Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (8 page)

Then suddenly Jill stops talking, her fingers buried in the dog’s deep fur. I can hear the baby, my Martian, making the noises that are making me leak. To him I am just a bag of milk, I know this. A giant milk bag, with a pink-brown bull’s-eye at its center.

So how does she fit in? I ask, wanting to get back to the girl though it’s too late — I know she’s gone. My question will only cause Jill to uncross her legs and smooth her wool slacks before taking up the leash.

I just think of her often is all, she says. You were the one who asked.

This happened back in the days when the girl was working as a flagger, which paid ten dollars an hour back when ten dollars an hour was a lot of money, though perhaps the job was damaging what we would now call the girl’s “self-esteem”—she’d just graduated from college, she’d not expected that she’d have to stoop to flagging. Which meant standing for hours with a sign in your hand, one side saying
STOP
and the other
SLOW
, the same two speeds she saw her life operating in. She wasn’t even allowed to make the decision about when to show the
STOP
and when to show the
SLOW
; the boss, who mostly stood at the edge of whatever hole they were making, leaning on a shovel, decided that.

It was the kind of job the girl couldn’t function in unless she was wasted; she tried a few times and by the end of the day the cartilage inside her knees developed a serrated edge and her arms filled with ball bearings that rattled down against her lungs whenever she lifted the sign above her head. By three o’clock she’d be pounding on the door of the Port-O-Let until whichever of the guys was in there let her in and toked her up. Then suddenly the texture of everything became more vivid; an oily puddle could occupy the better part of an afternoon. And she was proud of the fact that she never killed anyone, though perhaps this was only a matter of luck. Luck and the fact that the girl was willing — whenever she sent people down the road
SLOW
when the sign should have said
STOP
—to throw herself onto the trunks of cars, sounding a
thunk
loud enough to make them halt.

This happened a couple of times, the driver glancing back in terror to discover the flagger girl splayed across his rear windshield. This was how she met the man she dated briefly that summer, who had a convertible in whose tiny jump seat she ended up, screaming, “Look out!” because there was a mail truck approaching the other way.

“Don’t worry, I see it,” he said. After swerving around the traffic cones while the truck went past, he continued down the street.

“Are you always this hysterical?” he asked, when she finally managed to sit up. She explained to him how she had simply made an error for which she was taking the responsibility by rectifying it herself. Not hysteria but self-reliance. As in Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“We’ll go for coffee,” he said; then, “No wait a minute, you don’t want coffee. What you want is a drink.” Yes. The man was nice-enough-looking. He had one of those big mustaches like the good cop in a TV show. So the girl stashed her hard hat and orange vest in the trunk of his MG while they went for a drink in one of the seedy Chinese restaurants downtown, which were just opening for lunch. She wasn’t too worried about leaving the job site — it was a state job and the infraction process was so complex that basically she would have to commit a felony to get the boss to work up sufficient energy to fire her.

And now, after all these years, the girl can’t remember much of the dialogue that passed between them. Except that at one point she asked what he did: just filler, a substitute for an actual thought. But he used what she said as a springboard for his own interrogation: “Why is everyone so obsessed with ‘do’? Why is it assumed we all need to ‘do’ something? What exactly do you mean by ‘do’ anyway?”

She said, “Just forget it.”

Then he teased one of her legs off the stalk of the barstool and used it as a lever to spin her around. “Let’s just say I’m a househusband,” he said. “Without the wife. Without the house.” And while she found this slyly sexy, even in the dim of the bar she could tell that the man had used a blow-dryer to style his pepper-colored hair. And in those days blow-drying was a quality she distrusted in men.

But nothing happened: the man simply paid for their drinks and then drove her back to the job site, where the boss grumbled about her explanation — that she’d gone to the emergency room to be checked out after the impact — but did not contest it. “You gotta be the worst flagger girl ever,” he said.

