Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  It was when she rose from picking up her dropped paper that Ruth got her own impression of Happy. Happy’s ice cream, a scoop of vanilla in a wafer cone, had been licked down to a slick, striated nub, and it was clear from Happy’s clean, dry hand and unsullied blouse that she had licked unceasingly since she left the ice cream parlor, taking care that every stray dollop of the stuff was brought quickly under control, not a drop wasted. The cone’s rim, pale and damp and spongy with Happy’s saliva, endured, as Ruth looked on, a continuous barrage of muscular jabs and strokes from the hot red tongue, and the librarian might have believed in that moment that she was looking at the devil incarnate.

  They stopped, stood, glared, allowing their glares to soften into curious, frank, but not impolite, gazes. Happy did not know who Ruth was, but arranged her face into an attitude of expectant friendliness. Ruth knew who Happy was, but pretended not to. She said, “Newsletter?”

  Happy glanced at the ice cream cone and, apparently satisfied that it had been diminished to below the tide line, looked up again with a welcoming smile. “Certainly!” she said, and stuck out her hand.

  Ruth proffered the paper. “New here?”

  “Very,” Happy said, her eyes ratcheting back and forth over the page.

  “Well, this is the town newsletter.”

  “And you’re the author?” Still reading.

  “Ruth Spinks. I work at the college.”

  “Hmm,” Happy said, evidently in response to what she had read. She looked up. “In what capacity?” she asked.

  “Librarian.”

  Ruth might have described Happy’s gaze as disconcerting: up went the eyebrows, framing large gray eyes that jittered in their sockets, reading Ruth’s face. Like an MRI: silent, invasive, pregnant with energy.

  “Happy Masters,” Happy said now. She pinned the newsletter under a sweatless armpit and stuck out a hand to be shaken. Ruth shook it, dropping more papers. She picked them up.

  Silly, Ruth thought, to continue the charade. She said, “You’re the one who’s moved into the Framdsen House.”

  Happy nodded. “We’ll have to have a new name, don’t you think?”

  “A new name?”

  “For the house! I was thinking of ‘Lake-Edge.’”

  Well, there went the Framdsens, down the memory hole. Just you wait, lady—soon you and I will be forgotten, too. She watched Happy devour her cream-packed cone in two large, neat bites, then lick each finger, every nail unpainted but trimmed and sanded to a precise smoothness, all the while reading, with robotic speed, the newsletter.

  “Good,” Happy muttered, through a mouthful of ice cream cone. She swallowed. “Oh, very nice. This is superb stuff, Miss Spinks.”

  “Miz,” Ruth said, testily, foolishly.

  Happy looked up, flashed a winning smirk. “Ah. Pardon me, I must sound like a throwback.”

  “No,” said Ruth. “I used to be married.”

  Happy nodded, handing back the newsletter, which was no more sullied than when she accepted it. “Of course you did. Now, I’m off. I’m certain we’ll be working together soon.”

  Working together. Strange thing to say, for Ruth knew of no possible capacity in which she might find herself working on anything with Happy Masters. And she would prove to be right—she and Happy would never work together on anything. But they would definitely be meeting again.

  6. The messenger of death

  Dear Citizens:

  September is here again, time to throw open our doors and welcome back our beloved students, the women of Equinox College. “Every parting,” as Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection”—and so let us rejoice, even in this impending season of decay, the arrival of friends old and new.

  For their edification of the new, allow me to devote this month’s newsletter to a retelling of our town’s most cherished historical event, its creation myth, the Apple Blossom Massacre. Not only is it vital to our moral strength that we understand the history of the ground upon which we daily tread; this story may serve as a cautionary tale for newcomers and longtime residents alike.

