Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  Roger the therapist wears Birkenstock sandals that he slips off his feet to sit cross-legged in his chair, from which he reports in what is supposed to be a soothing yet forceful voice that we are good people and next time we will be able to make the cookies. Then he stands with his arms outstretched to give the author of this particular sob story a hug, only the majority of us are not huggers: instead we stare back at him through the steam rising from our coffee cups until Roger puts his arms down like a corkscrew folding up.

  “Okay, you’re not ready, I respect that,” he says, and then it’s on to the next person: I can’t even microwave a bowl of soup without the whole thing turning into a great big goddamn fucking and on and on until you start feeling like you’re stuck in one of those sci-fi time loops, and the three hours goes by like three thousand years.

  You can see why it would have made me feel full of myself, to know that I could go home and spend my afternoons with Mister Chester, while the other narcos would be pulling second shift at the Tool-and-Die and biting their nails down to the quick. A little animal-human interaction, a few weeks of my mother’s cream cheese and chutney sandwiches, and I figured I’d be back to my old life selling boats. I had the personal affirmations that Roger made each of us write for ourselves hanging in the kitchen—LIFE DOES NOT REQUIRE YOUR PARTICIPATION and BEING A CURMUDGEON IS NO SIN—those were the only two I’d been able to come up with that didn’t strike me as the verbal equivalent of a yellow smiley face.

  “What’s a cur-mud-gee-on?” Louisa asked, squinting at the refrigerator door. I told her it meant a person who didn’t want to be nice all the time.

  “Everyone wants to be nice.”

  “I don’t.”

  Louisa shrugged: “Maybe you’d be happy if you were nice.”

  “Who says I want to be happy?”—but of course my sister says I should be happy because I’m living back home with her and Mum, all of us gals together again at last.

  “Plus we’ve got cable,” Louisa pointed out, her voice warbling with glee.

  BUT THE IDEA that I had, through oversimplification, misunderstood the situation out there on the gulag (like: who was paying the mortgage anyway?) occurred to me one day when I saw my mother stepping out of the house with my father’s Browning. She held the gun with both hands while she carried the box of cartridges by clenching the open box-flap between her teeth. When I asked what she was doing, she grunted, “Mmhm mhmm mmmh,” until I took the bullets from her mouth.

  “I want you to show me how to load this,” she said, and then of course I’m dumb enough to ask her why.

  “I want you to show me how to load this so I can fire it,” she snapped. “Really. Must we proceed with these inane questions?”

  My mother may be short and squat, a victim of too many shortbreads with her tea, but she’s still not a woman you want to go up against when she’s got a bee in her bonnet and a gun in her hands. So I drew back the bolt and showed her how the bullets fed into the barrel. Then I tried to show her how to brace the butt against her shoulder but at this point my mother strong-armed me away.

  “I’ve got it. All right. Enough!”

  She marched across the field to one of Mister Chester’s jumps, a couple of logs that I had stacked. Along the way, she collected some Snapple jars from the piles of trash, jars that she lined up on the top log of the jump. She was wearing her rubber barn boots and a pleated skirt that stuck out from underneath her raincoat. When she raised the Browning I could see the ripples where her pantyhose sagged on the backs of her knees.

  Boom! Her first shot knocked her over, and she went down like a tree, her knees locked so that when she landed, still clutching the rifle, the barrel pointed straight up from a clump of poppies.

  “I won’t have you mocking me,” she yelled from that nest of orange flowers, from which she wouldn’t rise until Mister Chester and I had ridden off. “Be gone, the both of you! Both you and that wretched hack.”

  Being the kind of animal who thrived on chaos in its sonic form, Mister Chester never flinched no matter how the branches rattled from her shots. And somehow it was thrilling, if you want to know the truth — to be the last remnant of a dying outpost while the enemy encroaches on all sides. In no time I started feeling like a member of the Polish cavalry riding toward the German tanks, the little cones raining down from the hemlocks to be crunched by Mister Chester’s feet. With my recent attentions, his nut-brown coat had once again begun to shine the way it did when we were both kids, and when he galloped across the pasture he lifted his legs like a showgirl, like the sky was a camera and the sun was its bulb, flashing whenever a cloud sailed past.

