Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (16 page)

Shortly after the arrival of Mister Chester, Mum shamed my father into also buying a more docile creature for my sister, a pony the color of curdled milk, whom she named Mister Twinkie. I own only one photograph of her from the family’s brief Mister Twinkie era: ten years old and cowgirl-hatted, her fists full of the pony’s cotton-boll mane. She looks like she’s found the place she was born to be, her and the pony giving off an aura of yellow light. You would not guess from this picture that Mister Twinkie would turn out to be just bad luck with four legs attached: mention his name now and all that light will drain from Louisa in the form of yolky tears.

What happened was that not too long into his time with us, the pony had a heart attack as it trotted along under Louisa’s weight, and Louisa sank to the ground with three hundred and fifty pounds of dog food underneath her. Picture me as the littler sister watching from the far side of the field as the bigger sister squats bowlegged with the carcass in between her fancy boots. Even from a distance I knew that Mister Twinkie was dead and I knew that she did not, and I knew that my knowing forever changed the space between us. “Get up!” she hollered, and even tried to drag the pony a few feet, until I came across the pasture and explained that Mister Twinkie could not get up, he never would.

After this, it seemed my mother soured on the whole idea of country living. But at least the demise of Mister Twinkie gave the backhoe a chance to prove its worth. And while he was at it, my father dumped several weeks’ garbage into the hole before he scooped the dirt back in.

MAYBE YOU ALREADY KNOW that “desperate situations” are what Saint Jude is supposed to be the patron of, unlike other saints who could at least pull enough rank to get themselves saddled with a legitimate disease. Not Judas Iscariot with whom he is often confused, but Thaddaeus the apostle, brother of James. And what with his being decapitated by the Persians you might also imagine that he is not going to let anyone easily off the hook: after you get released from inpatient treatment, you’re still looking at outpatient therapy for at least six weeks. Which means sitting around for three hours every morning with the other narcos, drinking coffee that tastes like it’s been perked inside the hospital’s incinerator with all the other medical waste.

How outpatient at Saint Jude’s worked was that we went around the room delivering our bulletins from Loserville, the plots of which were all fundamentally the same:
I can’t even make cookies without the whole thing turning into this great big goddamn fucking flop, so how the hell can anyone expect me to
dot dot dot, you can fill in the back end of the sentence with the hobbyhorse of your own ineptitude. The professional staff called it “sharing,” one of the bad words in my book, but if you start quibbling about the nomenclature you can forget about them ever signing off on your paperwork.

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 whatever 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.