Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (5 page)

Take, for example, a vacuum cleaner: maybe you’ve always made do with the carpet sweeper (not even electric) that your mother handed you like a bayonet when you first headed off to college. Life was simple: you pushed the sweeper, its bristles spun around and ate up all the crumbs. And somehow twenty years go by without your ever feeling any need to upgrade the sweeper. . until one day when this guy shows up on your front porch, lugging a vacuum with an iron snout and a plaid cloth bag like a bagpipe. He comes bearing the news that you’ve won a free one-room carpet cleaning, and you’re trying to tell him:
Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots, whoever you are, my life’s just fine the way it is. .

But say he barges in anyway, sticks his foot in the door, as the expression used to go back in the days when people were willing to be more literal. Now the foot in the door is this man’s speech:
Don’t worry, there’s no money up front, no risk
. He’s screaking the vacuum down your hall, trying to hunt himself up some carpet, which is difficult, your house being planked in wide pine boards except for in the living room where there’s some ugly orange mid-depth shag that you have a fondness for lying on when brooding and so have resisted your husband’s rallying against it.

The vacuum guy is short and wide, maybe fifty but a hard-earned fifty, his short-sleeved shirt pee-yellow and fraying, a gray tattoo escaping from each hem. One bicep’s got two bird feet clenching a crumpled flag; on the other some runes that you decode as the bottom half of U.S. NAVY. He reminds you of Popeye, especially when single-handedly he attempts to lift the sofa in the middle of the room, and though it’s only a joke what you say next — about him being careful not to rupture himself — it makes him puff up like a rooster. Apparently you have insulted him, and in retaliation he hoists a chair as if it were a marshmallow. As if to prove you cannot stop him. Rupture himself indeed!

Before you know it, he’s got the cleaning attachment mounted on top of the vacuum’s snout and is laying down the foam in stripes, saying,
Now, what would you pay for this kind of cleaning power?
as the foam dries into dust.
What would this kind of cleaning power be worth to you?
It’s a question he will not let you off the hook of, until finally you guess,
Four hundred dollars?
just to try the number out. It’s the wrong one, though, a number that makes the man squint at you with one eye bugged, as if he wants to punch you. But then he swallows the big gob in his throat and picks up his spiel where he left off, at the part about the Denby Company’s installment plan. Five years at only forty-five dollars a month — that’s what you’d pay for this kind of cleaning power!

You sit on the stairs, watching the man grunt in the wake of his machine while his whole story assembles inside your brain in flashes. How he did not think it would come down to this, humping vacuums on and off of porches, how he thought his pension was in the bag. . until downsizing cut him short. And he is humiliated by his day-in, day-out need to proclaim the virtues of the Denby, or it’s you on the stairs who imagines that he is, or it’s you imagining that you imagine: who can tell when by late afternoon you’re always buzzed? When the man squats to adjust the pile-depth feature, and you see the spot where the sole of his black loafer is worn clean through, you resign yourself to doing what you can to save him. Forty-five dollars a month is not much, after all. And cleaning has always held your interest.

ACTUALLY it’s the crevices that interest you, the creases on the front door of the stove, for example, where the dirt congeals, combines with grease, and changes form. There it becomes durable to the harshest solvent, a matter stronger than mere dirt. You have to stab it with a knife and pry it out like the old mortar in the stone walls that snake their pathways through these woods.

The idea had not appealed to you at first — your husband’s suggestion, then insistent lobbying, that you all move out here to the woods. You all: husband, wife, son. The woods: scrubby forest, logged off long ago. The rationale was that your son had started hooking up with trouble, had committed break-and-entry and been caught. But something about this explanation sounded fishy, sounded like a cover for some other story about what’s going on, a story that has to do with you, though you are not sure what it is.
Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots
or the equivalent of which you were about to say, when your husband tricked you by bringing you here to see this house, with its clean plank floors and their umber grain, the intricacies of which you could spend a lifetime studying. And the front porch that overlooked an old mill creek, which flashed by white and silver where it passed over stones, the same round stones whose fellows have been mortared into the foundation upon which the house itself sits. First thing you did was go down to the creek and yell to see how loud a yelling it had the power to drown out, which had embarrassed your husband (beside him the realtor standing on the porch in heels), but he let you do it because he knew it would win you over, another trick.

