“Speak!” she said, again and again, and “I am four today!” but Monsieur Toilet was silent. Her mother had named him that, during Jemma’s vividly remembered toilet-training days. She’d had a fear of him, of being consumed — he was so big, and made such an awful noise, and after the last gasp of the flush the old pipes would moan horribly. Jemma’s mother found a kit in a store, a big plastic smile, flat, friendly blue eyes, a big nose that she thought looked French. A beret from her own collection completed the disguise. Jemma fell in love, or at least into a deep, abiding friendship with the smiling eyes and the unchanging grin. When her mother saw her dancing, Jemma aware that she had to poop but unable to understand it, or how to address it, she would call out in an accented cartoon voice, “O, Jzemma, I am so ongree, so very ongree!”
The face and beret were gone now; he was just a green toilet full of clear green water redolent of fake pine. But Jemma still thought of him as a friend, so it was with a particularly heavy heart that she finally gave up and went back to her room to get into her party dress. She pulled it over her head and went looking for her mother to do up the back. She found her in the basement, overseeing installation of the moonwalk. The rain was increasing when the men tried to inflate it in the side yard. Jemma’s mother threw open the storm doors and beckoned them inside. She was still convincing them to bring the thing in when Jemma found her.
The air pump ran off a little gas engine, but their scenarios of carbon-monoxide poisoning did not discourage Jemma’s mother. “Look around you, gentlemen. Isn’t this room just full of windows? Vent! Vent your hose!” She even helped, a little, with the assembly, though it went against her principles even to twitch a finger in support of a deliveryman. She kicked a screen out of a bottom window, and shoved a hosepipe through. With smudged fingers she buttoned up Jemma’s dress and braided her hair while the castle-shaped moonwalk rose in the eastern half of the room to press and stoop against the ceiling, its highest towers bent perpendicular against white stucco.
“So lovely,” her mother said, turning Jemma around to appraise her. She stared at Jemma dreamily for a few moments, then started from her reverie with a cry, announcing the time. She was still wearing her shopping dress. Her hands were filthy, her hair matted in places with batter, and a thin layer of flour over her face made her look like a corpse. She rushed upstairs, tailed by Jemma. Layer by layer she put on her party clothes and her party face, breaking between steps to finish the preparations. So she admitted the caterers with only half of her pair of eyebrows drawn, and only one set of eyelashes in place; squeezed out a bouquet of white, yellow, and red roses onto the cake in her slip with hair teased high into horns. She passed through many frightening incarnations on her way to the final beauty. It was hard to reconcile the end product, a smooth, pink look only slightly too studied to be natural, with all the stops along the way: Minnie Mouse, Cruella DeVil, Mr. Heat Miser.
The house was similarly transformed in steps into a party palace. A white tent rose in the front yard, sheltering a half-dozen tables draped in white with centerpieces of orange flowers surrounding a candle that would not stay lit because of the wet wind. A band set up on the porch, a plastic parquet dance floor unfolding in squares in front of them as they tuned their instruments. The dining-room table grew to twice its real length, extensions hidden under a pool-sized expanse of tablecloth. Serving stations popped up in the corners of the living room. A bar appeared in the wide hall, complete with a giant silver mirror that Jemma compulsively smudged with her fingers before it was lifted into place. A puppet theater rose on the other side of the basement from the moonwalk. Jemma watched the puppets rehearsing — up to four of them operated at once by a woman who could braid hair with her feet — a princess and a dragon, a knight and a witch, all throwing out their arms and singing “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La.”
By the time Jemma was trying unsuccessfully to zip up her mother’s dress, the clown had arrived. He drove up in a yellow Volkswagen big enough to hold fifty clowns. Jemma watched him emerge from the car, first the requisite big red shoe, distinguished with a coontail at the heel, then hair the very same cornflower blue as her dress, eyes ringed in bruisy purple and green, a hooked nose like a dangling chili that hung straight across the huge lips, painted in a despairing frown. His thin neck, chalk white, disappeared into a Mad-Hatter collar, green on top of an orange shirt. His red frock coat had tails as long as a wedding train; five feet after his bottom they ended in motorized-ferret tail-bearers that chased after him and made figure eights. Green pedal pushers vanished into socks of every color, half the spectrum on the left foot, half on the right. Last to emerge was the other shoe, a surprise black. He removed two giant valises from under the hood of the car and came high-stepping up the walk, revealing under that black shoe the painted image of a squashed kitty.
“Jesus Christ,” her mother said.
“I told you,” said Calvin, watching with them at the window. He hated clowns, and had lobbied hard against summoning one to this party. He was making gestures through the window at him, shaking his fist as if to cast paper, rock, or scissors, but instead flashing strange finger symbols, and muttering under his breath, but Jemma was close enough to hear. “Adonai! Father strike him down!”
“The clown is here!” their father said, coming up behind them and putting a hand on Jemma’s shoulder. “It’s your birthday clown!”
“What were you thinking?” their mother asked their father. “Where did you get that thing? Weren’t there any normal clowns?”
“What?” their father asked, looking genuinely perplexed. “Funny hair, funny nose, great big shoes. It’s not a pony, is it?”
“It’s scaring me already,” said their mother. It had almost arrived at the doorstep when it suddenly dropped its bags and did a sort of disco move, pointing down at the ground and then sweeping arm, hand, and finger up in an arc to point straight up at the sky. Then it fell back onto the thick wet grass, the softest lawn on the hill, and began to shake violently. “Oh God, is it having a seizure?” their mother asked, and then answered her own question. “It’s having a seizure!” Their father rushed out, joined shortly by their Uncle Ned, not a real uncle but a friend and colleague of their father. A crowd gathered, puppet lady and moonwalk techs and bartender and servers all in a semicircle, some asking aloud if this was part of the act, because it wasn’t very funny. “Why did you get an epileptic clown?” their mother asked, brandishing the sterling cake cutter she’d confiscated from a well-meaning but ignorant teenager, who would later be carving out the roast, before he could shove it into the big, sad mouth.
“Like I was supposed to know? Like, what, the ones with blue hair seize on rainy days?”
“Stay calm, everybody,” said Uncle Ned. “The clown’s going to be fine.” He was removing the trembling shoes, for reasons that did not become apparent until after the ambulance had come and gone, carting the clown away down the south side of the hill just as the first guests were beginning to arrive up the north side. A trauma surgeon, he was cool in a crisis, and used to being the only person who knew what to do. Just as Jemma’s mother was most keenly lamenting both the arrival of the clown and its departure, and Jemma’s father was leaving another message with the answering service at the clown agency, Uncle Ned appeared in the shoes, having plundered from the valises and the Volkswagen a traditional round nose, a rainbow afro, and a pair of hairy yellow overalls. “Hey kids!” he said in his sharp, commanding voice, not the least bit goofy and not even particularly friendly.
“I got him,” Calvin said to Jemma as they watched the guests arrive. “Did you see it? I got him.” For the rest of the night he would try to cast seizures at various adults and children and fail, but never accept that his gesturing fingers had only been coincidentally related to the clown’s affliction.