Best to Laugh: A Novel

by Lorna Landvik

  “He was?”

  “Yeah, he hated the war, and he thought Johnson was finally wising up and would have gotten us out a lot earlier.” Jim took a deep, final toke of the joint. “When I got drafted, he gave me his lucky Indian head penny. The one he carried all through Korea.”

  I felt like we were talking about someone I’d never met and when I told him it was the three-month anniversary of my dad dying, he said we had to go to Fort Snelling, stat, and pay our respects. So we drove out by the airport to the cemetery, which is HUGE and filled with row after row of white headstones that seem to go on forever. First we stopped at the grave of one of Jim’s friends, and he knelt down, his hands running over the engraving like he was reading Braille. The date made me feel like my lungs weren’t working: 1949–1968.

  A plane roared overheard and I wondered if from way up high, all those tombstones in all those lines looked like dominoes, and if you flicked them with a finger they’d all fall down.

  My dad’s grave didn’t have its permanent marble headstone yet—more unfinished business—and Jim put his arm around me as we squatted in front of it and I bawled like a baby.

  “Life’s a bitch, Candy,” he said, and then he was crying.

  I feel like I don’t know anything.

  11/19/73

  Dear Cal,

  Mrs. Freeburg cornered me in the hallway today and said auditions were being held for Hello Dolly and I’d be perfect for the lead role. I said I’d think about it just so she’d leave me alone, and she said, “Candy, you’re one of the most talented students I’ve ever worked with. I want you back onstage. It’ll be good for you.”

  Instead of going to Chemistry, I sat in a bathroom stall for all of second period, but not to play over and over those words about me being so talented. The reason I locked myself in the can is that I drank so much this weekend I still felt a little sick. Sick enough to barf twice.

  3/5/74

  Dear Cal,

  Big college tour today . . . and thanks to the WORST tour guide ever, I hate my life even more.

  6/15/74

  Dear Cal,

  Shit! This is the second time I’ve asked the question: am I still a virgin? All I know is that I woke up in Bryan Emery’s basement with some of my clothes on and some not and a vague memory of rolling around with a guy who smelled like pot and Slim Jims. Karen was the only one still there—where’d everyone else go?—and she had less clothes on than me.

  “Man, were you wasted,” she said.

  “Like you weren’t,” I said, pulling a squished chunk of Slim Jim out of my hair.

  “Eww,” said Karen as we gathered up our stuff. “Is that what I think it is?”

  We both stood looking at the used rubber.

  “I hope it’s from the guy I was with,” I said.

  “Same here,” said Karen.

  They went on and on to an embarrassing degree, the entries recounting my dissolute ways, and I felt sorry and angry at the girl who wrote them. I stopped reading before I got to my college calendaeiums, knowing they were mostly a robotic rundown of grades and assignments with the occasional review of a theater department show I should have tried out for, but didn’t.

  Shoving back under the bed the box of notebooks that proved I was eligible for citizenship in Loserville, I trudged upstairs.

  “Listless” would have been an overenthusiastic description of my mood, and after making the huge physical effort of turning on the television, I collapsed onto that on which I was collapsing a lot lately—the couch.

  Ignoring the sweet June day outside, I watched a soap opera in which two well-groomed lovers frolicked on picnic grounds while the spurned, well-groomed former boyfriend lurked in the bushes, flashing his well-groomed senator grandfather’s pistol. I watched another soap opera in which a well-groomed wedding couple took their vows, while the spurned, well-groomed girlfriend stole away in the backseat of the bridal couple’s festively decorated car.

  “Now that’s what I call a honeymoon surprise,” I muttered.

  Interrupting the stories of these philandering, violent, but always well-groomed characters were the deodorant, toilet paper, and floor wax commercials, and I was watching Mr. Whipple squeeze the Charmin when something fluttered onto my lap. It was a ticket.

  “It’s for Heidi Wheaton,” said my grandmother, standing behind the couch. “We’re seeing her tonight.”

  My postcollege social life had whittled away to nothing, and I could tell from her expression that she was waiting for me to resist her invitation.

  Not having the energy, I said, “Fine.”

