Best to Laugh: A Novel

  MY VOICE MADE A SOUND that I couldn’t tell was a laugh or cry, and I slurped my tea for a while, composing myself before I went on and Madame Pepper slurped her tea, waiting.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE I WAS TO begin my freshman year at the U (there was no way I was going to a college that enrolled that Earthshoe–Asian Studies dipshit) I woke up on the north side of noon, my head pounding, my mouth tasting of the dry heaves that spasmed up my throat.

  I had spent the night at a party whose host was a brother of a friend of an acquaintance, helping myself to their warm beer and cloudy bong. On my way to the bathroom, stepping over a pair of blanketed humps I assumed were bodies, I belched, tasting again the evening’s debaucheries. In the bathroom, after splashing cold water on my face, I reached for a towel on the rack, only to find it was my T-shirt.

  I walked the mile or two home and was not exactly pleased to see that I couldn’t sneak in the house, as my grandmother was in the front yard, watering her hydrangeas.

  The look on her face upon seeing the bedraggled, hungover vision that was her granddaughter was not one of anger, or disgust, but of delight.

  “Candy! You’re home!” she said dropping the hose.

  “Sorry I didn’t call, but—”

  She waved away my apology and dipped her hand into the pocket of her gardening apron, pulling out a letter.

  “Look!” she said, waving it like it was on fire. “Look!”

  “What is it?” I said, even though it was pretty clear it was an envelope.

  “It’s from Kermit Carlson,” said Grandma, her voice quaking with excitement. “The postman just delivered it!”

  It took only seconds for me to rifle through my mental Rolodex: Kermit Carlson was my dad’s army buddy and short-lived business partner.

  “How . . .?” I whispered. “Why?”

  “I wrote him,” said my grandmother, and taking my arm she led me to the front steps where we both sat down. “Right after that college girl said those awful things . . . my goodness, I’d given up that I’d ever hear back . . .”

  We both stared at the letter she held.

  “How . . . how did you find him?”

  “I used the address from a letter your dad had written me. The hardware store. Now come on, open it up!”

  “It’s addressed to you. You read it.”

  “Out loud?”

  When I nodded she said, “I’m so nervous,” and I agreed that that was exactly the way I felt.

  MADAME PEPPER STIRRED honey into her tea, the spoon clinking against the china.

  “Zo. What did the letter say?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things . . .” Tears pooled in my eyes. “I memorized the whole thing—I tend to memorize important letters—would you like to hear some of it?”

  Madame Pepper nodded and I closed my eyes, scrolling through the paragraphs imprinted on my brain until I found the ones I wanted.

  “HERE’S WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JOJO,”I recited.

  “I was with Arne when he knocked her down on our bicycles (we were both pretty hammered). She was on her way home from work, wearing a gray uniform—not, I can tell you, the getup of a lady of the evening! I’ll admit that both Arne and I paid for the services of a few women over there, but JoJo was never one of them.”

  I paused, remembering how my grandmother’s shoulder had sagged into mine when she read that.

  “Arne was a pretty private guy and kept his courtship quiet, although once in a while he would say something like, ‘Man, that JoJo’s something,’ or ‘She makes me want to dance!’ For a reserved guy like Arne, I can tell you, that was a high compliment!

  “When they were in New Jersey, she was busy with her new baby but sometimes she’d have me over for dinner, and although she was shy about her English, she’d manage to make little jokes. She was so funny! She did an impression of Arne that even had Arne doubled over!

  “What I remember most, though, was how kind she was to my mother, who was sick with emphysema. JoJo would take the baby and visit her, knowing a baby can cheer anyone up. I remember my mother telling me how JoJo said more than anything she wished her old family could have met her new family.

  “I’d just like Arne’s daughter to know that JoJo was truly a lovely person.”

  19

  MY GRANDMOTHER HAD GIVEN ME such a gift with that letter that I decided to give her one back, and by the time the residue of my hangover headache subsided, I resolved to give the boot to my profligate ways.

