Coulrophobia
Jacob M. Appel
My father fancied himself a shrewd landlord—he refused to rent to lawyers, the children of lawyers, even a college girl who “had law school written all over her”—but he probably bit off too much when he sublet to the mime. That was the summer after I turned eleven, when we lived in the dilapidated Oakland duplex that my father billed as South Berkeley in the real estate listings. The structure itself was an ugly stucco cube, topped with red slate. But it sat at the end of a row of once fashionable ranch houses and bungalows, shaded by eucalyptus trees and jacaranda. The colorful hedgerows—hibiscus, thundercloud plums, bougainvillea—lent a false air of elegance, though you didn’t have to look too closely to spot the cracked terracotta and chipped paint. After the computer science department terminated my father’s graduate studies (a parting he attributed to politics and they, to plagiarism), he earned some cash by renting the bottom half of the duplex. The first tenant was a hippie-turned-clairvoyant who conducted séances in her kitchen. Aquamarine had childbearing hips and didn’t seem to own a bra. Sometimes she sunbathed topless in the backyard, displaying her generously-oiled flesh to anyone peering out a second-story window. After six months, our clairvoyant tenant connected with her late grandmother, who insisted that Aquamarine tend to her grave in Newfoundland. The result was that the rooms stood vacant while my father and stepmother bickered over money.
My stepmother was for unloading the apartment to the first bidder. She was the breadwinner, after all—copyediting medical journals for five dollars a page. To her, every month without a tenant meant more evenings cuddled up with galleys for Orthopedics Today and Colon and Rectum. My father preferred a wait-and-see approach. He was content to pass his afternoons watching for his stocks to scroll across the bottom of the television screen, or listening to right-wing talk radio, until a sufficiently worthy boarder came a-knocking.
My father turned down one young couple, a Romanian oboist with a Czech wife, because they were a “baby-risk”: “Kids trip on things,” he said. “You might as well tape SUE ME to your ass.” Another couple, Mexicans, failed the “civil forfeiture” test: “One ounce of weed,” said my father, “the DEA puts us all out on the street.” When my stepmother protested that the Mexicans were avowed Jehovah’s Witnesses—they didn’t even vote, let alone smoke dope—my father snorted and waved her off impatiently.
They were going at it like this, one steamy June morning, when the mime poked his head around the screen door.
“I’m here about the apartment,” said the mime.
My stepmother made a sharp, forward motion with her head—her way of nudging my father toward the doorway.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the mime continued, “but your bell isn’t working.”
“You have to push harder,” answered my father. “Like your life depends on it.”
He led the mime across the tight concrete porch and heaved aside the warped rocking chair that blocked the door to the spare apartment. The mime eyed me curiously. His name—or at least the name he would later affix to the lease—was Simon Stillman. He was somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, his hair tinged with gray, with large, almost helpless features that suggested wonder rather than sorrow. He sported worn dungarees and an un-tucked Los Angeles Dodgers t-shirt. More Red Skelton than Marcel Marceau. My father struggled to find the appropriate keys for each of the three door bolts. “Safest neighborhood in the world,” he said to the mime. “Still, you can’t be too careful.”
“Turner,” ordered my father, turning to me. “Help the man with his bag.”
The mime agreeably handed me his small leather satchel. At that point, I didn’t yet know he was a mime—and I thought, given the satchel, he might be a physician who made house calls. “Take good care of that,” said the mime. I nodded. My father pushed open the door and we stepped into the cool, stagnant interior.
The ceiling bulbs had burned out. We waited in the dusky entryway while my father went off for a flashlight. “Do you enjoy the dark?” asked the mime. His voice was nasal and vaguely Midwestern.
I said nothing. I was a good, quiet kid.
“I enjoy the dark,” said the mime. “It’s very honest. Like silence.” He stood arms akimbo, beaming like a human flower. “On the other hand,” he added, diplomatically, “I enjoy the light too.”
The door swung open and shut. My father blinded me with his flashlight, one of his favorite tricks. I shielded my eyes. “Gotta keep the boy on his toes,” he said.
He steered our prospective tenant through the unadorned rooms, the walls stripped down to their sockets and picture hooks. Aquamarine had left behind a few husks of furniture—mostly threadbare upholstery—but not much. We were back on the veranda again, on the flagstone patio, when my father popped the question: “Are you, by any chance, an attorney?”
“No,” said the mime, smiling. “I’m not.”
