And then: Ivy.
She had to save Ivy. Her first doll. Her best doll. Those eyes; that face. Ivy could not be lost. She dropped her Happy Girls on the floor and skidded into the hall. Hard to see now, harder still to breathe. She threw open the office door and entered with a plume of swirling black: there, in the display case. Across the room to the corner, and then…
Locked.
Where was the key? Somewhere in the desk. In a panic, she threw open the drawers. They clattered to the floor. Where was the fucking key, goddammit? Where did I put the motherfucking key?!!? The room was filling with smoke from the ceiling down, closing in, inch by roiling inch.
At last she turned, clenched her fingers together, and sent her fist flying through the glass.
Ahhh—her darling, her Ivy. She cradled the doll in bloodied hands, drawing breath in short bursts, crying with gratitude. This is what mattered. This, her one and only, her baby. She turned to go, to flee at last with her treasure.
The hallway was clogged with smoke, as black and foul as tar. She ran five, six feet and was stopped by a ragged, excruciating cough—and then found that she could not draw another breath.
Her grip tightened on Ivy. How did the phrase go? Stop, drop, roll. But that was for being on fire, correct? She tried again to inhale: her lungs protested; the wisp of smoke that managed to enter was expelled by another horrible cough. Happy retched, spat bile. I can’t breathe. Her legs buckled, she fell to the floor, and there, at last, she found a layer of air her lungs would bear. She gulped it, crawled along on all fours, found the stairs. The fire was all around now, climbing the walls and banister, glowing dusky red through the smoke. Almost there. She slid down the steps on her behind, one at a time. She counted as she went. Count with me, Ivy: One. Two. Three. Four.
Five. Six.
Seven.
Seven.
Nine?
Sss…
She didn’t feel her fingers go limp, nor feel the doll fall away, tumble past the banister, and drop head-first into the flames. She felt nothing at all but deep exhaustion and relief. It didn’t occur to her that she was going to die; she only understood sudden and absolute calm. The sirens didn’t rouse her, nor did the sound of men’s voices, of stamping feet. She felt the firemen’s hands on her as if through a hundred layers of fleece, gentle and reassuring as spring rain. It was only as she was being bundled into the ambulance that Happy came around long enough to understand what had happened: she’d been shot at, Kevin Russell was dead, and the house—that roaring orange object that filled her field of vision—was lost. Ivy—Ivy was gone. She raised an arm as if to say, Stop! Let me go back!—for the burning house seemed to welcome her now, welcome her into absolute rest, and calm, and the end of pain. With her Ivy, her precious Ivy, in whatever world awaited. But the arm fell back to her side, and the EMTs pushed the gurney through the doors and slammed them shut, and Happy drifted back into sleep, to suffer another day.
34. The Future
And peace fell over the village of Equinox.
That, anyway, is what might one day be written in a future history of the town—some engaging, unpretentious volume by some amateur historian, a labor of love with a limited print run, for the limited quantity of future citizens who might want to read it. “Peace fell,” it will inform these curious few, for hindsight is conveniently imperfect, casting a blur upon distant people and events, leaving them susceptible to simplification, wishful alteration, statistical mediation. It is like the glance out the airplane window which renders a rutted road straight and true, which reduces human drama to dots in a landscape. Hindsight has no time for detail; it has the whole of history to get through. Its jaundiced eye sweeps over us, consigning us to summary. Equinox, New York, pop. 414, it will declare, endured a period of dramatic change.
And then…peace fell.
But the cloak of peace has yet to fall over our characters. They’re frozen—a frieze, in fact—in the present, in a crescendo of shock and fear that it would not occur to them might soon pass into history. Their lives are like the plucked strings of a guitar, a minor seventh; the dramatic chord they inhabit still reverberates, drowning out all other sound. It is cruel to leave them there: time to release them, to let the chord decay. Time to lead them into the rest of their lives.
