Read Best to Laugh: A Novel Online
Authors: Lorna Landvik
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Humor, #United States, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Contemporary Fiction, #American, #Literary, #Humor & Satire, #General Humor, #FIC000000 Fiction / General
Best to Laugh: A Novel (4 page)
O
UR
HOST’S
APARTMENT
WAS
A
SURPRISE.
“Goll-eee,” said Maeve, imitating the actor who played Gomer Pyle on the old TV sitcom. “These are some fancy digs.”
“Thanks,” said Ed. “Want a tour?”
We oohed and ahhed over the fact his bedroom not only looked like an adult slept in it—there were no orange crates serving as nightstands, no mattresses on the floor—but that it seemed restful, as if thought had gone into its design and decoration. His bathroom had the same octagonal white tile as the one in my apartment did, but his towels matched and hung from the rod as if folded by a maid. It was his office, though, that most excited me.
“Look at this library!” I said of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering three walls.
“I wish I had a two-bedroom,” said Maeve, plopping on a leather chair with wheels. “It’d give me space for a weight room.”
“You’ve sure got a lot of stuff about the Kennedy assassinations,” I said, my finger running along the spines of more than a dozen books. “And look at all these CIA titles!”
Maeve swiveled in the office chair and squinted.
“
Who’s Really in Charge?
” she read. “
Our Shadow Government in Nicaragua.
Secret Presidents—More Powerful Than Our Elected Ones.
What the hell, Ed, are you some kind of conspiracy nut?”
“If you consider wanting to know the truth nutty, then I guess I am.”
“
Mrs. Dalloway,
A Bell for Adano,
Leaves of Grass,
” I read aloud, moving on to his expansive fiction and poetry section. “Well, at least you’re not completely nuts.”
“No, not completely,” said Ed. “Now let’s go open up that wine—unless you’d like to psychoanalyze the reasons I may or may not have
The Joy of Sex
on hand.”
“Do you?” asked Maeve brightly. “Have it, I mean? Because if you do, I’d love to borrow it.”
I
N
E
D’S
LIVING
room, Maeve plunked her big sculpted self down on a sleek suede couch and crossed her big manicured feet on top of the coffee table.
“I had no idea substitute teaching was so lucrative,” she said.
“Hey, you mind?” asked Ed, nodding toward those big feet and when, with a long aggrieved sigh, Maeve removed them, he put in their place a tray holding the bottle of wine and three glasses.
The bodybuilder’s spiel on the unhealthy aspects of alcohol was interrupted when Ed said, “Fine. It’s just more for Candy and me.”
“Oh all right,” said Maeve. “But just one glass.”
“And substitute teaching is criminally underpaid,” said Ed, steering back onto the conversational road. “Everything in this room was paid for with my game show winnings.”
Maeve took a big gulp of wine. “Oh yeah, I forgot you’re a big television star.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ignoring Ed, she turned to me. “And you. Are you Japanese or Chinese or—” she drummed her kneecaps—“Americanese?”
“Geez, Maeve,” said Ed.
“Just asking!”
“I’m a quarter-Finnish,” I said, with nursery-school-teacher sweetness. “A quarter-Norwegian and half-Korean.”
“And I thought I had an identity crisis!”
“Maeve, really,” said Ed, “what is your problem?”
“Who said I had a prob—”
The weightlifter was unable to finish her sentence, overcome as she was by a sudden crying jag.
Mood swings are by nature odd and unexpected things to witness, but this one seemed truly bizarre. Ed’s expression telegraphed he felt the same way I did; nevertheless, he got out of his suede club chair and the two of us flanked the bereft Amazon, patting her wide, shuddering back and offering inane assurances like “There, there” and “It’s okay.”
She picked up real quick on the inanity part.
“It’s not okay!” she said, sniffing in a gurgle of phlegm. “It’s never okay!”
“What do you mean?” asked Ed gently.
“That ‘Americanese’ thing—I was just trying to be funny! But I’m just a doofus and nothing—not even a little joke!—ever works out for me!”
This confession inspired another bout of tears (for such a big woman
she had a delicate, kittenish way of crying), and when she was all done and Ed refilled her wine glass, she explained how she and her trainer had been confident of her taking home the Miss Dynamo Lady trophy and how she had just that evening heard from said trainer that they’d failed to get her entry in on time and she’d been disqualified.
“And the cash prize is five hundred dollars! The women hardly ever get cash prizes, and we have to fight to get even an ounce of the ton of respect male bodybuilders get, even though we have to work harder because of our testosterone deficit!”