My father slouched with his hands in his trouser pockets, waiting for more. The mime watched a magpie hopping along the adobe parapet, and said nothing.
“What line of work are you in?”
“Me?” responded the mime. “Entertainment.”
My father lit up—his gotcha grin. “Entertainment, television?” he asked. “Or entertainment, adult entertainment?”
“Oh, no,” said the mime. “Theatrical entertainment.”
“That sounds somewhat risky,” pursued my father. “Financially speaking, I mean.”
“Maybe. It can be.”
My father went in for the kill. “And your employer is….?”
“Myself. I perform mime at the zoo.”
Even at the age of eleven, I recognized this to be a fatal admission. He might as well have confessed to gun-running or pedophilia. Aquamarine, at least, had been a fortune teller with a trust fund. But my father looked up suddenly, like a man pierced by an arrow. My stepmother glared down from their bedroom window—her hair wrapped in a kerchief, her small, sharp features like blades. My father shifted his weight uncomfortably and examined the flagstones.
“You’ll pay for the first month in advance?” he asked.
“Depends how much it is,” answered the mime.
“Of course, that’s a given,” conceded my father. He appeared to have rapidly warmed to the idea of renting to the mime. “We’ll go inside and figure out something reasonable.”
“I do hope so,” said the mime.
“I wanted to be a mime once,” said my father. “But I talked myself out of it.”
The mime did not laugh. “It’s hard work,” he said.
“I don’t doubt that,” agreed my father. “Mime is money.”
Our new tenant retrieved his wallet from his back pocket. He redeemed his satchel with a five-dollar bill.
Later that evening—after the mime and my father had negotiated a “fair” price—I watched from behind the front curtains as Simon repeatedly pressed the broken doorbell. He had no way of knowing that the coils had rusted through, so he pushed with full force—as though poking out an eye. He tried using the tip of a broken branch, then the point of a baby-blue children’s umbrella that he’d retrieved from the curbside. But when he finally gave up, he looked over to the window and flashed me an unexpected smile. He seemed satisfied, not frustrated, as though his efforts had confirmed what he’d known all along.
After the mime’s arrival, my parents’ relationship took a momentary turn for the better—much the way a patient revives briefly before a relapse. They still bickered over in-law visits, Fourth of July plans, who was to buy me new sneakers. But they steered clear of the danger zones: money and sex. Although Simon Stillman hadn’t laid out the first month’s rent in advance—he told my father this sounded too much like a lawyer’s ruse—the promise of a regular income lifted some of the weight off my stepmother’s shoulders. She returned to aerobics. She let her waist-length, strawberry-blond hair hang loose. And since my father no longer referred to his bedroom as the ice palace, and to my stepmother as Nanook of the North, I imagine she was doing other things to his liking as well.
Watching my father at the dinner table, during those first weeks of June, you could still discern the shadow of his youthful promise, of his irreverence. He was once again the confident teenager who tried to get into the San Francisco Aquarium with a fishing rod, the brilliant undergraduate who’d been recruited to Berkeley as the next Alan Turing. Maybe that’s what he’d been like all the time before my real mother discovered the caresses of her Capoeira instructor, before the two women vanished into the ether. Or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking. I guess we all try to imagine what our parents were like in childhood, in college—before life chewed them up and spit them out. Those long summer nights, when my father volleyed mime puns, offered the only portal I’ve ever had.
My stepmother must have shared my curiosity. One night, shortly after my father started a new job at the phone company, she looked up from a kelly-green folder labeled Clinical Hepatology, and, apropos of nothing, asked, “What did you want to be when you grew up?”
My father flicked his cigarette ash into an empty Pabst can. “A computer scientist,” he said.
“No, Gary. I mean before that. Did you ever want to be—I don’t know, a mime? Or an astronaut? Or something like that?”
“Too long ago,” said my father. “I can’t remember.”
“C’mon, Gary. I’ll tell if you’ll tell.”
My father folded his arms across his chest and looked up at the sky. A few dim stars fought through the hazy orange glow of the city.
“I wanted to be a puppet maker,” said Sylvia. “Like Gepetto.” She drew her sweater over her shoulders. “Your turn.”
“I told you. I can’t remember.” My father strolled to the umbrellaed table and took hold of the book I was reading. Swiss Family Robinson. He flipped through the pages indifferently and handed it back to me. “If your mother asked less questions,” he said, “we’d be one big happy family.”
“Fewer questions,” interjected Sylvia. “Fewer. Not less.”
“I tell you, kid,” he said. “I should have married a mime.”
