Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  Sometimes after class instead of changing buses at the transfer station she stays on Marco’s bus, his route taking her west to the bridge over the inlet and beyond that, the shopping mall. Sometimes she rides with him all the way to the mall but more often she gets off at the bridge to stand and gaze at Mary, whose features, Ruth realizes one day with dismay, are definitely, slowly fading. The folds of her wimple have all but disappeared and her toothy smile has lost its outer edges, becoming so blurry that it’s hard to tell if her lips are turned up or held level or, indeed, whether the Mother of God is frowning.

  But Ruth’s concentration is broken when she also realizes that it’s Prairie Rose on duty behind the seawall, wearing her reflective orange vest, megaphone in hand. She is telling the people jockeying in boats below to sit down and keep their life vests fastened. “Oh, yeah?” yells a man standing up in a Boston Whaler, “and what if we don’t?” Prairie Rose bullhorns back that noncompliance is a maritime offense for which she’s authorized to issue summonses.

  “I think I heard that kind of talk before,” hollers the man in the boat. “From a guy by the name of Pontius Pilate!”

  THE SUDDEN FADING of the miracle causes battle lines to be drawn among the citizens of town. There are those who believe the Miracle Management Response Team ought to be given the task of erecting a tarp to shade Mary’s face from the sun, a sort of visor for which a frame would have to be built atop the seawall. This proposal is supported mostly by the shopkeepers, whose tills have been fattened by the constant flow of tourists. And then there are those who are sick of the town’s being inundated by cars with I BRAKE FOR RAPTURE bumper stickers. Poison-pen letters start appearing in the local paper; the anti-miracle faction is accused of having a pro-homosexual agenda, the sunshade contingent of crass commercialism sailing under the flag of piety.

  One good thing about the fading, at least according to Prairie Rose, is that it’s caused the amount of litter to decline: “I guess they think it’s Mary’s way of telling them the party’s over.” But she herself has grown nervous about what will happen when the apparition disappears. She’s heard a rumor that there are no openings on the grounds crew, that the odds are more likely she’ll be laid off once the Virgin flies the coop. And this worries her, especially since she’s just plonked down eight hundred dollars for a computer so that she didn’t have to head down to the library every time she needed to communicate with the BioFinders.

  So far what they’ve done is place personal ads in the newspapers of St. Louis and New Orleans, ads inquiring after anyone who knew one Ruth Horowitz in the mid-seventies, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, five-foot-six, 110-pound nursing student. They’ve also made inquiries via the meat cutters’ union and posted notices on the “Mardi Party” website, a chat group for people who attended the Mardi Gras in years past and want to reminisce. All of which Prairie Rose could have done herself, but BioFinders also guarantees that they will screen the crackpots and forward only those respondents who are Prairie Rose’s IPBFs (“identified potential biological fathers”).

  Late at night, Ruth can hear the keys being tapped in the walk-in closet, where Prairie Rose sits on the futon with the computer planted between her legs. The idea of Prairie Rose telling the whole wide world about her mother’s behavior, so long past, makes Ruth feel as though there are worms entering between her own legs and crawling up inside her. Worms that are not even real words or worms, but particles zapping through the air, zapping right in front of her nose as she tries to sleep while all night Prairie Rose’s computer keys go tippy-tippy-tap.

  With nights like these, the hour she spends each day skipping through life becomes her raft. Marco yells, “Big steps, ladies, shoot those knees up to the moon!” and they march around in circles, they sashay from side to side, they skip through an obstacle course of hula hoops. One Wednesday the headbanded woman skips so exuberantly that centrifugal force sends her crashing into a wall, which her head strikes with a hollow whomp that echoes off the cinder blocks. In its wake, the woman lies motionless, her mouth opening and closing like a fish.

  Marco asks her, “Can you speak?” as the woman struggles to get something out.

  “No,” she says weakly.

  The women gather around to help their classmate to her feet, Ruth among them and suddenly piping up, insisting that they not move her. And while they wait for the paramedics, Ruth holds traction on the woman’s head, Mr. Lindquist having insisted that she always keep her first-aid card current. It was the duty of women who hitch their carts to older men, he said, just in case they ever needed CPR.