So now in the morning your husband drives off, a funnel cloud of dry leaves and gravel. Somehow fate has afforded your marriage just one car. (Your husband chalks it up to money, but this is the kind of simple explanation you distrust.) You console yourself with the notion that
stuck
is another way of saying
off the hook
: all day you can let the ghosts tell you the story of every ding in the floorboards as you wax them down on your hands and knees. Like the ghosts, you would be glad to die here in this nothing town: New Woodland, not even a name but a promise of one, a promise of something that has not happened yet. Your husband likes it, you suspect, because the town has no liquor store, no boys wearing baggy jeans and slantwise ballcaps. Therefore he thinks you and your son are safe here. Ha ha ha.

WHAT YOUR SON has done is break into a house, in the company of another boy, with whom he microwaved the telephone and an expensive collection of Hummel figurines. This would have not been so bad — in fact, the idea interested you: how the telephone looked as it melted into itself, as observed by your son peering through the window into the little lighted booth. But the boys also turned on the water taps and left them running, causing thousands of dollars’ damage, and so instead you tried to do something stern with your face when you asked him why. Of course, your son merely shrugged, your son being a maestro of the shrug — slowly his shoulders traveled toward his ears, his right one elevated slightly higher and his head cocked in that direction while simultaneously his right eyebrow lifted and his left eye squinched. The movement of the arms lags slightly behind that of the shoulders, the hands led by the meat at the base of the thumb as they rise up, flip over, and come to rest palms up, in the posture of Jesus.

Finally your son said, “Skipper wanted me to do it.”

Then the words came to you as if you were dredging up deep silt: “Well, if Skipper wanted you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” This was what your own mother had said. You remember wondering what the bridge had to do with anything.

Your son considered for a moment, still holding the Jesus pose.

“Sure,” he said.

IT DOES NOT MATTER if your place in the world is small: you make the food, you clean the house. You know the only true world is the one you carry inside of you, and what appeals to you about cleaning is the way it gives you hope that this interior world can be perfected — you
can
run a toothpick around the creases in the stove and in this manner attain enlightenment. And it turns out that you are not sorry at all that you bought the Denby (which you hide in the closet, your forty-five-dollar secret). You use its crevice tool between the floorboards, extracting hairs that have lain stretched out for a century, now restored to their natural curl.

The Denby even has a glass-topped reservoir where you can see the ancient crumbs collect, magically, in the shape of the letter
D
(for Denby!). There is an explanation, of course, a metal grid in the shape of the
D
through which the air gets sucked. But to you it is Ouija, inverted: the ghosts bring the letter to you instead of making you discover it. And these are ghosts who have no special fondness for suspense. These are reliable ghosts who’d just as soon have you always end up with the letter
D
.

So there is this to entertain you — seeing the
D
appear again and again. And there is also lying in your upstairs bedroom with a bottle of cough syrup, Doctor Vicks. In the bed pushed against the southern window through which you watch the bigleaf maple leaves light up before they fall, the quilts smell like your mother who died long ago. And there is also putting on your husband’s old coat, tramping rubber-booted along the creek with Doctor Vicks a small red man in your pocket. When the wind picks up and makes the limbs click, you can find a place to stand where the birches will accommodate your arms’ spread, your head thrown back and your roar drowned by the louder roaring of the creek. So how come everybody thinks it’s you and not the creek who’s crazy?

YOUR SON WAS BORN only fifteen years ago, and yet you are starting to forget how it was when he was in your body. You remember that the pain grew intense and then you’d begged to be put out: the world went dark for a while and when you woke they handed you a perfect son. And because you were not aware of his leaving, it was easy to forget that he
had
left — sometimes you dreamed him still inside you until you woke to hear him crying. Or crawling around, creaking the floors. Or as he is now: lying on his bed with the headphones on, his body jerking as if it were being zapped by a thousand volts.

But is he not like any other kid? Okay, he has destroyed a house, but he has also promised not to do it again. Hard to tell at this point whether your husband’s plan has worked — to bring the boy out to the woods to save him. Sometimes your husband will be standing in your son’s bedroom, angrily brandishing a film canister that holds your son’s meager stash of pot. Your husband shakes this rattle like a shaman, and your son resists by refusing to take the headphones off, so that he twitches like a zombie on the bed while your husband yells. It’s a creepy ceremony, so you stay downstairs when it’s going on.