“You mean a mute,” said my stepmother. “Mimes can speak.”
“As I said,” said my father—but he sounded mellow, almost playful.
A similar mock-gruff humor marked his early encounters with Simon. The mime had repaired the warped rocking chair—his own father had been a union carpenter in Des Moines—and often relaxed under the porch eaves, reading. Although in many ways Simon defied the stereotypes of his profession, the same could not be said for his small, personal library of thespian manuals and pacifist philosophy. He owned The Pocket Gandhi, The Speeches of Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. Also Mime Time II: Another Book of Performance Tips. My father, returning home from Pacific Bell with his tie loose around his collar, paused frequently to interrupt the mime’s R & R with a bout of small talk.
“Whatcha reading?” my father might ask.
“This?” the mime would answer. “It’s Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
That was the opening my father needed. “You sure I couldn’t loan you something more your speed? Maybe Silent Spring? Or All Quiet on the Western Front? A mime is a terrible thing to waste, you know.”
The jokes proved relentless, but good-natured—and the mime took them in stride.
Simon’s days off were Mondays and Tuesdays. When he learned that my friends were all away at summer camp, but that we could only afford the free twice-a-week program at the community center—a god-awful experience characterized by forced swimming and long stretches of “quiet time”—Simon established a “clown camp” in his living room. Just for me. For three hours every Tuesday morning, he unveiled the mysteries of his little black satchel: settling powders that turned your skin to snow, “beard stipple” to create the illusion of facial hair. Simon wielded his brushes and sponges like a skilled swordsman. With a few slashes of a liner pencil, he could cut or raise his age by twenty years.
We did our work in dim light, illuminated only by the circle of decorative yellow bulbs built into the casing of Simon’s mirror. Photographs and newspaper clippings were tucked into the corners of the frame: Nelson Mandela, Kermit & Miss Piggy, numerous snapshots of a young black teenager. The enormous reflective plate was the centerpiece of an otherwise under-furnished, almost spartan dwelling.
“It’s a show-biz mirror,” Simon explained. “From my television days.”
“You were on TV?” I asked.
“Here and there. Commercials mostly.”
“Will you be on again?”
“I don’t think so, Turner,” he said, dabbing his cheeks with rouge.
“But it’s possible?”
The mime put down his brush. Three delicate blue stars trailed away from the corner of his left eye. “I used to have a boy your age,” he said. “He asked questions like that.”
“What happened to him?”
Simon frowned. “He grew up.”
Months later, I’d connect the grown-up son to the black teenager in the photographs. “Adopted too late,” my stepmother said. He’d deserted Simon for a career smuggling immigrants, earning himself three decades in San Quentin when several day laborers turned up dead in a boxcar.
The mime retrieved a derby hat and cane from his rollaway wardrobe. He set the hat on his head at a highly unreasonable angle.
“What will you be when you grown up?” he asked.
“A computer scientist,” I said. “Or a mime.”
“Good,” said the mime. “Delightful.”
And we might have continued at that pace, too. To an eleven year old, at least, anything seemed possible, that is, until my stepmother started miming, and Simon stopped paying rent.
It started one Tuesday morning—about a month into my “clown camp”—Sylvia found the mime and me under his locust tree, practicing characters. We stood facing each other, about five yards apart. I was an angel. Simon was a devil. Every five minutes we were to switch roles quickly, as though passing a rubber ball. When my stepmother appeared through the gate in the stockade fence, neither of us broke form.
“How are my two mimes?” she asked.
Simon didn’t answer. Instead, his body—from forehead to rump—went suddenly angelic. His big eyes shifted heavenward. His arms rose slightly, their upturned hands opening like anemones. St. Gabriel, announcing John the Baptist, could not have shown such innocence. I responded with a curl of my fingertips, a fiendish flare of my nostrils.
“Not talking, are you?” said my stepmother. “The strong, silent types. Well, we’ll see what we can do about that.” She disappeared into the house, reappearing moments later with a tray of lemonade, sugar wafers, cantaloupe balls on toothpicks.
I looked to Simon for permission to thaw. He transformed himself suddenly into a monument to hunger. Gone was his beatific purity, replaced by the desperation of a ravenous beggar. Yet other than a shift of his tongue—which now protruded puppy-like over his lower lip—it was hard to pinpoint how exactly he’d moved.
Even Sylvia was impressed. “Bravo!” she cried, tapping her hands together.
