Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  Annotation

  Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?

  *

  Lucia PerilloBAD BOY NUMBER SEVENTEEN

  BIG-DOT DAY

  DOCTOR VICKS

  REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES

  A GHOST STORY

  CAVALCADE OF THE OLD WEST

  HOUSE OF GRASS

  ASHES

  THE WATER CYCLE

  SAINT JUDE IN PERSIA

  ANYONE ELSE BUT ME

  HAPPINESS IS A CHEMICAL IN THE BRAIN

  SLASH (1976)

  LATE IN THE REALM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  *

  Lucia Perillo

  Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

  BAD BOY NUMBER SEVENTEEN

  Don’t tell me about bad boys. I’ve seen my black clouds come and go. Coming they walk with their shoulders back like they’ve got a raw egg tucked inside each armpit, and they let their legs lead them. Going, you can count on the fact that their butts will cast no shadow on those lean long legs. You can’t compete in the arena of squalid romance if you’re one of those guys shaped in the rear like a leather mail sack: you’re automatically disqualified. That’s just the way it is. I didn’t make the rules.

  My prodigals make up for slender means by wearing their jeans tight enough so that their billfolds have a hard time sliding in. And they make up for the fact they’re usually kind of stupid by not saying much. This is important. This is the litmus test. The last thing you want is a desperado with a big mouth; you might as well invite a wild elephant home for dinner.

  See, for years I have done some serious observation, up close and from a distance. I’ve seen them hawk and spit before the drive-up window, I’ve watched them jimmy the pinball machine at King Arthur’s Reef. Yeah, yeah: I know King Arthur had a table, he didn’t have a reef, but ours is a coastal town and the natives feel claustrophobic inside any bar that doesn’t have a nautical theme. Why it matters I don’t know, because inside is always dim — so you can’t see that the only decorating theme is duct tape, which holds the stuffed fish to the walls and crisscrosses the red vinyl in the booths, and even bandages some of the more expensive bottles of liquor that no one has the heart to throw away because of something as picayunish as a little broken glass.

  But out of all the dives in town, the Reef is probably the best laboratory for studying the players, the wannabes with their ball caps and Aerosmith Tshirts, and the shy bloodhounds who rest their elbows on the bar and silently massage their dewlaps. Inside every dissolute romantic there’s a brooding Schopenhauer, with a chronic melancholy that he nurses like a sourball in his cheek. He can see the whole arc of his life — from the uphill curve that is his present freedom to the downhill slope that’ll lead him to some evangelical storefront church where he’ll suddenly find himself swaying with his hands raised in the air. And the ones who come without this flaring sense of precognition are just losers, plain and simple.

  Like one night in the Reef there’s this guy sitting on a barstool, checking me out over his shoulder from time to time? The fact that he’s missing part of one finger shrouds him with the kind of mystery that ought to make him a contender, were this aura not counteracted by his jeans riding so low they expose a length of his crack that’s about equal to what’s missing from his hand. Which knocks him out of the running, especially when a few boilermakers later he erupts in my direction with something about letting him know whenever I’m ready to have him take me outside to his car, where he’s going to — his phrasing—eat me out.

  I’m sitting in a booth with my sister Louisa, who giggles. “Don’t giggle,” I tell her. “What that guy said to us wasn’t funny.” Even though she’s my older sister, since she has Down syndrome I have to explain everything.

  “I think he’s funny,” she says in that woofy voice of hers. “I think he’s cute. I think that boy wants to be my boyfriend.”

  This is the kind of thing Louisa’ll say that drives a stake into our mother’s heart. Lately Mum’s been talking about getting Louisa’s tubes tied, a plan I could condone on pragmatic grounds but against which I’ve nonetheless felt compelled to launch a squeak or two of protest. Louisa’s been living with Mum ever since she got kicked out of the group home for repeated makeup theft, and even though Louisa’s relatively self-sufficient — she can ride the bus, she has a job assembling calendars and pens — my mother won’t rest easy until Louisa’s fate is sewn up. I mean, Louisa needs a baby about as badly as she needs a scholarship to MIT, but then part of me says: What right do we have to go monkeying around with Louisa’s body? Since when did we set up camp between her legs? I even feel squeamish bringing Louisa into the bar, like someone’s going to call Child Protective Services on me, though Louisa’s well past thirty. When the bartender checks our IDs she lingers for a long time with Louisa’s, her eyes ping-ponging between the mug shot and Louisa’s face.

  After a few moments of scrutiny the bartender slides her ID across the table. “What does she want?” the bartender asks me.

  One thing Louisa’s figured out is this what-to-do-when-people-refuse-to-speak-to-you routine. “Beer!” she pipes angrily.

  “You want me to bring her a light beer?”

  “St. Pauli Girl,” Louisa insists. Where she gets this from I don’t know. St. Pauli Girl. But the bartender’s still looking at me.

  “Hey, I’m her sister, not her mother. Give her what she wants. She’s not the one driving.” And I order a St. Pauli Girl for myself too, just so Louisa won’t get paranoid that she’s done something weird.

