Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  An uninitiated observer might believe that this office was in the process of elaboration; that its sparseness was the product of transitional uncertainty. This was not the case, for it was finished, and Happy liked it this way. The room was fifteen feet square, its oak floorboards edged with inlaid walnut trim and largely covered by a Persian rug. The two front legs of her desk rested upon this rug, and upon the desk lay very little: a large calendar/blotter darkened by tight, angular handwriting; a cell-phone charger base with phone, to which a headset was attached by a thin black cord; a closed and dozing laptop computer the color and thickness of a slate shingle (the very kind of shingle that her crew would soon be affixing to the roof); and a yellow legal pad. The white walls were largely bare, save for some framed drawings to Happy’s right and a glass display case to her left. The drawings were her original sketches for Lilly and Sally, and the opening handwritten page of her manuscript for the book. The case contained dolls—not Happy Girls, not Pioneer Suzy or Padma of Delhi or Patriot Jane, War Orphan, but the original dolls that had inspired them. Ivy, of course, the first, her worth in dollars negligible, her sentimental value incalculable. She shared the space with a trio of masterpieces. A 14-inch Circle Dot Bru, with its silk French dress, woolen hair, and chipmunk cheeks—and, disturbingly, breasts. A Bébé Steiner, its thick eyebrows, curly mohair locks, and bulging paperweight eyes bizarrely offset by two rows of perfect, individually carved teeth. And the weirdly real Kammer and Reinhart character child, its rare glass eyes and pouty mouth seeming simultaneously to invite and ward off the hands of the upper-class German child who must once have owned her. There was something about the very finest dolls (these three, together, were worth sixty grand, easy) that inspired both affection and fear; that challenged as well as surrendered. These were the ones their owners could never part with, the ones a child would keep until death, the ones collectors lusted after at doll shows, on the internet, in trade magazines. They were as human as real children, their features as finely wrought as if by God. It was to that level of adoration, that of a mother’s for her child, which Happy aspired; she wanted to pierce the hearts of girls, ensnare them, wring from them every last drop of their devotion. She wanted to own their souls.

  There were more dolls, of course, thousands more, some in East Hampton and others in the city, in her apartment and in climate-controlled storage. But it wouldn’t be long before they were all together again, in a museum, here in Equinox, sharing their home with Happy’s Girls. This was part of the emerging plan. Equinox would be her Vatican, her Salt Lake, her Jerusalem. The faithful would flock here to worship, and Happy would be there to collect their offerings, let’s say ten dollars a head.

  Maybe fifteen.

  Arrangements had been made with her people in New York and New Jersey: she was now, officially, on a year’s sabbatical. On only the most vital questions would she be consulted; the company would be propelled by its own colossal momentum. She had been freed to do whatever she pleased. But here, in the office, despite the row of leaded windows thrown open to the wind-whipped lake and hills and sunless sky, she felt stifled. She had opened and closed her laptop several times, had written things on a pad and crossed them out. It would seem that her project lacked a starting point, a launchpad for her remaking of the town. She felt like she had the week after her wedding, newly committed to building a life, and provided with all the time in the world for building it. Then, she had languished—she had grown dissolute, and unhappy, and thick around the middle. She had wandered through years of marriage until she stumbled upon her future, and then had stepped into it, as if into a bejeweled and gilded carriage, and let it carry her along.

  And here it had stopped. It had delivered her to the magical kingdom, the kingdom of herself, and she had emerged only to discover that the kingdom had not yet been built.

  Well, the work of building it wasn’t going to be done on a computer or legal pad, was it! No, it was going to be done with her hands and feet, with guts and muscle. To make an omelet, you had to crack a few eggs—she would go into town, and get to work, the sculptress, gloved and goggled, chipping the first cool splinters from the marble.

  She rose, leaned out the window, and breathed in the roiling sky. She knew what to do—a town lived by its stomach. With a glance at her watch, she turned around and walked out the door.