  “Or the kiss of life,” he said, poking her.

  And now, bracing the woman’s head between her palms, Ruth looks down at the face and is ashamed. . because even after all these weeks she doesn’t know the woman’s name, she simply hasn’t paid attention. Angela, the other women chant as they try to call their comrade back into the world, her lips testing and rejecting many of the common prefixes as if she cannot decide which word it would be worth her breath to speak. “Angela,” Ruth repeats with them, holding the woman’s head and stunned by the thought of what this skull in turn might hold, the whole contents of a woman’s life.

  “Angela, say something,” she says.

  LATER, WHEN RUTH HEADS HOME on the bus, she’s the only passenger except for one rumpled soul asleep on the back bench seat. Marco’s talking at her across his shoulder: “Jeez, if I’d known you were a nun, I would of asked you sooner what you think.” After Angela had sprung to her feet and, with a smack of her hands, announced that she was ready to get back to work, and after they’d insisted against her wishes that she ride off with the paramedics, the women had remained in a circle around Ruth and would not disperse until she came up with some plausible reason why she’d let them think that she was deaf.

  “Oh. .” she demurred, before seizing on the first explanation that came to mind, “for spiritual reasons I took a vow of silence.” And from the way the women turned away from her in the locker room when she undressed, it dawned on her: they thought she was a nun.

  “What I think about what?” Actually, Ruth finds herself relieved not to have to be the deaf woman anymore, having long ago worn out her repertoire of shrugs and gestures.

  “You know, the Virgin — come on, I know you’ve looked. Looks like some kind of chemical oxidation to me, if you rub your fingers on the concrete they’ll come up a little purple on the tips. But then I figure, what’s the difference between oxidation and a miracle anyhow? It’s like a rainbow — you could explain a rainbow using numbers. But when you look at it you don’t think about numbers. The first thought that pops into your head is miracle.” This last word Marco pipes through the trumpet of his fist, his pinky and ring finger wiggling.

  “So what do you think?” he repeats.

  “About the Virgin? I’m not sure what she is.”

  Marco cocks an eyebrow her way through the rearview. “I thought you nuns were in the business of being sure.”

  “Actually, I’m not a nun.”

  They are stopped at a light, and now Marco turns around with his blue sleeve draped over the driver’s seat. “Then what are you?” he asks.

  Ruth shrugs, thinks about it.

  Finally she says, “I guess I am only a skipper through life.”

  THROUGH THEIR INQUIRIES with the meat cutters’ union, BioFinders comes up with a man who matches one of Ruth’s fragments, a man with whom Prairie Rose one day announces she has been corresponding.

  “I think he’s the one. He knows you, Ma.”

  “What does he know?”

  “He knows the way you blink when there’s something you don’t want to talk about. The pretend-blink. The way you shut your eyes and leave them closed too long, like you’re hoping the world will go away and leave you alone.”

  Like her, Prairie Rose says, he is broad-shouldered with brown eyes and auburn hair. Like her, he favors flannel shirts and boots. Like her, like Prairie Rose Horowitz, who
has made Ruth crawl into the closet to witness something, the computer gleaming like an eyeball in between them.

  “Can’t you shut that thing off?” she says. “I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “No, I wanted you to come in here and see this.”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t know if this is such a good idea. I read about men shanghaiing girls all the time using these computers. Before you know it you’ll end up God-knows-where in some motel.”

  In the cramped space, Ruth tries to pivot around so she can crawl back out of the closet. But Prairie Rose says, “Wait a minute, this is why I called you in here. He’s sending us a picture. He’s gonna prove who he is before he makes you say who you are.”

  Ruth is on her hands and knees, and now she crab-walks sideways back in the direction of the screen, which ticks and hums as dots assemble at the top of it. Then the dots become lines, and the lines thicken into an oblong: the brow, the white of the eyes, the head angling one ear their way. Some strange bright speck contorts its shape.

