“So,” Happy says to her husband.
“So,” he replies.
“Get yourself any trim when I was in the clink?”
He shakes his head no.
“Honestly? Not even a fresh-faced college girl?”
“They have men their age now,” he reminds her. He smiles, gazes into her eyes. She gazes back, with uncommon intensity, and he blinks.
“Do you want to fuck an ex-con?”
“Wouldn’t mind,” Jims admits.
“I got a tattoo.”
His eyebrows go up. “You’re kidding.”
In response, she unbuttons her blouse and pulls aside her bra. There, above her right breast, a crude heart has been etched, and inside it a ragged script reads, Happy Girl. She squints in the sunshine and lets her husband touch the bare skin.
“Did it hurt?” he asks, astonished.
“Oh, yes,” Happy answers, beaming. “In the best possible way.”
* * *
On a cool and breezy day in March, Ruth Spinks makes two hundred copies of her final newsletter, takes one last look around her cleared-out office, writes an address on an inter-office envelope, and leaves the building.
Outside the front entrance, she locks the door. Then she removes the library keys from her keychain, puts them into the envelope, ties it shut, and drops it into an already-overflowing drop box in the mail room. God only knows when they’ll get to that—it’s Spring Break, and the “Back in 5 mins!!!” sign seems to have been sitting on the unoccupied counter for weeks. But it’s out of her hands now. Her apartment in the city has been secured, her possessions have been thinned down to the barest essentials and packed into the moving van now parked on the street in front of her former home. The house looks much as it always has, save for the SOLD sign posted in the yard; tomorrow it will be occupied by Happyites. So be it. She will be living, an anonymous spinster, in the inviolable warren of New York; and when her time comes she will hobble to the Brooklyn Bridge and leap into the East River.
But first the newsletters, a few here, a few there. Two to the middle-class ladies getting their hair done at Serene Attractions. A pile at the Happyland Bistro, and another pile at the hardware store. A few to passersby, people she doesn’t recognize. A stack at the new Inn. One even in Archie’s mailbox, for she has forgiven him. And whatever is left goes on the front counter of Glenda’s Market. The girl behind the counter smiles at her: it is a former Equinox student, an occasional library patron, who has chosen to hang on through the college’s dark days. Good for her—but Ruth will be having none of it.
Before she leaves, she reads what she has written, a bare few paragraphs in the center of a sparse green page:
Dear citizens:
This will be the last newsletter I will ever write, and though I take leave of this self-appointed (but still, in my opinion, important) position with some misgivings, I cannot say that I will miss the town that fair Equinox has become. It is not the one I moved to, and not the one I will remember—nevertheless, I have only the fondest wishes for it, and hope that it becomes a place of tranquility and inspiration to all who live here in the future.
Allow me to leave you with a question for which there is no answer. Perhaps it will lodge itself in your minds, and be useful to you someday. The question is, What is a town? Consider your own home, Equinoxians (or, as the case may one day be, Happylandians). Is Equinox a collection of buildings? Or is it a collection of people? Is it the end product of a long and complicated past, or is it the raw material out of which a future may be sculpted? Or is it, citizens, all of these things?
I hope that you will ask this of yourselves when it is time to erect a new structure, or renovate a park, or alter zoning laws, or elect a new mayor. I hope that you will think about how the decisions you make today will affect the citizens of tomorrow. I hope you will give serious thought to how much your town means to you, how much your fellow-citizens mean to you.
For my part, Equinox no longer means so much to me. My Equinox is gone. Perhaps this is right and just; perhaps my Equinox was mired in the mistakes of history, in the flaws of its inhabitants. Perhaps it is correct to pave over the rutted tracks of the past, to brick up the walls where the ghosts live, and forget.
But consider, Equinoxians: you are the impending past. You are the people whom future citizens will wish to forget. You may, upon consideration, decide to foster a local culture that values the lessons of yesterday; or, conversely, you may decide that there’s no point.
And if you choose the latter, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps there is no point. I, after all, have given up on Equinox—hardly a strong foundation on which to build this argument. Nevertheless, there is a part of me that is, and shall always remain,
Your faithful servant,
Ruth H. Spinks.
