On Cadence’s 12th birthday, as she blew out the candles on her cake, one of her uncles told her it was time she learned to smile. The other relatives around the table nodded their agreement and formed a chorus.
‘Girls and women look more beautiful when they smile.’
‘Even the plain ones, ha ha.’
‘Been to any good funerals lately, ha ha?’
‘Cheer up, it might never happen, ha ha.’
‘Smiling puts people at ease.’
After that she made a point of observing women on the buses she rode to school each day and noticed that that many of them had lips stretched across their faces in what, she supposed, could be termed a smile. She didn’t think they looked beautiful. She thought they looked a bit insane. She also noticed that men on the buses didn’t smile. Nor did her male relatives. She asked her aunt if boys and men should smile too.
‘Stop trying to be a smarty-pants! That’s not attractive in girls.’
Throughout her teens and 20s she dumped every boyfriend who told her she needed to smile more. In her 30s, long after she’d given up on men, she met Triton, who never mentioned any absences on Cadence’s countenance. She married him.
Over the years they found plenty to laugh about. Much of it grew from a shared love of wordplay and this was how they passed the time on long car journeys with their three children. If they passed a building with letters on the outside they asked the children to come up with a silly definition. When they passed a hut belonging to the New Zealand Deerstalking Association with NZDA on the door, the children competed to come up with the best silly sentences:
‘Never Zap Dancing Ants.’
‘Nice Zebras Don’t Atrophy.’
‘No Zombie Deaths Allowed.’
‘New Zoologist Dads Apologise.’
‘Needy Zoomers Demand Answers.’
‘No Zealous Disputatious Adults.’
In the outside world, the children were straight-faced, but inside that car, their laughter bounced off the roof, the windows and the floor.
When the relatives started to say what a pity it was that the children had inherited their miserable expressions from their mother, Cadence’s icy stare froze them in mid-sentence. When they thought of retaliating by asking her where her sense of humour was hiding, they changed their minds when they saw icicles forming in Cadence’s eyeballs.
As the children grew into young adults their facility with words was impressive. That facility, along with their impassive faces, served them well in their sometimes tricky travels around all corners of the world, and later, for two of them, in their professions as prosecution lawyers.
And so the years passed, some filled with laughter, some filled with tears and some filled with both. All the old relatives eventually died. A few friends died. One of the children died. There were grandchildren, some of whom were smilers and some who weren’t. They all enjoyed creating silly sentences.
When Cadence and Triton retired they bought a piece of bare land near a lake and built a log cabin. They dug and planted and filled their garden with fruit trees and flowers. They filled their house with stray dogs and cats, all of which shared their bed at night. Each morning Triton opened the curtains when he brought in cups of tea. They lay in bed watching the sunrise and making jokes.
‘Hair today, gone tomorrow.’
‘Ooh, That was a bit toey.’
‘Okay, I feel a bit of a heel now.’
‘Eye knew you would.’
‘Oh, thigh, you think you nose everything, don’t you?’
‘You scraped the bottom there.’
‘Now listen ’ear, just give it a wrist.’
‘That’s a waist of a good joke.’
‘I’m only trying to keep abreast of your humour.’
‘Such a cheek!’
‘No ’arm done.’
‘Okay, I’ll back off now.’
‘Oh? So you don’t have the stomach for it?’
And they lay curled together in their warm bed, gazing out the window over their garden at the gold-streaked sky reflected in the lake, sometimes laughing, sometimes smiling, sometimes watching in silence.
Then one day, inevitably, there was only one of them lying there, with the last of the cats and one old dog on top of the bed. There was the sound of the animals breathing, but no more word play, no more laughter. Until one morning the remaining person in the bed whispered to the breaking dawn.
‘You were always so very fanny, weren’t you?’
And the room filled with a sound that might have been laughter.
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