  * * *

  Outside, swirling winds gathered up gum wrappers and cigarette butts from the sidewalk and whipped them into miniature twisters of detritus, before setting them down again to lodge against the curb or underneath a hedge. Thunder rumbled, pitched too low to detect its trajectory, and crows tumbled from tree to tree, seeking cover from the coming rain. It was the correct weather for August in a town like Equinox, which in its semi-dilapidation seemed always, even on sunny days, about to be rained on. Clouds raced behind half-shingled dormer and crooked turret, or appeared as reflections in cracked windows. Clapboards willingly gave up their curled and brittle paint, and tarpaper flapped under eaves. Happy schooned through it, her slacks rippling against her thighs, her hair swept back like a Viking’s. People ignored her as they passed, heading for their homes or cars.

  The village market was housed in a squat arts-and-crafts cottage that had been retrofitted with a big ugly display window, where nothing was displayed save for a pile of old newspapers, a mouse-chewed box of candy bars, and the tired woman who manned the counter. About as welcoming, Happy thought, as a pitchfork in the eye. Well, maybe it looked like the husk of an insect, some dried-up hornet or fly dead on a windowsill—but perhaps it was really a chrysalis, something drab and inert out of which a marvelous new life would soon unfold. She felt a surge of electricity as she gripped the aluminum door handle—was that the storm, or the crackle of excitement?—and threw open the door. A dangling bell-string clanged like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Happy stood a moment on the threshold, sniffing the air, casting her eyes to the corners of the room. Pressed tin ceiling, that was promising. And beneath her feet, worn pine boards, had to be two inches thick from the sound her tapping foot made against them. Everything else—the aluminum modular shelves, the framed faded posters of distant lands (Canada, enticed one, offering as encouragement a photograph of a horse in the foreground of a barren prairie), the smell of frozen things having gone off and then been frozen again, the cobwebs—all that would have to go.

  The old woman behind the counter had not looked up. Was she dead? “Excuse me.”

  Nope—up came the head, open came the eyes, much like the sleep-eyes dolls that filled Happy’s rooms in the city. “Mm?” the old woman croaked, reflexively brushing specks of imaginary dirt from a blue polyester dress yellowed (by age, not design) at the hems.

  “Do you own this store?” It was bad form to tap her foot, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “Nope,” the old woman said. She was looking at Happy, or at least facing in her direction, but there was something about those eyes: the irises the same blue as her dress, and yellowed at the edges, too: they lacked focus, or maybe were focused on some unexpected place, like the back wall, or the past, or a parallel universe. They were crazy eyes, is what they were—but the rest of this woman, the spotted skin and bony shoulders and turkey neck, were as dull and solid as a sack of moldy flour. Happy began to feel a familiar rage manifesting itself as a faint ache in the groin: the same thing she felt whenever confronted with anything inert, or ugly, or inscrutable. This woman was all three.

  Through gritted teeth, Happy said, “Is the owner here?”

  The woman glanced, with maddening slowness, over her right shoulder, where there stood a steel door, its scraped and gouged green paint partially obscured by an advertisement for Finland. “Was a minute ago…” she said.

  “And now?”

  Only a shrug.

  Okay, fine. Happy maneuvered herself around the counter, nearly upsetting a rotating display rack of plastic banana hair clips, and pounded on the door. She felt like an archaeologist on the thre
shold of the mummy’s tomb. It annoyed her, deeply, that the old woman hadn’t tried to stop her.

  From inside, a rustling, a scraping, a heavy tread. The door swung open. As soon as Happy saw the owner, she knew the battle was won. A shame, really; she’d hoped for a fight. It hardly seemed worth going through the motions now. The man who stood before her was little taller than she was, and half again as heavy; he had the blockish body that results from a five-Coke-a-day habit and a lifetime of indolence. His coarse gray hair drooped over a pitted forehead, and the eyes were brown and dull as bark. They regarded her from behind thick curtains of tired flesh, and thick black eyebrows—dyed? she wondered, and if so, why?—dove into the furrows between them, in hostile curiosity. Happy said, “Mister…?”

