“No, I—” she said, “no, it’s fine! I mean, it’s just…”
“It’s too much to ask…”
“…it’s just I don’t have a car.”
Now he was the one who was silent.
“To get there,” she said. “To New York.”
He laughed. “No, no—I’ll fly you, of course. I’ll buy you a ticket. You’ll be my consultant, you see. A woman’s touch.”
Had anyone ever called her a woman before? Her mother, once she started menstruating. “My little woman,” she had said, to Janet’s horror. And in a general way, lumped in with the rest of the college. “The women of Equinox.” But by a man? Never. And never had she been accused of having any kind of “touch.” Well—it appeared she was a woman, and she had a touch, and she was flying to New York.
“Yes,” she said. “Okay.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sure!”
“Oh, thank you, Janet!” he said, and it delighted her to be able to please him—this wealthy man, who had everything he wanted, but needed her—a woman—to pick out a birthday present for his wife. She felt good, and powerful, and urbane. And if anyone had pointed out that the whole thing was weird, she would have told them that, as far as she knew, that’s how rich people did things.
She hit the hook button and Happy came back on the line.
“Well?” came the impatient voice.
Janet bit her lip. “It was nobody,” she said.
* * *
Her good mood lasted all the way until dinnertime, when she detected, within the gang, a certain social discomfort. April didn’t touch her. Ty was silent, or silenter than usual. Rain seemed unusually solicitous, the way she was when you got dumped or were depressed. Neither of which had happened to Janet.
The truth came out over ice cream. A glance passed between April and Sara, and April and Sara noticed her noticing. So Sara said, “Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it.”
“What?” Janet asked, when Sara failed to say anything.
“They think you’re working for Happy Masters,” Ty muttered, daubing her face with a napkin.
“Oh,” Janet said.
“Because actually I saw you going into her house?” Sara said. “I was going by in Neil’s car and telling him where she lived and there you were? It was you, right?”
She looked at April, whose brows were knotted together with preemptive scorn. They had not spent a lot of time together lately: Janet had been begging off. She said, “So what if I am?”
April sighed and picked up her napkin, evidently only in order to throw it down. “I knew it. I knew you were with her.”
“I’m not with her. I’m just an assistant.”
“That is so with her,” said Sara.
“Hon,” April said, “you know she’s the antichrist, right? I mean, she murdered Glenda? And the Inn? And now she’s trying to tear down the library? And all that fucking girly shit? I mean, I know you’re girly but come on, Hon, the bitch is so totally a gender fascist, I can’t believe you would help her.”
“It’s just a work-study job,” Janet said.
“Would you take a work-study job with Hitler?” Sara inquired.
An angry prickle went up Janet’s back. “She didn’t kill that lady. She didn’t.”
“Guilty until proven innocent,” Sara replied. “It’s in the Constitution.”
“Um, other way around,” Ty muttered.
Janet felt Rain’s hand on her shoulder. “Janet should get to do what she wants,” she said, but even Rain sounded insincere. Ty resumed eating.
“You know, Janet?” Sara said, leaning over and pointing a stubby finger tipped with gnawed black polish. “You’re totally off in never-never land lately? We got Sally Streit coming and you don’t even seem to care.”
She had, of course, been sworn to secrecy—but she wanted to tell them. If they knew who had donated the money, they would change their minds. She didn’t tell, though. She sat with her head hung and let her hair dangle in her sundae.
“It’s just a job,” she repeated.
“Yeah, well,” Sara added, “you’re not even supposed to have it. Because you’re already working at the library. You can’t have two work-studies. Especially since you get a discount because of your mom being a college professor.” She snorted. “I wish my dad got a discount for being a janitor.”
That was about the end of that. Janet got up and left without busing her tray. Part of her hoped that April was following—that she would shout Janet’s name, and grab her from behind, and spin her around and into her arms. But it didn’t happen, and by the time she got to the Goodbye Goose, she forgot that she wanted it to.