Maeve’s face, by virtue of her nearly nonexistent eyebrows, looked naked, and when it crumpled, Ed and I braced for more of her kitten cries, but the big cat drew in a deep breath and lifting her broad jaw to the ceiling sniffed deeply.
“I guess I’ll just have to train extra hard for the Valley Vixen event. The cash prizes aren’t that hot, but rumor has it the winner’ll get free membership at this great gym in Toluca Lake and a year’s supply of protein powder and vitamin supplements.”
“Speaking of which,” said Ed, “anyone hungry?” He retreated to the kitchen and returned with a tray of nuts, cheese, and crackers, none of which he served in their original packaging, further impressing me as to the man’s hosting abilities.
Muscly Maeve was curled up on one side of the couch, I sat on the other, and Ed was back in the club chair, and it was in these positions that we did what people will when they don’t know each other; we told our stories. That is, Maeve told hers, and we listened.
Watching as Ed topped off her glass for the third time, she told us if she had to describe herself as a kid, it would be tall, homely, and lonely.
“It’s not that my parents didn’t love me; it’s just that there wasn’t a lot of time for me. See, Father is a professor of linguistics—he’s at the University of Munich now and Mother—well, Mother of course is Taryn Powell.”
I knew I wasn’t drunk—a few too many Ripple wine binges in my misspent youth had tainted my taste for the grape, and I had hardly touched the cabernet Ed poured—but the bodybuilder’s words made me feel as if I were.
“Wait a second,” said Ed. “Did you just say your mother is Taryn Powell? Taryn Powell, the actress?”
“No, Taryn Powell the bearded lady. Who do you think?!”
“Wow,” I said.
“No kidding,” said Ed.
“I don’t like to broadcast it,” said Maeve, picking cashews from the bowl of mixed nuts. “People are never straight with you when they know your mother’s a movie star. Well, was. Now she can only find work on TV.”
My grandmother never missed an episode of
Summit Hill,
the nighttime soap opera starring Taryn Powell as Serena Summit, the regal, long-suffering matriarch of a wildly rich and fabulously flawed family.
“I can’t wait to tell my grandma that I live above Taryn Powell’s daughter!”
Maeve finished chomping nuts and swallowed hard, her red-rimmed eyes threatening to irrigate her face again.
“See, that’s exactly what I mean! Now all of a sudden I’m someone
interesting,
when just minutes before you thought I was some freaky bodybuilder.”
“I didn’t think you were—”
Maeve waved away my weak denial.
“Listen, it’s Father—Mother’s first husband—I most take after, and proudly so. I followed his footsteps into academia.”
“You did?” asked Ed.
“Yes,” said Maeve coolly. “I have a master’s in physiology.”
“Are you a physiologist?” I asked, not exactly sure what that was.
“Right now I’m working as a medical transcriber. It’s not my life’s goal, but it pays well and I can set my own hours.”
“I had no idea,” said Ed, balancing a wedge of cheese on a cracker.
“Well, you haven’t exactly been eager to get to know me.”
Maeve wrinkled her nose, as if Ed’s unreciprocated attention had an actual odor to it. Seeking cleaner air, she turned to me. “But it was that study that sparked my interest in bodybuilding. To be the master of my own physical destiny! To fine-tune and mold my musculature! To transform the gangly girl into a powerhouse of womanhood!”
Stirred by her own words, Maeve Mullman stood up, posing with her glass held high. Her T-shirt and baggy warm-up pants couldn’t disguise her well-defined body; her muscles were convex and shapely, and I raised my own glass to salute her and her efforts.
“To powerhouses of womanhood!” I said.
“To mastering physical destiny!” added Ed.
“Hey,” said Maeve, the celebratory moment fleeting. “Are you making fun of me?”
Both Ed and I averred that we were not.
“Because that’s what I can’t stand. People making fun of me. I don’t mind honest questions—‘Why do you lift weights?’ ‘Why do you like to bulk up like that?’—but I hate people making fun of me.”
She banged her empty glass down on the coffee table and bolted toward the door, her long strides making tracks in the thick gray carpet.
“I wasn’t making fun of you!” said Ed, and I echoed him, but Maeve exited, slamming the door against our assurances.
“I think,” said Ed after a long moment, “a nerve may have been touched.”
Shortly after Maeve’s departure, I made a less dramatic one.
“Since it looks like she’s eaten all the cashews,” I said, pilfering through the crystal nut bowl, “I guess I should be going, too.”
“Hey, we never got to our Scrabble game,” said Ed.
“I would have creamed you.”
“In your dreams. And don’t go just yet—I’ve got something for you.”