A few days later, the man drove by again around quitting time and took her to dinner at a chic French place. They went dutch, which the girl made a big stink about, though privately she resented his not lobbying harder for the bill. But it must not have been a sufficient degree of resentment to keep her from inviting him home, which in those days was what you did after a date, which you did not call a date. The sex you called “fucking,” which was supposed to prove you were a woman who had torn the veils from her eyes. The girl called herself a woman, although the word felt like a thistle in her mouth.

As for the man, he was old enough to be one, with a thicker body than those few college boys whom she’d seen in the buff. And the sex was thicker too when it parked itself atop her like some not-quite-solid mass. She assumed this was one of natural consequences of aging, that the whitewater of sex would slow to a dribble, giving one time to get the adult work of life accomplished — like making grocery lists or calculating the number of days to the next paycheck — while the act itself took place. And when it was done he fell asleep, which the girl counted as an improvement over the college boys too, who afterward would crank up the album
Aqualung
and drop a couple more hits of acid and then want her to come outside with them to toss around the moon-glo Frisbee.

But later, when the darkness was rolling itself back up like a rug, she woke to find the man on top of her again. It was actually not the weight of him that woke her, for he was trying, she could tell, not to disrupt her sleep, but the fact that the room itself was shaking. All she had for a bed was a mattress under which she could feel the floorboards flex. When the square of frosted glass dropped from the fixture on the ceiling, the man flattened himself on top of her.

“Earthquake,” he muttered.

“What are you doing?”

“I was just trying to keep you from being cut.”

“No,” she said, when the trembling stopped. “I meant before that.”

“What? I didn’t want to wake you up.”

He got up to sweep then, a gesture that she knew was supposed to make her grateful while at the same time giving him an excuse not to have to meet her eyes. And if he
had
asked, he queried as the pile of glass clinked along the floor, wouldn’t she have gone along for one more round? Probably, she admitted, but he didn’t know that for a fact. In essence, he had raped her.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I certainly did not. That was a hundred percent consensual”

“How do you know that?”

He said that it could be inferred from her behavior earlier in the evening. He assumed she’d be willing, and what was the point in her losing sleep over something he could take care of on his own?

Well, fair question, she thought, because what did she know? The girl was not pretty, and she assumed that if she were she’d have more data when it came to men. She was merely young, and when you are young you do not realize the power your youth has, how it trumps everything, even money and smarts and looks. Sometimes (now) she looks at the one snapshot she has of herself from those weeks: there she is, a waif in a filmy Indian peasant shirt that you can see her nipples through. No wonder she couldn’t get any kind of job but flagging. In those days, she went to job interviews like that.

After the earthquake, she was uncertain how she should feel about him. The man was exceedingly cordial, he did not again mount her in her sleep, and there were no aftershocks, the fault held in its new place. Being from L.A., he was not alarmed the way she was, stockpiling a dozen gallons of water in plastic jugs. If it ever happened again, he said she was supposed to dive under a table. “Yeah, right,” she said. “If it happens again I’m running.” But he swore that she should trust him on this: go for the table.

Even though she came to understand that his ego thrived on his remaining a mystery, little by little, his story couldn’t help but leak. And when it did, she felt a few pangs of disappointment pass through her not-so-ample chest, because the story was more mundane than she had hoped. Having to do with windmills. Having to do with his engineering degree and his MBA. Turned out he was trying to start his own company, working on a business plan for putting windmills in the mountain passes. Meanwhile he was living with his baby sister, helping take care of her kids. And this part of his story appeared to be true, at least she saw them. A little boy and girl. They called him Uncle Stan.

On the first weekend they spent together — don’t worry, there are only two weekends in this story, it’ll be over with soon — he came by with both kids crammed into the jump seat, and they all went roller-skating around the lake. It made the girl happy to mother the children, and the man, she could tell, also took pleasure in her ministrations to them. But as they looped the lake, sometimes when the children weren’t looking he reached out and caressed her buttocks. Sometimes he reached farther in, past her buttocks, in between her legs.

