The Laugh Lady Lives Next Door

 by Rick Book
 An article in The Globe and Mail

In the cool of summer mornings in Toronto, before the humidity turns the city into a sauna, before the chemical blanket of smog descends, here in my leafy Beaches neighbourhood these are the sounds I hear through my open office window: mourning doves, cardinals and robins singing; the hiss of rush-hour traffic; the pneumatic squish of street car brakes; and from next door, a woman laughing. 

I have never met this woman, as far as I know, and have no idea who she is, but she lives in the old Tudor apartment building to the east of me, and her window must be one of a dozen that open onto my backyard. Her laugh is long and boisterous, and suggests to me that she is a woman of a certain age and, perhaps, a certain size. It often starts around 8:30 a.m., a time of day that makes it seem unnatural, as we simply don’t expect people to be so amused so early in the morning. They’re usually rubbing yellow crumbs of sleep out of their eyes, slugging back strong coffee and groping through closets in search of clean, unwrinkled clothes. But not this woman.

I will be deep in concentration at my computer when suddenly she erupts with a full-bellied, crank-back-your-head kind of laugh. It’s a sound that reeks, not of whiskey and cigarettes or a raucous pub at closing, but of open-throated, unbridled delight. The woman holds nothing back and sounds just plain happy, right down to the very core of her. When was the last time you ran into anyone like that?

Of course, I am curious, filled with all the inquisitiveness of a nosy neighbour or perhaps even an aural voyeur, but I want to know what’s going on over there. Why is this woman laughing?  

Naturally, thoughts turn to sex. At first, I conjured up steamy scenarios in which her husband had left for work and her lover dropped by for a rousing morning tussle in the sheets. But I’ve never heard anyone laughing with her and there’s never been a deep male voice spilling out with hers into my backyard.  Something tells me it’s not that kind of delight that’s tickling her fancy.

It occurred to me that she might be listening to a hopped-up morning deejay on a commercial radio station. Could all this laughter be triggered by the antics of some manic morning show personality? I knew immediately that this was wrong as they’re just not that uproariously funny, certainly not in any sustained way.

I found myself imagining a life for this woman that would explain this peculiar morning habit. Maybe she’s an emergency room nurse or 9-1-1 operator who works all night and videotapes her favourite comedy shows, then watches them every morning to unwind and let off steam. Is it Jon Stewart and The Daily Show that turns her into a one-woman laugh track? Is it Leno’s or Letterman’s monologue that rocks her to her socks? Perhaps it’s Just For Laughs gags from Montréal, or The Three Stooges in black and white on the Comedy Network that produces all this hilarity.

I wondered, too, if she might simply be talking on the phone. Perhaps she has a crazy friend who regales her with uproarious stories about an incompetent boss, her dysfunctional family, another date gone terribly wrong. Somehow I don’t think so.

  

It once crossed my mind that she has a terminal illness and, like Norman Cousins, is trying to laugh herself back to health. But that diagnosis was deeply flawed, I could tell, for this woman simply sounds too robust. There’s no hint of despair, no room for it; no pain restricts that woman’s diaphragm from a full-bore belly laugh.      

One evening last fall I thought I’d met my laughing neighbour. A middle-aged woman, roundish and friendly, was locked out of her apartment. I said she could wait at my place until her building superintendent returned. I happened to be watching a movie at the time and invited her to join me. Suddenly, she let out a great big laugh. I hit the Pause button and turned to her: “Is it you?” I asked.  “Are you the woman I hear laughing every morning?” But no, she said, it wasn’t her. And so the laughing woman remained an enigma somewhere inside the building next door.

Winter set in and with our windows shut tight I didn’t hear the woman for a long time. But on a recent January day when it was a balmy six degrees and my windows were flung wide open, there she was again – at 12:55 on a weekday afternoon. She’s had a morning nap, I thought, and is just beginning her day.

It was good to hear that laugh again, if only briefly, and I look forward to it as a harbinger of spring. She makes me smile, this woman, whoever she is; her familiar song is as cheerful as any bird’s. It’s a sound much needed in the world and is made all the sweeter by the mystery of it.

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