Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (17 page)

But in the narrow focus of her rage, the percentage of cars in the parking lot that are cruisers does not click, as Mum grabs what she thinks is the gun from her trunk and shakes the blanket and the limb comes rolling out. In the meantime my father has stepped into the substation and is now striding her way with three troopers in tow, among whom my mother is suddenly whirling like a ninja, swinging at my father’s head like it was a piñata full of shit, jabbing the limb like a bayonet every time she gets an open shot. She’s shrieking all the Anglo-Saxon that she knows, carrying on like a Pentecostal jabbering in tongues, sunglasses slantwise on her face so that one eye shows Picasso-like above and one below, both of them bugged from the pressure of all the steam inside her head, the cause of which is curiously not my father but the woman who sits in his Lincoln with the windows rolled and all the doors locked — the terrified counterpart to terrified Louisa, who similarly cowers in my mother’s car with her eyes shut and both hands over her ears.

Or at least this is my version, cobbled together from everyone else’s, starting with the troopers’ report. From the back seat of the Hyundai (this was after I called a cab out to the gulag so that, after throwing their bail, I could drive the felons home) my mother was not shy about painting me her own picture of events, the focal point of which being how she’d be damned if she was going to stand by and let her home be snatched from underneath her.

“You’ve always hated that place,” I said.

“Well, I take comfort in surroundings for which I feel a touch of loathing,” she snapped. “That’s the British in me. Why do you think England has so bloody many chip shops?”

For his part, my father weighed in later that evening via the telephone, his version coming down to the bottom line that I could count on his pressing charges. “Your mother’s not exempt from the rule of law,” he said, “just because she’s got a broken heart.” All I’ve got to say to him is that he shouldn’t flatter himself about my mother’s heart.

And maybe it was Louisa’s account that was the most unbiased, Louisa who was plied with quarters and taken downstairs to the vending machines. A lady policeman showed her how the handcuffs worked. “Then I was locked in jail with Mummy,” she said, her terror having given way to exhilaration over her ordeal.

We were back in the kitchen, eating from a Styrofoam container of moo goo gai pan that I found in the glove box, my mother having retreated upstairs. Louisa’s voice takes on a conspiratorial tone when she tells me, “Mummy got locked up for a bad word.”

Which? I ask, but here my sister clams up.

“Come on,” I say. “Was it the
F
?”

A sideways shake from Louisa’s head.

“
S-h?
A-hole?” and now she starts giggling.

“Was it, you know, something British? Did she call the cops wankers?”

Louisa’s dying, fit to burst.

“Dildo, dickhead? Douchebag? Dork?”

“No — it was the
C
!” she squeals, the baddest of the bad words because it is the female one. And this recounting of my mother’s naughtiness has made my sister drunk with remembering her minor part in it. She can hardly contain herself when she reports, “That’s what Mum called the lady.”

“Which lady?”

“The one sitting in his car. The one who Mummy says has ruined everything!”

THAT’S HOW OUR TIME on the gulag came to an end, because property values had gone haywire and we knew he would go after whatever he could get. My mother would end up she knew not where yet with Louisa, and I would get another moldy duplex for myself in town, whose other half would be occupied by a pair of teenage newlyweds, whose common wall would thump whenever he tied one on and sent her reeling against it. Of course, I was only projecting at this point, extrapolating from the data of the past, which I wasn’t supposed to do now that I’d been rehabbed. Roger said that I should see my life as a ball of clay that could be molded into anything.

“But say I left the clay in my purse in the car, and say with the windows rolled up the whole thing got sort of baked and cracked so that when I go to take the clay out of my purse it crumbles?” Somehow we’d wound up back at the clay metaphor for about the thousandth time, and when I mention this scenario all the other narcos go: “Yeah! Yeah! What about when that happens?”

Roger rolls his eyes before letting them wander back to me.

“Well,” he says, “an addict can make up all manner of excuses.”

“You’re saying there’s no such thing as an accident?”

“All I’m saying is that adults take responsibility for their actions.”

He’s tapping his clipboard with his pen like he wants to move on, but I won’t let him. “But Roger,” I say, “think about it. All I’ve got are some dry clay crumbs. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” He’s giving me his thin smile, a signal that he’s about to go into his default mode, which is whimsy.

“Maybe you have to use your imagination,” he says.

“Like how?”

“That’s up to you,” he says without uncurling his lips. “Perhaps you could use the crumbs to make an hourglass.”

OKAY: JUST TRY telling this to someone like my mother — her life is clay, she can be anything, when the clay dries up she’s supposed to put the crumbs inside an hourglass — when in fact her doofus of a public defender has already convinced her that she can be only one thing and that is Crazy, especially if she doesn’t want to pull some serious time in the big house. He also told her that, since Louisa would likely be deemed an unreliable witness, I was the one who ought to carry the flag on her behalf. I guess I should have been flattered, since
reliable
is not a word that’s been applied to me much of late, maybe not since the old days when I was my father’s stable girl. Whenever the question was, “Did you remember to brush out Mister Chester?” I was perfectly consistent, I could always answer yes.

