Equinox had a town park, though not many people ever bothered to visit it. Even at this time of year, when the air bore a hint of crispness, and the leaves still offered shade from afternoon sun, the park was usually deserted—it was damp, marshy even, and poorly maintained, the gravel paths overgrown with weeds and the once-prominent signs that identified various trees and shrubs (planted, years ago, by a different generation of Equinox students and their teachers) broken, collapsed, and covered over with humus. The shoreline had retreated and the dock had begun to sink into the mire, and the entire area gave the impression that it was in the process of being reclaimed by nature.
Jennifer Treisman, however, visited it despite all these disincentives, or maybe because of them. She thought the park was crap, and so it was there that she went when she felt like crap, and wanted to smoke a crappy cigarette and toss it into the crappy water. She felt like crap today because it was morning, and it was Tuesday, and all the little fat bitches were back, and her kids were bugging her, and her husband was bugging her. She also had a cold and had dropped a pipe wrench on her bare foot, bruising the shit out of it. So at around ten she told Bud she was going for a walk, and grabbed her lighter and cigs, and headed along the lake path to the park.
The lake path was no better than the park. It used to be kind of nice, back when they moved here and bought the gas station, but now it had sunk in places, or gotten flooded, or had dead trees lying across it. The ghost of Thomas Crim, the town founder, was supposed to stalk it at night, or so said the kids who came down here after dark to scare the living shit out of each other and screw: she was always finding beer bottles and rubbers or the occasional solitary sneaker or sock. Chunks of metal or lumber or scrap wood were always washing up onto the path, artifacts of the industries that had once come to life on this stretch of lake, then shuddered and died. Dead fish rotted in the reeking air. Anyway it didn’t take her long to get to the park, and walk out on the crooked pier, and light her cig. The sun had come up behind her and cast long shadows of the trees out onto the water; she was cold underneath her sweatshirt and sucked the hot smoke in as fast as she could, to warm up.
Fucking fall. Fuckin’ A. Everything croaking, everything going rotten. She didn’t know how she was going to get through another winter in that house, with the drafty windows and the piles of dishes and the stinking laundry she was supposed to do. She had to run the space heater out in the garage and everybody’s fucking cars broke down in the same boring way every year, and the extra money they made fixing them went to pay the high heating bills. It was all just a pain in the ass. At least it wouldn’t be hot—she’d had it with hot, with the sweat in her crotch and the burn on her arms and the flies. Just now she could hear them, buzzing around some reeking thing nearby, which come to think of it she could smell even through the smoke. Give it up, she wanted to tell them—you’re only going to live a couple of days anyway. You’re flies.
She sucked the cigarette down to the filter and tossed the butt into the lake, into the same place she always threw it, where there was a little pile of butts lying in the mud underneath the surface of the water. Which she couldn’t see, because somebody had thrown some clothes off the end of the pier, and they were half-sunk, half-floating on the surface.
Which is where the flies were swarming, actually.
There wasn’t really a particular moment when it sunk in: instead, her mind kind of started and missed a few times, and then revved up, like a motorcycle, roaring faster and faster, until she couldn’t hear anything but roar. She didn’t scream, she just started moaning and kept on moaning. She saw her cigarette butt smoldering there on the gentle lump of blue polyester that stretched up above the water, stretched over the corpse that bloated underneath it. The cigarette lay there, soaking up the tainted water, and eventually it was saturated and went out. And now that there was no smoke, she could make out the smell, and it was as bad a smell as there was.
The legs bobbed gently, partially concealed by a stand of reeds; the face was waterlogged beyond recognition. The chest and head were pinned beneath the surface by a large round stone, which two gray hands still clutched. You couldn’t have identified her just by looking, but there weren’t many people it could have been, and Jennifer recognized the dress. To her credit, she didn’t throw up until she got home.
* * *
Needless to say, it was all anybody was talking about at the bar that night. It seemed like everyone had been to the park and had watched the soaking EMTs haul the corpse out of the water; everyone seemed already to have heard about the suicide note, which had read simply
H
MASTERS.
P
P
Y
If there had been people left in the town before this who didn’t know who Happy was and that she had brought change to the village of Equinox, they certainly did now; indeed, Happy’s conversational currency was so valuable that people in the Goodbye Goose seemed even to know things that weren’t true. In the front corner by the window one could hear a trio of humanities lecturers conspiring:
“I heard she once ran a guy down with her limo. The driver tried to stop, but Happy told him if he did, he was fired.”
“Well, she’s a firer, obviously. Her employees tried to unionize, and one by one their houses got burned down.”
“Wasn’t that Rupert Murdoch?”
“I think that was Martha Stewart.”
“Martha Stewart was framed.”
“God, I knew you’d say that.”
And, on the other side of the bar, in the old church pew behind the pool-table-cum-coat-rack:
“All I know is, she ain’t buying my land, no matter who she kills.”
“You think she killed that lady?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“C’mon, she drowned herself.”
“I heard the handwriting on that paper was funny.”
“What was funny about it?”
“I dunno, it was fucked up.”
And out back, in the parking lot, the voice of April Cort could be heard, holding forth to a small group consisting of Ty, Sara, Rain, and Janet.
“I say we run this bitch out of town. She comes here, takes over everything everybody loves best, then murders poor Glenda in cold blood. And the cops are saying they aren’t gonna do anything. It’s bullshit, girls. I think we gotta have a protest.”
“You despised the old bat,” Ty drawled, applying lipstick the color of dried blood.