18. Put on something pretty
“Happy Masters.”
A cough. A chuckle.
“Hello?”
She was in the office, sketching on a pad with a disposable pen. She preferred the cheapest possible ballpoint—if it looked good in ballpoint, then it was good, period. She was trying out a new girl, just for the hell of it—her name would be Soledad, she would be Cuban, a daring escape, a rescue at sea, her parents dead, etc., etc.—and was wondering what kind of hair to give her. Black, of course, but what length? And she had written and rewritten several times a paragraph describing her eyes—the way they were black like the moonless sky during the harvest festival in her tiny rural home town—and it sounded like crap, as if she were describing the doll itself instead of the girl it was based on. She was wondering if maybe she had lost it: that special Happy Girls something.
Well, she reasoned, so what? Her place was here now, in this town. Her town. Anyone could make up a story; Happy was making up a place, and bringing it to life. Out of wood and metal and glass, she was constructing a new and perfect reality—books and dolls were small potatoes in comparison. Besides, she had a stable of writers, of designers; of managers and lawyers and marketers whose job it was to perpetuate her vision. Why should she care if her mojo was flagging? She was past that part of her life, and onto something bigger, and better, and more complete. Something unique.
So how come she felt so thick-headed all of a sudden? Like a dolphin or killer whale, trying to write with flippers. “Hello!” she shouted again, into the headset, for her caller appeared to have vanished. The vestigial instinct to tap the hook button overwhelmed her: damn this digital age! She tapped the desktop instead.
But then, “I’m watching you,” said a low voice.
She put her pen down. Oh are you? she thought. This could be interesting. “Who’s this?” she said.
“Somebody who knows what you did.”
It wasn’t a voice she’d heard before. A man’s, gritty and close and not at all muffled. In spite of herself, Happy turned and peered out the window. The lake was still and empty, no boats visible on its calm cold surface. The leaves were gone from the trees and everyone seemed to be waiting for snow. Nobody stirred. It was nine in the morning.
“How did you get this number?”
“I have my ways.”
“Well. I guess now you’re going to tell me what it was I did?”
She could hear the phone being transferred from one hand to the other. “Murder,” enunciated the voice.
“Ah, yes, I’ve heard that one. You’re aware I was out of town? You know there was a suicide note? I can hardly help what people do of their own volition.”
“You hired someone to kill her. And then you buried the evidence—under the Inn.”
“I see. What evidence is that?” Happy said.
The question seemed to take the caller by surprise. “I don’t know. Evidence.”
“You know what? I’m beginning to lose interest in this call.”
“You won’t get away with it. The whole town knows.”
“Believe me—if there was anything to get away with, I would. Goodbye.” She hit END, then copied down the number from the screen and called her office in New Jersey. Her security man agreed to find out whose it was. Then she took off the h
eadset and stared at her drawing.
A little boat at nightfall, barely held together, packed with people. But Soledad stands alone. She stares off into the distance, the wind picks up her hair. A tear forms in her eye but never falls. The solitude of tragedy. The tragedy of solitude.
Cuba: an island. Aloneness. Isolation. No man is an island? But she’s leaving the island. She came from money—a sugar plantation. The Communists took it away. Now she’s heading out, into the world. With her uncle. Uncle Riccardo…the star baseball pitcher. But a wave will come and sweep away her family. She’ll be found on the beach, half dead, by…by…
Somebody. Some stupid bitch white kid.
She pushed the sketchpad away. Soledad, Schmoledad. What was the matter with her? She got out of her chair and walked to a glass case in the corner. There was Ivy, dressed simply in the cotton shift Happy had found her in, standing with one hand slightly raised, the other at her side. A greeting, a gesture of thanks. She could remember what that doll had done to her, and the others that shared this case—her beloved Deps and Jumeaux. It wasn’t that she wasn’t inspired, of course; it was just that her ambition had shifted. People, places excited her now. Restoring them. Creating them. Getting them to do what she wanted. She had always assumed that money and fame would be enough, but it turned out she was wrong. You had to cajole, to insinuate. You had to make them want what you wanted. This had never been a problem with the dolls—somebody always wanted them. But for some reason she had encountered resistance here, in Equinox.