  It wasn’t exactly cold turkey, but a rearrangement of priorities. Less imbibing of pot and alcohol and more of books. Classes began and I stopped going to parties and started studying. Hard. The more credits I took, the more books I had to read and the more papers I had to write and the busier I was, the better.

  That I graduated early with honors was no big surprise, but no big thrill either.

  I took on more hours at the pie shop/diner I’d been working at since my sophomore year, thinking it was the taking-a-breather-until-I-figure-things-out tonic I needed, but apparently I wasn’t qualified to act as my own pharmacist.

  In my polyester uniform that zipped up the front and crepe-soled shoes that squeaked, I served hamburger platters, poured endless cups of coffee, and scooped ice cream for à la mode orders. I liked the pace and flurry, and the atmosphere was collegial, owing to the fact that most of my coworkers were still in college. On break, we shared laughs, slices of banana cream pie, and plans.

  Monica was excited about spending her senior year in Spain (“I am going to get muy bilingual, you guys!”), Lynn had accepted a summer internship at a paper in Washington, D.C. (“If I don’t win a Pulitzer in ten years, I’ll buy everyone lunch!”), and Merilou, studying veterinary science, told tales of puppies vaccinated and cows laboring (“You guys, I had to put my whole arm up her ‘til I felt the calf’s head!”).

  I lent my laughs, congratulations, or ewww’s to these conversations, but they began to work on me like a corrosive, eating away at the false front of confidence I had constructed around me.

  Having graduated college, I had met the only goal I had set for myself. Now I was bereft of plans for the future, because, I realized, I didn’t believe in the future. Not in a doomsday end-of-the-world future, just my own, which was even scarier. My hopelessness was like a snag in my restaurant-wear pantyhose; it started off small and kept inching upwards, irreparable. Sadness, certainly no stranger, came back as a constant presence, settled in, refused to budge.

  I had survived losing my mom and my dad but didn’t know how to survive losing myself.

  Coming home from work on a stormy summer night, I stopped at a drugstore and bought a bottle of aspirin and two bottles of cough syrup.

  My grandmother was in the living room, sitting on the couch and making a face as she sipped a pink-colored drink.

  “Oh kid, I won’t be making one of these again. It’s a Red Russian, because I added cherry juice.”

  With a little shudder, she set the glass down on the end table.

  “Say, Barnaby Jones is coming on. You want to watch it with me?”

  I declined, claiming I was beat and needed to get some sleep. A timpani of thunder rumbled, and clomping down the basement steps I heard the rush of a sudden rain.

  In my bedroom, I took my poisons out of my purse and sat on my bed, thinking over and over, I am so empty. I couldn’t hear the storm anymore, my ears filled with those words, the sounds of my breathing and the thud, thud, thud of my heart. Dumping the aspirin bottle into my open palm, I crammed the pills in my mouth like popcorn and then I uncapped the cough syrup and took a long swig. I was startled by the flavor; my jaw tingled at the sweetness, and turning over the bottle I saw from the label that I was trying to do myself in with children’s cough syrup. Children’s “super-grapey!” cough syrup. I sat for a moment, my mouth filled with aspirin melting under a grape oil slick, and the absurdity of what I was trying to do and with what I was trying to do it hit me hard. It was as if some giant forc
e walloped me on the back—not just walloped me but hollered the words of my secret power mantra, my life saber, into my head, and with a great exhale, aspirins and grape liquid spewed out of my mouth, spraying the bedside rag rug and the hem of a canopy curtain panel with a purple snow shower. I was mortified and strangely elated.

  A CONE OF LIGHT shone from under a yellow-shaded lamp; I had talked through the dusk and into the evening.

  Madame Pepper palmed the back of her neck and turned her head, as if working out a kink.

  “What do you mean, your secret power mantra?”

  “It’s from this character Heidi Wheaton did in a show my grandmother and I saw. She plays this Indian yogi who advises the audience to get their own secret power mantra ‘to obtain your life’s desires.’”

  “And what is yours?”

  “If I told you,” I said, wagging my finger, “it wouldn’t be a secret.”

