Growing Up Clown

As the loving son of a clown, he reveled in all the goofy wonder. As a grown man, he returns to the ring and discovers what was really underneath that permanent painted-on smile.

Illustrations by Pascal Girard

“Ich bin ein clown und sammle augenblicke.” I am a clown and I collect moments.

-Heinrich Böll

I remember she’d take a long tube sock, fill it with powder, tie the end into a knot, then squish her eyes and mouth shut and rhythmically beat her face with the sock until her head was adorned with a fleeting halo of chalky haze. With her face still scrunched, she’d toss the sock into her open caboodle and then settle in to stillness as the cloud of powder tried to sneak away before she coughed open her eyes.

I remember she’d hold her breath and wait for the powder to dissipate, her face motionless but not emotionless, for plastered onto it were the ebullient colors and shapes of perpetual joy. The reds and yellows transfixed her whitewashed countenance, twisting and contorting the painted-on musculature into a paralysis of laughter.

I remember she’d blink open her eyes and study the image in the mirror: the inverted music notes under her eyes; the triangles above them; the exaggerated, untiring smile bending up into her cheeks. It was a smile that reminded all who chanced upon it that the hilarity would not relent, that the jokes would not stop, that the comedy would not end—for what happens when the comedy ends? What happens when the laughter dries up, and the mouth reverts to its resting state?

With the careful placement of a red wig over the pantyhosed mess of hair atop her head, my mother would transform into a clown.