Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  “What’s Mum shooting now?” Louisa asks, without too much concern: Louisa’s memory is like a wake that closes up behind her as soon as she moves on.

  “Just the barn,” I say to my sister, who doesn’t look up because she’s mesmerized and letting her body sway. She’s watching MTV again, standing so close the jump cuts splash their colors into the white screen of her face.

  “Why’s Mummy want to kill the barn?”

  The amazing thing is what happens next, when my mother stomps from the barn to the backhoe sitting some thirty yards off, parked among the burn barrels like the skeleton of something that had just been exhumed from the dirt, its yellow spots reduced to freckles, its tires caked with last year’s mud. What’s amazing is the magic she works to get the ignition to turn over, and the way that, after much fiddling with the shift, she somehow manages to bring the machine to life. Suddenly she’s in gear, moving chink chink chink toward the barn from the far side of the pasture, her raincoat flaring from the ancient driver’s seat while the bucket scrapes along the ground. It looks as if she’s trying to build enough speed so that when she plows into the barn the whole thing will go down; she’s angling toward one corner where the footings are especially cracked.

  By now it’s dusk, and dribbling out of the backhoe’s seat are particles of foam rubber that look like snow as they’re seized and carried by the wind, over and through the crowns of the naked alders. An A-1 sunset has just started to creep from cloud to cloud, and I have to yell above the music for my sister to come get a load of this, as our mother, furious and wild-haired and small, steadies herself behind the wheel.

  ANYONE ELSE BUT ME

  “Don’t try to make anything burn” is Marco the instructor’s first piece of advice to the class, which the YMCA catalogue had listed as “Skipping Through Life”: somebody’s idea of an upbeat name for the senior citizens’ women’s exercise group. Ruth’s enrollment fee had been a gift from her daughter, who said, “Ma, you’re turning into a lump.” And indeed, Ruth is hard in the running for fattest person in the class, though, her daughter’s opinions aside, she is not all that fat. It’s just that the other women are surprisingly firm for a bunch of. . well, old ladies.

  Ruth also guesses that she’s the youngest old lady here, fifty-six, barely squeaking over the wire that was the minimum age for the class. Marco himself looks some years younger, husky but toned, a city bus driver who leads the class during his lunch hour, he explains—“to keep the pizza out of my mouth.” Soon Ruth realizes that these introductory comments are meant for her, the rest of the group having been through this routine on countless noons. Her outsider status is also made clear by her sweatpants, which no one else but Marco is wearing. The rest of the women are dressed in coordinated leotards.

  “I won’t be giving much instruction,” he tells her as he warms up, lunging from side to side with his fists on his hips and his legs spread. “I think you’ll be able to follow along. But if you have any questions, give a shout.”

  Then Marco punches a button on his tape deck, from which bursts the trumpet intro of an Andrews Sisters number, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Abruptly the women line up and begin to march in a circle, swinging their arms. As Ruth imitates their movements, she can’t help thinking about the goose step she play-marched with, back when she was just a kid. And how did it happen that one day you’re playing Hitler in the alley and before you know it you’re in the senior citizens’ women’s exercise class, where the instructor’s calling out, “Big steps, ladies! Big steps!”?

  PRAIRIE ROSE, her daughter, works for the town’s Miracle Management Response Team, which has been made necessary by the appearance of the Virgin Mary in the dark stains running down the concrete seawall that can be seen from the bridge over the inlet that bisects town. Prairie Rose complains about how working for the MMRT is not all it’s cracked up to be: mostly you just walk around in an orange vest, picking up trash. The viewers of the miracle gather on the bridge and in the marina parking lot, where concessionaires charge five dollars for a ride out to the base of the seawall to touch Her. In the parking lot the viewers leave behind not just rosaries and candles but also a surprising number of wadded hamburger wrappers. “I mean, personally, I think of Mary and I think salad,” Prairie Rose says, “but the evidence suggests that she’s got everyone else hankering for red meat.”