  “Did you tell your grandmother?”

  “No. Like I said, it’s a secret power mantra.”

  “Bah,” said Madame Pepper waving her hand, “I meant, did you tell her about what you did? About the pills and cough syrup?”

  “Oh, no, I’d never tell her that. She’d kill me.”

  Seeing that Madame didn’t appreciate my joke, I added, “She’d be worrying about me for the rest of her life.”

  “And should she be?”

  “No!” A burble of laughter rose up my chest. “That’s the thing! It just struck me as so pathetically funny—attempted suicide by children’s cough syrup—well, it made me realize how instead of dying, instead of going to sleep for good, I was finally ready to wake up! I had a transcendental moment, like when people get born again!” I let loose a crazy-woman cackle.

  “When those words, my life saber, came into my head, something shifted. My real life, and what I really wanted, came out of hiding! And not just out of hiding; it seemed possible! Maybe I could be the real me and do the things I’d always wanted to do; maybe I could get on a stage and make people laugh.”

  “Ah-ha,” said Madame Pepper, as if an image had appeared in her mental crystal ball.

  “And then my cousin calls needing a subletter for her Hollywood apartment and boom . . . here I am.”

  The wrinkles around Madame Pepper’s mouth softened as she smiled.

  “Boom. Here you are.”

  “And just today, I’m happy to announce, I finished writing my act!”

  Lifting the teapot, I aimed the spout at my cup.

  “I think that is sign,” said Madame Pepper, watching the trickle of tea dribble out. “Time for you to get going.”

  “Oh,” I said, flushing. I’d forgotten how easy the seer found it to send me packing. “Oh, okay.”

  “Candy.” Grabbing my wrist as I stood up to go, my host snorted a laugh. “Yes, it is late; you probably should go home. But what I really mean is yes, yes! It is time you get going!”

  20

  THE NATURAL FUDGE was a vegetarian restaurant on Fountain Avenue that offered comics a small stage on which to perform while waitresses wearing long madras skirts and not enough deodorant served tofu omelets and vegetable burgers that looked like patties of gravel.

  Owing to the general laissez-faire atmosphere, there was not a strict time limit, although if an act was truly dying, the emcee might wander onstage and kindly pull the plug.

  The audience had been “entertained” by a guy who fashioned out of balloons lumpy shapes he claimed were aardvarks or bears; a wan guitarist who sang a song about a guy who “left me the way you leave the garbage, out on the street, alone and putrid,” and a bearded, wild-eyed comic who seemed less intent on making people laugh than convincing them that the IRS stood for Infernal Republic Stealing and how the US government was full of “imbeciles and idiots that make morons look smart!”

  “O-kay,” said the emcee, as the comic stalked off the stage, railing about taxation without representation. “I guess this is both a stage and a soapbox. Let’s hope the next comic considers it the former. Ladies and gentlemen, Candy Pekkala!”

  Did every other citizen on Planet Earth feel the same strange blip at that moment when time stood still? Were birds frozen in flight, ocean waves unable to break, all winds snuffed out?

  But then my heart thudded, reminding me of my existence, and I swallowed—hard to do when all moisture had evaporated from my throat—as I moved my legs in a fairly accurate semblance of walking, toward the stage. It occurred to me that I was experiencing similar sensations to those I had when I’d been called down as a contestant on Word Wise, and I reminded myself that I’d done all right there.

  “Hey,” I said, stepping toward the mike. “How’s everyone doing?”

  A few audience members responded that they were fine.

  “It’s a pleasure to be here at the Natural Fudge. Although I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what a ‘natural fudge’ is. Is it similar to an ‘unadulterated donut’ or a ‘pure peanut brittle’?”

  There was a mild—very mild—smattering of laughter at this unscripted reflection, and I scurried back to my written material.

  “Anyway, I’m happy to be here. I just moved here from Minneapolis, Minnesota, home of Paul Bunyan, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and the Jolly Green Giant. All three of them, in fact, I dated. Paul seemed like he had an ax to grind, the Pillsbury Doughboy was a real softie, and the Jolly Green Giant was not all that jolly, and bigot that I am, I really couldn’t get past his color.”

