Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  Her mother hated the doll, and hated the book. But Janet absolutely adored this wonderful gift. She would read the book over and over, until the dust jacket was torn and taped a hundred times, until half the pages, dog-eared to the breaking point, lacked any corners at all. She would fondle and caress her Janet doll, make clothes for her, hold entire conversations with her, kiss her every night before she went to sleep, and she was still doing these things at an age when most girls were taking up smoking and sex. She would bring little Janet to junior high and keep her stashed in her locker, in a plastic drawstring Gap bag.

  She still had the doll, in fact, in her closet. In her dorm room, right here at Equinox College. Some nights she even slept with it.

  When she first came to Equinox (“a good place to meet girls,” her mother had suggested) Janet got into the internet and discovered what had since become two unhealthy preoccupations: lesbian pornography and the Happy Girls web site. The latter featured, among other things, a profile of Happy, complete with photographs of her home in New York, and her other home in East Hampton, and her workshop, and her collection of antique dolls. There was an archive of interviews and magazine pieces about her, and Janet had read these many times, mining them for information that might suggest that she and Happy might be kindred souls. Phrases from Happy’s lips, reprinted in the interviews, stayed with Janet as if she had really heard them—and, lying in bed at night with little Janet in her arms, she did hear them, spoken in tones of gentle affection, of quiet confidence, in a voice simultaneously youthful and wise and seductive. I understand what girls need. The life of American girls is my obsession, my guiding passion. I want to live forever in the hearts of our nation’s girls.

  She understood that these phrases (like the dirty pictures she’d come to associate them with) were not directed at her. She was only one girl among many—in fact, she wasn’t even a girl anymore. Nevertheless Happy Masters occupied a particular place in Janet’s universe; she was a role model, a conscience. A figure of—how to put it?—particular affection. No. Lust. The Happy Girls web site, even more than the others that she guiltily ogled in a private corner of the library computer room, held a strange erotic power for Janet, its commingling of innocence and commerce a kind of pornography, for a demographic of one. Her desire for Happy was hopelessly complicated, deeply private, and fantastically obscure.

  So it was hard to imagine Happy Masters meaning anybody any harm. Sure, she bought the store, and sure she fired the old lady, but who ever went there? And if they did, how did the old lady treat them? Bad, that’s how. She was mean and nobody liked her. Besides, you couldn’t know why she really killed herself—you couldn’t ever know anybody, really. If there was one thing she tended to agree with Sara about, that was it. People were unknowable, oneself included.

  The thought made Janet want to drink, and there was the bar—but here they were, yapping away in the parking lot.

  April, it seemed, was trying to organize a protest. Signs, chants, the whole magilla, right out in front of Happy’s place. “We’re gonna run the bitch right the hell out of town!” she said.

  “I dunno…” Rain began, but she was interrupted by Sara, whose pale round fist was shaking in the evening air.

  “Yeah!” Sara said.

  “I like it,” Ty admitted.

  “All right! Janet, Rain, you in?”

  “Well…” Rain said.

  “How about we go in for a couple of drinks first,” Janet said, and a flash of irritation passed over April’s face before she nodded her agreement.

  “Okay, okay—a little liquid courage. C’mon, girls!”

  “That does sound nice,” Rain said, licking her lips.

  And so into the bar they marched.

  8. Like a murder of crows

  Inside, Dave Dryer’s jaw was throbbing, even as he raked in the post-suicide dough. This was not a new problem. His jaw hurt him all the time, in a recurring, menstrualesque cycle, and it was that time of the month.

  He’d never had good teeth. His mom’s were fine, but Dave had gotten his father’s, which at the time of his death had dwindled to a row of rotten stumps concealed by white plastic caps. Dave’s mouth was already lousy with cavities while some of his schoolmates still had their baby teeth; he had four falsies by the time he was 17. And six years ago he had the defining dental experience of his life. The family dentist, a tall, gentle old guy named Read Muschamp, had determined that Dave would need a double root canal. He himself, however, was retiring in a week, and so made Dave an appointment to see another dentist, a Doctor Pine, who would perform the surgery. Pine was abrupt, sweaty, red-faced, with wispy blond hair that appeared to have, over years, been half pulled out by nervous hands. He poked around in Dave’s mouth and told him to come back in two weeks. “Don’t eat for a day and bring something to hold.”