  And by the time we got back, I had to hand it to my mother: more often than not, she was hitting her marks. If the jar didn’t shatter, she’d cry, “Bloody hell!” then fire again. I could hear her muttering like a chipmunk as I put up Mister Chester in the barn. Every time a bottle bit the dust, she went: “Hah!”

  Inside the house, lost in MTV-land, Louisa was watching a guy prance around in a black leather contraption that exposed his buttocks whenever he turned his back to us.

  “Bad manners,” she said, wagging a finger at the screen.

  “I think bad manners is the point.”

  Though the guy’s bare ass was working its magic, still Louisa couldn’t keep her attention from eventually turning to the outside world.

  “What’s Mummy doing? It’s time for Oprah,” she said as she peered out the living room’s picture window, twisting herself into the drapes. When she turned around again, the video had changed to a troop of large-breasted women, very energetically dancing.

  “What happened to the guy with the butt?” she asked suspiciously — like I had somehow deliberately made him vanish.

  IT TOOK ME a few days to figure out what she was up to, my mother, when I started coming home from mornings with the narcos and the two of them were gone. Well after sunset they got in, with half-ravaged cartons of take-out food and Louisa giddy, I could tell, from the adrenaline rush of some new unfamiliar form of guilt. My mother wore the collar of her raincoat turned up like a spy, and she even had on — I swear — dark glasses. Except that these glasses had rhinestones at the hinge.

  When I asked where the two of them had been, Mum reported from somewhere high up in her sinuses that she was under the impression that one of the benefits of getting old was that you did not have to give a continuous accounting of your whereabouts.

  “At least that’s how it was explained to me by your father,” she added, though this cynicism sailed right over Louisa’s head.

  “We got Chinese food,” my sister said, holding up the crinkly sacks. “It’s your favorite: pig and duck.”

  That night, in the car trunk, swaddled in an old pink blanket, I found the Browning and swapped it for an alder limb of about the same configuration. I could picture my mother cruising by the pulp mill until her path intersects my father’s just as he gets off from work. Then Mum leaps out of the car, muttering something about being stuck out on the gulag with an addled child and a junkie, before she discovers that the Browning is now a stick and damns me to hell forever.

  And this is part of what happens, or at least the middle act of it — the drama commences when my mother stops at a traffic light and realizes that she’s pulled up alongside who else but my father: right-hand lane, wearing his tweed porkpie hat, Carmen blasting so loud that she can see his windows flex. There’s too much traffic for her to stop and pop the trunk right then and there, so instead when the light turns green what she does is pull in behind him. And she rams him a couple of times, then tries to cut to his left to force him off the road, the only problem with this plan she’s making up as she goes being that her car’s a Hyundai while my father’s in his Lincoln. With a little evasive maneuvering he could leave her in the dust, but instead what he does is give her what she wants, in this case meaning that he does pull off, he even gets out of the car in his stupid hat like he’s offering himself to wh
atever punishment she wants to inflict. And my mother apparently takes some hope in that, that his willingness to let her kill him is his way of atoning for his sins, her gunshot his penance, his penance her forgiveness (& suddenly her plan changes — she will only graze him with a flesh wound), when in fact my father has stopped here only because he’s noticed something that my mother in her homicidal trance has not, which is that the parking lot belongs to a substation for the state police.

  But in the narrow focus of her rage, the percentage of cars in the parking lot that are cruisers does not click, as Mum grabs what she thinks is the gun from her trunk and shakes the blanket and the limb comes rolling out. In the meantime my father has stepped into the substation and is now striding her way with three troopers in tow, among whom my mother is suddenly whirling like a ninja, swinging at my father’s head like it was a piñata full of shit, jabbing the limb like a bayonet every time she gets an open shot. She’s shrieking all the Anglo-Saxon that she knows, carrying on like a Pentecostal jabbering in tongues, sunglasses slantwise on her face so that one eye shows Picasso-like above and one below, both of them bugged from the pressure of all the steam inside her head, the cause of which is curiously not my father but the woman who sits in his Lincoln with the windows rolled and all the doors locked — the terrified counterpart to terrified Louisa, who similarly cowers in my mother’s car with her eyes shut and both hands over her ears.

