Best to Laugh: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

And what about the huge laugh I got playing the turkey in my fourth grade Thanksgiving play, when instead of delivering my “Gobble-gobble” line, I ad-libbed, “How’s about we all go out for burgers?” And had he forgotten the recent schoolwide speech competition when Mr. Meyers had cast me to deliver a Huck Finn monologue because none of the boys could do his lines justice, and I had taken home the Best Comedic Performance certificate?
    True, he had witnessed few of my triumphs on school stages because they occurred during his work hours (or the hours during which he slept), but that was little solace, reinforcing my belief that he had deliberately chosen the swing shift to avoid interaction with me.
    “I’d like to see one of those impressions,’” my dad said now.
    Fighting back a swell of hurt and rage, I pointed to the TV and trying to keep my voice light, I said, “Oh, man, look at that crazy hat Doc Severinsen’s wearing.”
    A S I GREW, so did my father’s basic obliviousness toward me. Was he leading the standing ovation when I took my bows as one of the Pigeon sisters in our high school production of The Odd Couple ? Nope. Or as the social worker in A Thousand Clowns ? Nada.
    Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the theater type—maybe he felt more comfortable cheering me on in a gym, or better yet, a pool, considering I had broken two school records and was nominated swim team co-captain as a junior? Uh-uh.
    G RANDMA EXPENDED A LOT OF ENERGY figuring out ways to help the merry laughing little girl outrun the shadow of her mother’s death, and when I was in second grade she had brought me to the YWCA for swimming lessons.
    “It’s something your mom would have wanted for you,” she told me as we rode the bus downtown. “Do you remember how she’d take you down to the kiddie pool practically every sunny day of summer?”
    “Sort of,” I said, trying desperately to add details to the vague picture of her in a skirted swimsuit, sitting on the concrete ledge of the pool.
    “Well, she always said you took to the water like a fish. She said you were a born swimmer.”
    Swimming was good for me; I could beat the water with my arms, kick it with my legs, and rather than being punished my aggression was rewarded with breaking records and earning titles. I took up diving, too, practicing over and over reverse and inward pikes, finding, in that space between the final bounce and the entry into the water, flight.
    I N MY JUNIOR year, while I was at swim practice, Arne Pekkala’s atrophied heart finally gave out. Having done what my coach called the prettiest one-and-a-half somersault tuck she had ever seen and clocking my best time ever in the two-hundred-meter butterfly, I had no idea that it would be the last time I’d climb out of the pool and peel off my swim cap, feeling that odd exhilarating exhaustion; the last time I’d goof around with my teammates as we headed toward the locker room, accusing one another of being responsible for the warm spots in the pool or the extra bubbles.
    T HE NIGHT AFTER MY DAD WAS BURIED, Karen Schaeffer, a girl in my art class, came clumping down the basement steps.
    “Nice pad,” she said of the former storage area my grandmother had allowed me to appropriate as my bedroom, letting me paint it black and red and helping me rig up a clothesline around the bed and hang gauzy curtain panels from it.
    “Thanks,” I said, and, exhausted from the events of the past few days, my voice expressed none of the surprise I felt over Karen’s presence. She traveled in circles that didn’t overlap mine, and the only social exchanges I had with her were in the art room.
    “I’m sorry about your dad,” she said, and her hand darted into her jeans jacket pocket. A second later she lit a thinly rolled joint with a yellow Bic lighter and held it out to me. “This might help.”
    It did.
    As much as my father was physically and emotionally absent in much of my life, his death knocked me