  “To hold?”

  “Yeah, to grip? You know, in your hand. Trust me.”

  The surgery was supposed to take three hours and was scheduled for two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Dave arrived on time at the office, an ill-lit paneled half-basement with brown shag carpeting and nowhere to sit, and was ushered to an examination room by the hygienist, a wheezy woman of about forty whose dirty yellow hands were weighed down by dozens of ornate rings. Pine came in, impatient, annoyed, as if Dave had shown up hours late. He wanted to go with a local, anesthetic-wise. “I don’t do sleep unless you beg,” he said. “Waste of money. You don’t need it. You got your grip thing?”

  Dave held up a round stone he’d found in the parking lot.

  “Good enough. Okay, let’s go.”

  They were the worst three hours of Dave’s life, at least up to that point. The dentist spat and swore, clanking around in Dave’s mouth as if it were the open hood of a busted tractor. The local was all but worthless; Dave cried like an infant. He nearly threw up several times. When five rolled around, the dentist was nowhere near finished. He stuck a tube in Dave’s mouth, lashed it to his face with medical tape, and gave him a wadded-up ball of gauze to clamp to the end. Pine blew his nose and flung the tissue on the floor. “Fuck,” he said. “Be here at seven tomorrow. Don’t move around too much.” He showed Dave the door and walked him to his car. “If it hurts take aspirin.” Dave could only nod in response, his head throbbing with the effort.

  In retrospect, he ought to have gone straight to the hospital, or the police. But what did he know? He didn’t sleep that night, instead focusing all his mental energy on remaining alive. The pain was breathtaking—literally, it was an effort to breathe. The aspirins were worthless, and he couldn’t get anything into his mouth anyway. The wound swelled up and his head doubled in size. He was at the dentist’s office at a quarter to seven, and when the hygienist arrived to open the door she dropped her handbag and screamed.

  “What the fuck did you do to yourself?” Pine asked him half an hour later. It was only the first of the insults, accusations, and curses Dave would endure over the next six hours. Luckily, he was unconscious for most of them, passed out in the chair. When he woke up he really was in the hospital, and his mother was beside him, weeping. He would spend four days there, what was left of his blood awash in antibiotics. They did try to sue Pine, but by then he and the hygienist had vanished. Dave sometimes doubted whether he was a real dentist at all.

  So years later, it still hurt: something in there wasn’t right. Eating sucked, nothing tasted good anymore. And when it hurt, he began to feel insane, like some kind of werewolf—he grappled the bar glasses and bottles of beer with a deadly grip, and hated everybody in sight.

  Not that he had ever really liked these college girls, even when they were going to bed with him. He didn’t like their clothes or their high drunken voices, he didn’t like the shit they talked about—their stupid teachers, their stupid boyfriends, their stupid girlfriends. He didn’t even like the way they drank. Real drinkers sat at the bar and got it done. With these girls, it was all knee-slapping beer binges—screaming and
singing and vomiting all over his bathroom, then having the nerve to demand he build a second one, just for women. They were all in here tonight, it seemed, blabbing like a murder of crows, saying how much they hated Happy Fucking Masters, a woman they hadn’t even heard of until a couple of days ago.

  He liked, however, Janet Ping. A lot. She had been in here last night and downed three glasses of red wine without moving from her seat. Tall, skinny, and not very talkative, she reminded him of his mother. One time last year she had stayed past closing and told him everything he could possibly have wanted to know about her, including how many boys she had slept with (one) and how many girls (two), and that her mom never flushed the toilet, and that she didn’t like music. She said her dad had made the sweater she was wearing and took it off to show him, and her undershirt rode up and he saw her tiny breasts, braless and as freckled as her face. He had been running his hands over them in his mind for five months.

