Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (7 page)

It’s too late to run: suddenly you’re struck by a flashlight beam, and you know now that the moving stones are children wrapped in sleeping bags, a dozen who have spent the night here. One girl calls out, “It’s Jason’s mother!” and a low singsong wafts your way:
Whoa-oh, Ja-suh-uhn’s busted. . Jay-suh-uhn’s busted
. The woods ring with the song while you try to think of an appropriate thing to say, but by the time you can dredge up the words your son has already said them:
What are you doing here?

CHERRY TONGUE is the giveaway, that fuzzy, red, iridescent tongue whose scent you camouflage by chewing Life Savers. In any case your husband can tell the scent doesn’t come from gin. So when he asks, “Have you been drinking?” you can answer him indignantly. He is wrong and he knows it, you have not had a real drink for months. And there
is
a difference: Gin sent you down like a rock kicked off a cliff. Gin was the tall man standing up there while you fell too fast too far for there to be any use in crying out.

But Doctor Vicks you could speak to and he
would
talk back; your head might grow yards from your feet but even then the squat red man was there to look you in the face. Or rather your feet might grow yards from your head, for the feeling was not as if you floated but rather as if you waded through the real, the real having thickened into jelly around your legs. Doctor Vicks engulfed you in a warm swirl like the sweat underneath a man’s armpit, which you could curl yourself into. With your husband, this had stopped happening long ago. And sure, you used to love him, but how can you love anyone to whom you are an embarrassment? Next question: are you an embarrassment to your son Jason? Hard to tell. For now, you are two dogs circling each other, using your paws to travel sideways. Knowing that you are not really going anywhere, knowing that you are only headed back to where you were.

THE SUNDOG LADY shows up at the wrong time of year for vacuum sales. Now the rain falls steadily and instead of leaf crumbs what you have is mud against which the Denby is powerless so long as the mud stays in liquid form. So this is what occupies your day: waiting for the mud to dry so that it can be sucked. You haven’t the heart to tell the Sundog lady that not two months ago you bought a Denby. Instead you are thinking about all those years with just the carpet sweeper, and now this glut of vacuum salesmen — salespeople. How strange life’s feast or famine.

Still, the Sundog lady importunes on you to let her give you a demonstration—“then you’ll know what I’m talking about.” Brown-skinned and wearing great padded silver boots, the Sundog lady responds to your invitation across the threshold: “Honey, if you don’t mind, I think I better get these moonboots off my feet.”

Underneath, she’s wearing pantyhose, and you walk her quickly to the carpet. You’ve noticed that she has no vehicle, and she explains that she walked from the crossroads where her husband dropped her off, with the intention of demonstrating — she calls it “demo-ing”—the Sundog along the way. She has the vacuum strapped to a rolling luggage cart with a complicated web of bungee cords that she untangles. Then she shows you how the Sundog has a water reservoir through which the dirt gets sucked, even the mud will be sucked, believe you me. And though you just this morning ran the Denby over the shag carpet, still there’s a brown film wobbling on the surface of the water reservoir after she makes one swipe.

It sort of sickens you: how hard you fight the world, how the world keeps coming in.

The Sundog lady sees you frown and understands — and is grateful — that you are genuinely interested and not just letting her go through the motions. She also knows she’s got a live one on her hook, and so do you: you could buy a vacuum and spare this woman any further trudging along the shoulder while the cars spray rooster-plumes of mud into her face. You have that power. You are that well off, really: if you were a more reliable sort of wife you’d be sure to have a car. And you could build a fire and let the Sundog woman spend the afternoon in her stockinged feet with a mug of tea. No doubt she would find your husband’s furniture odd and sterile: not much there to cushion her meaty bones. Instead the two of you will have to lie on the shag, underneath the old quilts that smell like your dead mother, eating Oreos on salad plates until the light grows dim and she calls her husband to come fetch her.

As she navigates the vacuum around your living room, the woman speaks in the reassuring tones of farther south, those sunny places that you talk to on the phone from Castle Ethel. She’s admitting that you are the first person today to let her in. But she does not seem disheartened: “Ain’t had the chance to get out in the country much,” she says. Because you ask, she offers that it’s pretty, but that she would be afraid to be alone out here at night. “Too much space with nothing here,” she says, “and I’d always be feeling like it was up to me to fill it up.”

Having never smashed any plates before, I was surprised by their substance, how they made the copper skillets sway on their hooks over the range, jeweling the kitchen with those shards of orange light. Then I wadded the curtains in my fists and threw my weight back against them.

Okay, I’m leaving, Jimmy says. You can take your tit out of the wringer.

Then there’s the telltale snarl of his car in retreat, a mufflerlessness out of place in this neighborhood, where the rest of our vehicles were manufactured by the timid Japanese. And then it’s quiet, the kind of quiet that’s hard work to remember, as I lie in the kitchen, still gripping the curtain rod like a ceremonial sword.

Soon Jill comes in the door that he left open — she’s been outside walking her sheltie with all the other neighbors dragging their dogs around until their bowels empty for the night.

You should have shut the blinds, she says. Unless you really did want everyone to show up here tomorrow with a casserole, she adds.

So what was the fight about this time?

You mean what’s the name this time.

Okay, what?

La-riss-a.

She humphs: Now you need to get some holy water and sprinkle it around the house.