  Prairie Rose took the job with hopes of being transferred to the city grounds crew once the apparition fades. She has visions of herself kneeling in bark mulch, changing the flower bed that spells the city’s name from tulips to marigolds as the seasons cycle through. In the interim, she says she’s just biding her time—“until ol’ Mary decides to beam herself back up.”

  Of course, Prairie Rose has explanations, some kind of chemical the concrete was treated with, but Ruth is not so ready to write the Virgin off. More than once, she’d found herself standing on the bridge whose stone balustrades were now globbed with candle wax. All around her, people muttered prayers and worried their rosaries, while below them a flotilla of boats vied for position, overloaded with spectators who made the small crafts lurch as arms strained toward the seawall.

  Being part of so much humbled humanity, even Ruth felt her heart begin to stretch until the bag of it touched the underside of her skin, and the contact discharged something on the order of a static shock. It was all she could do to keep from crying out.

  “Oh, Ma, you’re like all the other nutballs,” Prairie Rose told her. “You believe it because you’ve got nothing else going on in your life.” But Ruth had to fight her impulse to go to the bridge too often, because she worried that the miracle would be rendered meaningless through overexposure, as she concluded it had been for Prairie Rose.

  WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was growing up, Ruth had lived with a Mr. Lindquist, a formal man whose formal name Ruth first started using as a joke, before it stuck. He was some years older than she, an Air Force pilot in WWII, and Ruth had thought it odd — and so did not allow herself to think about it too much — that a man of his generation would never have proposed to her a formal marriage. Perhaps this had to do with Prairie Rose, to whom Mr. Lindquist’s advice was usually prefaced with, “Look, now, I know I’m not your father. .”

  During all the years of his not-quite-fatherhood, Mr. Lindquist had spent his early mornings tinkering with a light aircraft he was building in the garage, which was what killed him in the end. The search and rescue squad found him dangling from a tree limb, pieces of the fuselage dotting the evergreens like shiny ornaments.

  What money he left Ruth was modest (the bulk of it went to his son, a stand-offish man not much younger than she was): enough to support a woman who does not drive and who shops the canned goods stacked in the supermarket’s Wall of Value. Prairie Rose had already left home and embarked on a series of disastrous relationships with men she would in the end denounce as helpless. Helpless! In her segues between boyfriends, she often moved back into the walk-in closet off the living room in Ruth’s apartment, where she slept on a futon mattress.

  She was a strapping girl who could run for miles along the inlet without breaking a sweat, and she kept her weight bench on the sagging front porch of the old house whose upstairs Ruth occupied. Even when Prairie Rose was not living in the closet, sometimes Ruth would wake in the night to the loud clink of the barbell being set down in its keeper.

  So when Prairie Rose said, Ma, you’re turning into a lump, Ruth knew this was not just an appraisal of her body but also of her life, for the truth was that ever since Mr. Lindquist died — okay, since even before Mr. Lindquist died — she’d really never (as they say) “done much.” She’d raised a daughter, for a while she’d worked part-time at the library shelving books: wasn’t that enough? But the answer was no, at least not according to Prairie Rose. Just one class, just one hour each day, Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how anyone can be overwhelmed by this.

  Ruth tries to explain how first there are the preparations to attend,
the purchase of exercise clothes and the daily packing of one’s duffel bag, then the getting dressed, the breakfast, the bus ride, the transfer, the other bus ride, the class and the shower and the reversal of bus rides until finally the getting home and fixing lunch.

  After this, she is tired enough to indulge herself in a little nap, then maybe in the afternoon she ventures out to the library or walks down to the inlet, before returning home to fix dinner for herself and (often) Prairie Rose, for whom she buys vegetables and assembles them into a meal whose creation and cleaning up will fill her evening. Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how her mother could be satisfied with so little; Ruth doesn’t understand how a person’s life could accommodate much more.

