Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Uh—you should come see this.”

  They rose from the table and went to the side window that Jims had been gazing morosely out all evening. Through it they could see the road flares rising and falling in the dark, and hear, muffled by the glass, the shouts of the villagers, inflected with a dangerous admixture of fury, amusement, and intoxication.

  “What is it?” Sheila wondered aloud.

  “I believe it’s a torch-bearing mob,” quipped her twin.

  “It’s an opportunity,” Happy said, definitively, and the three of them, well acquainted with this tone of voice, looked to her for instructions.

  “Silas, Sheila. Clear off this table, light the chandelier. And put on some nice music. Jims, you know how to get to the basement?”

  “I think so.”

  “There’s some old metal folding chairs down there. Bring ‘em up and clean off the dirt.”

  They did as she asked. Hands on her hips, she cast a quick glance around the room. “The stereo is in that cabinet,” she told a fumbling Silas Klam. Then she went to the door to await her mob.

  * * *

  Ruth had not been at the bar that night. She rarely went there, preferring to drink, and smoke, by herself, at home, over a good book. She liked a book with a discolored ring on the cover, or a corner bent and puffed up by water. She liked a book that had been smoked in, that smelled like other nights spent smoking and reading. She liked the stink of living, of privacy and unhealthy indulgence, and she did not like interacting with other people after five p.m.

  But a mob was something that interested her, especially if it was a mob organized to oppose Happy Masters. In the wake of poor Glenda’s suicide—and she could hardly blame the poor thing, for life held little for a childless old woman in a town like this—Ruth had done a bit of research on the internet. (Yes, she admitted, it did have its uses.) She discovered a thing or two about the mogul from New York. She had read excerpts of some of the Happy Girls books, had lurked on a Happy Girls message board, had priced a few Happy Girls dolls on eBay.

  What she had found interested her. The Happy Girls empire, it appeared, was based upon a foundation of marketable taste and emotional manipulation. The stories were about the horrors of war, endured through obedience, good manners, and nice clothes. They were about the honor of men and the loyalty of women, about the innocence of children, from which we could all learn a thing or two. They represented a view of life, particularly American life, that was less a philosophy than a highly selective, market-tested sampler of the less unsavory manifestations of human nature. The books, and the web sites, and the whole overweening culture of Happyness, were written in a kind of therapized sociobabble, stressing obedience to the heart over the mind, the personal over the political, and the girl over everything, except of course the man, to whose advances every girl character was expected, once beyond the confines of her respective plotline, to gratefully succumb.

  Happy Masters was a militant anti-feminist. An archetype-peddler. A power-mad housewife. A menace.

  So, sure, a suicide: Happy Masters didn’t kill the old lady. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t her fault. Ruth remembered what Sartre had said about fascism: it is defined not by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. Happy Masters was a crypto-fascist, a killer by proxy. She was a passive-aggressive murderer, and she wanted to murder Equinox, New York.

  Ruth might not have liked her town very much, but it had left her alone when she wanted to be left alone, and that was enough for her. When the mob passed by along Main Street in a drunken wave, she put down her book and her cigarette and headed for the door, flashlight in hand, eager to know how the mistress of misinformation was going to wiggle out of this one.

  * * *

  They were clustered on the gravel drive, spreading out into the hostas and rhododendrons. They were underneath her windows, waving their flares, burning figure eights in the air. The villagers, on a trumped-up mission of justice. This was good: it would help her to do what had to be done. Jims and the Klams had got nearly all the chairs from the cellar and were wiping them down with blackened hands. Quiet music—Ligeti? Who in the hell put on the Ligeti?—filled the room like a gentle haze of scented smoke. The chandelier was dim.

  They watched her, Silas and Sheila and Jims, their faces half terrified, half delighted, for they knew they were about to see Happy at her best, forging diamonds from coals in her fists. In boardrooms, in courtrooms, on golf courses and at stockholders’ meetings they had seen it. Now they would see it here, in the comfort of home.