  Anyway, the bartender vindicates herself later, by taking care of Finger when he makes his suggestion about taking me outside. Or maybe this is ego talking, my assuming that Finger was bird-dogging me and not my sister, who is after all not a bad-looking woman, especially with her new perm and John Lennon eyeglass frames. I guess the bartender decides to step in as Louisa’s protectress since she thinks I’m being too lax about that job. Bartender says something to Finger underneath her breath, something threatening enough to make his eyes go wide. Then to soothe us all she takes a bunch of change from the till and drops it into the jukebox.

  This does the trick: the bar falls silent while the lead guitar knifes its way through the intro. Then, with the grace and synchronicity of ballerinas, all the guys start playing air guitar by strumming the folds of skin around their navels. Finger tilts woozily over his glass, and by the time the song ends his arms are folded on the bar with his head nested inside, whistling the strange birdcalls of sleep.

  “Look,” Louisa says, elbowing me. “That fun
ny boy is sleeping.”

  “I told you he’s not funny. He’s a jerk.”

  “Yeah,” she says, bobbing her head. Often I find myself wishing Louisa did not agree so enthusiastically with everything I say. It forces me to police myself all the time, and this policeman speaks in a voice I recognize as belonging to my mother, who’ll say (as in defense of turning off Louisa’s plumbing), I wish you would start considering your sister’s future more seriously. All I’m trying to do is set things up so that Louisa will be less of a burden when the day comes that neither I nor your father are around.

  My mother always gives the words your father an extra jab. He has a new wife who lives with him in a house overlooking the Tacoma Narrows and the bridge that replaced the one they call Galloping Gertie because it turned into Jell-O on a particularly windy day. My mother, on the other hand, is stuck living with Louisa in a trailer, though she becomes offended when I refer to it as such. “It’s a mobile home,” she insists huffily. “And I’ve got the clubhouse. I notice you don’t mind coming down off your high horse whenever you want to use the pool.”

  As you can tell, it’s a sore subject — my mother stuck with a clubhouse whose lone assets are a machine that dispenses last year’s Ho Hos, and a pool that can barely accommodate a decent cannonball, while my father’s got Galloping Gertie II and the whole of Puget Sound right in his living room. My mother thought she could salve her pride by hiring a decorator, whose handiwork ended up making the trailer look like the set of a late-night TV talk show, which must remind Louisa all the more about how her life has paled ever since she had to leave the group home, where she could tussle with her girlfriends on the battered furniture every night, like attending summer camp forever. Louisa is simply too big for my mother’s place — and it’s not so much her fatness as the way that her high spirits make her seem loud and clumsy. And my mother takes them as evidence of Louisa’s naïveté and thinks we must band together to fend off evil.

  “Look, Louisa,” I say, watching Finger’s drool run from his downhill cheek. “You’ve got to start looking out for yourself. There’s a lot of boys out there who are not nice boys.”

  Her face darkens. “Like the boys who yell at me at the bus stop. Mummy says they aren’t nice.”

  “You know what I call them? Creeps.” And then I ask her, “What did Mum tell you to do about them?”

  Louisa answers ambivalently, and I can tell that despite their terrors the bus stop boys still glitter. “Mummy said just ignore them. She said for me to pretend their voices are the wind.” This she demonstrates by blowing our cocktail napkins off the table.

  “Goodbye, creeps!” Louisa whooshes.

  NOW, LET ME CONFESS I haven’t always proved to be the shrewdest judge of human nature. My romances have left me with a recurring dream in which I’m slashing tires and the tires’ blood is spilling out. In my freshman year of high school I encountered Bad Boy Number One, who had me doing his pre-algebra problems half the night while he worked out the science of breaking-and-entering. Number Two was old enough to drive a car, and this romance (with the car more than the boy per se) left me with a greenstick fracture of my collarbone. Number Six was the one who suckered me into cosigning the loan on his new Mustang — how this story ends you don’t need me to say — and Number Eight was the proud owner of a set-yourself-up-in-the-creative-and-lucrative-world-of-tattooing-with-EZ-monthly-payments kit, which he’d ordered from the back of a comic book.

  Don’t ask me why I couldn’t see he had loser written all over him, not until after I let him go to work on my left arm, on a rattlesnake whose rattle he inked on the inside of my elbow. It was supposed to be a little snake, but Number Eight had not yet mastered his craft, and the tail came out blotched and broken. Which compelled Number Eight to keep on keeping on, zigzagging it down the length of my forearm so that he could get the most practice in. No way I could shut him down without leaving a lopped-off reptile on my body, and by the time he got to my wrist I have to admit the snake was starting to look pretty good, and the head — which he ran onto the back of my hand, too large for the rest of its body by half — was a masterpiece, with a mosaic of scales and a flicking tongue.