  “What’s that?” Ruth asks.

  Prairie Rose inches toward the screen and squints.

  “I think he’s got an earring.”

  The jowls appear, the mouth, the neck. An older man, jovial but wattled. The computer has turned his features uniformly gray. Nothing about him jogs any atom of her memory. It’s pretty hard to imagine this gray blob pulling off the fwap-fwap trick.

  “Thank God Mr. Lindquist never took it into his head to get an earring.”

  They kneel on the floor, peering at the image. And finally, when the face is all there, Prairie Rose turns to her mother and asks: “Well, what do you think, Ma? Is that him?”

  HAPPINESS IS A CHEMICAL IN THE BRAIN

  Is it not possible for good manners to exist alongside physical pleasure? Whenever I think of my husband’s mistress, the person who pops into my head is the former president of France. He had his mistress and he also had his life as a statesman. His country and his many women. Not mind over body, but mind and body dropped into separate pans of the scale. And the pans both resting on the air. The air that will let neither drop.

  Not that I have much faith in the air’s good intentions. I happen to have a disease of the sort that will not kill me, a fact that strikes me as unfortunate because, more than death, I am afraid of the whining sap who might emerge from the medley of my pains. In my view, the air is full of chemicals, and as for the mind — well, the mind is a dog that the body walks on its short leash.

  That’s how I came to sniffing like a hound for any possible mistress who crossed my path. I sniffed Daphne my neurologist and I sniffed Julie, the carpenter who built the ramp that would get me into the house once I could no longer walk at all. But Julie announced straight off she was a lesbian, and she even showed me a picture of her lover, and their child who was born with spina bifida and who wears braces on her legs.

  “We told Lucy the braces would give her superpowers, like Wonder Woman’s magic belt,” Julie told me as she hammered. “We showed her pictures of knights in their armor and told her how much it weighed.”

  Of course, I knew why Julie was telling me these stories: they were meant to be consoling, reminders of the other citizens who resided in the country where I had begun my travels. Had she asked I would have told her about the president of France, how he did not hobnob with the masses. Those who eat pâté de foie gras know they are not common. Part of the pleasure comes from knowing that destiny does not permit everyone this type of food.

  For his last meal he did have foie gras, and also ortolans, the little singing birds that are an endangered species. He made a tent by draping his napkin over his head, so he could more fully inhale their scent. While the rest of his guests chattered, the president of France sat with his head covered like a ghost, decimating further the ortolan population by cracking their bones with the few good teeth that he had left.

  HERE IS AN unusual fact about my husband Daniel: he happens to own a gun — a shotgun from his childhood. Though for years I protested its presence in the house, recently I told Daniel I’d changed my mind about the gun: it was reassuring to know I had the option of shooting myself when I couldn’t bear another day.

  But I made the mistake of offering this pronouncement over dinner, as Daniel dished up his lentil soup. The soup, I might add, has a more delicate flavor than its name would suggest. I have asked what the secret ingredient is, but Daniel refuses to say. Coriander is what I suspect.

  He began to blink profusely as the ladle dripped: “Perhaps we don’t have to discuss this over dinner—”

  “This lovely dinner,” I added. “Forgive me. You have gone through the trouble of making your special soup, and here I am talking about shooting myself. I forget how dramatic it must sound.”

  And we never came back to the gun, but in a way we did, because all of a sudden Daniel expressed interest in buying one of the old hunting cabins on the river east of town. “We could use it in summer,” he said, “so you don’t wither in the heat.” He said it came with its own hunting blind, though the plank walkway to the blind was in disrepair. I told him that after thirty-two years of marriage he should know me well enough to know a hunting blind was about as enticing as an outhouse.

  “The cabin has indoor plumbing, dear.”

  “We already have indoor plumbing.”

  “But we don’t have cattails.”

  “Remind me, what is a cattail?”

  Then he showed me a picture. A little dilapidated shack. It was cheap because it was built in the floodplain, set up on concrete footings. To access it, you ascended a half flight of stairs that brought you to a rickety deck.

