Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (11 page)

“Hey,” Stella says, “you know why accountants always want to meet girls they can bring home to their mothers?”

“Why?”

Stella stops digging to look up at Ginny. “Guess.”

“I give up.”

“You always give up.”

“Just tell me.”

Stella wipes the earstick on the dash before popping the sunglasses back on her face. “Maybe I don’t feel like it anymore,” she says sulkily as they idle in the car, waiting for the traffic to clear from the parking lot.

“Here’s the difference between you and me,” Stella says at last. “You’d be embarrassed if you were me, but I’m not. Even when I was a kid, I knew exactly what I was doing. When I’m ninety years old and peeing in a bedpan, that night with Leroy’ll be how you remember me and don’t tell me it won’t. When it comes to you, I’ll be fourteen forever. And how much would other people give for that, unh? To be fourteen forever? If I could bottle that, I’d make a mint.”

Ginny doesn’t answer because she’s still thinking about her sister’s shoes, ebbing in the Sound, bright red. Meanwhile, Stella takes the flask from her expensive leather Coach bag and drains the last swig, the flask being another thing that hasn’t changed, though she keeps better booze inside it these days.

“Anyway,” Stella continues, wiping her lips with the back of her hand, “that’s why you always come back here with me, though I’m bound to drive you nuts. There’s always a chance that I’ll be able to come up with something that’ll top having my tits licked by the Salmon Boy. I don’t think so, but you never know. Maybe someday that old Indian will reappear and you’ll catch me balling him. Or the blind lady!” she quacked.

Then there’s quiet in the car for a while. “So what’s the answer?” Ginny says.

“Answer to what?”

“The girls and the accountants and their mothers.” But Ginny can tell that Stella is already bored by the accountants.

“Hunh,” she grunts. “The answer is: because they still live with them. But see, it’s not funny anymore. That’s what happens when you give up. All the funny goes away.”

By now the traffic has filed out of the parking lot, and when Ginny pulls out, the fair lights in the side-view mirror blur into one smear. They’re headed north along the shore road, though this is not the direction home. Ginny’s just glad to be driving with no husbands, with her sister in the front seat.

“So where are your husbands tonight, Stell?” she asks, and when Stella says, “Who?” in a rednecky voice, Ginny can’t help but laugh.

“They’re history, Gin. I swear sometimes I can’t even remember their names.” Then Stella sticks her head out the window and shouts
Leroy!
to the night.

“Isn’t it strange?” she says when she pulls in her head. “That someone you love can dry up and blow away like an old leaf? Whereas ten minutes with the Salmon Boy is something that I never will forget.”

They’ve come out of the trees, and here the house lights shine on the bay’s far shore, marking the contours of the hills. The far shore is also where the mill sat, lit up like a steamer the girls once claimed someday would carry them away. When they were girls, in the pulp mill days, the air smelled so sour that a whiff of it would bring tears to your face. But it’s been years since the pulp mill burned, and now the air tastes clear and sweet.

Before Yvonne Beauchemin made her final exit, she had a vast spread catered for us her neighbors by the best (and as it happens the only) French restaurant in town. First let me get the end of the story out of the way, for I am no lover of suspense: she did herself in the next day in her Peugeot, in a pigskin coat worn inside out. Her coat pocket contained a note, unsentimental and succinct, to the effect that she wished her ashes to be spread here on the Puget Sound.

No, we were not intimates. I know these things only because I was the one who found her, early morning, while taking my daily constitutional around the labyrinthine drive of our housing development, which is called Infinite Vistas. Let me also explain that to purchase a home at Infinite Vistas one must be at least sixty years of age, and suicide among our ranks is not uncommon. Anticipating this, the builders took care not to provide us with garages. Instead we have carports, under which Yvonne Beauchemin attached a length of dryer duct to her tailpipe. The hose ran on the far side of the car and was not visible from a distance, but when I came closer, I saw that the carbon monoxide had already done its work and turned her skin the color of a red plum.

So there you have it. As I’ve said, it’s a common enough local tragedy. Sooner or later those of us who are not lucky enough to drop neatly dead will contract painful and wasting illnesses that we fear will force us to beg our children to put us out of misery. Do I sound heartless if I say that we’ve trained ourselves not to grieve overmuch?

When she first came to me wanting pills, she knew exactly what to ask for, having read the book. Here at Infinite Vistas we’ve all read the book; we know which pharmaceuticals would shuffle off our mortal coils. You can imagine the burdens of being a medical man in a community like this, how it forces one to duck his head, to do his walking at an hour inhospitable to other souls. In Yvonne Beauchemin’s case, I felt especially culpable for being the GP who’d first sent her shuttling up the pike, from internist to oncologist to surgeon and back. Sometimes I wonder what good I have done, when a person walks in complaining of something so minor as a stomachache and I have to tell him or her as the case may be that no, it’s not simple at all: you’re dying. And it seems as if my words more than anything make it so.

Some months after her last surgery, she was again sitting in my office, a small brocade cap like an African king’s drawn down on her head. She had jeans on, the silly paper cape over her breasts but by this time I could tell Yvonne Beauchemin had no patience for petty embarrassments.

“Henry,” she said in her wet Swiss vowels. “I’m having trouble sleeping. Be a good fellow and write me a scrip for Nembutal.” Because her long-dead husband had also been a doctor of some sort, a psychiatrist I think, she knew how to get her tongue around a word like
scrip
.

“You wouldn’t get caught,” she insisted.

“It’s not a matter of caught.”

“Oh, come on, Henry. . I bet you wouldn’t even have to write the prescription, now, would you? I bet you’ve got enough squirreled away in your own medicine cabinet at home.”