  But what was this? Her face, that gentle face, was wet with tears! She screwed shut her eyes, and more dripped out, slow as syrup. She met their gazes one by one and said, “How do I look?”

  “Sad?” Silas suggested.

  “Excellent,” the weeping CEO replied, then she took the doorknob in hand and said, “Showtime!”

  9. The field of poppies

  The mob fell silent as the door—which none of them had taken the initiative in knocking, let alone knocking down—flew open, and Happy herself appeared on the steps. If they had been collectively expecting anything, this was not it—the great woman bent over, blubbering, nearly crippled by, apparently, grief. She swabbed each cheek with the back of a hand under the dim yellow porchlight, and spoke in a voice simultaneously commanding, arresting, and aquiver with emotion.

  “Please,” the voice said, choking back sobs. “Please, come in.”

  Of course they could have said no. They could have drawn her outside and into their maw, and torn her to pieces (though this particular mob might ultimately have declined to sully themselves in this manner). But somebody in front—it looked like a couple of college girls—laid their flares on the ground at their feet, and then everyone else did the same. “Ow!” came the voice of some sandaled bystander, and they began to file into the mansion now called Lake-Edge (there sat an attractively irregular lump of granite, wedged between two azaleas, with the words sandblasted into its face).

  Of course it was large, this main hall, with its fifteen-foot-high French windows and marble staircase that fountained up and away in each direction to an impossibly high second floor. Its chandelier, which subtly shifted its crystals with every faint breath of air in an effervescence of honeyed light, was as tall as a man; but it nevertheless hung so far overhead that you had to crane your neck to see it. There were leather sofas that faced a coffee table the size of a corner office, and a loveseat, and a cluster of metal folding chairs that seemed to have been anticipating visitors. Inevitably, people sat in them. A pair of gaunt adults in mourning clothes (or did they just dress that way?) ushered the angriest faces to the most comfortable seats, where they collapsed in attitudes of sourness and exhaustion, their scowls weakening on their brows. “Welcome,” a scruffily handsome man said, as he shook each callused hand, “welcome, thanks for coming.” The entire scene had a feeling of unreality—perhaps it was the drink, or the hour, or the mystery of death that hung over the village. But everyone felt it, everyone allowed themselves to be gathered into its soft and flabby arms.

  Like a dream, Ruth Spinks was thinking. Nothing surprises us in it—with no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, cut off from our habits. Who said that? Jean Cocteau, maybe, but such was the mood that even the printed word seemed like a fantasy. She felt as though she had stumbled, like Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, into the soporific field of poppies. A yawn escaped her lips. She didn’t sit down.

  Happy climbed halfway up the staircase, and leaned (as if for support, in her weakened state) against the banister. She said, “Thank you—” and then was evidently overcome by emotion, for she reached into her pocket and drew out a tissue, which she used to daub her cheeks and blow her nose, in that order. At last she took a breath and began again.

  “Thank you all for coming. To be honest, I expected something like this. My arrival here has set certain things in motion, I realize, and one of those things, evidently, was our fel
low citizen’s death.”

  A beat. Nobody had expected her to bring it up. But questions were poised on lips, and accusations. Perhaps a mouth opened, maybe a breath was drawn to speak, but Happy spoke first.

  “Glenda’s retirement,” she said, in a miserable exhalation of breath, “was prompted by a discussion between us the day that I bought the market from Mr. Pell.” She squeezed her snot-filled tissue tighter. “I had been prepared to keep Glenda on in her familiar position behind the counter, and relieve her of her other duties in the store, which would be taken over by part-time employees. There was a lot of work to do, and I was eager to get it done. Well, you can imagine my surprise when she refused. ‘No thanks, Mrs. Masters,’ she said, ‘it’s the end of an era. I think I’ll take my leave.’”

  There was a momentary shifting of bodies in the chairs, and the barely perceptible stirring of dissent, as Happy’s portrayal of Glenda fell upon skeptical ears. Perhaps sensing this, she forged on.