Simon stepped out of his pose. “Go on, young man,” he said to me. “Eat. An actor cannot survive on mime alone.” He pulled a red Adirondack chair beside my stepmother’s and settled onto the broad, flat arm. I poured extra sugar into my lemonade.
“That was remarkable,” said Sylvia. “You have a gift.”
“All in a day’s work,” said the mime.
“I didn’t know mimes did that.”
Simon smiled. “You thought we spent our time trapped in imaginary boxes.”
My stepmother grinned sheepishly. “Maybe,” she said.
“Would you like me to teach you?” asked the mime.
“It’s too late for that,” said Sylvia. “Besides, I talk too much.”
“Nonsense. It will help relax you.” The mime stood up. “Give me your hand.” He took my stepmother by the arm and began to mold her body parts—shoulders, ankles, thighs. I was struck by his confidence, the ease with which he assumed this physical intimacy. Sylvia offered no resistance and rapidly adjusted into foundation stance.
That proved to be the first of many lessons. Simon taught my stepmother all of the standard illusions: walls, cliffs, spheres. They took turns hauling an imaginary boulder—which Simon later transmuted into an imaginary feather. They tugged either end of an invisible rope. The effect on my stepmother’s mood was fast and sweeping: Overnight, she went from all nerves to nearly happy-go-lucky. She said mime soothed her soul. It made her feel—in her own words—contentedly preverbal. The time she’d once devoted to crossword puzzles and game shows was now spent under the honey locusts in the mime’s side of the yard, inventing a repertoire of lions, gorillas, teapots. Sylvia arrived at supper each evening as bright as a newly minted coin. She still corrected my grammar often enough—but now she sometimes let slide an irregardless or a very unique.
At first, my father found my stepmother’s new pursuits amusing. “It’s every husband’s dream,” he said, “all sex, no conversation.” Then: “silence, at last!” Soon, though, he grew prickly and resentful. Something essential had occurred in my stepmother’s life, he must have sensed, and he wasn’t part of it. So he complained that his steaks were undercooked, that the bathroom needed scrubbing. “You’d have more time,” he said, “if you didn’t stand out there pretending to be a tree.” My father stuck his arms out haphazardly—mimicking a child’s imitation of a tree—to emphasize his point. The truth was that Sylvia’s cooking only improved with her new pastime. She even experimented with exotic recipes, ceviches, Ghanaian stews—for herself and me. The house was as pure as fresh laundry. Yet my stepmother, in her newfound serenity, didn’t let my father’s salvos perturb her.
“Why don’t you try it yourself?” she finally asked him at our Fourth of July cookout.
“Because it’s bullshit,” said my father. He flipped a hamburger patty with his spatula. “All hoity-toity bullshit. Like men wearing kilts. If you ask me, there’s something very aggressive—sinister—about these professional mimers.”
“Do you know what you are, Gary? You’re a coulrophobic. A man who’s afraid of clowns and mimes.”
A patty skittered off his spatula onto the ground. “If God didn’t want us to speak,” he said, “he wouldn’t have given us mouths.” He kicked the lost meat to the edge of the patio with his sneaker.
“Suit yourself,” said my stepmother.
The following morning—after my father drove to the phone company—Sylvia took me to the zoo. We rode a train, then a bus. Through the fog, she pointed out the TransAmerica Pyramid, the Bank of America Building, Coit Tower. I’d been to the zoo when I was younger, but didn’t remember.
First we saw the animals: the cozy meerkats, the oafish rhinos, the African elephants Maybelle and Lulu. It was a foggy Wednesday morning, so we had the giraffe house and the seal island all to ourselves. As exciting as the wildlife might have been on another occasion, that day we both seemed to be going through motions of admiring the exotic animals.
The sun had just cut through the haze, when we finally came upon Simon. He was in front of the food court. He’d attracted a crowd of about thirty, mostly teenage boys—they looked like campers from a church group.
The mime stood perched atop a black wooden box. He posed as a leopard, his entire weight resting on the ball of one foot. An oaktag placard reading PLEASE TIP THE MIME protruded from an upside-down top hat.
Sylvia wiped the moisture off a turquoise picnic table; I sat down beside her. Soon Simon became a locomotive. A butterfly. A tortoise. And then he performed the most fantastic feat—he fulfilled for us everyman’s fantasy. Surrounded by onlookers, Simon did the unthinkable: He smiled directly at me and Sylvia. Then he winked.