After dashing into the kitchen Ed returned with a six-pack.
“Isn’t that the chocolate milk stuff you were drinking down at the pool?” I asked.
“YaZoo. It’s chocolate soda. It’s one of my game show ‘parting gifts,’ which I now realize means ‘hard to part with,’ since no one wants any.”
“Well, gee . . . thanks.”
Laughing as I reluctantly accepted the six-pack, Ed took out from his back pocket a folded piece of newspaper.
“Here’s your real present.”
“Want ads?”
“For game show contestants. See here,” he said, pointing to red-inked circles, “this one’s for
Word Wise,
and here’s one for
Use It or Lose It
—although they only have prizes, not cash—and this one’s for
The Money Tree.
That’s the show I was just on. Call them up and see what happens.”
E
D
OFFERED
TO
SEE
ME
HOME,
and while I thanked him for his chivalry I reminded him I lived in the same complex and thought I could safely navigate the short distance between his four-plex and mine.
I breathed in the jasmine and eucalyptus-tinged air. After the harsh smoggy daylight, there was something tender and wistful about this Hollywood night that smelled of sachets tucked inside the lace and satins of a widow’s lingerie drawer. It was almost dreamy, that soft-scented air, and
I could have walked for miles in it, but instead I turned toward the back of the complex and the pool.
Light shone from behind a shaded window in Billy Gray Green’s apartment, but I presumed he was out bartending and like most people didn’t want to come home to a dark house. Just in case he was home, I stripped to my underwear in the shadows and slipped into the water, slicing through it in long quiet strokes, thinking of the evening, thinking of the melodrama of Maeve’s story, of my own.
H
ERE’S
SOME
GOOD
ADVICE:
don’t read your old diaries when you’re depressed. Earlier that summer I had holed up in my bedroom doing that, and believe me, you can’t win: the bright and cheery entries will make you wonder why you don’t feel like that anymore, and the sad and whiny ones will make you think nothing changes.
5
/
12
/
68
Dear Cal,
Dad gave Grandma a box of chocolate-covered cherries and we drove out to Aunt Pauline’s for lunch. I didn’t want to go because I had a stomachache.
I hate Mother’s Day.
2
/
24
/
69
Dear Cal,
One word for the Nokomis Jr. High Talent Show: Huge Success! (Okay, two words.) Miss Lindblom asked me to emcee and it was so much fun! When Dale Ferguson walked off the stage after forgetting the words to “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” I said, “I guess he fell in.” The audience cracked up. And when Carla Dierks and Paula Peterson came out to dance in their little leotards, a bunch of boys started to whistle and I pretended to crack a whip and said, “Settle down, animals.” And not only did I get to emcee, I got to close the show! Paul Dahlquist and I sang “If I Had a Stammer.” With Paul’s good guitar playing and my okay Bob-Dylan-as-a-stutterer impersonation, we got a standing ovation!
6
/
4
/
70
Dear Cal,
Finally, FINALLY, at the ripe old age of fourteen, I got my period! Grandma had given me a box of pads when I was eleven years old and it was starting to seem like I’d never need them, and besides, my friend LeAnn Jerdy and I used most of them up making houses (mostly igloos) for our Troll dolls and sleeping bags for Ken and Barbie.
I stayed up late, surprising Dad when he came home by giving him a big hug. He was so surprised he hugged me back, but it didn’t take him long to let go and say, “What’s this all about?”
“Oh, I just wanted you to know I’m not a hermaphrodite like Charlotte said I was and today I turned into a woman!” That’s what I wanted to say—it was sort of momentous news after all—but in the end, all I could say was, “Nothing. Good night.”
10
/
1
/
71
Dear Cal,
We had a Laugh-Off Assembly at school for April Fool’s Day, and the sophomores RULED. Tom Schmitz dressed up in a gray wig and a baggy dress and sang “Folsum Prison” in an old lady voice. Matt Triggs dressed up in a blonde wig and shorts and a tank top and did a cheerleading routine. I dressed up in a man’s suit and tucked my hair up into a hat and gave a speech called, “What I Expect from You Brats.” The first big laugh came right after I introduced myself as Mr. Welby (our school principal). Afterwards, Mr. Welby came up to me and said he didn’t know whether to be flattered or suspend me!
7
/
29
/
72
Dear Cal,
Debbie Hutchinson said I wasn’t supporting the team. Peggy Brendan said I made the rest of them look dumb. “No,” I thought, “you did that all by yourselves.”
