The End of Forever (21 page)

That night she lay in her bed and remembered how gentle he’d been with her, how he’d let her cry herself out, holding her and hugging her. She noted something else too. For the first time in months, she felt peaceful, as if the tears had washed away the hard knots that lived inside her stomach and along her spine. And she also realized that she’d told him about Amy and didn’t have a headache.

“Couldn’t you have put your makeup on when you got there?” Erin asked, staring at David as he drove, dressed in his full clown gear.

“It’s a kid’s birthday party,” he said. “Can’t spoil the illusion by going off to the bathroom and changing when I get there, can I?” He looked over at her and grinned. Even under the white greasepaint and big orange mouth, she recognized his electric smile. He looked exactly as he had a year ago—oversize baggy suit, yellow curly wig, and bowler hat perched on his head. A flower she knew squirted water was stuck in his lapel.

“People are staring,” Erin said as a car passed them and the driver did a double take.

David waved. “That’s the trouble with the world. It’s too conventional.”

David might be indifferent to what others thought, but Erin wasn’t. It was one of the things that made her and Amy so different. Amy never cared what others thought, while to Erin it had always mattered. Maybe that’s why Amy, and now David, made friends so easily; and why it had been so out of character for Erin to dress in Amy’s clown makeup the year before and fulfill Amy’s commitment at the Children’s Home. “People hardly expect to see a clown driving down the freeway,” Erin told him.

“Careful, sweet-face, or I’ll douse you with water. But then, I don’t want to spoil my routine for you.”

Erin almost told him that she knew his routine but decided that it would take too much explaining. “So who’s this all-important woman I’m supposed to meet?”

“She’s a regular doll,” he said mysteriously. “You’ll love her.”

Erin wasn’t too sure. David parked his car in front of a two-story brick house on a tree-lined side street off Bayshore Drive. She could smell the salt water in the breeze. He took Erin’s hand and led her up the sloped driveway. The door of the side entrance flew open, and a little girl with blue eyes and dark blond hair barreled out and grabbed David around the waist.

“Whoa,” he said, laughing and hugging her. She made several gestures with her hands, and
David responded with rapid gestures as well as words. “I know I’m late, but I told you I had to pick up a friend.”

The girl turned toward. Erin who watched, fascinated as the child’s fingers flew in more gestures and signs. “This is Erin,” David said, shaping her name with his fingers. “We’re in the play at school together.”

The girl measured Erin with wide, unblinking eyes. Caught off guard, Erin didn’t know how to respond. “This is my sister, Jody,” David said.

Erin was at a momentary loss. Why hadn’t David told her that his sister was deaf? “I—urn—hello, Jody.”

“Watch,” David told her. “This is the sign for ‘Hello.’ ”

Erin repeated it awkwardly, and Jody giggled, then turned back to David and signed something. David laughed. “She thinks you’re pretty,” he told Erin. “And she wants to know how I got such a pretty girl to date
me.”

Just then a woman flung open the screen and ushered the three of them inside a big, sunlit kitchen. “David, the kids are waiting for you in the den.”

“Well, I can’t keep my public waiting, can I?”

Twenty children sat on the floor in a semicircle, and they giggled and pointed when David entered. Erin hung toward the back of the room, where she watched as David performed. He did magic tricks, made animal shapes out of balloons, and managed a few pratfalls in between. Watching
him, Erin felt her throat grow thick. She kept remembering how well they’d worked together at the Children’s Home, and she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t told him about it before now. She felt that she was deceiving him in some way.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” the mother of the birthday child whispered in Erin’s ear.

“Yes,” Erin said.

“We’ve known his family for years. My daughter, Tracy, and David’s sister, Jody, started at the same school for the hearing impaired when they were both two.”

“That young?” For the first time Erin perceived that in spite of all the laughter, the room was strangely quiet to be filled with twenty children. “Are all these kids deaf?”

“That term’s inaccurate,” Tracy’s mother said. “Some are more handicapped than others. Tracy and Jody both are considered ‘profoundly deaf’—they can’t hear anything. Others have some hearing with the use of special hearing aids. They ail attend a special school where they’re taught a combination of signing and lipreading. They’re all taught to talk too, but since speaking depends so much on hearing, they don’t sound like regular kids to the rest of us.

“In other words, you can’t imitate what you can’t hear?” Erin asked.

“That’s right. Eventually we want to mainstream Tracy and Jody.”

Erin knew that mainstreaming meant putting
kids with handicaps into regular classrooms. “Was Jody born deaf?” she asked.

“No. When she was a year old, she caught meningitis, and it left her without her hearing.”

“She’s a pretty girl.”

“Yes, and she absolutely adores her big brother. He’s a nice guy and very talented.”

Erin watched as David brought Tracy from the audience and made quarters appear from behind her ears. Then he presented her with a bouquet of flowers that seemingly materialized from under his coat.

When it was time to serve the cake, Erin helped Tracy’s mom pass it among the children, then she and David slipped out the back door. In the car David tugged off his hat and wig and red false nose and tossed them to the backseat.

“I’m impressed,” Erin said. “You had them eating out of your hand.”

He grinned, and his orange-painted mouth stretched cheek to cheek. “All women under the age of ten fall at my feet.”

“It must be your humility that attracts them.”

David snickered. “That’s one of the reasons I keep you around, Erin. You never let me forget I’m a mere mortal.”

“Someone
has to remind you.”

They rode in contented silence for awhile. “How about a Coke?” David asked.

“Sounds good. You look like you could use one too. Your face is running.”

David laughed and swiped at the greasepaint with a tissue. It smeared, making his dark-penciled eyebrows smudge over his forehead. He turned into the driveway of a McDonalds and parked.