When they dropped the kids off at the sister’s house, the sister was friendly enough but the girl didn’t know what to make of the way the sister held her thin smile just a bit too long in place. Maybe it was pity for her, the girl who was sleeping with her brother without even realizing that he was a ghost. She could tell it was a running joke when the sister called after the kids as they tromped into the house, “Did you take good care of your uncle Stan?”

Then the second weekend they took the ferry to Canada and headed west along Vancouver Island’s tip, the sun making the tongues of surf look silver where they lapped on the shore. He drove while the girl rolled from his stash of good Humboldt County weed, the MG’s top down, the girl holding the joint up to his lips. Where the road dipped close to beach, they stopped and clambered down the rocks. There the girl squatted behind a clump of grass to put on her two-piece bathing suit (this is what astounds her now, this idea of her in a bikini) and went running down the sand while the man watched her getting smaller as she receded. That’s how she pictured herself, in terms of how she looked to him, and on her return she made a point of arcing her legs, her impossibly thin legs that she tried to make look graceful and fluid, hyper-real.

He knew of a bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts of some obscure fishing town, a cabin that sat in the side yard of someone’s house, perched on a bluff that dropped to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There was a hibachi on the deck, and they drove into town for charcoal and red wine and steak, which the man grilled along with thick slabs of potato. Not having steak knives, they had to tear the meat with their teeth, their hands gripping the rind of fat. Afterward, he took her (what a bizarre expression, “took her”) as she bent over a chair while he stood watching in the bureau mirror. And when, under their collective weight, the legs of the chair inched apart and sheared off, they continued while she lay facedown on the pile of spindles in the narrow space afoot the bed.

“Hair of the dog,” he said in the morning, uncorking another bottle. The owner’s practice was to leave breakfast outside the door on a tray, rapping lightly to let the guests know it had been delivered. The girl opened the door with the hem of her T-shirt yanked down in her fist, and the owner, having paused in her retreat to inspect the flower boxes along the drive, made a sour face when she glimpsed the girl’s outstanding disarray.

The weather had changed sometime in the night, and the ocean vista that had been so brilliant was packed now with gray vapors. By the time they finished their eggs, the drizzle had escalated into full-blown rain, so they played backgammon and got drunk on the complimentary sherry, draining the decanter while the day grew fuzzy on their tongues. To make something memorable of it, they played out the marquis and the maiden, the stupendous groupie in the bathtub, Margaret-Trudeau-not-wearing-any-underpants-when-she-meets-Leonid-Brezhnev, etc. He lapped the last of the sherry off her chest while she strained at the sheet he’d torn in strips to bind her, though the straining was largely a charade. In fact her tethers were loose enough that as soon as he finished the girl worked herself free.

“You liked it,” he said. And she thought: Okay, so she liked it, so what? Is it so wrong to be twenty-three years old and to want a man to ravish you in a strange room by the sea? She wanted many things that she was too ashamed to say.

Then he gathered the hair at the base of her neck and pulled tight enough to bare her throat. “And how about if you’d known I’d spent some time in jail, huh? Some women are attracted to men who’ve been hauled in once or twice.”

The girl was thinking of the college boys she’d known when she asked what for. Chaining themselves to things in protest or growing marijuana in the woods.

“Aggravated assault,” he answered, looking away, letting her hair drop.

The girl figured he wouldn’t have started if this were not a moment that he took some relish in arriving at with women, this cathartic moment of his getting the story out. Turned out it was a former girlfriend, with a subplot involving her waving around a kitchen knife. Of course, aggravated assault was just the plea deal he agreed to, and she didn’t need him to explain what aggravated assault turned into when you decoded it backward through the courts. She didn’t say the word, but she did ask why he pled guilty.

“She was the one who’d come over, drunk out of her skull. She was the one who sucked my dick, but how do you prove that?”