Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  So now in the morning your husband drives off, a funnel cloud of dry leaves and gravel. Somehow fate has afforded your marriage just one car. (Your husband chalks it up to money, but this is the kind of simple explanation you distrust.) You console yourself with the notion that stuck is another way of saying off the hook: all day you can let the ghosts tell you the story of every ding in the floorboards as you wax them down on your hands and knees. Like the ghosts, you would be glad to die here in this nothing town: New Woodland, not even a name but a promise of one, a promise of something that has not happened yet. Your husband likes it, you suspect, because the town has no liquor store, no boys wearing baggy jeans and slantwise ballcaps. Therefore he thinks you and your son are safe here. Ha ha ha.

  WHAT YOUR SON has done is break into a house, in the company of another boy, with whom he microwaved the telephone and an expensive collection of Hummel figurines. This would have not been so bad — in fact, the idea interested you: how the telephone looked as it melted into itself, as observed by your son peering through the window into the little lighted booth. But the boys also turned on the water taps and left them running, causing thousands of dollars’ damage, and so instead you tried to do something stern with your face when you asked him why. Of course, your son merely shrugged, your son being a maestro of the shrug — slowly his shoulders traveled toward his ears, his right one elevated slightly higher and his head cocked in that direction while simultaneously his right eyebrow lifted and his left eye squinched. The movement of the arms lags slightly behind that of the shoulders, the hands led by the meat at the base of the thumb as they rise up, flip over, and come to rest palms up, in the posture of Jesus.

  Finally your son said, “Skipper wanted me to do it.”

  Then the words came to you as if you were dredging up deep silt: “Well, if Skipper wanted you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” This was what your own mother had said. You remember wondering what the bridge had to do with anything.

  Your son considered for a moment, still holding the Jesus pose.

  “Sure,” he said.

  IT DOES NOT MATTER if your place in the world is small: you make the food, you clean the house. You know the only true world is the one you carry inside of you, and what appeals to you about cleaning is the way it gives you hope that this interior world can be perfected — you can run a toothpick around the creases in the stove and in this manner attain enlightenment. And it turns out that you are not sorry at all that you bought the Denby (which you hide in the closet, your forty-five-dollar secret). You use its crevice tool between the floorboards, extracting hairs that have lain stretched out for a century, now restored to their natural curl.

  The Denby even has a glass-topped reservoir where you can see the ancient crumbs collect, magically, in the shape of the letter D (for Denby!). There is an explanation, of course, a metal grid in the shape of the D through which the air gets sucked. But to you it is Ouija, inverted: the ghosts bring the letter to you instead of making you discover it. And these are ghosts who have no special fondness for suspense. These are reliable ghosts who’d just as soon have you always end up with the letter D.

  So there is this to entertain you — seeing the D appear again and again. And there is also lying in your upstairs bedroom with a bottle of cough syrup, Doctor Vicks. In the bed pushed against the southern window through which you watch the bigleaf maple leaves light up before they fall, the quilts smell like your mother who died long ago. And there is also putting on your husband’s old coat, tramping rubber-booted along the creek with Doctor Vicks a small red man in your pocket. When the wind picks up and makes the limbs click, you can find a place to stand where the birches will accommodate your arms’ spread, your head thrown back and your roar drowned by the louder roaring of the creek. So how come everybody thinks it’s you and not the creek who’s crazy?

  YOUR SON WAS BORN only fifteen years ago, and yet you are starting to forget how it was when he was in your body. You remember that the pain grew intense and then you’d begged to be put out: the world went dark for a while and when you woke they handed you a perfect son. And because you were not aware of his leaving, it was easy to forget that he had left — sometimes you dreamed him still inside you until you woke to hear him crying. Or crawling around, creaking the floors. Or as he is now: lying on his bed with the headphones on, his body jerking as if it were being zapped by a thousand volts.