  When I pointed this out to Daniel he said, “Julie can build another ramp.”

  I asked why, suddenly, he wanted a cabin.

  “I thought I might try my hand at hunting.”

  I told Daniel I could no more see him hunting than I could see him behind the wheel of an ice-cream truck.

  “Why not? I have always been attracted by the idea of sitting outdoors at dawn with a hot cup of coffee and the smell of wet wool filling up my sinuses.”

  When I tried to picture Daniel’s sinuses I saw stalactites dripping.

  “What would you shoot?”

  “Ducks, I suppose. Surely you would share with me my roasted duck.”

  “Could I wear a napkin on my head? Like the president of France, when he ate his last meal?”

  I was trying to be funny, but my questions just made Daniel twitch. “Last meal? You’re not still thinking of shooting yourself?”

  “Oh, Daniel,” I said as I touched his cheek. “I think about it all the time, but your duck has nothing to do with that.”

  AND I LET the subject of the cabin drop as he also let it drop: still, in short order, the gun vanished and a strange key appeared with all the others on their hooks. The fob was a yellow rubber fish that could function as a penlight when it was squeezed. I was not upset that he had gone ahead and bought the shack, though I could hardly believe that he wanted a place to shoot poor birds. Easier for me to believe that he was preparing a trysting place. He would never bring his mistress to our house, though in fact I thought this might be all right: it’s a big house and we could all play cribbage after.

  Instead Daniel spent his weekends at the cabin while I worked here, compiling indexes for nonfiction books. This is how I became acquainted with the president of France — I had indexed one of his biographies. Under ortolan there were six entries. Under mistress, twenty-seven.

  Or I assume Daniel went to his cabin, because he came home smelling of paint. I began to drop names: “I ran into Daphne on her bicycle.” But all he said was: “Who is Daphne?” Or: “I ran into Julie in Home Depot,” but his response told me nothing: “I saw her Lucy on the monkey bars when I drove past the park.”

  And so the summer gave way to fall, and the fall I spent on a biography of Aldo Leopold, the grandfather of modern-day ecology. Here’s what I know: sampling meth
ods, Sand County Almanac, sandhill cranes. I can remember the slots but not what fills them. And the slot for Daniel’s mistress remained empty.

  I knew if I asked Daniel to take me to see the cabin he would feel obligated to put on a barbecue or take me fishing, though my interest in the cabin had nothing to do with barbecues or fishing. So one day while Daniel was at work I rode there in the HandyVan, my customary means of getting to the doctor and the store. I could tell that Lou the driver thought it strange as I directed him not to any of our usual destinations but toward the dirt roads that ran near the river. When we got to the cabin — which sat with a dozen others in a row — Lou wrestled the wheelchair backward up the deck’s wet steps.

  “What are you going to do out here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Lou. I suspect I’ll just be taking nature in.”

  “But it’s raining.”

  “Yes, Lou. I’ve noticed.”

  He still seemed reluctant to leave, so I waved him off: “The other cripples await you, Lou, they need you to take them to the mall. Come back at four. I’ll be all right.” Reluctantly he got back in and backed down the dirt road. I sat there waving him off until the HandyVan disappeared.

  The river ran behind the cabins, a few of which had been fixed up by other people who must have had real houses for themselves in town. A few more had slipped over the brink of feasible repair. And then there were the desperation rentals, people eking out the winter underneath their mossy roofs, waiting for the flood, the muddy yards studded with broken plastic toys that would be swept away. These cabins showed no signs of life but for the drone of radios buzzing like bees trapped in their windows. The golden oldies. Music for somebody with no place to go except the past.

  I stuck the key in the lock and panicked a moment when the knob would not turn — a healthier wife could have kicked the flimsy door to splinters. Stopping to assess the outside of the cabin then, I realized that Daniel had not given much thought to its adornment. No wind chimes had been strung outside, not even a deck chair on the deck. It was as if the cabin had no patience for these distractions, as if it were single-minded in its intent.