  Most Equinoxians are aware that our town was founded in 1784 by a Revolutionary War soldier named Thomas Crim. To express their gratitude for his military service to the newly independent United States, our government had granted him a great deal of the land our town now sits upon. Crim rode here from New Jersey on his horse, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a hatchet, and the musket he fought with during the war. Within a few years he had cleared our shoreline, built himself a log cabin, and planted a small apple orchard. With the help of other former soldiers, he built a tavern and a church, and was said to attend both regularly. He brought a girl back from one of his trips and married her, and she became Emily Crim. Soon there were more than a dozen people living here, and a vote resulted in the name Equinox, which is said to refer to the town’s springlike blossoming.

  But all was not well in Equinox. Emily Crim soon discovered that her husband was impulsive, paranoid, and violent; some historians have suggested that he suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Shell shock, in other words. This violent paranoia was soon brought to bear upon a relatively innocent group of residents, the small Onteo Indian tribe, who lived in a tiny village on the shores of what is now Unionville. (If you have found arrowheads while planting your tomatoes, you can thank the Onteos!) Crim had become convinced that the Onteos intended to wage war on the citizens of Equinox, and managed to steer several other townspeople (the tavern-keeper and minister, to be precise) around to his point of view.

  Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Even in an era rife with settler-Indian conflicts, the Onteos were as unlikely a threat as could have been imagined. What little we know about them suggests that they had not waged war in fifty years. Indeed, early explorers of the area reported that the tribe had formed their village on the lake after being decimated by a band of Senecas sometime around 1725, and had devoted themselves to a quiet life of fishing and hunting far from other human habitation. But this fact had escaped Thomas Crim, and his friends the minister and barkeep didn’t know that Crim was mad, and so the stage was set for what would become known as the Apple Blossom Massacre.

  It was May, and Crim’s apple trees, which in the years since his settlement here had grown as high as a man on a horse, were heavy with white blossoms. They would have littered the ground and drifted in the air like snow. He decided to send an emissary—a teenage boy named Jacob who knew a little Seneca and could make himself understood—in a rowboat along the shore to invite the Onteos to a festival, an apple blossom festival, to celebrate the coming harvest of fruit. We can presume that the Onteos knew about the white settlement to the south, and must have been relieved to discover that the settlers were friendly. Of course they accepted.

  It comes down to us from Georgia McCullum, the minister’s wife and an obsessive journal-keeper, that the Onteos were to arrive in late morning, on foot, for they had no horses. Mrs. McCullum, who owned the only clock in town, reports that at a quarter past eleven, “a great clamor was heard, and the shouts of the red men and women, and the cries of their children, and smoke was seen rising over the trees.” A couple hours later her husband returned, filthy with dirt and Indian blood. He, Crim, and the barkeep, Samuel Fitters, had murdered many dozens of Indians with their guns, he said, and then had ridden to their village to kill the survivors, which they accomplished quickly, setting the village on fire on their way out. The resulting fire consumed many acres of forest, and, ironically, threatened even Equinox itself, though the town was ultimately saved by the relatively damp weather and a change in the wind.

  The following day the bodies of trusting Onteo men, women, and children were thrown into the lake, where they rotted for weeks, drawing huge clouds of insects and carnivorous birds. Though some of the Onteos’ bones have been recovered and given a proper burial, most still lie at the bottom o
f Onteo Lake, near our beloved beach.

  As for Crim, he would soon descend completely into lunacy, threatening to murder his wife (she would flee their home and vanish into legend) and eventually drowning himself in the very spot where the Indians’ bodies lie. Jonathan McCullum would also commit suicide, shooting himself to death in the woods behind the church (our present Episcopal church, constructed in 1884, stands on the site of the original church). Samuel Fitters would leave Equinox and eventually help found a free-love colony in the Hudson Valley. Nothing is known of the boy Jacob, the messenger of death.

  The apple orchard, however, lives on today, its fruit nourished by blood (and orchard-keeper Archie Olds tells me this year’s crop will be a bumper!). So when you welcome our newest residents, bring them an apple, and a smile.

