Send in the Liar
Boza was hungover. Partying with her fellow clown school graduates last night after their final class had been a mistake. At the bar, Boza had felt damned smart—first gig lined up for the day after graduation—but in the piercing light of an April morning, it was clear that her fellow clowns wore the smarty-pants. Shot after shot of Jägermeister had been tossed back, and now everyone else was sleeping it off while Boza was ringing her first doorbell as a full-fledged clown.
She’d had a hell of a time finding parking on the narrow street, finally wedging her banged-up Chevy Vega between a Cutlass Supreme and a yellow Ford Pinto. Her gear—plastic bowling pins for juggling, balloons to twist into wiener dogs, the ubiquitous rubber chicken, everything except the piñata, which didn’t fit—was stuffed into an army-green duffel that once belonged to Boza’s dad. Not exactly festive baggage, but it was the only thing she owned that was roomy enough for her clown paraphernalia. She set down the bag and piñata, then rang the bell again.
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The porch she stood on clung to the large, ramshackle Victorian like a ripped sleeve on a threadbare jacket. A few years ago, before Boza had to move back in with her mother because she got fired from the grocery store after one too many times missing her shift, she’d had a studio apartment in this neighborhood. The building she’d lived in was an ancient house like this one, except it had been converted into six units and featured two open-mouthed, roaring concrete lions on opposite sides of the wrought-iron front gate. Boza had loved those lions.
This house had no gate and no lions. Boza regarded her reflection in the front door’s leaded glass. Did the black-and-white makeup diminish her bloodshot eyes? Jesus, she hoped so.
The young teen girl who answered didn’t seem to notice. When Boza swept into a bow and said, “Boza the Clown, at your service,” the girl only nodded, swinging open the door.
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Boza studied her. She looked as wiped out as Boza felt. Too young to be partying last night—Boza hoped—but something was up with this chick. Greyish circles shadowed her eyes. She wore a faded flannel shirt and frayed bellbottom jeans. Her tread on the hardwood floor was heavy.
She led Boza through the hallway and a creaky kitchen, then into the backyard, where a card table and folding chairs were set up. Red streamers, taped to the table, fluttered in the spring breeze. A transistor radio was tuned to AM-950 KIMN. From its tiny speaker, Gloria Gaynor sang “I Will Survive,” which hit number one on the Billboard chart this week. Boza was more into rock than disco, but she liked the message in this song.
Besides the streamers, there were no other decorations and no kids in sight. Boza rubbed her chin, then remembered it was plastered with white pancake makeup. Wiping her hand on her pants, she tilted her head at the girl.
“I made my brother take a bath,” the girl explained. “I told him no bath, no party.” She crossed her arms over her thin little chest. “I should check on him.”
As she turned to go inside, Boza said, “Hey, um…what’s your name?”
The girl pivoted. Her expression was slack. “Suzanne.”
Boza nodded. “Could I ask, Suzanne…where are your parents?”
Suzanne’s indigo eyes flickered at her. “My dad’s at work. My mom…” She blinked. “Mom died six weeks ago.” She put a hand on her collarbone.
Boza sank onto a folding chair. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t ask, but Suzanne went on, “She owned a record store on East Colfax. An armed robber shot her to death.”
Jesus. Boza remembered reading about that in The Rocky Mountain News, but she hadn’t connected it with her gig today. When she’d called on Wednesday to confirm, the guy who answered—must have been Suzanne’s dad—just said in a tired voice that yes, it sounded fine, they’d see her on Saturday.
“I’m so sorry,” Boza repeated.
Suzanne nodded. Wordlessly, she went inside.
Waiting for Suzanne’s return, Boza thought about the woman who’d called to reserve the gig. Alex, her name was. Bubbly voice. Gushing about her son Chris’s upcoming party for his sixth birthday. Talking about how excited she’d been to receive Boza’s number when she contacted the clown school to inquire if they had any women students.
“In less than a year, it will be the 1980s,” Alex had said. “Women’s lib is in full force. We can vote and take out mortgages and make decisions about our own bodies.” Alex paused, and over the telephone line, Boza imagined her raising her fist in the air like Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem. “Don’t you think it’s high time we began supporting each other professionally, too?”
Boza thought about her own mother, Diane, who had never worked outside the home. Throughout Boza’s childhood, Diane’s three-pronged life mission was getting on Boza’s case for every perceived infraction, buying expensive furniture and newfangled electronics on credit, and trying to appease Boza’s dad with platitudes, massages, and homecooked meals. She reminded Boza of an aging version of Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie, minus the pink smoke and glass bottle.
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Any moron could have predicted what happened next. The minute Boza turned eighteen, her dad traded in her mom for a younger model. Absent a child-support requirement, he hightailed it out of Denver, while evading only alimony payments.