She didn’t understand. Why not have a nice town? That’s what it came down to. It’s better to live in a nice town than a crappy one. Yes, she had knocked down the Inn, but everyone had seen the artist’s rendering, what she proposed to build was better. There were no two ways about it—some things were better than other things, and her vision of Equinox was better than the Equinox she’d found lying here, abandoned practically, like a toy left by a child in the dirt. Like a doll, like Ivy.
And then there was that loon from the market—why wouldn’t the stupid story die, the way the old lady had had the common courtesy to do? People amazed her—when there was nothing to complain about, nothing to whisper or fuss over, they just went ahead and made something up. Like this thing with the library—she had offered to build a new one, a nice one, and here people were picketing her house, stepping on her flowers, because they wanted the status quo. They liked things the old way. They feared change.
Not, she thought, that the new people were any better. The pilgrims, the settlers, with their fat bellies and fanny packs and adjustable baseball caps—they showed up at least two or three times a day, expecting to be asked in, expecting to become friends. What were they thinking? Was this who she was changing the town for? These triple-chinned losers, who bought her books and dolls, and visited her web site, and traveled hundreds of miles so that they could live down the street? And the complaints! They complained to her about the water, about the college girls, about the unavailability of rental videos. They called to ask her—her, Happy Masters!—what to do about their clogged sewer lines, and their intermittent TV cable service, and the deer in the yard. Who worried about deer? Shoot them! Happy said. Eat them! And they thought she was kidding!
She sighed, and pressed her hand against the glass case (for even when no one was watching, Happy had a talent for histrionics—and who knew, maybe someone, her crank caller perhaps, was watching). It would be nice to enjoy small things again. Little girls, little stories. But she’d been there, she’d done that. She returned to her chair and let her head slump onto her crossed arms.
And allowed herself the rare indulgence of a memory. She didn’t know why the memories came when they did, but she had long ago decided not to resist them; like ghostly visitations, they seemed pregnant with significance. In this one, she lay half-asleep in the back of a car (and what did childhood memories consist of, she wondered, before the automobile?); the low, filthy skyline of Queens gave way to a highway’s poisoned treeline; and then mountains reared up, cutting off the sky and filling the car with unfamiliar scents. She must have been five. Her parents’ voices reached her from the front as she drowsed, nothing but a series of inflections, their words stolen by the open window. A kind of urban drawl for her father, the vowels sharpened and elongated, like machetes. She still heard it sometimes, in the city, from the mouths of the men she hired to fix things, deliver things. And her mother, never saying two words when one would do, a voice careful and gentle and full of suppressed humor. She didn’t know where they’d been going that summer day, but her father had had to stop suddenly and swerve (a deer, maybe? a branch in the road?), and her mother’s hand had been there to keep Happy from rolling off the seat and onto the floor. No one cried out, and it was over in a moment, the danger behind them. But her mother’s hand was there, the fingers long and white though hardly elegant—rather, they were thick and strong as a man’s, hands that washed clothes and cooked meals, sure, but also fixed the toaster, painted the shingles, and, if you begged, played granddad’s harmonica. She remembered her mother as strange, but well-loved. Unorthodox, but in a way that invited admiration, rather than envy.
Or maybe she was making that up. Maybe she was making it all up—memory did such things. It was almost fifty years ago. That was the car they would die in, at a city intersection, on the way back from buying a Christmas tree, while Happy lay in bed, feverish, under a neighbor’s care. A drunk driver had hit them—some bum down on his luck, no doubt. All of them killed, in that seatbeltless age. Happy remembered the bustle on the front stoop, the way their return lifted her spirits—and then the knock at the door instead of the key in the lock, and the policeman’s voice inquiring if this was the home of Eleanor and Richard Snover. They had only meant to cheer her up. Instead they had orphaned her.