  Your faithful servant,

  Ruth

  7. Instruments of patriarchal tyranny

  Equinox had a town park, though not many people ever bothered to visit it. Even at this time of year, when the air bore a hint of crispness, and the leaves still offered shade from afternoon sun, the park was usually deserted—it was damp, marshy even, and poorly maintained, the gravel paths overgrown with weeds and the once-prominent signs that identified various trees and shrubs (planted, years ago, by a different generation of Equinox students and their teachers) broken, collapsed, and covered over with humus. The shoreline had retreated and the dock had begun to sink into the mire, and the entire area gave the impression that it was in the process of being reclaimed by nature.

  Jennifer Treisman, however, visited it despite all these disincentives, or maybe because of them. She thought the park was crap, and so it was there that she went when she felt like crap, and wanted to smoke a crappy cigarette and toss it into the crappy water. She felt like crap today because it was morning, and it was Tuesday, and all the little fat bitches were back, and her kids were bugging her, and her husband was bugging her. She also had a cold and had dropped a pipe wrench on her bare foot, bruising the shit out of it. So at around ten she told Bud she was going for a walk, and grabbed her lighter and cigs, and headed along the lake path to the park.

  The lake path was no better than the park. It used to be kind of nice, back when they moved here and bought the gas station, but now it had sunk in places, or gotten flooded, or had dead trees lying across it. The ghost of Thomas Crim, the town founder, was supposed to stalk it at night, or so said the kids who came down here after dark to scare the living shit out of each other and screw: she was always finding beer bottles and rubbers or the occasional solitary sneaker or sock. Chunks of metal or lumber or scrap wood were always washing up onto the path, artifacts of the industries that had once come to life on this stretch of lake, then shuddered and died. Dead fish rotted in the reeking air. Anyway it didn’t take her long to get to the park, and walk out on the crooked pier, and light her cig. The sun had come up behind her and cast long shadows of the trees out onto the water; she was cold underneath her sweatshirt and sucked the hot smoke in as fast as she could, to warm up.

  Fucking fall. Fuckin’ A. Everything croaking, everything going rotten. She didn’t know how she was going to get through another winter in that house, with the drafty windows and the piles of dishes and the stinking laundry she was supposed to do. She had to run the space heater out in the garage and everybody’s fucking cars broke down in the same boring way every year, and the extra money they made fixing them went to pay the high heating bills. It was all just a pain in the ass. At least it wouldn’t be hot—she’d had it with hot, with the sweat in her crotch and the burn on her arms and the flies. Just now she could hear them, buzzing around some reeking thing nearby, which come to think of it she could smell even through the smoke. Give it up, she wanted to tell them—you’re only going to live a couple of days anyway. You’re flies.

  She sucked the cigarette down to the filter and tossed the butt into the lake, into the same place she always threw it, where there was a little pile of butts lying in the mud underneath the surface of the water. Which she couldn’t see, because somebody had thrown some clothes off the end of the pier, and they were half-sunk, half-floating on the surface.

  Which is where the flies were swarming, actually.

  There wasn’t really a particular moment when it sunk in: instead, her mind kind of started and missed a few times, and then revved up, like a motorcycle, roaring faster and faster, until she couldn’t hear anything but roar. She didn’t scream, she just started moaning and kept on moaning. She saw her cigarette butt smoldering there on the gentle lump of blue polyester that stretched up above the water, stretched over the corpse that bloated underneath it. The cigarette lay there, soaking up the tainted water, and eventually it was saturated and went out. And now that there was no smoke, she could make out the smell, and it was as bad a smell as there was.

  The legs bobbed gently, partially concealed by a stand of reeds; the face was waterlogged beyond recognition. The chest and head were pinned beneath the surface by a large round stone, which two gray hands still clutched. You couldn’t have identified her just by looking, but there weren’t many people it could have been, and Jennifer recognized the dress. To her credit, she didn’t throw up until she got home.