  “Pell.”

  “Mr. Pell, so pleased to meet you, I’m Happy Masters.”

  No reaction. Well, that was no surprise; he could hardly have been expected to produce daughters. She went on, eliding the awkward pause so skillfully that even a careful eavesdropper might not have been sure it was ever there.

  “Mr. Pell, may I speak to you in private for a moment?”

  The eyebrows rose, lowered. He shrugged, as if in parody of his counter clerk, and turned toward his chair, a swiveling antique that stood before a crooked chipboard desk. Happy followed. The windowless room was eight feet square, most of which was taken up by towering stacks of paper. It was murky, illuminated only by a single ceiling bulb, and the air was close and putrid. Mr. Pell sat with a grunt, and regarded Happy from below. There were no other chairs in the room. The steel door snicked shut behind her, and a switch was flipped in her head. She was different now: relentless, glib, incontrovertible: Homo hardsellius.

  “Mr. Pell, let me get straight to the point. I want to buy your store. Today.”

  “Not for sale,” he said, but a hint of life crept into those hooded eyes.

  “You could be on your way home, right now, with a check in your hand. You could, in fact, be on your way out of town. Winter will be here soon, Mr. Pell. You could be on Maui by the end of the week.”

  “Where?” he muttered.

  “Hawaii, sir. Or wherever you like.” Finland, maybe, or Canada. Gotta hurry this up—it was like doing business in a doghouse. “Mr. Pell, I would like you to retire today. I would like these to be the last moments you spend in this store. I would like to remove the burden of this property from your hands, right now. What would it take to make this happen?” There. She waited.

  He stared at her. The eyebrows again dipped toward the nose, the horrible misshapen nose, like compass points toward some chunk of magnetic ore. He was trying to stop it, but he couldn’t: a small smile clearly was working at the corner of the fleshy mouth. Happy did not attempt to conceal her own smile. Gotcha, she thought.

  Fifteen minutes later Mr. Pell emerged from his office carrying a navy blue sport coat, a travel mug, a snow globe, a shoehorn, and a small rectangle of paper. A bystander might have noticed him exchange a glance with his clerk—dismissive and faintly remorseful on his part, idly curious on hers—but this bystander would have had to possess near-superhuman powers of perception. Anyway, there was no bystander. There was only the clerk, and, in the office, Happy Masters, who could be heard to draw and release a long, thoughtful breath. There was the sound of drawers being opened and closed, and then a grunt of satisfaction, and then a series of squeaks, accompanied by the astringent scent of a magic marker. A pause was followed by Happy’s brisk emergence from the office and a quick turn around the store. “Aha!” came her voice, and then the noise of masking tape being peeled and torn from its roll. This caught the clerk’s attention. Was that woman stealing tape? Perhaps this had something to do with Mr. Pell’s dramatic exit—what was happening here? She sat up straight, her vertebrae cackling like thrown dice.

  Happy went to the door and taped her sign to the glass. From inside the store, the words could be read in reverse:

  CLOSED

  FOR

  RENOVATIONS

  Then she opened the door and held it that way. As if in response, the clouds cracked open and a bolt of lightning set the sky ablaze. A drop fell, and another, and then the rain bucketed down upon the sidewalk and bounced and spattered through the doorway and onto the filthy floor. Happy glared at the old woman, and the old woman glared milkily back.

  “Lettin’ in the wet,” the old woman said.

  “You’re fired,” Happy replied.