The next day she belonged to Aunt Missy.
There was a peculiar quality, in Happy’s memory, to those years of terror and dread—twelve years, more than a quarter of her life. They existed in her mind like an unheated wing of a rambling house, a place you didn’t want to go, could only get to by rooting through drawers and closets for the key, but which required complicated detours to get around, and over time the detours, though inconvenient, became so familiar that you no longer remembered what it was like to walk freely through your own home. Sometimes you heard noises from the sealed rooms, or smelled some foul meal cooking, or noticed a wisp of dark smoke curling out over the transom, but you pretended not to notice. You pretended you lived in a regular house, and had regular habits, like a regular person.
Of course Happy hadn’t managed to forget. She remembered from time to time. The toys she wasn’t given, the whippings given to her alone. The cousins stripping her naked, scratching her back with their fingernails, twisting her arms. Coming home from school to find they had pissed on her bed, or ripped the pages from her books, or opened her diary, or stolen her door from its hinges. She had used to remember, once a month, Aunt Missy’s refusal to give her tampons, the way the cousins held her down as she bled. (Mercifully that memory came around less often these days, or at least less regularly.) She remembered burns on her palms, hair chopped off in the night, dog food on her dinner plate, bugs in her shoes.
And yet: “You’d be nothing without me,” Aunt Missy had said.
She sat up at last, emerging like a time traveler into the quiet reality of her office. The clock tower crookedly tolled; somewhere a chain reaction of honks rippled through a gaggle of geese. Her watch said five o’clock: she’d slept. From a drawer she produced a tissue and daubed at the puddle of drool she had left on the blotter. She yawned, blinked, rubbed her face. Five minutes later, she picked up her pen, and reluctantly, effortfully, began again to write.
* * *
“Good riddance, bitch,” Jennifer Treisman said, and hung up the phone. She turned around to find Vince staring at her, jeaned and shirtless, holding a sock in his outstretched hand.
“What!” she
snapped.
“Uh…I’m outta socks except for one.”
“Well get some out of the dryer!”
“Uh, I looked. They’re wet.”
Jennifer gripped her head, as if trying to keep it from flying apart. “Just, I don’t know, wear dirty ones this one time, okay, Vince!”
“Okay.” But he didn’t move.
“What!”
“How come you were talking like a man?”
She grabbed the note pad from the telephone table and threw it across the room. Vince raised his hand to his face, but the pad fluttered to the ground at his feet. “How come you’re not dressed when school starts in five goddam minutes?!”
“Cause my socks…”
“Out!”
He scurried off to the rear of the house, clutching his one clean sock, and warned his brother not to go into the kitchen. Smart kid. She sat down at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette, and smoked it, tapping the ashes into the puddle of maple syrup left behind from Buddy’s waffle. What the fuck did he need so much syrup for? Christ!
When they tramped through on their way to the door, she let them kiss her goodbye. In a minute, they were gone. She went into the back room and returned with some raggedly cut box cardboard, a marker, and a weathered-gray tomato stake, and began working on a protest sign. Twenty minutes later Bud appeared before her, oily rag in hand, and cleared his throat. Then he cleared it a couple more times.
“Um, hey.”
She leveled him what she hoped was a devastating glare. “Hey, what.”
“Just, I dunno. I’m working on, you know, that Buick? And so, are you gonna, you know, pump gas today? Or…”
“Or what,” she said.
He cleared his throat before saying, “Not?”
His receding hairline created a honeyed glow above his head, like a saint in a painting. She squinted at him. “What if I say not?” she asked. “What if I say that if me and those lesbos don’t get that bitch out of town there isn’t gonna be a gas station for me to not pump at? What if I say I’m too goddam busy trying to save our white asses to be out in the cold pumping gas all fucking day?”
Happyland Page 17