  “I asked her to stay—after all, what would the market have been without her? Just another corner store, without the particular charm that made it echt Equinox.” She shook the tissued fist as she uttered the word. “But she insisted. She was old and tired, she told me, there was no reason for her to go on.”

  Happy paused here, drew breath, and let out a sob. Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ruth thought, this is idiotic—but the crowd seemed to sigh in sympathy with Happy and her sitcom emotion. With obvious effort—whether the effort of speaking through tears, or the effort of acting—she opened her mouth, and with her hand over her heart, said, “I believed, with all my heart, fellow citizens, that she meant go on working. If I had imagined, even for a moment, that it was living she no longer felt compelled to go on with, I would have insisted. I would have taken her by the arms and given her a talking-to. I would have sat her down behind that counter and said Glenda, this is where you shall stay. You are loved by this town, you poor thing—you are ours, and we are yours.” Wearily, she hung her head. “But I didn’t. I am sorry, terribly sorry, but I didn’t. I let her go. I set her aside and forgot her. I did offer her a fine retirement package, of course—and I should add that your Mr. Pell, whichever remote getaway he may have departed to, had left no such instructions for me—and she thanked me for it, though without much enthusiasm. But I didn’t stop her from walking out that door. I never dreamed that it would be the last I’d ever see of her.

  “Equinoxians, I want to apologize to you. Though only Glenda could know why she so hated this life, though it was hers alone to retain or to throw away, I do feel responsible for its loss. I feel responsible in the same way that every one of us is responsible for each one of the others—we are fellow townspeople, brothers and sisters united by this place, this community, that we love. Though I have not been here long, I feel this unity more powerfully than in any place I have ever lived—I feel, most definitely, like an Equinoxian. And it is because I do that I mourn today.

  “I intend to honor Glenda in a manner befitting her life of service to our community: I will name the soon-to-be-reopened market after her. Heretofore, the market will be called Glenda’s, and her photograph, if any of you should happen to have one, will hang in a place of honor behind the counter. In addition, the money earmarked for her pension fund, since she has no known family, will be donated, in her name, to Equinox College, to start a work-study program for girls hoping to go into sales—because Glenda was, of course, a great salesperson. And she loved the women of our fair college, even if she never did find a way to adequately express it, and I intend to carry on that respect and affection however I can.

  “Fellow-citizens, I am sorry that it is such a sad event that has brought you here tonight. But know that you are welcome in my home. Please, make yourselves comfortable, and let me get to know you, each of you, as we mourn the death of an irreplaceable Equinoxian. If there is anything at all that you need, my husband James, and my guests Silas and Sheila Klam, will provide it for you.” A sweeping arm gesture accompanied this comment, which seemed to take its objects—Jims and the Klams—by surprise. But they nodded now with grim resolve, and hung their heads, and thought their private thoughts. And Happy turned back to the crowd and said to them, “Again, I am sorry, as we all are. And I thank you for coming here tonight.”

  Finally, Ruth thought—and now they’ll tear her to bits.

  But they didn’t, of course. One person—she wished she could have seen who it was—clapped, and then another joined in, and then soon they were all applauding, and getting to their feet, and nodding their appreciation as tears rolled down their booze-flushed faces. Oh, the power of drink, the power of cliché! She ought to have known. People want to hear what they want to hear.

  The mob did advance, all right, but it wasn’t red in tooth and claw, only a little pink around the eyes. Ruth, meanwhile, retreated: along the wall, out the door, and down the sidewalk toward home. Through the windows of the Framdsen House (or whatever it was called now) she saw the press of bodies, the crystalline yellow light of the million-dollar chandelier, and heard the burble and thrum of self-congratulatory patter. A pleasant sight, she realized, to anyone but her. Did that make her a bitch? No, no, nothing so terrible as that. As she had been in the sixties, as she had been during Watergate, and again during the Reagan years, and the Bush years, and the Clinton years (hard as that was to imagine now) and of course the Bush years again, she was radicalized. She felt the power of rage spreading through her like a potion, like a virus. Tomorrow—and lo and behold, it already was tomorrow—she would begin a new phase of her life: the once and eternal opposition of Happy Masters.