The thing is, I’d already done it last year; the stupid fundraiser in which we took turns washing cars, or standing on the corner of
46
th & Hiawatha, waving signs and hollering “Support Roosevelt’s Swim Team! Support the Teddies!” I didn’t mind doing any of that; what I did mind was the “uniform” we’d been told to wear—cutoffs
(“the shorter the better!”) and bikini tops. I didn’t like all the guys honking their horns and whistling and how we were all giggly, spraying each other with hoses or how Bonnie Anderson would lean over a car and practically smash her boobs against the windshield while the guy inside sat with his tongue (I hope that’s all) hanging out.
So I dressed in my dad’s old uniform, the kind he wore before he got promoted to foreman; a one-piece jumpsuit that zips up the front. And I tied a scarf around my hair, like Rosie the Riveter.
And I did what I was supposed to do—shout loud, wave signs, and wash cars—without that icky feeling of giving away something I didn’t want to.
Coach came by in the afternoon, and when she saw me she shook her head and muttered, “Typical,” but she wasn’t able to hide her smile.
2
/
14
/
73
Dear Cal,
Another Cry Day. On a scale of
1
–
10
, about an
8
.
After English class, I ditched school and took a bus to the Electric Fetus, figuring I might as well buy myself a Valentine. When I was up at the cashier, paying for
Exile on Main Street,
I hear this voice saying, “Excellent choice, Candy Bar.”
It was Jim Clark, my childhood crush. I spent a lot of time admiring him from afar (i.e., my bedroom window), watching him jump in and out of cars filled with yelling, joking high school boys and girls, and, once, watching him pose on his front step with his prom date, wishing I was that girl in the pink dress and blonde pageboy who held his hand and laughed when Mrs. Clark pointed her camera and said, “Cheese!” Anyway, from what Mrs. Clark told Grandma, he’s had a hard time since he got back from Vietnam, and I admit, I hardly recognized him with his Fu Manchu mustache and scraggly beard.
“Jim Clark, I haven’t seen you in forever!”
“Seems that way. You’re all growed up!” Then he said that surely I wasn’t old enough to be out of school yet, and I said, “No, I’m a junior,” and then he said, “A truant junior,” and asked if I wanted to go for a ride and I said sure.
He fired up a joint and we drove toward the River Road, listening to “Ride, Captain Ride” and “Smiling Faces Sometimes” and when
“In the Summertime” came on, he said, “Do you know who sings this? Mungo Jerry. Do you know where the name Mungo Jerry came from?”
“At the Stupid Names for a Band store?”
Jim laughed. “From a T. S. Eliot poem.”
Our fun and mellow drive changed when he blurted out how sorry he was he didn’t go to my dad’s service because funerals are hard for him.
“Good old Mr. Pekkala,” he said and sighed. “Every now and then I’d wander over to your garage late at night when your dad was in there working on his car, or just sitting there smoking. So we’d talk.”
“You would?” I said, my throat clogging up. “About what?”
Jim scratched his nametag sewn on the front of his camouflage jacket. “Everything, really. Cars. Sports. Politics. He was really mad that Johnson didn’t run for a second term.”
“He was?”
“Yeah, he hated the war, and he thought Johnson was finally wising up and would have gotten us out a lot earlier.” Jim took a deep, final toke of the joint. “When I got drafted, he gave me his lucky Indian head penny. The one he carried all through Korea.”
I felt like we were talking about someone I’d never met and when I told him it was the three-month anniversary of my dad dying, he said we had to go to Fort Snelling, stat, and pay our respects. So we drove out by the airport to the cemetery, which is HUGE and filled with row after row of white headstones that seem to go on forever. First we stopped at the grave of one of Jim’s friends, and he knelt down, his hands running over the engraving like he was reading Braille. The date made me feel like my lungs weren’t working:
1949
–
1968
.
A plane roared overheard and I wondered if from way up high, all those tombstones in all those lines looked like dominoes, and if you flicked them with a finger they’d all fall down.
My dad’s grave didn’t have its permanent marble headstone yet—more unfinished business—and Jim put his arm around me as we squatted in front of it and I bawled like a baby.
“Life’s a bitch, Candy,” he said, and then he was crying.
I feel like I don’t know anything.
11
/
19
/
73
Dear Cal,
Mrs. Freeburg cornered me in the hallway today and said auditions were being held for
Hello Dolly
and I’d be perfect for the lead role. I said I’d think about it just so she’d leave me alone, and she said, “Candy, you’re one of the most talented students I’ve ever worked with. I want you back onstage. It’ll be good for you.”
Instead of going to Chemistry, I sat in a bathroom stall for all of second period, but not to play over and over those words about me being so talented. The reason I locked myself in the can is that I drank so much this weekend I still felt a little sick. Sick enough to barf twice.