After the show, Simon crossed the plaza to where the one-armed juggler was balancing a bowling pin on his nose. The juggler’s audience was meager—mostly passersby who’d stopped to polish off their snacks before entering the ape house—and it thinned even further when the one-armed performer suffered a sneezing fit. Pins rolled across the concrete. That was when Simon stepped forward, his expression placid as ever, and emptied his felt hat into the juggler’s open case.
Shortly afterward, money again became an issue in our house. Simon had paid the June rent at his own initiative on the last day of the month. He’d knocked on the front door and had my father count the bills in broad daylight. The mime even requested a written receipt. But July rolled into August without a similar visit. (I later learned that it’s far more difficult to evict a tenant who has already shelled out one month’s rent.)
Rather than confronting Simon, my usually belligerent father avoided him. It was easier to vent his frustrations over supper.
“He’s two weeks late,” carped my father.
Sylvia sliced my lamb chops off the bone, cutting the meat into squares. “Relax,” she said. “We’re doing okay, now.”
“It’s the goddamn principle. Here it’s fucking V-J Day and he still hasn’t paid up.”
“It’s what?”
“Victory over Japan Day. August 15th,” said my father. “You can’t let yourself be taken advantage of like this.”
My stepmother shrugged. “Nobody’s taking advantage of me.”
“Of course, they are. You just don’t realize it.” My father pushed his empty plate toward the center of the table. “You’ve been fucking brainwashed.”
Sylvia poured herself a cup of hot tea. She held the tea cup at her lips, waiting for it to cool. She appeared to be considering her next sentence carefully. “Simon has been looking after Turner,” she finally said. “And he’s been helping me with my performance. Do you call that being taking advantage of?”
“Dammit, Sylvia,” shouted my father, slamming his fist on the Formica tabletop. “Whose side are you on?”
My stepmother began to clear the dishes. “I didn’t know there were sides,” she said.
“Well there are,” said my father. “I also have limits, Sylvia. I’m not running a homeless shelter. If he doesn’t pay by tomorrow, he’s out of here.”
Three more weeks actually elapsed before my father confronted the mime. By then, Simon was also delinquent on the August rent. During those three weeks, my father—for all his bluster—appeared to take pains to avoid the encounter. Maybe he really did fear his tenant at some level. Or maybe he sensed something larger at stake. Whatever the cause, he arrived home from the phone company earlier each afternoon—long before the mime returned from the zoo and settled in front of the TV. And then my father lost his job entirely. “Reverse discrimination,” he said. “I can read between the lines.” Yet without his income, we weren’t doing okay anymore. My father no longer had a choice: he had to press Simon for the rent money.
He brought me with him, maybe hoping to play on the mime’s sympathy. We found Simon dozing on his back patio. A thin book—Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener—lay folded open across his chest. Asleep, the mime’s face looked slack and vacant, as expressionless as unhewn marble. On the flagstones at his side stood a bottle of merlot and a half-empty wine glass. My father gave the mime’s deckchair a hard, rattling kick with his boot.
“Look you,” said my father. “We need to talk.”
Simon blinked twice. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers.
“I fell asleep,” he said—as much to himself as to us.
“You owe me rent. Two months’.”
The mime nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
This admission appeared to catch my father off-guard. He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the mime’s face. “When exactly do you plan on paying?”
Simon sat up, rubbing his hairline with his fingertips. “Soon,” he said.
“Soon?”
“You know how it is,” said Simon, deadpan. “Mime isn’t always money.”
My father stepped forward. I feared for an instant that he might grab the mime by the front of his T-shirt, but he merely leaned menacingly over Simon’s chair. In the process, he toppled the merlot bottle. The glass didn’t crack, but red wine leached along the furrows of the deck.
“Soon,” Simon said again—decidedly unruffled.
“Dammit,” scowled my father. “You’d better.”
He looked down at the spilt wine, then turned quickly and crossed through the gate in the stockade fence. I followed.
“Lazy shit,” said my father. “I should have rented to a goddamn lawyer. At least they make a fuckload of money.” He paced over to the barbecue grill and spit into the crabgrass. “Lazy shit,” he shouted, much louder.
I wanted to hit my father, just then. “He gave the money away,” I blurted out.
“What?”
“To the other performers at the zoo. The balloon artist, the one-armed juggler. The ones who don’t make enough money on their own.” I lowered my voice. “He said they needed the money more than you do.”
My father glared down at me. He’d sweated through his shirt, and beads of perspiration limned the corners of his face. Behind him, two gray squirrels played cat-and-mouse along the roof of the neighbor’s garage.
