Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

“Same to you.” He meant the renovated Framdsen house, which everyone had been ogling as they drove out of town.

  She replied, without irony, “Thanks, it isn’t bad. Still needs work. Happy Masters.” She stuck out a pale, soft hand. Dave took it. His long fingers, extending past her palm, brushed a gold link bracelet that had likely cost more than his truck.

  He said, “What’ll it be, Mrs. Masters?”

  “Happy, please. Do you have chablis?” Though her tone implied, Have you heard of chablis?

  “This okay?” he said, reaching back to pick a bottle from a shelf behind the bar.

  “Got ice?”

  He nodded.

  “It’ll do.”

  He prepared the drink and put it before her. “Start a tab?” he said.

  “Thanks, yes. What’s your name?”

  “Dave Dryer.”

  Why, stating his name, did he feel as if he’d done something terrible—that some irreparable damage had been done to his eternal soul? He’d just got done mentally dissing heaven, why should he care about any such thing? And yet he did. It was her face: there was something wrong with it, a kind of frightening symmetry that looked like something had been broken and then meticulously repaired. When she asked the next question, her voice was neither deep nor rough, but was whiskey-smooth. It burned, in a good way. He had to admit he liked it.

  “Are you from around here?” is what she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d your parents do?”

  He waited a beat before saying, “Die.” That threw her, though not as far as he might have liked. That beautifully rehabilitated face obscured her discomfort with professional swiftness, and she replied with the careful calm of a shrink.

  “Mine too. In a car crash on Christmas Eve. I was six.”

  “Mine in 2001,” Dave said, though his father had checked out a couple years before then. He didn’t want to get into that, though. “That’s when I bought the bar.”

  “Nice building.”

  “Yeah, you said.”

  Now she drew back an inch or two, self-consciously, letting him see her do it, letting him get a load of her boobs. He went ahead and looked at them. She nodded a little, closed one eye half-way. A single dry chuckle escaped her lips and she sipped her wine, leaving not a trace of the lipstick she wore, as if it were permanently bonded to her mouth. She said, “Hmmph.”

  His back cracked audibly as he stood straight, lifting his hands from the bar. “What.”

  “Doesn’t look like I’m going to get anything past you.”

  “Whaddya mean, Mrs. Masters?”

  “Happy. I mean, you know why I’m here.”

  “A burning desire,” he said, “for some chablis. On the rocks.”

  “I have designs on this town.”

  “So I hear.”

  “And your bar,” she said, swirling the ice in her glass, “is in this town.”

  “And you are in my bar.”

  She giggled, and he might have believed that it was real—that Happy Masters genuinely found this entire conversation a little bit awkward and a little bit sexy and a little bit embarrassing. “Well,” she said, “what do you say? Interested in selling?”

  “I don’t think so, Miz Masters.”

  She opened her mouth to say her name, again, but shut it before the word emerged.

  “No?” she said finally.

  “I like it here. I like Equinox the way it is.” Though was that true? Did Dave Dryer really like his home town? The place where his mother was eaten from the inside, and his father, his gentle father, with his wry smile and missing finger and cowlick that arced above his head like a halo, shot himself in the chest? In point of fact Dave didn’t like his town, didn’t like the college or the townies or even his bar, very much at all. Which is not to say he was eager to give it up.

  Happy Masters nodded. She downed her wine, hoisted her handbag onto the bartop, and rummaged in it for a pencil and notepad. She wrote something, tore off the page, folded it in half, and handed it to Dave Dryer. “That’s where we are right now,” she said, sliding down off the stool. “Every day you wait, Mister Dryer”—she gave her lips a little lick—“you can subtract a thousand dollars. Wait too long, and you can just cross out the entire thing.”

  As she left, her ass amply twitching underneath her pants, he felt a twinge, almost an itch, in the back of his throat, and it crept up and under his tongue and spread, with sinister gentleness, into the full breadth of his jaw. The itch unfolded into an ache, and the ache into a brilliant and stabbing pain, and he reached under the counter for the bottle of ibuprofen he had stashed there, and downed three of them in one waterless gulp. Then he took another, for good measure.