Cash-strapped and in debt, Diane did what any over-the-hill genie who still had halfway decent legs might do. Each night, she put on a miniskirt and barhopped, her ultimate goal being to marry a guy with money. In no time at all, she’d snagged Boza’s now-stepfather, Gary. By then, the furniture, TVs, and hi-fis had been repossessed—but no matter; Gary had plenty of both.
“He’s a mama’s boy,” Diane informed Boza. “Talks all the time about the woman.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s okay, though. I have ways to win him over.”
Now Diane was all about pleasing not just Gary but also his parents. “They’re a good family, Mary Ann,” her mother told her. “But they’re traditional. If I don’t toe the line, they’ll convince him that marrying me was a mistake.” She took in Boza’s lack of makeup, holey tennis shoes more gray than white, and hair that Boza kept short by cutting it herself, because beauty parlors smelled weird and the one time she’d tried going to a barber shop, the barber shooed her out, pointing to a sign reading We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone and telling her she didn’t belong in a man’s world. Fuck him.
“They judge me based on you, too,” Diane went on. “So word to the wise: clean up your act.” She stepped closer, tapping a manicured index finger on Boza’s nose. “Don’t mess this up for me, Mary Ann.”
Fuck that, too. Boza, who’d tried on a million names over the years, refusing to call herself something as dumb-assed as Mary Ann, ducked away. She was nobody’s lapdog. If her mother wanted to be one, that was on her. Boza had bigger fish to fry, even if she did have to live in Gary’s house until she finished clown school, got some gigs, and could maybe afford her own place again.
On the phone when Alex had asked about Boza’s routine, Boza explained the show she was designing, with a piñata included in the fee and saved for the grand finale. That was two months ago. Since then, she’d hung up fliers and had business cards made but hadn’t booked anything else. Well, the gigs would come. Hopefully.
Now, as Suzanne returned to the yard with her little brother in tow, opened the back gate, and ushered in guests, Boza clamped a hand to her spinning head. She felt like a clown, and not in the literal sense. What the hell was wrong with her? She was twenty-three years old, for chrissake. Maybe her mother was right when she said Boza fucked up everything.
But Alex had believed in her. And now Alex was dead. Boza adjusted her rubber nose and practiced her red-mouthed grin. She would do that woman proud.
Fifty minutes later, with her stand-up routine in the taillights—she’d remembered all her lines and gestures, received laughs at the right moments; it went better than she’d anticipated and she was sure that even her instructors would be pleased—Boza hung the piñata from an ash tree. The piñata was shaped like a genuine Bozo the Clown, and she was as proud of the research she’d done to unearth it in a mail order catalog as she was of her clever idea to transform herself into the first-ever (she was pretty sure) female Bozo.
She pulled a baseball bat from the duffel and handed it to Chris. “Birthday boy first.”
Chris didn’t have much of a swing. Boza allotted six attempts—one for each birthday year—and only once did Chris come close to the target. “It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s give someone else a try.”
“Gimme that!” A burly kid grabbed the bat from Chris. Jesus, Boza hated brats like this. There was one in every crowd, goddamn them.
The brat swung wildly, looking like an all-star hitter with a bad case of the yips. Whirling, carried by momentum, he stumbled full-throttle toward Chris.
Holy fuck. This was gonna be bad.
Boza stepped in front of Chris, accepting the blow across her gut. The hit brought up last night’s Jägermeister, dispersing bile all over the brat. His mother screamed, rushing forward to dab the brat with red napkins while Boza writhed on the grass.
Suzanne knelt beside her. “I’m so sorry,” she said, helping Boza rise.
Arms wrapped around her stomach, Boza stared down at her huge, silly shoes. “No…biggie,” she huffed.
Then she looked up, meeting Suzanne’s dark blue eyes with her own stupid bloodshot ones. She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
“Listen, Suzanne,” Boza said. “I, uh…I understand. When I was young, I, um…I lost my mother, too.”
Nodding, the girl again pressed her hand to her collarbone.
Boza’s mother was, she knew, at that moment likely vacuuming the green shag carpet in the immense, fancy bedroom she shared with Gary, running the Oreck around the white wood, gold-accented king-sized bed and the TV stand with the brand-new color TV. The every-girl-dreams-of-this bedroom in the suburban house where Boza slept in the basement and her mother asked her every freakin’ day when she was going to meet a decent guy like Gary, vacate the basement, and pump out some grandkids.
Boza grabbed the piñata, set it on the ground, and handed the bat to Suzanne.
“Whack that sucker ”til it breaks,” she said. “Give it all you’ve got, girl.”
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