In Kevin Russell’s case, sadly, there isn’t any of it left. On a stretcher in the driveway of the burning mansion, he is about to expire. He isn’t entirely aware of it—the sound of Dave’s shot still rings in his ears, and he has been overcome with tiredness, and with confusion. If we could give him a few minutes more, he might figure out what has happened to him. But we can’t. He won’t have time to come to terms with his mother, or his father, or his wasted life, let alone have one more beer, or one more screw, or one more cigarette. On the other hand, he will feel no fear, or guilt. His fingers and toes are numb, and his thoughts are turning gray. He’s a goner: sorry, Kevin.
Dave Dryer, on the other hand, is unharmed. Along with Happy, he will be brought to the hospital. Surgery and drugs will cure his lifelong oral ailments, and he will be released—into the arms, of course, of the police. He is a murderer now, and will spend the next dozen years in Auburn Prison. After a period of adjustment, he will feel right at home, and his stay in jail will be more or less uneventful: a few fights, a few close calls, and lots and lots of boredom. He’ll be out before he’s forty: hardly a catastrophe, in the grand scheme of things. His responsibility for the death of his best friend will come to seem like a foregone conclusion, their tempestuous friendship little more than a setting of the stage. Such is the obfuscating power of the guilty mind. Released from prison, he will Greyhound west, and never return to Equinox. He will live in anonymity, tending bar, it doesn’t matter where. He will never marry.
Archie Olds, on the other hand, will spend his winter in much the way he expected to. He’ll read a lot of seed catalogs and spend a lot of time down in Nestor, at the library, posting on internet message boards. Come spring there will be clearing, and grafting, and pruning, and the apple stand will be repaired and repainted, and in the fall motorists will pull over to the side of the road for fresh fruit. And through it all, Archie will be lonely, because Ruth Spinks has written him off entirely, and because Happy Masters will be, for some time to come, otherwise occupied.
Occupied how? For the following week, in recovery from her injuries: a cracked finger, a fractured coccyx, and lungs clogged with smoke. And then, for eight months afterward, defending herself from a series of lawsuits and criminal charges, among them extortion, fraud, libel, and (courtesy of the legal department of Streit Enterprises) copyright infringement. Even the Glenda Parsons case will be reopened. In the end, though, she will be exonerated, thanks to a crack team of Jims’s celebrity law school buddies, of all but a few minor charges; nevertheless, those charges will result in a series of fines, a spate of community service assignments, and seven months in the Onteo Women’s Correctional Facility. Her lawyers will file an appeal, but, following the example of Martha Stewart, whose stoic acceptance of her fate made for even better press than not committing a crime in the first place, she will begin serving her sentence immediately.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Poor Ruth Spinks, having hit the dirt at the sound of Dave’s shot, is just now rising from the snowy ground, rubbing her hip where a decorative stone has gouged it. She is at last beginning to be fed up with Equinox, and already the first inklings of a new life, far from this place, are taking root in her mind. Still, her instinct is to fight, and fight she will: for the preservation of the library, for the reaccreditation of Equinox College, for the incarceration of Happy Masters. And she’ll get what she wants. But eventually, with Happy’s sentence drawing to a close, and the town still largely in the hands of Happy Girls, Inc., she will know the futility of fulfillment, and will retire, sell her house to the second wave of Happyheads, and buy a third-floor walkup in Park Slope. Her farewell to Archie will go unrecorded, but w
e can imagine that it will be brief, subdued, and unmemorable.
Jennifer and Bud Triesman will join in the profusion of civil litigation against Happy Girls, Inc., and with their settlement money will build a new garage and ice-cream stand to replace the ones Happy fooled them into destroying. Within two months of completion, both structures will look as though they’d been sitting there for thirty years, and service with a scowl will be restored to the north end of town.
And what of Janet Ping? Happy, in the midst of her epic legal battle, will invite her back into the fold as her permanent assistant, and in doing so will create a creature of unparalleled personal and professional devotion. Forgiven for her sins, molded by tragedy, wracked with guilt, Janet will manage to find, in the depths of her infant soul, even greater admiration for her beloved than before, much to the disappointment and eventual alienation of her mother. And one day, on a journey to the New Jersey-based design headquarters of Happy Girls, Inc., Janet will even find love—the healthy, practical kind—in the form of a svelte and very femme miniature clothing designer named Vivienne LaFrance. It will be a love forged upon the anvil of Happy-worship, but there are worse ways of meeting your life partner. They will civilly unite in Montpelier, and honeymoon, at a 50 percent discount, in the Gertrude’s Flight suite of the new Inn. They’ll renovate a house in Unionville together, leaning heavily on the advice of Reeve Tennyson, who for the foreseeable future will be working in the kitchen and bath section of Home Depot in Nestor. They will thoroughly enjoy mocking his open ogling of their legs and chests, but Janet will be surprised to discover that the old bastard seems happier and more relaxed than he ever did on campus.
