Story Three. Part One.
Editor’s Note: Beth Kalet's story Appearances is our featured story. “Appearances” is one of 7 short stories included in Beth’s book Seven Stories, published in 2012. “Appearances” will be published on Hummingbird in parts, one per week over the next weeks.
Beth, a Hummingbird Guest Contributor, is an accomplished writer and editor. Her work, and her own story encouraged us to reach out to her.
In Appearances, Beth explores the notion that people and the lives they lead are not necessarily what you thought, or remembered. In fact sometimes the perception you hold is quite far from the reality.
Book Cover Photo Credit: Diane Pell
Joey Mayfield was the luckiest kid on earth. That was how I saw it when Joey and I were both eight-year-olds at the Pine Brook School.
Almost every weekend he’d get to go to some kid’s birthday party and eat cake and ice cream. His parents were clowns and Joey was their straight man. While his parents dressed in typical clown costumes, Joey could wear his blue jeans and Converse sneakers, but they insisted he wear a loud plaid shirt and a polka-dot bow tie. The colors clashed and Joey told me years later that the bright colors the three Mayfields wore to those events, the noise of all those kids he didn’t know, and the blaring air horn his parents honked at the slightest provocation drove him insane.
But I thought his life seemed glamorous.
Plenty of times his parents entertained at events Joey could not attend, and then his grandparents would come to stay with him. His rotund Nana and Poppy were as bland as his parents were colorful. His parents were light on discipline, but when his grandparents were at the house, Joey had to live by rules like dinnertime is at six and no friends over on school nights. His Nana cooked him things like pork chops and mashed potatoes with gravy and I remember one time I was invited to dinner on a Friday night when Joey didn’t want to eat anything. His Nana huffed and puffed when he insulted her food, telling her he wanted McDonald’s burgers and fries. She didn’t understand and I saw her wiping away tears when she turned her back on Joey. She was straight off the boat. That’s what he told me.
She knew two emotions: love and sorrow.
In a way, that was how it was with Joey, too. I didn’t see it so clearly when we were kids. I knew him all through elementary school and into high school, too. His parents had stopped insisting he accompany them to children’s parties by then, but they continued to embarrass him by the life they’d chosen.
They’d met in clown college. His mother was a newbie and his father about to graduate. Both had come to clowning, it turns out, the hard way. Joey’s mom had been born with a club foot and a botched operation left her unable to walk gracefully or with any sort of normal gait. She’d always felt awkward and obvious. For a shy girl, which she had been, it was a constant reminder of how different she was –deformed. You wouldn’t think choosing the life of a clown would solve her problem. You’d think it could only exacerbate it.
His dad had a physical problem, too. Something they call a cauliflower ear. That’s what boxers get from being hit on the side of the head too much and from what I’ve heard, that’s pretty much how Joey’s dad got his. Only he wasn’t a boxer.
Joey’s dad was a blustery guy, and though I know I’d seen him without his clown costume over the years, I cannot picture him out watering the shrubs or grilling hot dogs like everyone else’s dad in the neighborhood. The visions of Mr. and Mrs. Mayfield that most easily come to mind are the pair of them taking off for parties, dressed in costume, but with their colorful wigs shoved into their pockets, walking out the side door of their house to their compact car, each with a giant valise in hand. Joey’s mom would stop, run back in her clumsy way, and give her sullen son a hug. As he grew older, they’d let him stay alone at the house, and he’d dismissively wave them goodbye.
“Come on Pete, let’s go inside,” he’d say to me as soon as his parents were down the driveway. Inside, the house was a study in darks and lights. The walls all white, with dark furniture, a few dark paintings or prints of Old Masters of the studied variety. I remember one set in the woods with lounging men, women and animals and another dimly lit scene with grubby figures sitting around a table. A servant girl brings them platters of food. There were bookshelves filled to overflowing lining the walls, many of the titles in a foreign language I didn’t recognize.
From what I remember, his parents rarely went out when they weren’t working, never socialized with other parents in the neighborhood, didn’t understand coffee klatches and block parties. They pretty much kept to themselves. Since our back yards faced each other, I’d occasionally see my mom and his talking with each other at the imaginary boundary that separated the two properties. Once I saw them sitting together at our picnic table talking for a while. My mom reached across the table and gently placed her hand on top of Joey’s mom’s clasped hands. That was weird, but they were adults so I didn’t’ give it much thought.
Sometimes Joey’s parents went off to entertain at adult parties where they didn’t dress as clowns, but were nevertheless the hired act. I’d been to his house once or twice when the Mayfields were leaving for such a party and the striking glimpse of his mother’s legs sticking out from her long black coat, not lost in a billowy tuft of harlequin cotton, but gamely exposed in black fishnet stockings, left me dazed and speechless.
Part Two to follow.
To learn more and to purchase Beth Kalet’s book, Seven Stories, please click here. You may also contact Beth through Hummingbird by clicking here.
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