  And so it was with some pleasure, and considerable pain (jaw and otherwise) that he discovered them suspended before him, concealed by a white cotton blouse and cardigan, and above them the face they resembled. Janet bestowed upon him the shy smile that always earned her a free drink or at least a more reasonable rate, and when she ordered a round for her friends, he named, apparently at random, some absurdly self-defeating figure that barely made up the overhead. Janet didn’t seem to recognize this, which was part of her charm. She pulled a small leather billfold from a small neat purse and tugged a twenty out of a tidy little row of bills. He accepted it, along with a maddeningly demure glance, and said, “The natives are restless.”

  “People are overreacting a little, I think.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “You weren’t here when Glenda stopped by looking all wet and crazy. She was like the archangel Gabriel or something.”

  “Happy Masters didn’t kill her.”

  Dave shrugged. “Like that matters to anybody. Anyway, she didn’t seem like a killer to me.”

  Janet’s fingers splayed themselves on the bartop. She looked at him frankly. “She was in here?”

  He nodded. “Last week.”

  She cast her eyes around the bar, as if Happy Masters might still be around. “What’s she like?”

  He felt himself go a little red. “Tough cookie.”

  “What’d she drink?”

  “Wine,” he said, and deflated her sudden excitement by adding, “white. Chablis I think. With ice.” He poured Janet’s usual cheapo cabernet into a clean glass, wondering what interested her so much about Happy Masters. She watched him mix a cosmopolitan, pour a Wild Turkey, tap some club soda, and uncap a Rolling Rock. He loaded them onto a tray along with a ten and two ones, and pushed it to her.

  “What’re you so interested in her for?” he said.

  But Janet was back to her old guarded self: she shrugged, and blinked up at him from behind a frond of black hair.

  “Just curious,” she said.

  Dave watched the night pass by with growing interest: there was a strange intensity to the room tonight, fueled by a sort of opportunistic anger. Everybody was talking about Happy, and Glenda, and the sinister conspiracies that connected them, though he doubted they cared really, he doubted they even knew what they were talking about. It was the anger that fueled the anger, and the drinks he was selling them, and as the bar exceeded its posted capacity, and people spilled out onto the stoop and the sidewalk and the parking lot, he began to worry that things were about to get out of hand. Not the way they usually did, either: there would be no fistfights, or crying jags, or shouting matches. No, things were getting out of hand in a disturbingly organized way. There seemed to be a kind of mass consciousness to this group, a seething sense of collective purpose. When midnight rolled around Dave realized that he was witnessing the formation of a mob.

  When it happened, it happened quickly. Through the side window of the bar he saw some drunken farmer stumble to his truck, unlock his toolbox and take out a plastic sack of what appeared to be road flares. He moved to the front stoop, fired one up, and held it over his head.

  “Enough for everybody!” he shouted. “Lessgo!”

  A cheer went up. The bar emptied in a matter of seconds. Pint glasses clattered to the floor and chairs fell over. Outside, the flares blinked to life and lit the street. The mob had coalesced, and now it began to move.

  A part of Dave wanted to join it, but for some reason it didn’t seem like such a good idea. After a moment’s thought, he walked around the bar, gathered up the jackets, handbags, and feed caps that had been left behind, and put them out on the front stoop. Then he locked the door and started cleaning up his bar for the night. It was early, but whatever happened at Happy Masters’ house, he figured he wouldn’t want to see any of those people again tonight.

  * * *

  The three of them sat crowded around the far end of the big mahogany table, like ants on the end of a popsicle stick. It was dark outside, and the wind shook the windows: September, roaring in like a lawsuit. Behind them a fire crackled and hissed, warming their backs. In front of them three matching laptops hummed. Their eyes ranged over the screens, and their voices spoke in a shorthand.

  “A dome,” said Sheila Klam.

  “Too future,” said Happy.

  “A greenhouse, then,” said Silas Klam.

  “Maybe.”

  “We will call it a conservatory.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Do we animate the dolls?”

