Free Best to Laugh: A Novel by Lorna Landvik Page B

champion.
    Returning champion. Imagine that.

10
    I T WAS PAST FIVE when I got home. I changed into my swimsuit and found Ed by the nearly deserted pool.
    “Ah, The Warren Commission Sham, ” I said, reading the title of the book resting on his Styrofoam cooler. “More light poolside entertainment.”
    Ed didn’t answer.
    “I know you’re not sleeping,” I said, situating myself on the chaise longue next to his. “And by the way, you’re peeling.”
    “Where’ve you been all weekend?” he asked, not opening his eyes.
    “Oh, here, there,” I said casually. “Could be that I was on the ABC lot, taping Word Wise. ”
    Ed sprang up in his chair as if a bee had crawled up his swimming trunks.
    “You were on Word Wise ?” When I nodded, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have come down and watched the taping!”
    “I was going to, but then I got all superstitious. I didn’t want anyone who I knew to watch me if I lost.”
    “And did you?”
    “Eventually. But yesterday I won my first game, and this morning I went back as the returning champion and I won a grand total of four-thousand-seven-hundred dollars and a trip to Tahiti!”
    Ed whooped, causing Robert X. Roberts to stir slightly under his L.A. Times Sunday magazine.
    “Four-thousand-seven-hundred dollars and a trip to Tahiti—Candy, that’s great!”
    My smile stretched earlobe to earlobe.
    “Well,” I said, “it’s not the kind of money you won.”
    “On my first game show, I only won three hundred and a microwave oven. So who were your partners?”
    “Yesterday I had Precia Doyle—”
    “I love Precia Doyle! Not only is she a good actress—she’s smart!”
    “I’ll say. The other celebrity was Filo Nuala and—”
    “—Filo Nuala, the football player? He’s like Superman, a Rhodes Scholar, all-American, goes to the Super Bowl his second year—”
    “—he was pretty good at Word Wise, too, but I never got to be his partner. Today when I went back they had different celebrities.”
    Ed chuckled and lacing his hands behind his head leaned back in his chair. “Okay, Candy, tell me everything.”
    It was my pleasure.
    I told him how my mind had scrambled while playing with Precia Doyle, how fast the lights and beeps and turns were, and how I struggled to remember whether I was supposed to name a noun, an adjective, or a verb. I told him how I had barely slept the night before, so excited I was to go back as returning champ, and that I had won my first game of the day with my new partner, Benjamin Parnell.
    “Benjamin Parnell? He’s the dean of celebrity contestants—he’s been on game shows forever.”
    T HE LATE AFTERNOON SUN was losing its potency, and I blanketed myself with my towel.
    “He was nice. I got to go up to the Big Dictionary with him.”
    This was where the real money was earned. The celebrity sat facing his or her partner, behind whom loomed a big screen that looked like an open book, and on whose pages words lit up. The letter at play would be announced, and the celebrity had to give definitions—for instance, when Benjamin Parnell and I played, Yancey announced, “T— noun. ”
    A little bell rang and after clearing his throat, Benjamin Parnell said, “Call made by lumberjacks when chopping down—”
    “Timber!” I said.
    We sailed through nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but time ran out before we could get all the way to the last page of the dictionary; twice, Mr. Parnell’s definitions had been disqualified for using the root word, and once, I got stuck on his definitions, causing him to skip to the next page. But I had won fifteen hundred dollars, which wasn’t bad for two minutes of guessing.
    It was when partnered with Sally Breel, star of Sally in the Morning! that I won the most money, and the trip to Tahiti in the bonus round.
    “Sally Breel!” said Ed. “What was she like?”
    “All business. No chitchat at all during the commercial breaks—she’d sneak a cigarette or get her makeup