  But is he not like any other kid? Okay, he has destroyed a house, but he has also promised not to do it again. Hard to tell at this point whether your husband’s plan has worked — to bring the boy out to the woods to save him. Sometimes your husband will be standing in your son’s bedroom, angrily brandishing a film canister that holds your son’s meager stash of pot. Your husband shakes this rattle like a shaman, and your son resists by refusing to take the headphones off, so that he twitches like a zombie on the bed while your husband yells. It’s a creepy ceremony, so you stay downstairs when it’s going on.

  Often at night your son sneaks into the woods. Your husband’s idea is to install double deadbolts and hide the key, but you have dreams of fire, the three of you black fetuses crouched before the door. It wouldn’t work anyway, for your son can also use the gutters as his means of escape. Sometimes you hear him rattling down the spouts, and then, flashlight in hand, your husband is off chasing him across the lawn. But your son is quick and knows the shortest route to each trailhead. Useless to go after him with a car: he can get anywhere without a road. Out of the three of you, he is the one who’s come to love the country best.

  Your job is to keep tabs on your son — since, as your husband points out, you’re not doing anything anyway — though his suggestions are ridiculous: that you walk your son to school, that you establish a lookout from which you can see him should he leave the schoolyard. Instead, you and your son conspire to indulge each other’s silences, and he is grateful. He even shows you the drawings he makes in the margins of his textbooks, cities being devoured by strange machines.

  But then one day you betray this trust by following him: at the end of the drive you watch him stuff his muffler in the mailbox. Then he crosses the road and continues down the railroad right-of-way, where another boy is waiting. They walk along smoking cigarettes that they hold between their thumb and fingers in an attempt to look like men, though their backpacks are overscaled to their bodies and the sleeves of their plaid jackets fall too low on their hands. The autumn woods are brown and bright as the boys crunch along on the gravel, while fifty yards back you’re carefully stepping from tie to tie.

  Where the tracks veer over the creek, they walk to the middle of the bridge’s rusted trapezoid and sit on the ends of the ties with their legs swinging in the air above the water. The other boy extracts from his pack the bulky object you’d assumed was books: a radio instead. They sit there with their shoulders hunched like the wings of perching hawks, their wrists crossed between their legs, smoke rising from their crotches as they wiggle listlessly to rap music. Sometimes laughter erupts from them: your son’s high giggle, the other boy’s loud bray. You cannot hear their words except for when one occasionally rises above its brothers: douche bag or chickenshit. Your son and his friend are so boring that your follicles prickle, and you have no choice but to let your feet go to sleep because the boys might hear you if you stamped them in the gravel.

  Finally what they must be waiting for happens: you have to fight the urge to shout, because surely they too can feel the way the tracks begin to sing. Reluctantly, slowly, the other boy gathers his boom box, and he and your son each move to the outside of one of the bridge’s I-beams, where he places the radio in the hollow between his feet. Their toes fit inside the beams; the heels of their boots quiver in the air. They hold on with all their might as a dozen freight cars whoosh past. The girders scream like a sawmill as the log runs through it, the boys hugging tight with their long hair blowing behind them in the shape of fans, their teeth gritted and their mouths flaring wi
th the effort of trying not to be blown backward off the bridge.

  You cannot breathe until the last car is safely past, whereupon your knees buckle and you clatter to the ground. But the boys can’t hear this over their loud whoops and high-five slaps. Eventually, when they pack up the radio and continue down the tracks, you leave them to it: they’ve worn you out. Later, you will find the wrappers in his pocket and know that they hitchhiked to McDonald’s, eight miles away by the interstate. Which is how they celebrate their finding themselves not dead.

  SO NOW you could say to your husband: I know what he’s doing, he is waiting for trains to pass over the creek, so he can hold on to the bridge. Your husband will ask why your son does this, and you will have to tell him that there is no reason. Then of course your husband will protest: And you didn’t stop him? What if he was injured? What if he was killed! He’s right: maternal instinct should have led you to throw your body down on the tracks, the mother bird sacrificing herself. But somehow your son is no longer susceptible to your protection; he’s a bird that has already fledged. You see him out there and can almost not remember how it was when he was inside your body. If you were a hawk, he might even be the one you’d eat.