  * * *

  “Who the fuck is that?” Jennifer Treisman inquired of her husband, Bud, at around noon the following day. They sat in frayed aluminum-frame lawn chairs in the parking lot of Ice Cream & Gas, the business they owned together on the northern edge of Equinox, reading auto magazines during what Bud had called a “cigarette break.” Jennifer was indeed smoking. Bud had quit, but his mouth worried at an unlit Camel Wide.

  Everything about this bothered Jennifer. To her recollection Bud had never liked smoking, he only started because of her, and he only ever did it every couple of days. And she didn’t take cigarette “breaks.” She just smoked incessantly. If anything, she took cigarettelessness breaks, like when she was eating or sleeping or taking a shower.

  Bud, on the other hand, had been hopelessly passive-aggressive about the whole thing. He’d taken up the habit only in the most tentative and fearful manner, and every time he smoked one he used to get a horrible grimace on his face, and slowly shook his head, as if wondering how Jennifer managed to endure it. And now he couldn’t even pretend to smoke right, he kept taking the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and gazing at it in puzzled disgust, as if somebody had slipped it in between his lips while he was napping. The signals were subtle, but Jennifer was highly attuned to Bud’s nuances. Bud was all nuance, actually. He drove her batshit.

  “Who the heck is who?” he asked now.

  She said, “That chick there, and I said who the fuck, Bud, not who the heck.”

  “Oh, I know. I just didn’t want to say that.”

  “Yeah well you didn’t have to put ‘heck’ in there, didya? You could have just said ‘Who?’ and I would have just said ‘her’ and pointed, but instead you forced me to say fuck again. And now again. ‘Fuck.’”

  “Aw, c’mon, Jenny.” That’s what he said when you pushed him to the limit.

  “Don’t aw c’mon Jenny me, man.”

  “That’s not a chick, though. That’s a lady.”

  “A lady? You mean like me?”

  “No. I mean yes.” He frowned.

  “Uh huh.”

  “She’s coming here, though.”

  “So I guess we’ll find out who the fuck she is.”

  His only answer was to wriggle deeper into his chair, remove the unlit cigarette from his mouth, and turn it around in his hand.

  Jennifer and Bud were both thirty-something, but Jennifer had a bit more something than Bud. They had two kids, who at this moment were at school. Vince was ten and Buddy was six. Jennifer had no idea how any of it had happened. She had never regarded herself as the marrying kind, and still didn’t. Years ago, when Bud had wanted to shack up—actually, Eugene was his name at the time, still was in fact, but it had not felt right on her lips and so she started calling him Bud—she said, “I’m not gonna cook anything, I’m not gonna clean anything, and I’m not gonna empty out my ashtrays every day.” The words, intended to frighten, in fact seemed to please him. “Okay, sure,” he said. This was another phrase of Bud’s. “Okay, sure.” “Aw, c’mon.” “Aw, geez.”

  When, after about a year of unwashed dishes, bald jokes, and infrequent sex, he proposed marriage to her, she said, “Look, Bud, thanks but no thanks.” His response was, “Aw, c’mon, Jenny.”

  “I’
m not going to marry somebody who calls me that.”

  “How about Hon?”

  “Jennifer. And you don’t gotta call me anything because I’m not marrying you.”

  He grinned a placid little grin and later that night, when she was asleep, he put an engagement ring on her hand. In the morning she got up—he’d left for work at the lumberyard—and took off the ring and threw it across the room. But then she felt remorseful and put it back on. Next time she saw him she was wearing it, and then he went and planned a wedding. She never did agree to it. She had the damned thing on right now, next to her wedding ring, and twelve years and two kids later she still hadn’t agreed to any of it.

  The lady or chick in question was walking across their parking lot now, her arms swinging at her sides, her chest stuck out like a pigeon’s. She didn’t look like anybody who would live in Equinox. She could be a college parent, but they weren’t due until the weekend. Maybe she was lost. Or insane.

  Then they figured it out. “Oh,” said Bud.

  “Her,” said Jennifer.

  It was the new woman. The rich one. Things had been said about her. She was from the city. She had bought the house the rich guy had lived in, or almost lived in, and the rich people before him. She bought the market, too. She made dolls for girls.