  “No,” said Happy.

  “Stationary dolls. Dignified. Frozen in time. A moment in the imagination.”

  “Exactly. Move them at night.”

  “Repeat visitors will see something new each time.”

  “They’ll stay at the Inn,” said Silas.

  “Our new Inn, of course,” said Sheila.

  “Naturally,” said Silas.

  “What do you see, Inn-wise?” asked Happy.

  “You tell us,” said Silas: the correct response.

  Happy twirled a finger in her hair. “A replica of the mansion in Lily and Sally,” she said. “The rooms will have themes, antique doll themes. There will be a Dep room, a Jumeau room. There will be display cases built into the walls. The glass will be thick. There will be special suites inspired by the books. There will be bookshelves filled with books. Not Happy Girls books, period books, depending on the theme. Whatever people read then.”

  Inspiration was unfurling in Happy’s chest like a battle flag. She was on a roll. The architect and the designer were furiously typing, bent over their computers like turkey vultures. They were two of the ugliest human beings she had ever seen. She adored them.

  “Each room will have activities,” she continued. “Things people might have been doing. Lying half-finished as if they’d just walked out. Knitting, embroidery. On a table. Tatting.”

  “Honeymoon suite?” asked the designer.

  “Like the one in Gertrude’s Flight. Women who read it when they were thirteen, getting married now. They’ll be like Gertrude, moments after the book ends. Getting laid. Becoming a woman. And of course, the Japanese.”

  “The Japanese,” said Silas Klam.

  “The Japanese,” said Sheila Klam.

  “The Japanese will come. Happy Girls is the new Anne of Green Gables. They’ll spare no expense. They’ll fly into Syracuse. We’ll need a special car to pick them up. The car will stop in Unionville, and then…”

  “…they’ll get into…” Silas said, his voice rising.

  “…a carriage!” said Sheila.

  “Pulled by two horses. If the Amish can do it, so can we. They’ll be delivered to the Inn. Girls in 1830s dresses will usher them inside. Their contact with the modern world will be obliterated. We will need a stable.”

  “A stable,” said the architect and designer in unison. They opened a new file, began pointing and clicking. Architecting. Designing. Their hands clawed the keys, their eyes darted back and forth from screen to screen. There was somethi
ng faintly, revoltingly erotic about them, as if they were watching each other masturbate.

  As if interrupted by Happy’s thought, Silas looked up suddenly. “Happy.”

  “Silas.”

  “Do you own the Inn yet?”

  “I do not own the Inn,” Happy said. “It still has to be acquired.”

  “Happy,” Silas said.

  “Silas.”

  “You are presently suffering a public relations problem. What makes you think the present owners—”

  “They will sell.”

  Sheila stopped typing and looked up. Silas, too, stared.

  “They,” Happy said. “Will. Sell.”

  She had spent much of today at the police station in Unionville, answering questions about the death of Glenda Parsons. Jims had accompanied her, serving as her lawyer. The police station had obviously once been a bank: the former drive-up window was covered now by half-bleached black construction paper, and housed a little display of second- and third-place hunting trophies. And the cops themselves seemed profoundly uninterested in the investigation: overweight, exhausted, eyes underslung with purple, they seemed only to want to go home. And indeed they did, at five on the dot. “Thanks, Miz Masters,” Chief Giancamilli told her, having accepted her offer of free ice cream once she got around to owning the gas station. “I don’t think we’ll be needing any more of your time.” The old woman had had no living family, no apparent friends, and no reason to live, and so her death would be ruled a suicide.

  Where, Happy wanted to know, was the public relations problem?

  This was not, however, a question the Klams would have the opportunity to answer—and by the time they did, the question would be moot.

  Jims appeared in the dining room doorway, beer in hand, face darkened by boredom and beard stubble. He was going, Happy thought, to have to find something to do for the rest of the week—though perhaps he could spend some of that time fulfilling certain of Happy’s carnal needs. He did indeed look very good. At this moment, though, he also appeared puzzled.