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“He told me,” I said. I looked at the ground.
My father grabbed my shoulders, his fingers digging into my skin. He shook me hard. “Don’t lie to me, kid.”
“Okay, I saw him,” I said.
My father’s grip loosened slightly. I told him everything I wasn’t supposed to tell: about our daily trips to the zoo, about how we spent the days with Simon, about how my stepmother did mime in the food court.
It was all over in seconds. When I was done, my father shoved me backwards against the stucco wall. “You’d make a lousy fucking spy, kid,” he said. His eyes were smoldering.
He stormed up the back steps and slammed open the kitchen door.
“How long has this been going on?” he shouted.
“What’s wrong?” I heard Sylvia ask.
“You and the fucking mime! The kid ratted on you.”
“Please,” begged my stepmother. “Simon will hear you.”
“Who gives a shit if he hears me? He’s the one who can’t keep his cock to himself.”
“Jesus Christ, Gary. It’s not like that.” And as far as I knew, it wasn’t like that—at least not then. I watched their distorted outlines through the frosted kitchen window.
“The hell it’s not! How stupid do you think I am?” I heard the sound of something shattering—maybe porcelain on tile. “If he doesn’t leave tomorrow, I’ll throw his shit into the street.”
“You do that,” shouted my stepmother, “I’m leaving.”
After that, silence. I can still see them glaring at each other—at a total impasse, with nothing left to say. Then a door slammed. And another. When I finally sneaked back into the house around midnight, the lights were out and Sylvia was sleeping on the sofa.
My father—not Sylvia—picked me up from the community center the next day. He hadn’t shaved and his halitosis was worse than usual. From his clothing, rumpled, improperly buttoned, rose a fetid stench of stale tobacco and unwashed bedding. “She says I don’t communicate,” he said. “Can you believe that shit? She’s run off with a goddamn mime and I don’t communicate.” My father started the car before the passenger door was fully shut. On the drive to the city, we listened to Rush Limbaugh predicting the Sodom to come if Michael Dukakis ascended to the presidency.
“Do you remember where your idiot mother goes at the zoo?”
“No,” I lied.
My father swerved around a slow-moving Cadillac. “Well, you’d better.”
We found the zoo teeming with visitors. It was a warm, dry Friday afternoon—a rarity for the Bay Area in August—and people were making the most of it. The lines at the sno-cone stand extended past the koala cages; every seat on the carousel was occupied. The onlookers around the polar bear exhibit were so thick, you could hardly see through to the ice. When we arrived at the food court—my father periodically prodding my shoulder blades—it was standing-room only. My stepmother perched atop a wooden block at the foot of the mermaid-shaped fountain. Her pose was that of a sprinting deer. Around her milled teenage lovers, campers and counselors in matching T-shirts, a gaggle of overweight women enjoying ice cream. At the opposite end of the plaza, a larger crowd had gathered to watch Simon Stillman.
My father pushed through the crowd to Sylvia. She was barefoot. In front of her lay a naugahyde tote bag, brimming with cash. A cardboard sign beside the bag read: Mime Over Matter: If You Don’t Mime, It Matters. Below that: TIPS. Near Sylvia’s tiny left foot lay a small paper airplane.
“Would you get down from there?” called my father, breaking into the silence.
My stepmother held to her rigid pose.
The crowd opened up, shifting to include my father in the circle of spectators. Several parents looked at my disheveled father, then dragged away their young children. Others packed in to replace them. Few scenes draw spectators more quickly than a grown man antagonizing a mime.
“Enough of this bullshit,” shouted my father. “Say something, dammit!”
My stepmother’s gaze remained indifferent and fixed. More onlookers gravitated toward the action, maybe anticipating a show.
“Please, say something,” said my father, his voice cracking ever so slightly. Then he softened his tone. “Please, Sylvia. Let’s figure this out.”
My father covered his eyes with his hand. For a moment, it appeared as though he might begin to cry. The crowd skulked backwards. This was personal now—dangerous. Far more than simply harassing a mime.
My stepmother remained silent and motionless. A lone grackle scavenged the asphalt beside her.
“Get the hell down from there, Sylvia,” ordered my father, angry again. “You’re making a goddamned fool of yourself.” He raised his fist and shook it in the air, still shouting as the crowd retreated. I also inched away. Soon my father stood alone at the center of a growing circle, cursing, threatening, trapped behind the invisible walls of a no-mans-land that he’d created himself.