  3. Too precious for words

  Dave Dryer met Happy Masters a couple of days later. He’d been anticipating her. It had got around pretty quick that she had bought the market, and had thrown old Glenda out on her ass; the old lady had been seen wandering around in the park, muttering curses to herself and shouting at trees. The talk at the local bar was that there was more to come, that she’d be looking for sellouts, and everybody wondered who was going to be next. Dave heard all of the talk at the local bar because he owned it. It was called the Goodbye Goose, and he had bought it, at the age of twenty-five, with the money he’d inherited when his mother died. His parents had been farmers, but they’d earned themselves a little nest egg by inventing The Repeller, a device that would keep geese from hanging around in your yard. This was a problem in Equinox—geese lived near the lake all winter, and made a racket mornings, and shat all over everything. The Repeller detected their presence and then scared them half to death with a weird, piercing, science-fiction howl, generated by the scavenged parts of a synthesizer Dave had used to play in a shitty local band.

  Of course the sound bothered people, too, just as it had when it was coming out of Dave’s amplifier. But it bothered a lot of people less than the geese did, so an agricultural products company bought the rights to the design. As it happened, they went out of business, and Repeller never went into production. But the money, and some proceeds from the sale of his parents’ place on the hill, went to Dave, and Dave used it to buy this building—a three-story brick townhouse with a defunct tavern on the ground floor. Dave reopened the bar and fixed up the rest of the place to live in, and he’d been living in it for four years.

  Nothing much had changed in that time, in the bar, in the town, in his life. He’d quit drinking, that was one thing. He’d never done anything drunk that he was glad about later, and anyway alcohol was his business now. He had also quit fucking college girls a couple years back. He was too old for it and had begun to get a reputation, which now was in the process of attrition. In addition he’d lost some hair and had taken some business classes at the community college to supplement his completely worthless liberal arts degree from Nestor College, down at the southern end of the lake. His parents, having failed to live off the land, had wanted to get him educated and out of Equinox. Instead they were the ones who left—the town, and this life. If there was a heaven, he supposed they deserved to be in it—they had been good and loving parents—but in his opinion there wasn’t one. The whole idea was too precious for words.

  And so the arrival of Happy Masters, who people said was some kind of toy tycoon, was supposed to be a big deal. There had already been a fist fight about her—two brothers who owned the stone quarry up on the hill had argued about whether or not they should sell, should she get around to making them an offer. And people in the bar had started taking sides. By and large the locals liked the idea—rumor had it Ken Pell had gotten more than a hundred grand for the market, which was probably three times what it was worth, and there were plenty of Equinoxians who would stab their own sisters for that kind of money. College people, on the other hand—professors—said they’d never sell. They liked Equinox because it was quaint and cheap and on the lake. They liked authenticity, which evidently meant hicks and greasers, and they disliked the rich, a category they apparently excused themselves from.

  Locals, though: they liked the idea of some bigwig moving into town. They liked somebody spreading money around. They thought it would help.

  In Dave’s experience, however, rich
people weren’t too interested in helping. Not that he, Dave, was; but he couldn’t help even if he wanted to. His inheritance was tied up in his so-called education and three stories of old bricks, and he barely broke even every year. No, rich people—he’d met a few in college—had basically one priority, and that was not turning into poor people. He could hardly blame them. There was no reason to expect anything different out of Happy Masters.

  Still, he was surprised to see her on Thursday afternoon. The students weren’t due back until the weekend, and so the bar was empty, except for a couple of old men sleeping in separate corners, one with his head against a video game, the other face down on a table. He first noticed her approaching on the sidewalk, a busty little thing of around fifty, trying hard to look thirty with an efficient, angular haircut, a pair of white clamdiggers, a short-sleeved sweater and a pair of white tennis shoes. You wouldn’t call her beautiful; you would call her cute. She paused about twenty-five feet from the bar, and then, never taking her eyes from the building, stalked a slow circle around it, through the weeds, across the parking lot, along the red-painted plank fence, and back to the sidewalk, appearing, from Dave’s vantage point, in one dirt-streaked, smoke-tinted window after another. If she’d been a man, he would have assumed she was plotting how to rob him. Instead, back on the sidewalk, she appeared to make up her mind about something. She nodded to herself with a sharp jerk of the head, climbed the steps and passed through the open door.

  “Nice place,” she said.