Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (10 page)

THE OLD WEST was replaced by various booths that urged civic improvement. In the new West, everyone recycled their newspapers and cans. The water district gave out low-flow inserts for people’s showerheads and the city demonstrated the newest in compost bins. Even the wildlife department came with brochures about the perils of DDT and a few mangy birds of prey, to which Stella shrieked, “Kaw! Kaw!” until the young woman on duty told her that if she was going to annoy the birds she’d have to go away.

Ginny always insisted on being the one who drove because the fair, especially the fair, had a way of pumping Stella full of the black humors that made her manic and angry all at once. “Running on hi-test” was how Stella referred to these moods, which Stella traced back to Leroy but which Ginny suspected had more to do with the likelihood of her running into one of her ex-husbands. Sometimes it seemed that the fair existed just to give her husbands an excuse to knock each other around. More often than not, by the time the sky approached its purest dark, and the kids in safety-patrol bandoliers came through swinging their flashlights to herd the crowd home, one of the husbands would be towing Stella toward the car. Then Ginny would have to drive home while the two of them grappled in the back seat. Whenever a car pulled up behind, their bodies would flash as if a strobe light had hit them, lighting Ginny’s rearview mirror. They’d be engaged in some exotic form of either sex or warfare, but Ginny had long ago run out of patience with her sister to care which.

The next time Stella called, she’d sound contrite, though she would feign ignorance about the cause of Ginny’s hurt. What she said was always a variant of: “I mean, I’d understand if it weren’t my husband.”

“You mean your ex-husband,” Ginny says.

“That makes a difference?”

“You have many ex-husbands, Stell.”

“Several. You’re resorting to hyperbole.”

“Then I’m sure you could tell me which one it was,” Ginny says, hating the schoolteacher (which she is, which she’d become) that she could not jettison from her voice.

“Stell?”

“Okayokay.” This is Stella’s standard apology. “Whatever it is that I don’t remember I did, I promise never to do it again unless I don’t know what I’m doing when I do it.”

THE OLD WEST lasted until the girls were teens, by which time Stella had taken to carrying a flask in her embroidered shoulder bag that was spangled with tiny mirrors. Whatever was in the flask made Stella hoot and holler:

“Bring on the fish boy!”

“Let’s have Leroy!”

“Let’s see him roll that cigarette!”

And when he was wheeled into the stage’s brighter lights, she applauded more wildly and stamped her feet. She was wearing a skirt that she’d made from an old pair of jeans, the hem frayed, barely reaching the top of the V of her legs. It was that time of evening when the bay flattened its surface and turned silver, the last trace of sunlight mixed with the first trace of moonlight to create a dusty paste.

Ginny was eleven that first year of the flask, with only a vague idea what
drunk
meant. But the word was juicy enough to make the stardust cling to her sister’s body, which seemed full of a mysterious sap that garbled her words and caused a few strands of her dark hair to stick to the corners of her mouth. Then she started shimmying, in more or less one spot, while Leroy grubbed his lips through his tobacco. In a kazoo voice she sang,
I’ll be your hootchie-cootchie girl, you’ll be the jelly man
, while her arms swung and her fingers snapped.

“That girl’s out of control,” said a woman in the crowd as she looked around for someone in a position of authority. But under their breath the men sucked their teeth and whispered,
Oh, baby
, and
Come to papa
, as Stella shook the new round breasts that had snuck up on her so quickly that she did not even seem aware of them yet.

“Come on,” Ginny said, touching her sister, but Stella shook loose.

“I’m not out of control. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Ginny tried to stand so as to block everybody’s view of her sister. “So what are you doing?” she asked under her breath. Stella was pedaling her arms and wobbling her hips, submerged in the sweet liquor that filled her, swimming through it with her eyes closed and her breath held.

“Dancing,” she said, without coming up.