  Or at least this is my version, cobbled together from everyone else’s, starting with the troopers’ report. From the back seat of the Hyundai (this was after I called a cab out to the gulag so that, after throwing their bail, I could drive the felons home) my mother was not shy about painting me her own picture of events, the focal point of which being how she’d be damned if she was going to stand by and let her home be snatched from underneath her.

  “You’ve always hated that place,” I said.

  “Well, I take comfort in surroundings for which I feel a touch of loathing,” she snapped. “That’s the British in me. Why do you think England has so bloody many chip shops?”

  For his part, my father weighed in later that evening via the telephone, his version coming down to the bottom line that I could count on his pressing charges. “Your mother’s not exempt from the rule of law,” he said, “just because she’s got a broken heart.” All I’ve got to say to him is that he shouldn’t flatter himself about my mother’s heart.

  And maybe it was Louisa’s account that was the most unbiased, Louisa who was plied with quarters and taken downstairs to the vending machines. A lady policeman showed her how the handcuffs worked. “Then I was locked in jail with Mummy,” she said, her terror having given way to exhilaration over her ordeal.

  We were back in the kitchen, eating from a Styrofoam container of moo goo gai pan that I found in the glove box, my mother having retreated upstairs. Louisa’s voice takes on a conspiratorial tone when she tells me, “Mummy got locked up for a bad word.”

  Which? I ask, but here my sister clams up.

  “Come on,” I say. “Was it the F?”

  A sideways shake from Louisa’s head.

  “S-h? A-hole?” and now she starts giggling.

  “Was it, you know, something British? Did she call the cops wankers?”

  Louisa’s dying, fit to burst.

  “Dildo, dickhead? Douchebag? Dork?”

  “No — it was the C!” she squeals, the baddest of the bad words because it is the female one. And this recounting of my mother’s naughtiness has made my sister drunk with remembering her minor part in it. She can hardly contain herself when she reports, “That’s what Mum called the lady.”

  “Which lady?”

  “The one sitting in his car. The one who Mummy says has ruined everything!”

  THAT’S HOW OUR TIME on the gulag came to an end, because property values had gone haywire and we knew he would go after whatever he could get. My mother would end up she knew not where yet with Louisa, and I would get another moldy duplex for myself in town, whose other half would be occupied by a pair of teenage newlyweds, whose common wall would thump whenever he tied one on and sent her reeling against it. Of course, I was only projecting at this point, extrapolating from the data of the past, which I wasn’t supposed to do now that I’d been rehabbed. Roger said that I should see my life as a ball of clay that could be molded into anything.

  “But say I left the clay in my purse in the car, and say with the windows rolled up the whole thing got sort of baked and cracked so that when I go to take the clay out of my purse it crumbles?” Somehow we’d wound up back at the clay metaphor for about the thousandth time, and when I mention this scenario all the other narcos go: “Yeah! Yeah! What about when that happens?”

  Roger rolls his eyes before letting them wander back to me.

  “Well,” he says, “an addict can make up all manner of excuses.”

  “You’re saying there’s no such thing as an accident?”

  “All I’m saying is that adults take responsibility for their actions.”

  He’s tapping his clipboard with his pen like he wants to move on, but I won’t let him. “But Roger,” I say, “think about it. All I’ve got are some dry clay crumbs. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” He’s giving me his thin smile, a signal that he’s about to go into his default mode, which is whimsy.

  “Maybe you have to use your imagination,” he says.

  “Like how?”

  “That’s up to you,” he says without uncurling his lips. “Perhaps you could use the crumbs to make an hourglass.”