  I smiled, remembering to wait for the laughter. It didn’t come.

  “They say women in Minnesota are as cold as the temperatures there,” I said, my heart beating as if I were doing jumping jacks. “Just the other day, I met Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys who told me, ‘I wish they all could be California girls . . . except Minnesotans, who are so frigid they think that first base is home plate and that waving is an intimate act.’”

  There might have been one laugh, or it may have been a guy clearing phlegm from his throat; either way, it was the lone sound in a vacuum of quiet. I felt as if my body temperature had jumped ten or twenty dangerous degrees, and flitting through my brain was the panicky thought that I just might spontaneously combust on stage.

  “Hey, did you read production companies are combining the casts of a couple movies from last year, you know, to make things more cost effective? For example, Benji the dog will be starring with a weirdo with goofy hair in a buddy movie they’re calling For the Love of Eraserhead.”

  The silence was so vast that a pin dropping would have sounded like a sledgehammer smashing through glass.

  “And who saw Freaky Friday?” I didn’t wait for anyone to answer; I had no idea if anyone was still awake. “They’re going to make a psychological thriller combining that movie with the one where Al Pacino plays the race car driver. They’re calling it Freaky Bobby Deerfield. He’ll only race if he’s got his partner—a blowup doll—riding shotgun.”

  I raced through the rest of my act in front of what seemed less an audience than a collection of grim reapers, wearing black cloaks and holding up scythes, and I either blurted or forgot to say my last few lines, so desperate to flee from an onstage death.

  “HEY, NICE JOB.”

  Barreling out the front door, I turned around to see a nice-looking guy with curly brown hair, sitting on the ledge of the Natural Fudge’s front window. A half-second after the memory neurons fired, I recognized him as the trumpet-playing comedian I’d seen at the Improv.

  “Surely you jest.”

  Shrugging at my inability to take a compliment, he stood up. “How long have you been performing?”

  “This was my first time,” I said, hating how my voice sounded, how I was so close to crying.

  “Your first time? Congratulations! You did great!”

  “I did not! I bombed!”

  “You didn’t bomb.”

  He laughed at my smirk.

  “Okay, so you did—but on a scale of bombs—and trust me, I know bombs??
?yours was harmless. A mere stink bomb.” He stuck out his hand. “Mike Trowbridge, by the way.”

  “Candy Pekkala,” I said, shaking his hand. “So where’s your trumpet case?”

  “It’s not like a purse. I don’t bring it with me unless I’m going to be onstage.”

  “You were’t going on tonight?”

  “No, a friend of mine was supposed to perform, but I guess he chickened out.”

  “I wish I had chickened out,” I said as we began walking. “I can’t believe . . . I can’t believe how bad I did.”

  “You didn’t do bad,” said Mike. “You had a lot of good lines. Freaky Bobby Deerfield. I’d see that movie.”

  “Maybe I went on before I was really ready. Maybe I just need to watch more comics for a while.”

  “I don’t know. It’s been my experience that you learn the most from being onstage, not in the audience. By the way, can I walk you to your car?”

  “I took the bus.”

  “I’ll walk you to the bus stop then.’”

  We wound up walking blocks and blocks down Fountain and when I remarked that we had long passed my bus stop, he suggested we walk back to his car parked near the Natural Fudge.

  “So we can talk more. Then I’ll give you a ride home.”

  To me it sounded like a great idea.

  “Are you from here?” I asked.

  “Nope. Nebraska. I grew up on a farm.”

  “Wow. A real farm?”

  Mike chuckled. “A real farm with real cows and real crops. Mostly corn. Some soybeans.”

  “How long did you know you wanted to do comedy?”

  “I actually came out here with a band. A bunch of guys I’d met in school. We weren’t bad, but when two of the guys moved back home, the band broke up. And I realized that as much as I love music, I like making people laugh more. And if I can combine the two, great.”