WHAT HAPPENED in the years that came after the end of the Old West was that Stella dropped out of high school, messed around for a while, then took the GED and ended up getting out of college with a degree in accounting before the rest of her class, facts that she recited often and with a quack of glee. She liked to make up jokes at the expense of other members of her profession, like: How many accountants does it take to screw in a lightbulb? (Answer: none, because they make the receptionist do it so that when she climbs up the stepladder they can all look up her skirt.) She said the reason she chose accounting was because it did not require any thinking that could not be performed by a machine. “Like, six plus seven’s thrown me ever since the great brain cell die-off of the eighties, and you know what? It doesn’t matter anymore. They’ve got software that can compensate.”

And in this manner Stella won — rich men came to her with their receipts, and she owned a number of good wool suits that she now wore to work. But for the fair her short skirts were still made of denim, though store-bought now and finished at the hem. She liked to wear them with flashy heels in colors whose names Ginny remembered from the big crayon box: fuchsia, celadon, cerise. She also wore sunglasses, an extra pair of which she once tried offering to Ginny: “So you won’t be afraid of running into any of your kids or their parents,” she said. “Just in case you decide you wanted to cut loose.”

“When have you ever known me to cut loose?”

“Hey, Gin, I figure there’s a first time for everything.”

Ginny made the comment that she was not the sister who usually needed a disguise, but this made Stella shake her head. “No, you don’t need a disguise when people see you wearing one every day. Get me out of a suit and no one has a clue.”

“I was thinking more about your husbands.”

“Oh, them.” Stella waved her hand in front of her face as though she were shooing away a cloud of gnats. “They already have their ideas about me.”

THAT WAS HOW the Old West ended, that night Stella did her song and dance:
I’ll be your hootchie-cootchie girl, you’ll be the jelly man
. After everyone scurried away it was just Leroy on the stage, puffing his cigarette while Stella whooped. The barker rolled his eyes. “It’s that girl again. Your number one fan.”

Leroy squinted and tilted his heavy glasses before he said, “Let’s have a look.” Then he made the barker push him down the ramp, so that he was there with the sisters on the wharf, peering up at them through his thick lenses. He looked at Stella, then Ginny, then back to Stella again.

“That’s what I call groceries,” he said.

Up close, Ginny could see that his shirt was cheap and crudely stitched. When Stella asked if he wanted something to drink, he scratched his shoulder against his chin, which had a few black hairs too sparse to qualify as a beard.

“I s’pose I could do with a Coke,” he said.

Ginny was dispatched to get it from the concession stand at the other end of the wharf. And while she waited in line, the evening dimmed — by the time she was headed back toward Stella with the cup in her hand, the bay was more black than silver where it stretched across the opening between stalls opposite the Old West’s stage. Farther north, on the other side of the bay, sat the pulp mill lit up like a steamship, its stacks churning out the vapors that reduced everyone who ventured down to the waterfront in those days to tears.

She could not find Stella at first — she was not where Ginny’d left her — though eventually she spotted the wheelchair tucked behind the skee-ball booths and a shooting gallery. Stella was sitting slantwise on Leroy’s lap, her white shirt hanging on the back of the wheelchair, where it fluttered like a flag. Ginny knew that her sister was the one who’d done the unbuttoning, the Salmon Boy’s fingers sealed inside his fins.

“Whoa. Double trouble,” he said when Ginny approached. But Stella was only annoyed.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

“OH, THAT WAS YEARS AGO,” Stella says, waving her hand across her face, again the gnats. She has her bare feet on the dashboard; she’s using the earstick of her sunglasses to dig mud from between her toes. The reason for the mud is that at around ten o’clock Stella had grown annoyed at the way her heels kept getting stuck in the cracks between the planks. And she’d flung her shoes off the wharf, hollering after them, “To hell with you!”

That’s all it was: a woman standing with one leg crossed behind the other to peel the shoe off of her heel. Then other leg/other shoe. Then they both get fired into the drink.

That’s all it was, a woman taking off her shoes and flinging them into the sea, and yet seeing this somehow made Ginny forget (for a minute) all her sister’s petty offenses throughout the years — after all, wasn’t Stella right, weren’t her transgressions petty? So that what remained was everything about the fair that did not change: the cotton candy like cheap pink wigs and the smell of frying onions, the boys with giant stuffed animals on their shoulders that they’d won for their beloveds, though the conquest had cost them a hundred bucks.