The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

believe that she had about three shirts and two dresses and a white smock that looked like a peasant castoff. At one point I wanted to buy her an Indian dress she admired in a store window, but she wouldn’t let me, even when I insisted. “Not yet,” she said, whatever that was supposed to mean.
    So what did she have in those bags? Another nightmare grew in my mind — groceries and a hot plate! She was going to cook our meals all the way to Galen! Banana bread … curry … apple tea …
    “What’ve you got in those things anyway, Sax?”
    “There’s no reason to yell!”
    I looked at her in the mirror and saw her with her hands on her hips. I thought of how nice those hips were without any clothes on them.
    “Okay, I’m sorry. But how come you’re taking so much?”
    I heard gravel crunch, and then she was standing by my door. I looked up at her, but she was busy undoing the straps on the wicker basket.
    “Just look.”
    It was full of handwritten notes, magazine clippings, blank yellow pads, yellow pencils, and the fat pink erasers she liked to use.
    “This one is my work bag. Am I allowed to take it?”
    “Sax …”
    “The duffel bag has all of my clothes in it… .”
    “Look, I wasn’t saying …”
    “And the suitcase has some marionettes in it that I’m working on.” She smiled and clicked the latches shut on the bag. “That’s the one thing that you’ll have to get used to around me, Thomas: wherever I go, I always carry my life around with me.”
    “I would hope so.”
    “Oh, you’re very funny, Thomas. So clever.”
    June graduation ceremonies had taken place several days before, so the campus of my school was summer-green and silent and kind of sad when we drove away. Schools without students are always strangely ominous to me. All the rooms are too clean and the floors too polished. When a phone rings it echoes all over the place, and it will go eight or nine times before someone feels like answering it or the caller realizes that everyone’s gone and he hangs up. We passed a huge copper beech tree that was a great favorite of mine, and I realized that I wouldn’t sit under it again for a long time.
    She reached over and turned on the radio. “Thomas, are you sad that you’re leaving?”
    The last part of “Hey, Jude” was on, and I remembered the girl I was dating on Nantucket when the song first came out in the sixties.
    “Sad? Yes, a little. But I’m pretty glad, too. After a while you discover that you’re talking and moving in a trance. Do you know that I taught Huckleberry Finn for the fourth time this year? It’s a great book and all, but it was getting to the point where I wasn’t even reading the stuff anymore. I didn’t have to be able to teach it. That kind of thing’s not good.”
    We sat and listened to the song finish. I guess the station was doing a Beatles retrospective, because “Strawberry Fields Forever” came on next. I drove up a ramp onto the New England Thruway.
    “Did you ever want to be an actor?” She pulled a thread off the sleeve of my shirt.
    “An actor? No, not after my father, hell no.”
    “I remember being madly in love with Stephen Abbey after I saw him in The Beginners .”
    I snorted but didn’t say anything. What person in the world wasn’t in love with my father?
    “Don’t laugh at me — it’s true!” Her voice was almost indignant. “I’d just gone into the hospital for the first time, so my parents got me a little portable television set. I remember the whole thing very clearly. It was on Million Dollar Movie , which showed the same old film every afternoon for a week. I watched every showing of both The Beginners and Yankee Doodle Dandy .”
    “ Yankee Doodle Dandy ?”
    “Yes, with James Cagney. I was madly in love with both James Cagney and your father when I was in the hospital.”
    “How long were you in there?”
    “The hospital? For four months the first time and two the second.”
    “And what did they do —