And speaking of campus: Equinox College will, of course, be snatched from Happy’s grasp, and after a semester’s restructuring, it will reopen, with new teachers, new hope for the future, and new students—half of them male. For, in defiance of the edict that all publicity is good publicity, application levels will plummet, and the trustees will decide, with heavy hearts, that the college’s only chance to endure is to admit men. They will not be wrong, but the move will hardly guarantee survival: half the dormitory rooms will remain unoccupied, and many of the best teachers will have moved on to greener pastures, leaving behind the embittered, the weak, the uninspired. And Happy, meanwhile, will watch and wait (there is little else to be done, in her cell, on her cot, with one jump-suited leg crossed insouciantly over the other), until the time comes to make the old ladies an offer they can’t refuse.
Of course the Happy Girls organization will continue to expand, in spite of Happy’s incarceration. Through Janet and Jims (forced, by mutual devotion to their leader, to achieve an uneasy peace), she will quietly, legally move her plans forward. She will buy, and knock down, the Presbyterian Church, which anyway has lost much of its congregation to the new church in Unionville, which has better parking; and she will begin to erect in its place a modest, stage-one doll museum. The Inn will open and will draw hundreds of visitors, who will have their nails and hair done at Serene Attractions, buy Happy Girls merchandise at the new outlet store, and dine at the Happyland Bistro and the newly renovated Goodbye Goose, a genteel tea-house serving cucumber sandwiches and petits fours every weekday afternoon, along with the daily brew.
How, one might ask, will she do it? How will she return from the brink of death, from her day of reckoning in court, to reassert control over her heart, her mind, her empire? Because to observe the newly incarcerated Happy, freshly divested of her pearls, phone and earrings, and led to her cell—clean, yes; cheerfully utilitarian, yes; but undeniably a cell—in stenciled orange cotton and gray prison-issue tennies, is to observe the very picture of despondence. Her face scrubbed of lipstick, her eyes an insomniac pink, her hair at last more gray than blond and stuck to her forehead and cheeks with sweat: she is misery personified, for though others have suffered far more, few of her prominence have fallen so far, so fast, and lived to feel the shock and humiliation of their loss.
And for a week or so, it looks like she might not make it. Jeered at for her haughty air, uncallused hands, and sensitive palate, Happy comes to spend more and more of her time curled on her cot, her eyes open and staring, her arm curled around her pillow for comfort; and even the masses of fan mail she receives daily do little to rouse her from her stupor.
Until, one day, a car approaches the visitors’ gate at the prison. A pause, as identification is examined and information exchanged, and then a razor-wire-topped section of fence rolls aside, and the car is admitted into the parking lot. Dented, rusted, several of its smashed-out windows covered over with cardboard and duct tape, it rolls to a crooked stop, and the driver’s-side door creaks open. A sneakered foot juts out, and then another, and they are followed by a figure as wide as it is high, a figure that, observed from the guard tower, might possibly be mistaken, owing to its effortful, jerking gait, for a child’s wind-up toy, swollen to adult human size. The figure passes through the prison doors, announces itself at the visitors’ office, and is led to a contoured plastic chair to wait. The chair occupies a small booth that contains a low counter, black telephone receiver, and inch-thick pane of glass, beyond which an identical counter, phone, and contoured plastic chair are visible. The figure, contoured differently from the chair, chooses to remain standing. Eventually, with the stern assistance of a large-busted guard, the chair’s twin comes to be occupied by the hangdog ghost of Happy Masters.
“Well, well,” Aunt Missy says, “don’t you look sad.”