  “Because if you say, ‘No,’” she began, “. . . oh, okay. Good.”

  We took the bus to the State Theater to see the woman whose publicity trumpeted her as “the funniest woman on the planet!”

  Heidi Wheaton had been the breakaway star on Yuk It Up!, a comedy sketch show, and her ability to play anything from an addled rocket scientist to a larcenous babysitter had won her two Emmys and a wide fan base.

  In our velveteen seats, my grandmother and I sat back in the dark theater and for two hours I forgot how bad I felt about my life. We laughed and nudged one another as Heidi reprised her Yuk It Up! characters and introduced us to several new ones.

  Cool Old MacDonald was a jazz singer whose skat singing involved oinks, moos, and meows. Dottie Dunn was an Avon Lady who needed a little bump—or two—of Johnny Walker Red to give her sales pitch confidence.

  Guptula was an East Indian yogi who claimed to have the secret of life.

  After arranging herself in a cross-legged seated position, Heidi put her hands on her knees, palms up and with her eyes closed, took several deep and exaggerated breaths.

  “You must carefully choose a power mantra,” she said in a singsong voice. She opened her eyes, now slightly crossed. “The magic words that will be your guide and compass, your life saber—and no, all you Star Wars fans, I did not say ‘light saber’ but ‘life saber’ because it is exactly that, something used to slash away that which prevents you from getting your deepest desires. My life saber is—”

  Here she quickly said a word that sounded like maykmyneahdubbahl. She said it again, then repeated it so we understood it was Make mine a double.

  Big yuks from the audience.

  “Of course, your power mantra must be a secret,” Guptula counseled. “I can tell you mine only because I am more enlightened than you poor Midwestern yahoos could ever hope to be.”

  I laughed more than I had in a long time, but this wasn’t enough for my grandmother.

  “Come on,” she said, as the theater emptied of its happy, sated audience. “We’re going backstage.”

  Grandma was a polite and unassuming person, and that she steered me toward an usher standing by the stage and said, “We’d like to say hello to Miss Wheaton,” did nothing less than boggle my mind.

  “Uh, does she know you?” asked the usher, a pimply young man who wore a macramé headband around his forehead to contain a cascade of blond curls.

  “Of course she does,” said my grandmother, pulling me up the stairs. “And by the way, I absolutely love your hair.”

  The compliment softened whatever barricades the usher might have put up, and in no time my grandmother and I were behind the curtain.

  “Miss Wheaton!” barked my grandmother, as if she were the producer of the show, and the stagehand could do nothing but point.

  We followed his finger down a hallway and stood in line with a dozen people. When Heidi Wheaton and another woman emerged from her dressing room and saw us, the comedian whose features were naturally doleful looked even more miserable, promptly turning the other way. The woman with her laughed and taking the comic by the shoulders spun her around to face us.

  “I had fifty people waiting for me backstage in Portland,” the actress whined, “and this is all you can scrounge up?”

  She didn’t seem thrilled to go down the reception line, but she did, offering a tired smile as peopl
e thanked her for a magical evening, telling her they didn’t know when they’d laughed so hard, etc. After she had signed an autograph for a radio deejay, she shook hands with my grandmother, who said, “Miss Wheaton! My granddaughter here is just as funny as you are! Any advice you can give her?”

  “Yeah,” she said in a monotone. “Life’s a shit sandwich. So only eat the bread.”

  MY GRANDMOTHER FUMED as we walked to the bus stop.

  “What kind of advice was that? Honestly, I didn’t expect her to be so crude. Yes sir, Miss Heidi Wheaton has lost a little luster in my book! Would it have killed her to tell you something a little more sensible?”

  “I still can’t believe you said that to her! That I was just as funny as she was!” Feeling almost tipsy from all the laughing I’d done, I laughed again.

  “Well, you are—when you want to be!” She tucked her hand in the crook of my arm. “Oh, Candy, remember all those nights we’d watch Johnny Carson and you’d put on your own little show for me, all those times when you told me that when you grew up, you wanted to make people laugh?”

  “Grandma,” I said, my spirits taking a dive. “I . . . I was just a kid then.”

