s fair,” he admitted. “We only met once. I hired you for my daughter’s birthday. You were brilliant.”
Then it all came back. She saw the natural evolution of high forehead to receding hairline. Red-splotched cheeks now sat comfortably in a red face. He even wore the same blue suspenders. His name shook off a damp chill as it crawled up from memory. “Greg?”
“That’s right.”
Together, they noticed the empty chair across from her.
“Hey, can I join you?”
And because all at once she was sixteen again, she answered, “Sure.”
His jaw was on the floor when he saw her, he said, because he remembered that day perfectly: the last birthday before the divorce. Now Eloise lived in the city. Greg helped her pay for an apartment a few blocks from the ballet, where she performed on weekends.
“That’s funny,” Rose said. “I live downtown, too. I haven’t run into her.” And with my luck, you’d think I would have.
“Good for you. The city’s a different pace. New faces everywhere. Eloise needed that.” He drank a fragrant chai with short, childlike sips, like he wasn’t accustomed to the taste. She could smell it across the table. “Must be good for business, too?”
It took a few leaps to understand what he meant by business. Even then, the assumption felt absurd. Maybe clowns did get more work downtown. Next time she ran into one, she would ask. What better balm could there be for hyper-efficient city stress than a professional idiot?
Memory had never quite reconciled Greg’s short episode in her life. The hours that followed it—arguments her parents waged around her, a buzz declining into building deprecation, the conspirator’s wink Jerry snuck her as easily as a shiny red nose, Monday morning rumors in homeroom, even the instinctive repulsion that still accompanied the taste of beer—all that was as clear and untouchable as the street through the café glass window. What she had never understood was this strange, sad man, who had never quite understood her, either.
Rose searched for something to fill the silence. Before she could, Greg asked the one question she had spent all day avoiding.
“So, what brings big city Ellie back to the boonies?”
“My brother.” She toyed with her coffee cup, spinning it in slow circles on the table to stop herself finishing it too fast. When it was gone, would she leave this conversation? No, she’d just order another cup. The difference between half full and half empty, Rose thought, was that half full was moving away from something, and half empty was moving towards it. “It’s been a while and he’s going through some stuff.”
“What kinda stuff?”
“Rehab stuff,” Rose said, and finished her coffee.
“Oh.”
This time Rose didn’t try to fill the silence. She sat back in her chair, hands wrapped around the empty cup, and waited for him to speak.
“I hired him, you know,” Greg announced, at last. “A few years after I hired you. Didn’t even realize you were related when I called. My work was hosting a family carnival, and we needed to fill a booth. He was good. He kept pulling things out of his pockets, things you’d never expect. For hours. I don’t understand how that was sustainable. Just when you thought he couldn’t possibly have anything else stowed in there, out came another Twizzler, or another silk scarf, or another balloon.”
Or another bottle. Rose remembered that bit. It was a good background joke while other acts went on. Halfway through juggling, and some gawking kid would clock that your breast pocket had just produced a fifth rubber chicken. “Was he drunk?”
“Not that I could tell.”
“That’s Jerry, all right. Well, good for him. If I had kept it up, I’m sure I’d be an alcoholic too. And then who would stage the intervention?”
His bottom lip jutted out. In the voice of a child, Greg asked, “You don’t clown anymore?”
She fought an instinct to roll her eyes. “Once was enough. Why did hire me for that stupid party?”
She hadn’t meant to ask so bluntly. Implicit in it were a dozen other questions that weren’t really questions at all. Did you ask your daughter what kind of party she wanted? Have you talked to a therapist about your clown fixation? What if my parents hadn’t called when they did?
But for the first time, Greg seemed to step onto level ground. “Not my proudest moment. Eloise always talked about high school like it was life or death. I thought it might remind her to relax. Laugh a little. Not take everything so seriously.”
“And the beer?” Rose demanded. “You knew I was sixteen. Why did you offer me a beer?”
“Honestly? You looked like you needed it.”
Her watch read quarter past four. Soon a whoopee cushion would announce her brother’s arrival, and everything would go downhill from there.
As she got to her feet, Greg stuck out a hand. “Good luck to your brother. It’s a lot harder to stop than it is to start. Helps to have a wakeup call.”
She looked at his trembling palm. He was speaking from experience, she realized. That party had been her wakeup call. Maybe it had been his, too.
The movement came instinctively. Their hands nearly touched—those same fingers that wrapped around her waist all those years ago. You don’t try to catch a clown. You just watch them fall. That’s the whole point.
She let her heels slip out from under her. Air whistled past her ears. She hit the floor of the coffee shop with her loafers sticking up in the air. Instantly, faces ringed her vision overhead.
“Miss, are you all right?”
“Can I help you?”
“Do you need to call someone?”
Every eye in the coffee shop had turned the moment she fell. Only Greg stood back, hand outstretched, pitched high unrestrained laughter. His forehead shone like polished rubber. He laughed until the sound filled the coffee shop. He laughed until he wept.
That night, Jerry opened cabinet after cabinet, corkscrew in hand, his voice rising with every empty shelf. Any minute they would sit down around a cold lasagna. What happened after that was anyone’s guess.
But somewhere, in the café behind her, Greg was wiping tears from his eyes. A smile had overtaken his face like a stranger coming home. All he needed was a clown.