  * * *

  Needless to say, it was all anybody was talking about at the bar that night. It seemed like everyone had been to the park and had watched the soaking EMTs haul the corpse out of the water; everyone seemed already to have heard about the suicide note, which had read simply

  H

  MASTERS.

  P

  P

  Y

  If there had been people left in the town before this who didn’t know who Happy was and that she had brought change to the village of Equinox, they certainly did now; indeed, Happy’s conversational currency was so valuable that people in the Goodbye Goose seemed even to know things that weren’t true. In the front corner by the window one could hear a trio of humanities lecturers conspiring:

  “I heard she once ran a guy down with her limo. The driver tried to stop, but Happy told him if he did, he was fired.”

  “Well, she’s a firer, obviously. Her employees tried to unionize, and one by one their houses got burned down.”

  “Wasn’t that Rupert Murdoch?”

  “I think that was Martha Stewart.”

  “Martha Stewart was framed.”

  “God, I knew you’d say that.”

  And, on the other side of the bar, in the old church pew behind the pool-table-cum-coat-rack:

  “All I know is, she ain’t buying my land, no matter who she kills.”

  “You think she killed that lady?”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  “C’mon, she drowned herself.”

  “I heard the handwriting on that paper was funny.”

  “What was funny about it?”

  “I dunno, it was fucked up.”

  And out back, in the parking lot, the voice of April Cort could be heard, holding forth to a small group consisting of Ty, Sara, Rain, and Janet.

  “I say we run this bitch out of town. She comes here, takes over everything everybody loves best, then murders poor Glenda in cold blood. And the cops are saying they aren’t gonna do anything. It’s bullshit, girls. I think we gotta have a protest.”

  “You despised the old bat,” Ty drawled, applying lipstick the color of dried blood.

  “I did not despise her,” April came back. “She had her issues like any chick, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a right to exist.”

  “I don’t think?” Rain offered, “anyone’s saying it’s murder?”

  “All death is murder,” Sara said, slouching against somebody’s Buick.

  “How so?” Ty asked.

  “Everybody gets driven to the grave by somebody, is all I’m saying.”

  They all gave that a few moments’ thought, except for Janet, who was thinking of something else.

  Janet had never played with dolls, when she was a girl. He
r mother didn’t like them—“instruments,” she once called them, soon after her promotion to full professor in the women’s studies department at UW, “of patriarchal tyranny,” though Melanie Ping did admit to having owned a few herself in her day, “utterly unaware of their coercive capacity, though I was able to mitigate their effect through a lifetime of concerted effort.” So she provided Janet with blocks, with stuffed animals (as long as they weren’t too girly), with crayons and markers, but never with dolls. When Janet was in kindergarten she developed a taste for flowers and hearts; she drew them daily and proudly brought them home. No monster, her mother would magnet them to the fridge, but the following day usually found them purged, surreptitiously folded into the recycling bin and carried out to the curb with the newspapers. There was no question of Melanie Ping being a bad mother—she was decent and kind, generous with her affection. But always there was this arbitrary resistance, this mysterious, sinuous wall that snaked through Janet’s childhood, blocking access to some things, permitting others, with no clear logic. Ball caps yes, barrettes no. Red yes, pink no. On Halloween: ghosts, goblins, sure. Ballerinas, princesses, no way. Witches? Melanie Ping had to think about that one, which Janet had suggested one year in exasperation. Her mother thought for a good half hour before saying yes. Witches were empowered.

  On her tenth birthday Janet received, from her aunt, a doll. Not just any doll: a Happy Girl. The Happy Girl was also named Janet. This Janet doll was the daughter of a World War II soldier who was off fighting the Japanese, according to the story book that came with her. Stiff and compact, its dust jacket bordered by a strand of ivy and showing a painting of young Janet, her hair blown by wind, in the foreground of a washed-out air battle scene, the book was the most beautiful one Janet had ever seen. And the story seemed amazingly brave and idyllic—her fictional twin’s primary responsibilities were helping with domestic chores and writing sweet, perfume-scented letters to her father.