  After extending his Happy Hour into Sloppy Hour, a man in a rumpled suit and skewed tie stumbled past us, and my grandmother shook her head at the spectacle.

  “And all those school plays and talent shows, oh kid, when you’d steal every scene you were in! And Candy, did I tell you—I just read about this tavern in St. Paul that started hosting comedy nights, and I think you should go down there and—”

  “Oh, Grandma, I—”

  “—I don’t have to tell you how proud I am of all the hard work you put in at the U—good heavens, graduating early!—but now that you’ve got a degree, well, maybe it’s time to finally indulge your old dreams a bit.”

  Torn between telling her to shut up and bursting into tears, I pressed my lips tight so I couldn’t do either, and as we waited for the bus I seethed with anger and resentment that my grandma dare bring up my old dreams—dreams I didn’t dare bring up myself.

  THE THING is, Heidi Wheaton’s advice had a profound influence on me. Not right away, and not the stuff about the shit sandwich, which, as far as pithy sayings go, didn’t strike me as all that pithy. But weeks later, on a stormy summer’s night that brought me to a crossroads of terror and absurdity, it seemed only fitting that Guptula, her yogi character, appeared in my head along with the words that would be my own secret power mantra, my life saber. And when Charlotte’s apartment offer came just days later—well, like I said, it’s all about timing. Time, as my cousin had said, to get a life.

  WHILE HOLLYWOOD THROBBED with Friday night energy, I cocooned myself in that pool, in competition with nothing but my own pleasure, swimming back and forth, back and forth, each somersault turn launching me, in an explosion of bubbles, toward the other side. Dolphins understand the mood-brightening effects of a playful swim—you can’t fake smiles like that—but my buoyancy was more than physical.

  I had gone from a life so stuck that sorting my sock drawer qualified as excitement and accomplishment to moving into a Hollywood Boulevard apartment and mock sword fighting with its handsome building manager. I’d turned into such a hermit that the surprise was I hadn’t grown a full beard and a preference for flannel shirts, yet in one afternoon I had met more than a dozen people, at least one who already felt like a friend.

  Not wanting to snort water up my nose, I had to force myself not to laugh as I did another flip turn. I knew of course that I was in a confined space, a tiled rectangle, but it was the craziest thing—I felt as if a tether had been cut, and I was swimming without boundaries.

  8

  IN AN OFFICE BUILDING ON HIGHLAND AVENUE, I asked the temp agent if she were named after Zelda Fitzgerald.

  “Nope. Zelda Kleinman, my mother’s best friend. Although I do have an uncle who worked on the Paramount lot the same time as F. Scott Fitzgerald did. He said they went out for drinks a couple times.”

  “Your uncle went out for drinks with F. Scott Fitzgerald? I love F. Scott Fitzgerald! He could make a whole poem out of one sentence.”

  Zelda shrugged. “I prefer less poetry and a little more connection to the characters.”

  I knew a good debate didn’t have room for personal attacks so I restrained myself from asking aloud, Are you crazy? and we proceeded to have a nice conversation about books before the temp agent was reminded by her secretary that her 3:20 was waiting.

  “I like to send smart people to my clients,” said Zelda, clicking her pen like a detonator. “Ergo, I think you’ll do just fine by us.” She looked at the calendar that was spread across her desk like a giant place mat. “I don’t have anything at the moment, but when I do you’ll hear from me.”

  Chip, my next interviewer, declared me “impressive.” The contestant coordinator of Word Wise, he offset his boyish freckled face by dressing like the tenor in a barbershop quartet, in a bow tie and suspenders, his red hair slicked back and shiny.

  “You got a perfect score on the general knowledge test,” Chip said, peering at me through his horn-rimmed glasses. “That’s something of a rarity, even with our caliber of contestants.”

  I smiled modestly, not about to explain that I had the opposite of test anxiety, and that anytime anyone gave me a pencil and a time limit, I was in heaven.

  “Word Wise prides itself on its erudition,” he continued. “Anyone can play Password or Pyramid or Wheel of Fortune—he practically spat out these last three words—“but it takes erudition to play Word Wise.”