  Big whoop, was Jennifer’s reaction. She was glad they hadn’t had girls; dolls had never been her thing. Hunting and fishing had been her thing. She’d used to go with her dad, back when she and her dad were speaking. These days, smoking was her thing. Smoking and not being impressed with other people.

  Happy Masters was supposed to be her name. Now she stood before them as if presenting herself at last, as if they had been waiting. Her slacks hugged full and voluptuous thighs and ankles, her blouse revealed cleavage that appeared sculpted by mammary professionals. Straight white teeth as bleached as old bones accentuated a cherry-lipsticked mouth. What the hell did she want?

  “Hi?” Bud asked.

  “Well, hello!” The voice was a practiced tenor that gilded every syllable. “I’m Happy Masters!”

  Jennifer would have liked to wait—to simply stare at her, wear her down, watch the smile dissolve into the face and disappear. But she knew Bud wouldn’t go along, he’d have to open his mouth again. “And what does Happy Masters want?” she was forced to say.

  The smile didn’t waver; she transferred it to Jennifer with practiced ease and it mutated into a smirk. “Happy Masters,” she said, “wants to meet the neighbors.”

  “Don’t you live on the other end of town?”

  “We are still neighbors.”

  “Well,” Bud said, shifting in his seat, “welcome to the neighborhood.”

  It was with evident relief that she turned her attention back to Bud. “Thank you. Now, the sign says Ice Cream and Gas. How about some ice cream?”

  “Okey doke,” Bud said, getting to his feet, and then Jennifer saw Happy’s eyes flash over his shoulder: a look of appraisal, of the gas station, with its drooping gutters and filthy windows and grease-stained collection of oil bottles and metal advertising signs for products discontinued long ago; of the ice cream stand, the little eight-sided kiosk, its shingles faded half to gray and dissolving into little dusty piles on the cement. A look of appraisal, but something else too, something animal and sinister and ravenous, as if this chubby little woman might open up that big fat red mouth and swallow it all, the station, the kiosk, and Bud and Jennifer along with it. It was a predator’s look: the level gaze, the crease above the nose; the lips tightened, moistened. The gaze of the housecat, civilized by years of breeding, of stroking and combing and food from a can, as it stalks through the weeds, closing in on a chipmunk.

  She watched Happy walk in a cowboy roll across the cracked and weedy pavement, and she spoke without speaking, moving her lips in a silent promise: You ain’t gettin’ nothin’, bitch.

  * * *

  That night; everyone in the bar seemed to have crossed her path. A couple of farmers had seen her shaking hands with Ed Huber at the hardware; Jennifer Triesman had told her tale. Something was afoot: the rich lady from the city wasn’t just stopping at buying the market. She was doing some heavy acquisition. It was with considerable pride that Dave told of his own encounter, and his rejection of her offer. He put on his townie voice and said, “She came in here, waggled her tits in my face, and then left without paying. Why should I give her what she wants?”

  “Right on,” said Jennifer, who had no tits to speak of and a hundred dollars on her tab. Their eyes met and in no uncertain terms conveyed the sad sentiment that it was better to make an asshole miserable and be miserable yourself than for both of you to be happy. It was a time-honored philosophy, and one that small towns had been putting to work for millennia. Dave poured her another one on the house.

  The night took a weird turn, though, when Glenda Parsons entered the bar. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but had traditionally come hobbling in on her birthday every year to demand a free shot of whiskey. She seemed to have a birthday every few months, but Dave always served her—she undercharged him at the market out of malice for her sweaty little toad of a boss. Her body seemed bent, wracked by rage, and her gray hands were formed into fists scarcely larger than walnuts. Her eyes, always unsettling, now wheeled in their sockets like marbles in a pan, and her once-quiet voice shattered the commotion of the bar.

  “She’s out to kill ya all!” the old woman cried, and there was no doubt, when silence fell, who she was talking about.

  “Hey, Glenda,” Dave said, reaching for the Wild Turkey. “Is it your birthday today?”