  Number Eight OD’d on a speedball when the snake was just about complete but for the eye sockets that he hadn’t gotten around to filling, which was about the same time I realized that putting a snake’s head on your hand means that you have chosen an idiosyncratic road to head down in life, unless you plan to wear little white gloves all the time like Mr. Peanut. Though a butterfly or a rose won’t raise anyone’s brow, Bad Snake gives you a hundred demerits in all but a few select kinds of job interviews; where they finally took me in was at the boat shop. Boat people have a tendency to forgive what other people might consider sluttishness. There are few sluts in the boat world, the way there are few sluts at the Handy Rental, or working in Accounts Payable at Karl’s Kustom Kar Kustomizing, maybe because these industries top-heavy with losers are willing to extend women a quid pro quo of retroactive grace.

  Of course, the tattoo was what convinced my mother I had finally gone around the bend: ever since, she’s been afraid I have an unsettling influence on Louisa. Her preference would be for the two of us not to be left alone, but she waffles on this because I am Louisa’s cheapest chaperone. When mum wanted to go on a cruise, for instance, she had no choice but to ask me to move into the trailer for two weeks. This makes Louisa happy because she knows we’ll turn the radio up full blast and eat from Styrofoam clamshells of take-out food and launch into a cleaning frenzy just minutes before my mother walks back through the door.

  So I’m staying there on a drizzly Sunday, when what Louisa wants to do is see a movie. We commit the ultimate sin by spreading the newspaper out on the white carpet, and after Louisa scrutinizes the movie ads her finger stabs one called Primal Reflex, starring Hollywood’s latest flavor-of-the-month in some pretty steamy scenes. At junctures like these my mother’s voice cuts in, and I point out the comedies instead.

  Louisa’s mind is made up. “I want to see this girl do the hula-hula,” she says. In the advertisement, Latest Flavor’s got a hibiscus flower pinned behind one ear, her face framed in the crosshairs of a gun.

  “It’s not a hula movie,” I explain. “You’re thinking of like Annette Funicello.”

  “No. I’m thinking of her.” Louisa trots into her room to retrieve a movie magazine that’s got a picture of Flavor wearing a lei and a thong bikini, bodysurfing off the coast of Waikiki.

  “Toldja,” Louisa says.

  WITH LOUISA, you can never go into the obvious, the this has nothing to do with anything, oh my dearest darling one. Louisa’s brain moves like a jackrabbit, and when she’s threatened she uses the jackrabbit’s zigzag to escape. Like after she makes her point, Louisa immediately starts preparing, digging out this folding plastic rainhat Mum gave her last Christmas. What kind of gift, I said, do you call a piece of plastic that you got free from the beauty shop? — to which my mother sniped that Louisa wouldn’t know the difference. And it irked me to realize my mother had been right, because the rainhat is one of Louisa’s prized possessions. She wears it proudly as we board the bus downtown, which I suggest in order to make the trip seem like more of an adventure. Or maybe I’m subconsciously stalling so we’ll have to catch the three-fifteen show instead, which features dogs that speak with famous voices.

  No luck: we get there right on time, and during the movie I hear Louisa giggle whenever the woman appears naked on-screen. Of course, we don’t get to see the men naked, and for once I’m grateful for Hollywood’s injustices. Afterward Louisa gives the movie two thumbs up and can’t wait to boogie—I want a happy beer, she says, the Reef being just a few blocks from the theater.

  When I give her all my quarters for the jukebox, my sister punches in a rock-and-roll number called “Jesus Is Just Alright” and comes back to the table knowing all the words, which surprises me because I’ve never heard Louisa say anything about Jesus. Our
mother sometimes drags her to the Church of the Parted Waters, a Baptist outfit Mum joined because of its zeal for coffee klatches and potlucks, though often she returns home with her own dishes barely touched.

  I think the Baptists are afraid my mother’s hexed: why else would she have given birth to a Down’s kid when she was only in her twenties, the other one don’t even mention — they’ve heard about the snake. I also suspect Mum’s main interest in the church is that she thinks it’ll dignify the ugly rituals of cruising men. She’s sailing to Nassau with the Baptists as we speak, even though I didn’t have the heart to tell her what any woman with two working eyeballs should be able to see: that the Church of the Parted Waters is a magnet for losers. And I mean the capital-L Losers — we’re talking bankruptcy and Thorazine. Personally I think she’s got better odds of scoring heroin among them than a husband.

  But I should talk. I’m not even going to tell you about Black Clouds Nine through Sixteen, though my not mentioning them doesn’t mean they’re not etched permanently in my brain along with all the ways I behaved shamelessly in their presence. They’re printed inside my skull with such big block letters that when the next one walks into the Reef — and I know he’s the next one, don’t ask how I know — the word rolls up my throat and into my mouth without the slightest calculation. Seventeen. Straightaway that culprit gland starts spewing acid in my gut.

  A few days ago, I’d shown him the half dozen used boats we had sitting on the lot. I trailed behind so I could make a careful study of his hips, and now, as he’s walking in, I get the full-on view: black T-shirt with a breast pocket, breast pocket with a cigarette pack, cigarette pack a quarter full and crumpled. Right away he recognizes me and sits down to give me an update, something like, Yesterday I decided on the Bayliner and went over and gave Milty some money down. What I liked about the Bayliner was that it came stocked with this Mercury outboard that you could tear down with both eyes closed and one arm tied behind your back.