  OKAY: JUST TRY telling this to someone like my mother — her life is clay, she can be anything, when the clay dries up she’s supposed to put the crumbs inside an hourglass — when in fact her doofus of a public defender has already convinced her that she can be only one thing and that is Crazy, especially if she doesn’t want to pull some serious time in the big house. He also told her that, since Louisa would likely be deemed an unreliable witness, I was the one who ought to carry the flag on her behalf. I guess I should have been flattered, since reliable is not a word that’s been applied to me much of late, maybe not since the old days when I was my father’s stable girl. Whenever the question was, “Did you remember to brush out Mister Chester?” I was perfectly consistent, I could always answer yes.

  But to my surprise he did not appear; instead it was just me and Louisa and Mum and her lawyer, who wore desert boots and a plaid short-sleeved shirt with one of those lumpy wool ties squared off at the tip. They held the competency hearing in the modular building outside city hall, in a drop-ceilinged room completely lined with mustard-colored indoor-outdoor carpet, which was where I got up and told the judge about how my mother’d taken to leaving food in the glove box, about how she stood there muttering to herself when she first shot the gun, and to make it a stronger scrap for the story I had her babbling a mix of William Blake and Edgar Cayce. Plus I put her in her nightgown when she lies down in the poppies and will not get up. After all, how much difference is there between a nightgown and a raincoat? I mean, is God really keeping that close a tab on the nomenclature himself?

  So it was a victory, of sorts, when the judge ruled that my mother would just spend two weeks in the loony bin — at the end of which time he’d leave it to the doctors’ recommendations. “Piece of cake,” I told her. “You’ll get out with more pot holders than you’ll know what to do with.” The psych ward at Saint Jude’s is in a different building from the rehab unit, but sometimes our nurses would stop by the psych ward to borrow supplies for arts and crafts. They were afraid to let the populations mix for fear the narcos would start hitting up the psychos for their meds.

  All this I’m explaining in my mother’s bedroom as she packs her pink suitcase from the sixties with the plastic wood-grain trim. She wanted me to advise her about what she should wear to be a crackpot, and I said that was the beauty of being one: at last, you get to wear whatever you want.

  Late that afternoon my m
other comes downstairs with the suitcase, the shoes she’s selected pinched between the fingers of her free hand. They’re her good heels — she must have decided to go Classy Crackpot — and I can tell that she’s making a performance of her leaving, which is, after all, just a rehearsal for the more permanent leaving that will come later, when my father cuts her loose without a cent. Already he’s told me that after my mother leaves he’ll send a trailer down for Mister Chester, whom he plans to board at a stable near his new house overlooking the Puget Sound.

  “I guess it’s time for one last perambulation,” my mother says, after setting both suitcase and shoes beside the door. Through the picture window, I watch her feet slide into her boots on the steps and walk toward the barn, which is in truth little more than a shed, a cockeyed structure whose rotting silvery frame contains just enough room for Mister Chester and the winter’s stockpile of hay. My mother goes in and leaves the doors open, and soon Mister Chester comes walking out; when she comes out after him she’s once again got the Browning in her grip. She must have found it where I had it stashed between the hay bales, and for a minute when she hoists the gun I think she means to kill. Okay, I will let her have him, is what I say then to myself, because in nobody’s mind but my own was Mister Chester ever anything other than my father’s horse. As my mother has pointed out, all those years I was gone, living in town, what good was I? What good was I?

  But when the shot cracks out, instead of dropping, Mister Chester fixes my mother with a look that is clearly his horse-language way of telling her that she can go fuck off. When she fires again, Mister Chester picks up his pace only the merest notch as he saunters toward the woods. I realize then that my mother’s got the rifle tipped toward the sky, that she’s not trying to kill him but only drive him off. Life does not require your participation. Being a curmudgeon is no sin. Once Mister Chester blurs into the landscape’s sepia-colored edge, she twirls and empties the rest of the bullets into the barn before throwing the gun into the dirt.