  And then there is not just the exercising itself but also the mandatory socializing that comes with it. When they lie down for leg lifts, the women clump in groups to rehash the events of the twenty-four hours since they last lay down together. They know the routine so well they have no need to look at Marco or hear what he’s saying, nothing to impede the speed and fluency of their chatter. And Ruth panicked when she first realized that signing on with the exercise group obligated her to participate: at first the women were satisfied simply to instruct her in technique, winching up her leg like a dog’s for the exercise that Marco called “The Fire Hydrant.”

  But when the women turned onto their backs for pelvic tilts, a headband-wearer in a nearby clump called out, “So what’s your story, hon? You a widow?” Ruth wiggled her head in a manner that she hoped could be read as either yes or no.

  “Kids?” the woman persisted, but this time Ruth could not even muster the hint of a shrug as she lay flat on her back.

  Then she heard the woman whisper to the pelvic-tilter next to her, “I think she’s deaf.”

  Within the hour this rumor had worked its way from clump to clump, and from then on the women no longer tried to speak to her but merely torqued her body into position whenever they were of the opinion that she was not correctly emulating Marco. Ruth didn’t see the need to disabuse anyone about her deafness; she didn’t want even one drop of whatever power was left in her creaky body to be dissipated by jawing. Being deaf streamlined her commerce with the other women to its bare essentials. Being the deaf woman set her free.

  And when Ruth walked out of the Y that first day and boarded the bus for home, she was surprised to find Marco behind the wheel, wearing a blue city jacket and driver’s cap in addition to his sweatpants. He seemed to avoid her gaze deliberately, which made her wonder if the code of conduct for exercise instructors was anything like that of therapists: you did not acknowledge your clients outside the session, giving them the courtesy of not giving them away. But later Marco caught her gaze in the rearview mirror, and when they stopped for a traffic light he took his hands from the wheel and began making peculiar gestures. This bewildered Ruth until she realized that Marco was speaking to her in sign language. In response to which she tried to nod inscrutably, as if she understood what was being said.

  WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was a child, she took Mr. Lindquist in stride, but as she grew up that stride became a typically teenagerly sulk in pursuit of what Prairie Rose came to refer to as the Truth. Finally, Ruth made the mistake of admitting that, as far as Prairie Rose’s biological father was concerned, there were several possibilities.

  “So what you’re telling me is you were easy,” said Prairie Rose, easy being a word whose connotations in this regard she’d just picked up in high school. Ruth remembers exactly: they were sitting in Prairie Rose’s bedroom, in the “regular” house they’d occupied when Mr. Lindquist was alive, the room’s pretty lilac walls only a few months away from being repainted black and covered with posters of heavy metal bands.

  “Well, I guess that’s how your grandmother looked at it,” Ruth said.

  The upside of the “easy” remark was that it gave her an excuse to stalk self-righteously from the room, as if she had been wounded. And acting wounded saved her from having to explain — how when Prairie Rose was a baby Ruth had stared at her for hours and still not been able to reach a conclusive verdict. By the time Prairie Rose grew out of her baby flesh, Ruth could no longer remember much about the faces of the contenders.

  “Look at me, Ma,” Prairie Rose would say from time to time over the years. Then she’d hold Ruth’s face between her palms while Ruth stared back while Prairie Rose squeezed, as if the information were in there somewhere and could be extracted like orange juice.

  “Honey, I’m drawing a blank, I’m sorry,” was all that Ruth could say. And Prairie Rose would squeeze her face for a moment longer, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make sure it hurt, before she’d finally let her mother go.

  MORE RECENTLY, when Prairie Rose got on a jag and pestered her about the list of candidates, Ruth said there had been a meat cutter named Bill with a bubble of curly hair and a blond boy named Phil who lived with his mother off Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, where Ruth had briefly attended nursing school in 1976. Or maybe she had the Phil and Bill mixed up, she wasn’t sure anymore. During the month in question, she’d also traveled with her girlfriends to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where she had to admit there had been indiscretions.

  “What do you mean, indiscretions?”

  “Oh, honey, think about what you did when you were twenty.”