  You could try explaining this to your husband, but he has lost patience with your theories: you have quit drinking, you are supposed to be shaping up, no more talking about ghosts or hawks or angels, which in his mind are equally winged, all of them versions of the same thing, namely signs that you are going off. So you keep quiet when at night he sits at his drawing table, thinking onto paper the buildings that will become the city. The city is in good hands, because your husband has unerring taste: it was he who bought the Mission-style antiques that fill the house. Furniture for looking at, the sofa priceless yet spare as a bench. This is why you have held out for the ugly patch of orange shag: something to roll yourself into, something that will accept you without question. And now, with the Denby, its scalp turns up no crumbs. Clean is your surrender to domestic life; ugly is your protest. Clean but ugly. But clean is your protest too.

  AT NIGHT you go driving, for your husband doesn’t like to shop. Eight miles away by the north-south interstate, by the McDonald’s and the truck stop where the semis squeal, there is also a giant Eurymart where every possible thing gets the chance to gleam as if electricity were pulsing through it. This is only a trick of light, the Saint Elmo’s fire of fluorescence, but still it comforts you at midnight to see civilization buzzing — buzzed but yet still orderly, spaced-out but ultra-clean.

  Your husband cannot bear the Eurymart because he says the building has no soul. But he is wrong; the problem is that the Eurymart’s soul is so big that you have to be willing to let yourself be swallowed by it. The Eurymart makes you manic, giddy; you can lose yourself for hours. Red boxes of laundry soap tower overhead, look up at them and you’re liable to swoon. Enough food to stock all the underground bunkers of all the paramilitarists in these hills. You can’t just march around with a shopping cart; instead, they give you a sledge you have to tow behind you like a barge. When you polish off your Doctor Vicks you can just buy yourself another — hell, you can buy a dozen bottles, shrink-wrapped together in the family-sized pack.

  An elderly gentleman in a yellow Eurymart apron helps you load into your car this week’s teenage-boy-stomach’s-worth of food. Afterward, the trunk sags visibly, like a woman whose hips have given birth to many kids. When you try to give the man a dollar his face turns redder in the redness of the taillight glow. No, he says, he can’t take tips.

  You should go home now, but instead you head south on the interstate, where halfway between the towns of Ethel and Castle Rock there’s a sign for a rest stop named Castle Ethel. Here senior citizens with the fortitude of Mongolian nomads dole out coffee through the thick part of the night, night after night, for unfathomable reasons. They want you to tell them your story and are satisfied even if it only concerns what you saw in the Eurymart. In particular they like hearing about the new colors the vegetables come in, yellow tomatoes and purple bell peppers; they like gathering data that proves how strange the world’s become. Then they’ll let you beg off to use the pay phone on the far side of the parking lot: if there’s anything strange about a woman using the pay phone at two a.m., they don’t let on. Two a.m. is Castle Ethel’s idea of broad daylight.

  The pay phone sits on a post beyond which is wilderness, the receiver cable just long enough to reach into the car if you pull up close beside it. And you can sit here in comfort, dialing the sunny places fed by 1-800 lines: Tampa, Scottsdale, the catalogues spread out on your lap. “If my foot is ten inches long and four inches wide, would I take the Sunday Strider in a size eight and a half or nine? And exactly what color is mulberry — are we talking like a raspberry or would you say more of a grape?” It’s nice to hear yourself addressed as Ma’am. When you want to terminate these conversations, all you have to do is tell them that your credit card is Diners Club.

  Or sometimes you call the husband-and-wife TV Jesus team to ask if they’d let you come live on their Florida compound — you’ve seen the spread in People magazine, you know about the private jet. Unrepentant, the wife still wears her Grandpa Munster makeup even though the husband has recently been publicly tarred for leading a circle jerk with some other members of his flock. The members pulling on their members. “It’s not a crime, I don’t hold it against him,” you tell the young voice that answers the phone; still, she will not give you any information until you provide her with an estimate of the dollar value of your net assets.