“Bravo!” comes a voice from behind her, accompanied by a series of quiet, and if Ruth is hearing them right, sarcastic claps. A crackle of paper, a gentle and mellifluous chuckle. If it were possible to exit the market without facing her, Ruth would do it; but alas, fate has chosen to place this final obstacle in her path to freedom.
“Happy,” she says, with as much cheer as she can muster—which was never very much, and today is even less.
She is dressed in jeans, immaculate dark blue jeans and a pink cashmere sweater. She is grinning ear to ear. She has aged in prison—her hair is grayer, her face more drawn. Or perhaps she always looked this way, and Ruth has misremembered her. It has only been seven months, after all. Happy’s hands—thinner? frailer?—are clutching a green sheet of paper.
“Ruth—a superb performance. ‘What is a town?’ Food for thought, indeed! I suppose you didn’t recognize me there in the salon, getting my hair done?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“I see that you sold your house. How ironic!”
“Indeed,” Ruth says, jingling her keys.
“And I thought you would never leave.”
“Silly you.”
Happy shakes her head, emitting tsks. “Now, now. Don’t be a sore loser. You gave me a good run, there.”
“Well,” Ruth says, edging her way closer to the door.
“What, do you think I’m going to bite? Just because you helped send me to jail?” She offers up a dismissive wave. “It was all my own fault.”
“Yes, I know,” Ruth grunted.
“But I made some important contacts in prison—some lifelong allegiances, you might say. And I had plenty of time to cook up some new ideas. So I suppose I ought to be thanking you.”
“You’re welcome,” Ruth says. The heat here in the market, still cranked winter-high, is making her feel nauseated, and she longs for the comforting refreshment of the cold spring air.
“Where are you moving to?” Happy wants to know.
Her hand is on the knob now, turning gently; a cool draft curls around the jamb and into the store. “I think,” she says, “I’ll keep that to myself.”
“I can always find you,” Happy says, waggling her finger. “I have my ways.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Almost out now. And…there. Onto the sidewalk, and away.
“Ruth! Oh, Ruth!”
She sighs, stops, turns. Happy is standing just outside the door, her face pale and disappointed. She has to shout over the sound of a passing dump truck.
“Don’t you want to take a parting shot? Isn’t there anything you’d like to say?”
Plenty, she thinks. How many months did she spend spinning fantasies of putting Happy in her place? How many times has she spoken to the shower head, the rhododendrons, the computer screen, the stacks, delivering snappy put-downs, devastating rebuttals, righteous diatribes? More than she could count. You’d think the trial would have been enough to satisfy Ruth Spinks, but her moments in the witness box were a disappointment, diluted as they were by formal civility and hostile cross-examination, the long-hoped-for verdict offset by the town’s humiliating admission that it had been deceived. And so, no,
there was no satisfaction: quite the opposite, in fact. Only leaving here, Ruth reasons, will purge Happy Masters at last from her mind; only putting these miserable years behind her for good will bring her peace. She imagines what lies ahead: pulling away from the curb, Equinox receding in the sideview mirror, the drive downstate and into the city. For dinner tonight, she will visit the Vietnamese place around the corner from her new building, and she’ll sleep on the floor, like a student, beside the clanking radiator. The smell of the previous occupant’s cat will wrinkle her nose, and the sound of traffic will wake her before dawn. She’ll get up, and buy a paper, and read and smoke and drink coffee in blissful—and permanent—solitude. All that, mere moments and miles away.
But here, finally, is her chance. Wouldn’t she like to leave on a note of triumph, to wear at last the garland of vengeance that she long coveted, and wither Happy Masters with a few toxic words?
Happy cocks her head, raises a freshly-plucked eyebrow, and shrugs. “Well?” she asks, waiting.
“No,” Ruth shouts back. “No, it’s all yours.” And with a rustle of starched cotton and a decisive smack of palm against palm, she turns and makes for home.
With gratitude: Bruce Bennett, Nicholle Brending, Rhian Ellis, Steven Gillis, Margaret Halton, Roger Hodge, Lewis Lapham, Susannah Loiselle, Richard Nuñez, Ed Skoog, Bob Turgeon, Dan Wickett
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Copyright © 2013 by J. Robert Lennon
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