  “No more birthdays!” Glenda shouted, and though she had long been regarded as mad, there was a growing sense inside the Goodbye Goose that her lunacy had crossed some line. Everyone had enjoyed her occasional appearance as a local eccentric. But genuine suffering was not a welcome sight. People stared into their drinks.

  “You just watch!” she went on, shaking her arms in the air. Her filthy dress, dampened by rain, clung to her bones and her hair stood out in all directions. “She’ll buy yer souls and then burn yer bodies to ashes!”

  A couple by the door slinked out. Someone headed for the bathroom.

  “Hey, Glenda,” Dave said, coming out from behind the bar. “Sit down. Relax, have a drink.”

  “Don’t want a drink!” she exclaimed, and she jerked away from Dave’s touch. “Hands off! I just come to warn you. You won’t see me around here no more.” And she began to make her awkward way toward the door.

  “How come?” Dave asked. “Where are you going?”

  But there was no answer, and the door swung shut behind her.

  * * *

  Happy, on the other hand, had an excellent day. By its end she had bought, or arranged to buy, the hair salon and hardware store. The old geezer behind the hardware counter had actually stepped around it to greet her; he said yes to her first offer, which was about twenty grand lower than it would have been if he’d offered any resistance. The fat ladies in the hair salon nearly pissed themselves giggling when they accepted her check. Dave Dryer could only hold out so long, and she’d cozied up to the gas station guy, if not his bitchy ball-and-chain.

  But she would get to it all later. For now: pleasure. Her wine, chilled to the very border of freezing, stood upon a little mosaic table beside the enormous ball-and-claw bathtub she had had restored and in which she now lounged, hot and wet; its sides were sky blue, its feet a honeyed gold, its pieds d’or. Candles (jasmine-scented, imported from Provence) burned on the washstand; gentle music (a bit of Celtic harp) trickled through speakers recessed in the ceiling. Those had been the innovation of the internet mogul, the humiliated young turk whose ghost she imagined haunting these rooms, silently, unable even in the corporate afterlife to find two nickels to rub together. Thanks, sucker!

  She sank a little deeper into the suds, and she closed her eyes, and she imagined a prairie, grasses waving, rustling, above the dry ground, the sun hot
overhead (though not punishingly so), the sky azure, the clouds decorative, and here came a horse, its rider upright, strong, but easy, his hat raked to block the face from sun. Closer he came, and when he reached her (bonneted, flounced, Happy held a pitcher of ice water with both hands) he removed his hat, revealing a face as beautiful and sun-darkened as if sculpted from a block of walnut. She hands him the water…he drinks it…the drops run down his neck and into his buckskin shirt.

  “Take off your dress,” he says, in a near-whisper. Then his cell rings.

  “What!” she shouted, grabbing it up with a splash and scattering of bubbles. A clump of them pirouetted into her wineglass, tainting the wine. Why had she left the goddam phone on? Because she was incapable of turning it off.

  “Happy? Are you there?”

  The voice was distant, obscured by white noise, and she wished that just once her husband would call her from someplace other than a moving vehicle.

  “Yes!”

  “I’m in the plane! Can you hear?”

  “Yes!” she screamed to the empty bathroom.

  “I’m coming to see the house! The new house! Tomorrow!”

  It was inevitable, she supposed—he had to come eventually. Though she wished, as always, for more time.

  “Great!”

  “Could you call Pavel and give him directions?!” His driver, who made no secret of his distaste for her. She had asked Jims to fire him several times, but it was clear now that he needed some kind of ally to complain to about her. She had decided to let him have his Pavel, as a kind of sentient teddy bear. But she was not going to call up the Baltic bastard.

  “Have him use the internet!”

  “What?!”

  “The internet!”

  “Oh!”

  “I’m in the bath, Jims, I’m hanging up now!”

  “What?”

  “Goodbye! Goodbye!” She hit END and lay the phone down next to the glass of wine. The suds had begun to melt into it, their rainbow swirls spreading slowly downward through the liquid; from the speakers came the click and chirp of her Celtic CD skipping in the player. She sighed. Fuck it all! She picked up the glass of wine and emptied it into the space between her legs.