Happy hears these words through the phone receiver that, by the sheer force of surprise, she has been moved to press to her ear. In another time and place, these words would stir feelings of anger, of disgust, for her corpulent aunt, but now, laid low by misery, she can only nod in pathetic assent. She is indeed sad. There’s no getting around it.
“I brought you some stuff to read.” Out of a stained plastic grocery sack comes a small pile of much-thumbed paperback books, which are unceremoniously dumped on the counter. “Crime novels. Guess I’ll have to give ‘em at the desk or something. Anyway, they’ll help you pass the time.”
“Thank you,” Happy says honestly.
The old woman pins the receiver between her head and shoulder and leans against the counter, which bows visibly beneath her mottled hands. The motion seems to exhaust her, and her words are interrupted by raggedly drawn breaths.
“One time,” she pants, “before you came along…I was smacking your cousin around…and cut her face…with my engagement ring. When she got to school…they called…the cops. I ended up…six months…in the slammer.” She gazes up at the ceiling, shakes her head. “This place…was different then.”
She holds up her ringless left hand and offers Happy a small, rueful grin. “Cheap…fuckin’…thing. Just like…your uncle. Anyway. I got through it…by kicking ass…showin’ people who was boss…and givin’ away…a lot of cigs.” And she leans down and draws from her bag a carton of Marlboros. Kevin Russell’s brand, Happy remembers with a small shudder. “Spend your time…wisely,” Aunt Missy goes on. “I did…some favors in the clink…and got your Uncle Jim…taken care of when I got out.” And she pushes herself back to a standing position and pauses a moment to catch her breath.
Got her uncle taken care of? Happy can only assume that this doesn’t mean she put him into a nursing home. She imagines him, this stout, mysterious figure, heading out for a night of drinking, then being jumped from an alley and beaten to death by a gang of lady ex-cons. It is not an unappealing image, actually, and Happy feels a familiar tingle in her fingers and toes, a warmth in her barren womb.
“You know why I’m here?” Aunt Missy says, and then emits a cascading series of hacking coughs. “Because for the first time…since you got away from me…you’re gettin’ exactly what you fuckin’ deserve. Everything you get from now on that’s any good…it ain’t ‘cause you deserve it…it’s ‘cause you’ll manage to get away with it.”
She bends over, picks up her
plastic bag, now empty of booty. “I’ll be back,” she says, and hangs up the phone. Happy watches her aunt motion to a guard to take the cigarettes and books. Later, in her cell, when the guard arrives to deliver these gifts, Happy gets up from her cot, walks to the cell door, and says, “Take a few packs. Have a book, too.” And the guard—a skinny black girl with straightened hair and linebacker’s shoulders—says thanks, and helps herself. Their eyes meet, and Happy feels, for the first time since the start of the trial, her slumbering acumen yawn, stretch its long orange body, lick its deadly claws. Happy offers a small smile, and though it is not returned, some understanding passes between her and the guard, and the girl nods before moving on.
In the months that follow, Happy returns to form. She pumps iron, makes promises, passes out the cigarettes her aunt brings every week. She settles the civil suit with Sally Streit, and combines her written apology with a business proposition: what say we join forces for a line of lingerie? For the whore that hides in the doll collector’s heart; for the little girl that lurks in the dyke—there’s a market there, don’t you think? Sally Streit thinks enough to show up at the prison for a meeting through the glass, and she walks away with a verbal handshake and a crooked smile adorning her chiseled face. By the time her release draws near, Happy has recruited an entire factory’s worth of future parolees, who will accept minimum wage with a minimum of fuss. When she gets out, Jims, Janet, and the Klams are there to meet her, and they drive to the plot of land just north of town where the new Masters mansion is going up. Solid neo-Vic except for a Gehryesque waterfront face that follows the sinuous shoreline in a series of turreted arcs. From the beach you can see the new Happyland Inn at Equinox, and it is there that Jims brings her, in a familiar little red rowboat, for a temporary stay until the house is done. It’s early spring, and ducks bob on the cold lake surface, clearing a path for their bow. The wake from a distant motor yacht reaches them and they have to grab the sides of the boat to keep from pitching into the water. Note to self, Happy muses, get those things outlawed.
Happyland Page 33