  Then Prairie Rose was quiet for a moment, as if she really were thinking. “So it’s the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker,” she finally erupted peevishly. “Or maybe it’s Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who just happened to roar into town on their choppers!”

  The problem was that Prairie Rose never wanted the kind of information Ruth remembered, particularly the car upholstery, in one case a maroon brocade deeply quilted with silver fixtures — door handle, ashtray, button for the electric window. This was where the boy, whoever he was, suddenly glided his hand under her bra, and in the midst of the squirming she usually did at this juncture, a new thought occurred to her: Why not?

  It must have been twelve-string guitars that came into fashion that year and made those jangling sounds on the radio, sounds the boy used as an accompaniment when he performed his trick, like the fwap-fwap fluttering of a dozen doves pulled from a hat. Good God, what noises he was able to draw from her, and with only that one simple piece of equipment: his hand. It amazed her, doubly so when she learned about the portability of the trick, how it did not have to be this particular hand in this particular car, it didn’t even have to be in a car at all but also could be made to happen under the live oaks in New Orleans, the moss spongy underneath her and no music there at all.

  Now part of the reason Prairie Rose has to spend her days poking at trash left behind by the miracle’s viewers is that she’s recently entered into a contractual agreement with an outfit called BioFinders, and this costs big money. BioFinders guarantees that they will be able to locate Prairie Rose’s father, no matter what slim pickings she’s giving them to go on. The logo on their stationery reads, The World Is Small for the Persistent.

  What comes first in the mail is a thick trifold of green xeroxed sheets, to be completed by Ruth in as much detail as she can remember. They want to know every incident she’d been a party to between January and April of 1976 “that either culminated in the discharge of semen or vaginal penetration without apparent ejaculative discharge.” Start with January and work forward. Eight pages provided in all, with the instructions to use plain lined paper if additional sheets are needed.

  “Must we do this?” Ruth asks, after skimming over the forms.

  “Darn tootin’,” is Prairie Rose’s response. “Ma, you have no idea what it’s like to go through life without a father.”

  “What was wrong with Mr. Lindquist?”

  “Nothing!” Prairie Rose rolls her pupils back into her head and drops her eyelids over them. “This has nothing to do with Mr. Lindquist. This is about my life, Ma. The world doesn’t revolve around your inadequacies.”

  Later, R
uth has to fight her way to sleep, against the clank and growl that is Prairie Rose bench-pressing more than her own weight.

  WHEN RUTH FOUND herself pregnant, instinct told her to run. She packed her things and headed west, and when she hit the ocean and could go no farther she tossed a coin and made a right-hand turn. So Prairie Rose grew up on Puget Sound, and happily it seemed, and Ruth was happy during her years with Mr. Lindquist, who drove a Chrysler and liked the big bands, not what he called “that caterwauling on the radio.”

  Of course, when he died she’d grieved, though her sadness was tempered by her not being sure whether he himself would have been sorry. He was getting old after all, and the Air Force body he had been so proud of was starting to fail, his prostate removed the year before. At least he’d been able to finish the plane before the cancer could make him weak, for Mr. Lindquist — who’d dropped bombs and been a POW — was not afraid of anything except maybe dying before he got the last piece into place.

  Some people are like that, she thought: They need to get all the pieces into place. They want the precise orchestration of the big bands, not the jangling.

  And it was remembering this that finally caused Ruth to spread out the green sheets and commence writing. Her entries varied from a few sentences to pages of her large script. All told, she remembered clearly just four boys from the months in question, though one’s semen had only landed on the outside of her panties and she was not sure whether this should count.

  WHAT MARCO PLAYS at the exercise class is Mr. Lindquist’s music, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”: the women march and skip while Ruth, the deaf woman, includes herself at neither the tail nor the head of the line but settles someplace in the middle, a position she deems least conspicuous. She no longer needs their postural corrections when they lie on the floor for pelvic tilts, nor do her muscles resist with such vehemence that she can think of nothing else. Instead while she exercises she can let her mind wander to Mr. Lindquist, and how she’d loved him in a way that was not jangly at all.