  I smiled, sucking in my cheeks and lowering one eyebrow in an attempt to look erudite.

  “Now, we certainly don’t frown on ‘bubbly,’” he said. “After all, we don’t want the viewing audience to fall asleep. But we don’t insist our contestants jump up and down like maniacs, either. Just show genuine enthusiasm.”

  “I can be genuinely enthusiastic.”

  “I believe you can,” said Chip, marking a little check on the paper in front of him. “And your Orien—your Asian angle’s a good one. We don’t get a lot of Asians.”

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, Zelda phoned to tell me she had placed me at Beat Street Records for an “open-ended assignment” beginning the following week and Chip called to tell me I had made the Word Wise cut and was to report for taping on Saturday morning. There was no one at the pool to share my good news with except Robert X. Roberts and June, both of whom had surrendered to the arms of Morpheus; the Variety over Mr. Roberts’s face fluttering as he snored and Binky the brown-teared dog guarding June from his perch in a hot pink tote bag. I celebrated by swimming forty laps.

  The buildings of Peyton Hall—mostly stuccoed and green-shuttered four-plexes—formed a rectangular perimeter, open at the front on the Hollywood Boulevard side. Walking back from the pool, I usually took the sidewalk flanking the east buildings and then turned down the front walk to my four-plex, but being that I was now a person who sought out adventure, I occasionally walked past the big pillared brick building in the center back and made a loop around the buildings on the west side. Taking this route now, I passed a dense rectangle of shrubbery and promptly ran into an old lady.

  “Oof!” she said as we collided.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said as she staggered back into the shrubbery, dropping her woven string bag.

  Dressed like the matriarch of some Eastern European gypsy caravan, the woman peered at me from her perch in the greenery.

  “Here, let me help you,” I said, reaching for her.

  “Bah,” she said, waving me off, and when she was fully vertical she brushed off the sleeves exposed under her cape.

  “I didn’t see you!” I said. “It seemed like you just popped out on the sidewalk and—”

  The woman nodded her head toward the string grocery bag.

  “You will carry that for me,” she said in an accent thick as borscht. “Yes?”

  “Of course,” I said, and
after picking it up I turned to follow the woman who was already motoring down the path, her skirt swishing it like a broom.

  I had figured the old gypsy I had collided with had to be Madame Pepper even before we passed the gargoyle planter and crossed her threshold with the Welcome? mat, and when she took the string bag from me, I stood awkwardly on the small woven rag rug that served as her foyer, wondering if I’d been invited in or dismissed.

  It was jarring to step out of the light of a summer evening and into the gloomy glamour of what looked like an Old World apartment with accents provided by an addled Hollywood set designer. The furniture reflected no decorating trends popular within the past century, and even in the worst of circumstances Scarlett O’Hara would never have deigned to make a dress out of the heavy velvet curtains that hung over the parlor windows, brown and nappy as the backside of a flea-bitten bison. Dozens of autographed 8 x 10s of old film stars crowded the walls so that only glimpses of the tropical wallpaper were visible underneath; a palm frond unfurled like a magic carpet underneath a picture of Joan Crawford sitting on Franchot Tone’s lap; pineapple leaves formed a spiky tiara from the top of Norma Shearer’s head.

  “Why don’t you go home?” came the old woman’s voice from the kitchen. Having been given my answer—I was being dismissed—I turned toward the door.

  “Get some clothes on, and when you come back I will have tea made.”

  “Okay!” I said brightly, adjusting the towel I wore like a shift. I wasn’t being banished after all.

  “I HOPE YOU LIKE BLACK BREAD,” said the old woman, setting a silver coffee service on the table in front of the horsehair sofa. “Black bread and tea with honey—is good for what ails you.”

  Glenn Miller was playing on the console record player but at a volume so low that “String of Pearls” seemed less a jaunty dance tune than a tease. In a narrow gold vase on top of the upright piano, a stick of incense unfurled a scent that managed to smell both musty and sweet.

  “Zo,” said the woman, touching the knot of her beaded shawl. “I am of course Madame Pepper and you are the girl who was wanting to borrow a cup of sugar, yes?”