But to my surprise he did not appear; instead it was just me and Louisa and Mum and her lawyer, who wore desert boots and a plaid short-sleeved shirt with one of those lumpy wool ties squared off at the tip. They held the competency hearing in the modular building outside city hall, in a drop-ceilinged room completely lined with mustard-colored indoor-outdoor carpet, which was where I got up and told the judge about how my mother’d taken to leaving food in the glove box, about how she stood there muttering to herself when she first shot the gun, and to make it a stronger scrap for the story I had her babbling a mix of William Blake and Edgar Cayce. Plus I put her in her nightgown when she lies down in the poppies and will not get up. After all, how much difference is there between a nightgown and a raincoat? I mean, is God really keeping that close a tab on the nomenclature himself?

So it was a victory, of sorts, when the judge ruled that my mother would just spend two weeks in the loony bin — at the end of which time he’d leave it to the doctors’ recommendations. “Piece of cake,” I told her. “You’ll get out with more pot holders than you’ll know what to do with.” The psych ward at Saint Jude’s is in a different building from the rehab unit, but sometimes our nurses would stop by the psych ward to borrow supplies for arts and crafts. They were afraid to let the populations mix for fear the narcos would start hitting up the psychos for their meds.

All this I’m explaining in my mother’s bedroom as she packs her pink suitcase from the sixties with the plastic wood-grain trim. She wanted me to advise her about what she should wear to be a crackpot, and I said that was the beauty of being one: at last, you get to wear whatever you want.

Late that afternoon my mother comes downstairs with the suitcase, the shoes she’s selected pinched between the fingers of her free hand. They’re her good heels — she must have decided to go Classy Crackpot — and I can tell that she’s making a performance of her leaving, which is, after all, just a rehearsal for the more permanent leaving that will come later, when my father cuts her loose without a cent. Already he’s told me that after my mother leaves he’ll send a trailer down for Mister Chester, whom he plans to board at a stable near his new house overlooking the Puget Sound.

“I guess it’s time for one last perambulation,” my mother says, after setting both suitcase and shoes beside the door. Through the picture window, I watch her feet slide into her boots on the steps and walk toward the barn, which is in truth little more than a shed, a cockeyed structure whose rotting silvery frame contains just enough room for Mister Chester and the winter’s stockpile of hay. My mother goes in and leaves the doors open, and soon Mister Chester comes walking out; when she comes out after him she’s once again got the Browning in her grip. She must have found it where I had it stashed between the hay bales, and for a minute when she hoists the gun I think she means to kill.
Okay, I will let her have him
, is what I say then to myself, because in nobody’s mind but my own was Mister Chester ever anything other than my father’s horse. As my mother has pointed out, all those years I was gone, living in town, what good was I?
What good was I?

But when the shot cracks out, instead of dropping, Mister Chester fixes my mother with a look that is clearly his horse-language way of telling her that she can go fuck off. When she fires again, Mister Chester picks up his pace only the merest notch as he saunters toward the woods. I realize then that my mother’s got the rifle tipped toward the sky, that she’s not trying to kill him but only drive him off.
Life does not require your participation. Being a curmudgeon is no sin.
Once Mister Chester blurs into the landscape’s sepia-colored edge, she twirls and empties the rest of the bullets into the barn before throwing the gun into the dirt.

“What’s Mum shooting now?” Louisa asks, without too much concern: Louisa’s memory is like a wake that closes up behind her as soon as she moves on.

“Just the barn,” I say to my sister, who doesn’t look up because she’s mesmerized and letting her body sway. She’s watching MTV again, standing so close the jump cuts splash their colors into the white screen of her face.

“Why’s Mummy want to kill the barn?”

The amazing thing is what happens next, when my mother stomps from the barn to the backhoe sitting some thirty yards off, parked among the burn barrels like the skeleton of something that had just been exhumed from the dirt, its yellow spots reduced to freckles, its tires caked with last year’s mud. What’s amazing is the magic she works to get the ignition to turn over, and the way that, after much fiddling with the shift, she somehow manages to bring the machine to life. Suddenly she’s in gear, moving
chink chink chink
toward the barn from the far side of the pasture, her raincoat flaring from the ancient driver’s seat while the bucket scrapes along the ground. It looks as if she’s trying to build enough speed so that when she plows into the barn the whole thing will go down; she’s angling toward one corner where the footings are especially cracked.

By now it’s dusk, and dribbling out of the backhoe’s seat are particles of foam rubber that look like snow as they’re seized and carried by the wind, over and through the crowns of the naked alders. An A-1 sunset has just started to creep from cloud to cloud, and I have to yell above the music for my sister to come get a load of this, as our mother, furious and wild-haired and small, steadies herself behind the wheel.

“Don’t try to make anything burn” is Marco the instructor’s first piece of advice to the class, which the YMCA catalogue had listed as “Skipping Through Life”: somebody’s idea of an upbeat name for the senior citizens’ women’s exercise group. Ruth’s enrollment fee had been a gift from her daughter, who said, “Ma, you’re turning into a lump.” And indeed, Ruth is hard in the running for fattest person in the class, though, her daughter’s opinions aside, she is not all that fat. It’s just that the other women are surprisingly firm for a bunch of. . well, old ladies.

Ruth also guesses that she’s the youngest old lady here, fifty-six, barely squeaking over the wire that was the minimum age for the class. Marco himself looks some years younger, husky but toned, a city bus driver who leads the class during his lunch hour, he explains—“to keep the pizza out of my mouth.” Soon Ruth realizes that these introductory comments are meant for her, the rest of the group having been through this routine on countless noons. Her outsider status is also made clear by her sweatpants, which no one else but Marco is wearing. The rest of the women are dressed in coordinated leotards.