Her next bit of advice is that I shouldn’t clean up right away: instead I have to spend time basking in the wreckage I’ve wrought, since in it will appear the phoenix rising from the shards of my old life. But suddenly the phoenix just looks like broken plates, the good set of Spode that belonged to my mother, and when I whack myself with the curtain rod, the dusty curtains are reluctant to part company with the mucus on my chin.

Oh, come on, she says. Name one way that you’re not better off without him.

Money, I say finally.

Then Jill digs through the junk mail on the counter and pulls out the credit card applications. Here, she says. Here’s plenty of money, and you didn’t even have to leave the house.

So we bask for a while, but Jill thinks I’m not trying hard enough, and when she’s listened to about as many of my sobs and slobbers as she can stand, she says, Forget it, and starts sweeping up the kitchen. She has to work around the patch of floor where I’m regressing to my fetal self with the Harvey’s Bristol Cream. She bends the rod in half and shoves the whole thing — curtains and all — into the garbage. Meanwhile I’m watching her feet from eye-level, the hems of her slacks, her cable-textured trouser socks. And I’m also thinking about how, before she married the old man next door who died and left her with an ample trust, she told me she used to go around robbing mini-marts.

Tell that story again, I say.

Which story?

The one where you’re in the car with the boys back East, and the boys have the gun.

She harrumphs a little, says, Why don’t you tell it? Since you’re the one who’s always bringing that old warhorse up.

But I wasn’t there.

Jill lets the contents of the dustpan clatter. I wasn’t there either, she says. My brain was never in the same time zone as the parts of my body below my neck.

Jill’s the only woman my age I know who has a hairstyle that requires curlers — in her sweater and pearls, she could be Lassie’s mom. I offer her the bottle, but she insists on making herself a proper drink, her back turned to me, the glassware clinking against the counter.

So you walk into the gas station. . I say to get her started.

I was never the one who went into the gas station, she corrects. I was always the one who drove.

Okay, I say, you’re driving. You’re in Amish country and it’s midnight. And the boys are in the back seat, bouncing the gun around like a hot potato. They’ve just come running out of the mini-mart with a big stack of money.

You got it. See? You don’t need my help.

Jill stirs her drink with a cocktail fork. An olive floats like a tiny zeppelin between the ice.

That’s it? I ask, thinking there must be more to it than that.

That’s it.

You’re driving?

Hey, I’m driving fast as hell.

She drags a chair over to sit near where I’m curled up on the floor. Jill’s sheltie, whose name is Lois, has all this time been lying in the entryway, on the mat that’s made of woven weeds. She’s been to obedience school, and the way she locks up on command for some reason frightens me. When Jill whistles, the dog instantly unfreezes. Dragging her red leather leash, she trots over to lie against Jill’s shins.

So what about when you drive by one of those Amish guys? I ask. One of those Amish guys riding along in a buggy.

You don’t worry about them, she says as she reaches down to scratch Lois under the collar. You pass them in the oncoming lane and leave them in the dust.

But what about the horses? Weren’t you afraid of scaring the horses and making them bolt in your path?

Jill shrugs. Sometimes you’d look out and straight into the eye of the horse and you could see yourself as you went zooming past. But this would take place in the flash of an instant. And you couldn’t really tell if you were just so high you were imagining it.

The kitchen falls quiet again, except for the sound of the baby upstairs on his planet far away, his cries coming in a language that I do not speak. All I can decipher is that he has one idea and that idea concerns rescue, and he knows how to bypass the brain and shoot straight for the glands, producing two wet spots on the front of my blouse that I don’t want to think about quite yet. I’m still trying to imagine myself in the car, with the boys and the gun and the money and the horses, and this means stepping out of my whole life.

I think you’re going to explode, Jill says, pointing to my shirt.

First tell me how the story ends.

It doesn’t end, she says. You use the gun to get the money. You use the money to get the drugs. You use the drugs to get the boys. You use up the drugs and need more money. So you get out the gun and you do it again. It goes on and on and on.

Lois’s tail thumps on the floor. Her one idea is
happy happy happy.

But it ended, I say. I mean, you’re here.

I just got old is all, and then Jill laughs. She is, after all, almost thirty.

But here’s one thing I remember, she says more brightly. Here’s one thing I never will forget. Once we were driving through this tiny town outside of Chambersburg; the only thing this town’s got going for it is a pool hall sitting directly across from the courthouse. The boys are in back and they’re scared, because tonight for the first time they’ve had to fire the gun. They had to let the clerk know they were playing for real, so they fired a shot over his head and broke one of the plate-glass windows, which hung for a split second before it fell like a sheet of ice sliding off a barn roof. And then we lit out down the state road, which before long led us through this tiny town, where they’ve got the speed limit bumped down to twenty-five, only we’re cruising through at fifty. And all this time I’ve been trying to talk the boys down, when suddenly we pass the pool hall with its door flung open on a rectangle of light. It looks sort of like water, and there’s this girl standing in it, wearing one of those filmy Amish caps, the ribbons untied and dangling around her breasts. She must have ditched the rest of her Amish gear after she left her parents’ house; she’s wearing a green dress that’s short and slinky, her legs bare underneath — made me wonder why on earth she kept the hat. Something about wanting to flaunt the way all the rest of us think that we’re stuck with the cards that we’ve been dealt, but I don’t have time to work it out because I’ve got to concentrate on driving because suddenly there’s cars parked along both sides of the street. There was a guy running his hand up her leg, only I couldn’t see the rest of him; everything but the hand was cut off by the doorframe. And she was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at me, like she’d been standing there all her life, waiting for someone like me to come along.