She was right, of course: I did have my own dozen tablets. And not just my dozen but dozens more, enough to kill all of us here at Infinite Vistas. This was the problem: if I gave them to Yvonne Beauchemin there would be no end to the dying neighbors I would see.

“You’re afraid,” she said then, and I agreed that this was so.

After she’d sat and stewed for a while, she said, “Okay, forget I asked. As they say in the spy books: we never had this conversation. There’s plenty of other Nembutal in the world.”

“Breathe,” I said, and she breathed, though there was an ominous rustling to it, as if her lungs were full of dried-up leaves.

INFINITE VISTAS — or IV, as we like to call it, and it’s hard to see how the builders could not have anticipated our obvious jokes — is the kind of gated community that women with money move to after their husbands die, a pretzel arrangement of small overpriced homes laid out with views of the water, where for an immodest monthly fee one will never have to attend to the physical work of living. We moved here when my own wife was ill, because of the roll-in entries and the paddle door handles. “A place where you can be on death’s door and still get it open yourself,” my wife liked to quip. She was, as they say, a trouper.

Yvonne Beauchemin’s house sat on the opposite side of our cul-de-sac, a stand of manicured firs between us. I suspect the place appealed to her only as an easy place to land between her frequent travels, because her own needs were few. When she was well she used to climb up onto the roof of her carport to hose the leaves off, her body as lithe as a girl’s as she stepped from the ladder’s shimmying peak. By day she wore exercise clothes, not the kind for aerobics at the club but rather those sold at the mountaineering shop in town — expensive windbreakers and nylon pants. She was not, however, the kind of woman whom I could see engaged in any sport that would make her sweat. Instead she kept chained under her carport a yellow kayak that in the early mornings I’d sometimes come upon her sliding onto the Peugeot’s roof. And I learned not to offer help, for the first time I did she fended me off.

“This is how I work my upper body,” she said, shooting the boat onto the roof rack with one heave. Then she turned and offered me her biceps. “Feel that, Dr. Henry. Is that the arm of a little old lady?”

Impressed, I exaggerated enough to say that I believed she could out-arm-wrestle my grandson, who was at that time on the high school football team. I told her that he also had a kayak.

“You’ll have to have him come out and paddle with me,” she said as she tightened the straps on her roof rack. When she was through, she turned to me and winked.

“Don’t worry. I only take lovers who’ve reached the age of legal consent.” She hopped in her Peugeot and gave me a wave, but as she was driving away, she rolled down her window to say one more thing:

“Though you know, Dr. Henry, how much it varies from state to state. .”

IN THE INTEREST of family togetherness I once tried to share my grandson’s enthusiasm for the water. But I came to the conclusion that being trapped for hours in a precarious plastic craft in which urination is impossible is no sport for me. Weak bladders and decaying lower backs have caused most of the residents of Infinite Vistas, which has its own boat ramp, to forsake paddling in favor of small-horsepower motors and trailers that can do the lifting in and out.

But being prone to seasickness, I took up bird-watching instead, to feel that I was at least getting my money’s worth out of the premium we pay for being on the water. Something besides work that would take me from the house, though not for too long — I needed just a short spell from the bedside. And beauty too, I must admit that I was impelled by beauty, in a life that at that time surrounded me with all the body’s ugly exudates. The perfection of birds is like that of no other mortal thing — their sheen, their obsessive grooming. You never see them get scraggly until the bitter end, and even then it seems that it is the eclipse of their loveliness that kills them more than any underlying disease.

In winter, when ducks fill up our bay, there is a period when as often as not on my trips to the boat ramp I’ll find at least one hooded merganser. Perhaps this is a bird you do not know, a duck with a more intricately chiseled beak than your standard mallard’s, broad at its base, then tapering to a stalk that ends in a pointed droop. The body is tawny on its sides, the stark white breast bordered by two black stripes, the delicate head concealing a crest that can inflate to show a white polygon outlined in black, one corner set behind the yellow eye and flaring at the nape. What mesmerizes me is how it looks like a mosaic built from three completely different animals: the crest of a lizard, the flanks of a fox, the stripes of a zebra. And maybe it’s just in my estimation that this seabird appears more skittish than most, being never quite sure what it is.

Of course, there were also the strange clown-faced scoters, and the cormorants that unfurl their iridescent blue wings in the sunlight and stay poised that way as if they were fashioned out of metal. At home, I was medicating my wife far beyond what was deemed reasonable five years ago. Pain was the medium in which she floated, no cure for that, but still I was determined to glaze its jagged surface. Sometimes she giggled and grabbed at lights that flashed before her eyes, her eyes that glittered like the glittering eyes of birds that do not speak of these same things that we let go unsaid.

In those difficult months Yvonne Beauchemin tried to be the good neighbor, though her help was often inappropriate. The casseroles she brought to our house were overly spiced and made with leeks or fancy mushrooms, the kind of food my wife could not keep down. She also brought books that encouraged transcendental meditation as a therapeutic tool; when Yvonne left we cackled at her expense, my wife suggesting that her mantra be “Dilaudid.” But in the early mornings, before the nurse came and I left for the office, when the surface of the bay would be glassy and scarved with mist, I’d often catch a glimpse of Yvonne in the round frame of my spotting scope, the blades of her paddle milling through the air like the legs of a complicated water insect. A shameless thought would enter my mind then, when I’d see her tracking sleekly across the water: a woman approximately my wife’s age but vigorous in a way that my wife had never been, a woman who seemed to belong to a stronger and more perfect species. The shameless thought was that each of us had somehow chosen what we were, weak or strong, dependent or not. The foolishness of my theory became apparent to me five years later, when Yvonne Beauchemin became a bald woman just as my wife had been. And soon they’d become more similar still.