  * * *

  But back in Lake-Edge, all was weepily, gratefully, relievedly pleasant. Happy shook a hundred hands, every one eager and liquor-warm, and gazed into a hundred friendly faces. Well, not quite a hundred—eighty maybe, still a good fifth of the town. Equinox students, their hair cropped close or freakishly dyed, their ears and noses and eyebrows and nipples bristling with rings and jewels and studs, confessed their desperate affection for the Happy Girls dolls and books that, mere months before, they had condemned to yard sales and internet auctions. Stumbling townies blearily thanked her for her kind words. Bandy-legged hicks warily muttered their appreciation. Wide-assed matrons cooed and tittered.

  Of course, there were doubters still. The gas station woman lingered in a corner, scowling like a crow at the softened throng. A hook-nosed farmer crossed his arms and glared with hooded eyes. A butch little lesbian girl studiously avoided the receiving line. And that librarian sneaked out the door when nobody—nobody but Happy, that is—was watching. But how could you complain when you had this—this cute freckled thing with stars in her eyes—gazing up at her, pledging her eternal devotion? Happy leaned down from the marble step she was still perched upon, and said, “I’m sorry, you’re who?”

  “Janet. Janet Ping. Miz Masters, I want you to know that you are my—you’re my hero.”

  Thank God—for a second there, Happy thought she was going to say dessert, so ardent were her words, so tight her grip upon Happy’s hand.

  “Well, the world needs more girls like you, Janet,” Happy said. She was unaccustomed to speaking with fans older than, say, thirteen—but Janet Ping didn’t seem to mind the lilt in her hero’s voice.

  “This work-study program you mentioned. What…what kind of jobs…I mean, are…you going to be hiring…us?”

  “It hasn’t all been worked out yet,” Happy said. Because, she didn’t add, I just made the fucking thing up ten minutes ago.

  “Because I would be honored—I mean, I would love to work with you. For you. Miz Masters.”

  “Please, Janet, call me Happy.”

  The poor thing seemed about to cry. “Happy,” she said, with mesmeric emphasis, and Happy began the difficult task of attempting to extract her hand. To think they came here planning to kill her!

  “To answer your question,” she said, “I’ll probably need girls to work in the marke
t, and the salon, and of course there will be other projects as well…”

  At last Janet unclasped her hands, and Happy jerked hers back.

  “If there’s anything…here. Under you. I mean, in your organization—”

  “Not sure about that yet, Janet…”

  “—I would be so honored to—to—”

  “I understand.”

  “If you could interview me, maybe? Like this week or next? I could come anytime.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to begin—”

  “I would hardly take up any of your time…” Those eyes! They were positively Stepfordian in their devotion! They blinked, then blinked again, as if trying to dislodge some speck or spore.

  “Well, I suppose we could arrange…”

  Janet Ping seemed to grow three inches. “Yes! Next week? Monday?”

  “Ah, I don’t see—”

  “How about ten o’clock? How about I come then and if there’s a conflict you can call me up, my number’s—” and then she rattled off a string of digits Happy caught not one of. It was easier, she saw now, to just say yes. Janet Ping swooned with delight; those giant eyes squeezed shut and reopened, and the lashes fluttered like leaves before a thunderstorm, and her hands folded into a tiny ball, which she pounded against her chest. “Thank you. Thank you,” she said, backing away. “I will see you then. This is great. This is the best.” And then she ran off with her prize, vanishing into the crowd.

  Eventually she got them all out of the house. Jims and the Klams folded the chairs and leaned them up against the hall wall. Poor things—they looked like vampires, their eyes dangling in hammocks of gray, their foreheads greasy. “Silas, Sheila,” she said, taking each by a shoulder as narrow as a hatchet, “thank you. You saved my bacon.”