3
/
5
/
74
Dear Cal,
Big college tour today . . . and thanks to the WORST tour guide ever, I hate my life even more.
6
/
15
/
74
Dear Cal,
Shit! This is the second time I’ve asked the question: am I still a virgin? All I know is that I woke up in Bryan Emery’s basement with some of my clothes on and some not and a vague memory of rolling around with a guy who smelled like pot and Slim Jims. Karen was the only one still there—where’d everyone else go?—and she had less clothes on than me.
“Man, were you wasted,” she said.
“Like you weren’t,” I said, pulling a squished chunk of Slim Jim out of my hair.
“Eww,” said Karen as we gathered up our stuff. “Is that what I think it is?”
We both stood looking at the used rubber.
“I hope it’s from the guy I was with,” I said.
“Same here,” said Karen.
They went on and on to an embarrassing degree, the entries recounting my dissolute ways, and I felt sorry and angry at the girl who wrote them. I stopped reading before I got to my college calendaeiums, knowing they were mostly a robotic rundown of grades and assignments with
the occasional review of a theater department show I should have tried out for, but didn’t.
Shoving back under the bed the box of notebooks that proved I was eligible for citizenship in Loserville, I trudged upstairs.
“Listless” would have been an overenthusiastic description of my mood, and after making the huge physical effort of turning on the television, I collapsed onto that on which I was collapsing a lot lately—the couch.
Ignoring the sweet June day outside, I watched a soap opera in which two well-groomed lovers frolicked on picnic grounds while the spurned, well-groomed former boyfriend lurked in the bushes, flashing his well-groomed senator grandfather’s pistol. I watched another soap opera in which a well-groomed wedding couple took their vows, while the spurned, well-groomed girlfriend stole away in the backseat of the bridal couple’s festively decorated car.
“Now that’s what I call a honeymoon surprise,” I muttered.
Interrupting the stories of these philandering, violent, but always well-groomed characters were the deodorant, toilet paper, and floor wax commercials, and I was watching Mr. Whipple squeeze the Charmin when something fluttered onto my lap. It was a ticket.
“It’s for Heidi Wheaton,” said my grandmother, standing behind the couch. “We’re seeing her tonight.”
My postcollege social life had whittled away to nothing, and I could tell from her expression that she was waiting for me to resist her invitation.
Not having the energy, I said, “Fine.”
“Because if you say, ‘No,’” she began, “. . . oh, okay. Good.”
We took the bus to the State Theater to see the woman whose publicity trumpeted her as “the funniest woman on the planet!”
Heidi Wheaton had been the breakaway star on
Yuk It Up!,
a comedy sketch show, and her ability to play anything from an addled rocket scientist to a larcenous babysitter had won her two Emmys and a wide fan base.
In our velveteen seats, my grandmother and I sat back in the dark theater and for two hours I forgot how bad I felt about my life. We laughed and nudged one another as Heidi reprised her
Yuk It Up!
characters and introduced us to several new ones.
Cool Old MacDonald was a jazz singer whose skat singing involved oinks, moos, and meows. Dottie Dunn was an Avon Lady who needed a little bump—or two—of Johnny Walker Red to give her sales pitch confidence.
Guptula was an East Indian yogi who claimed to have the secret of life.
After arranging herself in a cross-legged seated position, Heidi put her hands on her knees, palms up and with her eyes closed, took several deep and exaggerated breaths.
“You must carefully choose a power mantra,” she said in a singsong voice. She opened her eyes, now slightly crossed. “The magic words that will be your guide and compass, your life saber—and no, all you
Star Wars
fans, I did not say ‘light saber’ but ‘life saber’ because it is exactly that, something used to slash away that which prevents you from getting your deepest desires. My life saber is—”
Here she quickly said a word that sounded like maykmyneahdubbahl. She said it again, then repeated it so we understood it was
Make mine a double.
Big yuks from the audience.
“Of course, your power mantra must be a secret,” Guptula counseled. “I can tell you mine only because I am more enlightened than you poor Midwestern yahoos could ever hope to be.”
I laughed more than I had in a long time, but this wasn’t enough for my grandmother.
“Come on,” she said, as the theater emptied of its happy, sated audience. “We’re going backstage.”
Grandma was a polite and unassuming person, and that she steered me toward an usher standing by the stage and said, “We’d like to say hello to Miss Wheaton,” did nothing less than boggle my mind.
“Uh, does she know you?” asked the usher, a pimply young man who wore a macramé headband around his forehead to contain a cascade of blond curls.