“You’re not going to drive through?” Erin asked incredulously.

David got out of the car, came around, opened her door, and offered her his hand. “Why?”

“Well because—I mean—your makeup and all. People will stare.”

“Stop caring what people think, Erin. Life’s too short to live it by other people’s rules. Come on, let’s go in.” Still she hesitated. He held out his hand and added, “If you do, I’ll be your best friend.”

Erin felt as if a giant hand had clutched her heart. “Why did you say that?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Why did you say that to me?”

“What did I say?” David asked.

For a moment Erin couldn’t get it out. “I’ll be your best friend,’ ” she finally said.

They were standing in the middle of McDonalds, in everyone’s way. “Lets sit down, all right?” David led her to a booth in the back.

Erin slid across the vinyl, another knot forming in her stomach.

“Now what’s wrong with being best friends?” David asked.

“It—it was just something my sister used to say all the time.”

David shook his head and sighed. “I have no way of knowing these things, Erin, and I hate having to be on my guard around you all the time. I probably picked it up from the kids—they say that all the time.”

His attitude irked her. She at least wanted him to be sorry. “Can I have that Coke now?”

While David ordered, Erin stared pensively out of the window, wondering about her feelings toward him. Sometimes he got on her nerves, yet other times he seemed so sensitive and kind.

When he returned, she saw that he’d been to the mens room and removed the greasepaint.
Chalk one up to sensitivity,
she told herself. “So how did you ever get into clowning?” Erin asked, attempting to lift the cloud that had fallen between them.

David sat across from her. “My mom tells me I was born a comedian. Anyway, after Jody was diagnosed as deaf I noticed that her eyes always followed me whenever we were in a room together. I used to make gestures and faces to make her smile.”

“She does have a pretty smile.” Pretty smiles seemed to run in his family, though Erin didn’t want to tell him that.

“Thanks. When Jody started at the special school, our family learned how to sign so that we could communicate with her. When she was little, she’d throw terrible tantrums if we didn’t understand her. We couldn’t let her get away with it, but I understood how frustrating it was for her when no one could figure out what she was trying to say.”

Erin knew what he meant. She’d been the only one to understand Amy’s baby babble when they’d been small. “So you became her interpreter?” Erin asked.

“That’s right. My parents would ask, ‘David, what’s she saying?’ Anyway, I began to pantomime and entertain her. And one thing led to another until I had such a routine down, that I began performing at birthday parties and hospitals to make extra money.”

“Is that why you’ve decided to become an actor?”

“Partly. You know, deep down clowns are really serious people. They see the good and bad in life and help people laugh about both.”

“But sometimes there’s nothing funny about life.”

David shrugged, “Not to me. I think that hurting gives us a way to measure being happy. How can you know one without knowing the other? Its the difference between doing a hard dance move and an easy one. Which would you rather do?”

“The hard one’s more challenging, so I feel better if I do it well.”

“That’s the way I feel about life. Why walk around desensitized? Why go for the easy moves when the hard ones make you feel better? I watch Jody deal with other peoples’ ignorance every day. People who don’t understand her handicap and who laugh at her whenever she tries to talk because she sounds weird to them. Sometimes it gets her down, but most of the time she keeps right on going.” David balled the wrapper from his straw and bounced it on the tabletop. “I decided that making people laugh is sort of my mission in life. So I do my clown bit whenever I can. I’m doing the Special Olympics in June.”

“Isn’t that when all the handicapped kids compete in sports events out at USF?”

“Yes. Jody and some of her friends are competing. The organizers are always looking for people to
help with the events.” David snapped his fingers and added, “Say, maybe you’d like to help out! You know, if you have the time.”

An image of Amy surrounded by machines and hoses, and with tubes sticking out of her mouth and arms, caused Erin to recoil. She couldn’t face spending the day around kids who looked imperfect. Yet there was no way she could tell that to David, “I—I don’t know. June’s a long way off We still have the play to get through.”

“Speaking of the play, are you really going to make me meet you at the theater Monday morning at seven to practice our dance moves?”

“Absolutely.”

David groaned and dropped his forehead dramatically against the table. “I can barely walk that time of the day, much less dance. Are you always such a slave driver?”

Erin recalled how Amy always groaned about getting up early. “I’m going to college to study dance theory, so I need to spend a lot of time practicing if I’m going to be good. Don’t you practice so you can get better?”

“I practice,” David said, his blue eyes holding hers. “But I never forget that it’s supposed to be fun.”

“And you think I do?”

“I think you need to loosen up and not take things so seriously.”

“Life
is
serious,” she countered. “And it can sometimes be too short.”

“That’s the point.” David took her hand, lacing
his fingers through hers. “If it
is
short, shouldn’t you have some good times along the way? Shouldn’t you give everything you can to the people you meet?”

Erin pulled away, because a tightness was beginning to crawl up her back into the base of her skull. “I have to be at my mom’s store soon. We’d better go.”

David studied her so openly that Erin began to squirm. At last he said, “We clowns make people laugh and forget about their problems. The strange part is that whenever we do, we forget about our own problems. So, I’m going to see to it that you lighten up and let yourself go if it takes the rest of the school year.”

“You do that,” Erin said, standing because of the tightness that was inching slowly into her temples. David didn’t understand, and she could never describe to him what it was like to have someone close to you die; to have a family of four suddenly become a family of three, and to feel like a sole survivor—a leftover that parents fight about.

“Are you going to Spring Fling?” Shara lay on Erin’s bedroom floor tossing raisins into the air and trying to catch them in her mouth.