  And only once were you ever frightened there, staring into the forest that skirts Castle Ethel, your Styrofoam cup paused on your lip when suddenly you realized that what you’d thought were two empty skin-colored plastic grocery bags were in fact two sets of limbs intertwined among the shadows. “Gotta go,” you told the Jesus person as you leaned way out the window to recradle the phone. For a minute you were quite sure one of the sets of limbs was your son’s, tangled inside the plaid coat worn by the other set of limbs. Their hair shone like that of beautiful long-haired dogs while they strained against each other and keened as if bits of glass were running through their bowels.

  It was a vision you drove away from as fast as you could, though on the way home you reconsidered: it could have been some flesh-tone plastic grocery bags, and an old sleeping bag flapping in the wind; the coat you thought you saw was just its plaid interior and the hair was its nylon shell. You were still mulling it over in your own kitchen at three a.m., unloading the groceries only to discover that once again you had forgotten milk.

  THE NIGHT is a tunnel that shrinks as the year draws to a close, contracting to fit inside the circumference of your headlights. Then the world becomes only what the car can itself contain: the radio, the heat, the bottle of cough syrup on the seat beside you like an obedient child.

  And if the night is a tunnel, what awaits you at the other end? An opening into light? A wreck? Pulling off at Castle Ethel? Or simply going home? On the road home there’s a sign for New Woodland Marsh, a nature sanctuary on the edge of town, which you’ve driven by who knows how many nights and dawns until on one of them you turn here. Three miles of gravel road that plunges through the gulleys, the fearsome thump and scratch of tree limbs on the roof. At the end a parking lot and a sign that shows the layout of the nature trail, the trail an elevated boardwalk that lets you walk atop the marsh, the dark eroding below you as your boots plunk along the boards.

  Eventually it leads to a dry island in the middle of the marsh, where wrens flitter and herons squawk from the highest limbs of the scraggly alders. Oddly enough, you smell the remnant of a fire and realize that you’ve stumbled into a clearing, a clearing full of frosted stones the color of jewels. Maybe they are hunks of marble. Maybe the trees here were petrified and turned to minerals a million years ago. Then one of the stones shifts and changes shape, and you hear a rustling as if from a lady’s ballroom gown. And more of the stones shift, change
shape. . by now you’re backing toward the boardwalk again.

  It’s too late to run: suddenly you’re struck by a flashlight beam, and you know now that the moving stones are children wrapped in sleeping bags, a dozen who have spent the night here. One girl calls out, “It’s Jason’s mother!” and a low singsong wafts your way: Whoa-oh, Ja-suh-uhn’s busted. . Jay-suh-uhn’s busted. The woods ring with the song while you try to think of an appropriate thing to say, but by the time you can dredge up the words your son has already said them: What are you doing here?

  CHERRY TONGUE is the giveaway, that fuzzy, red, iridescent tongue whose scent you camouflage by chewing Life Savers. In any case your husband can tell the scent doesn’t come from gin. So when he asks, “Have you been drinking?” you can answer him indignantly. He is wrong and he knows it, you have not had a real drink for months. And there is a difference: Gin sent you down like a rock kicked off a cliff. Gin was the tall man standing up there while you fell too fast too far for there to be any use in crying out.

  But Doctor Vicks you could speak to and he would talk back; your head might grow yards from your feet but even then the squat red man was there to look you in the face. Or rather your feet might grow yards from your head, for the feeling was not as if you floated but rather as if you waded through the real, the real having thickened into jelly around your legs. Doctor Vicks engulfed you in a warm swirl like the sweat underneath a man’s armpit, which you could curl yourself into. With your husband, this had stopped happening long ago. And sure, you used to love him, but how can you love anyone to whom you are an embarrassment? Next question: are you an embarrassment to your son Jason? Hard to tell. For now, you are two dogs circling each other, using your paws to travel sideways. Knowing that you are not really going anywhere, knowing that you are only headed back to where you were.