“I did not despise her,” April came back. “She had her issues like any chick, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a right to exist.”
“I don’t think?” Rain offered, “anyone’s saying it’s murder?”
“All death is murder,” Sara said, slouching against somebody’s Buick.
“How so?” Ty asked.
“Everybody gets driven to the grave by somebody, is all I’m saying.”
They all gave that a few moments’ thought, except for Janet, who was thinking of something else.
Janet had never played with dolls, when she was a girl. Her mother didn’t like them—“instruments,” she once called them, soon after her promotion to full professor in the women’s studies department at UW, “of patriarchal tyranny,” though Melanie Ping did admit to having owned a few herself in her day, “utterly unaware of their coercive capacity, though I was able to mitigate their effect through a lifetime of concerted effort.” So she provided Janet with blocks, with stuffed animals (as long as they weren’t too girly), with crayons and markers, but never with dolls. When Janet was in kindergarten she developed a taste for flowers and hearts; she drew them daily and proudly brought them home. No monster, her mother would magnet them to the fridge, but the following day usually found them purged, surreptitiously folded into the recycling bin and carried out to the curb with the newspapers. There was no question of Melanie Ping being a bad mother—she was decent and kind, generous with her affection. But always there was this arbitrary resistance, this mysterious, sinuous wall that snaked through Janet’s childhood, blocking access to some things, permitting others, with no clear logic. Ball caps yes, barrettes no. Red yes, pink no. On Halloween: ghosts, goblins, sure. Ballerinas, princesses, no way. Witches? Melanie Ping had to think about that one, which Janet had suggested one year in exasperation. Her mother thought for a good half hour before saying yes. Witches were empowered.
On her tenth birthday Janet received, from her aunt, a doll. Not just any doll: a Happy Girl. The Happy Girl was also named Janet. This Janet doll was the daughter of a World War II soldier who was off fighting the Japanese, according to the story book that came with her. Stiff and compact, its dust jacket bordered by a strand of ivy and showing a painting of young Janet, her hair blown by wind, in the foreground of a washed-out air battle scene, the book was the most beautiful one Janet had ever seen. And the story seemed amazingly brave and idyllic—her fictional twin’s primary responsibilities were helping with domestic chores and writing sweet, perfume-scented letters to her father.
Her mother hated the doll, and hated the book. But Janet absolutely adored this wonderful gift. She would read the book over and over, until the dust jacket was torn and taped a hundred times, until half the pages, dog-eared to the breaking point, lacked any corners at all. She would fondle and caress her Janet doll, make clothes for her, hold entire conversations with her, kiss her every night before she went to sleep, and she was still doing these things at an age when most girls were taking up smoking and sex. She would bring little Janet to junior high and keep her stashed in her locker, in a plastic drawstring Gap bag.
She still had the doll, in fact, in her closet. In her dorm room, right here at Equinox College. Some nights she even slept with it.
When she first came to Equinox (“a good place to meet girls,” her mother had suggested) Janet got into the internet and discovered what had since become two unhealthy preoccupations: lesbian pornography and the Happy Girls web site. The latter featured, among other things, a profile of Happy, complete with photographs of her home in New York, and her other home in East Hampton, and her workshop, and her collection of antique dolls. There was an archive of interviews and magazine pieces about her, and Janet had read these many times, mining them for information that might suggest that she and Happy might be kindred souls. Phrases from Happy’s lips, reprinted in the interviews, stayed with Janet as if she had really heard them—and, lying in bed at night with little Janet in her arms, she did hear them, spoken in tones of gentle affection, of quiet confidence, in a voice simultaneously youthful and wise and seductive. I understand what girls need. The life of American girls is my obsession, my guiding passion. I want to live forever in the hearts of our nation’s girls.
She understood that these phrases (like the dirty pictures she’d come to associate them with) were not directed at her. She was only one girl among many—in fact, she wasn’t even a girl anymore. Nevertheless Happy Masters occupied a particular place in Janet’s universe; she was a role model, a conscience. A figure of—how to put it?—particular affection. No. Lust. The Happy Girls web site, even more than the others that she guiltily ogled in a private corner of the library computer room, held a strange erotic power for Janet, its commingling of innocence and commerce a kind of pornography, for a demographic of one. Her desire for Happy was hopelessly complicated, deeply private, and fantastically obscure.
So it was hard to imagine Happy Masters meaning anybody any harm. Sure, she bought the store, and sure she fired the old lady, but who ever went there? And if they did, how did the old lady treat them? Bad, that’s how. She was mean and nobody liked her. Besides, you couldn’t know why she really killed herself—you couldn’t ever know anybody, really. If there was one thing she tended to agree with Sara about, that was it. People were unknowable, oneself included.
The thought made Janet want to drink, and there was the bar—but here they were, yapping away in the parking lot.
April, it seemed, was trying to organize a protest. Signs, chants, the whole magilla, right out in front of Happy’s place. “We’re gonna run the bitch right the hell out of town!” she said.
“I dunno…” Rain began, but she was interrupted by Sara, whose pale round fist was shaking in the evening air.
“Yeah!” Sara said.
“I like it,” Ty admitted.
“All right! Janet, Rain, you in?”
“Well…” Rain said.
“How about we go in for a couple of drinks first,” Janet said, and a flash of irritation passed over April’s face before she nodded her agreement.
“Okay, okay—a little liquid courage. C’mon, girls!”
“That does sound nice,” Rain said, licking her lips.
And so into the bar they marched.