Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (18 page)

“I won’t be giving much instruction,” he tells her as he warms up, lunging from side to side with his fists on his hips and his legs spread. “I think you’ll be able to follow along. But if you have any questions, give a shout.”

Then Marco punches a button on his tape deck, from which bursts the trumpet intro of an Andrews Sisters number, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Abruptly the women line up and begin to march in a circle, swinging their arms. As Ruth imitates their movements, she can’t help thinking about the goose step she play-marched with, back when she was just a kid. And how did it happen that one day you’re playing Hitler in the alley and before you know it you’re in the senior citizens’ women’s exercise class, where the instructor’s calling out, “Big steps, ladies! Big steps!”?

PRAIRIE ROSE, her daughter, works for the town’s Miracle Management Response Team, which has been made necessary by the appearance of the Virgin Mary in the dark stains running down the concrete seawall that can be seen from the bridge over the inlet that bisects town. Prairie Rose complains about how working for the MMRT is not all it’s cracked up to be: mostly you just walk around in an orange vest, picking up trash. The viewers of the miracle gather on the bridge and in the marina parking lot, where concessionaires charge five dollars for a ride out to the base of the seawall to touch Her. In the parking lot the viewers leave behind not just rosaries and candles but also a surprising number of wadded hamburger wrappers. “I mean, personally, I think of Mary and I think salad,” Prairie Rose says, “but the evidence suggests that she’s got everyone else hankering for red meat.”

Prairie Rose took the job with hopes of being transferred to the city grounds crew once the apparition fades. She has visions of herself kneeling in bark mulch, changing the flower bed that spells the city’s name from tulips to marigolds as the seasons cycle through. In the interim, she says she’s just biding her time—“until ol’ Mary decides to beam herself back up.”

Of course, Prairie Rose has explanations, some kind of chemical the concrete was treated with, but Ruth is not so ready to write the Virgin off. More than once, she’d found herself standing on the bridge whose stone balustrades were now globbed with candle wax. All around her, people muttered prayers and worried their rosaries, while below them a flotilla of boats vied for position, overloaded with spectators who made the small crafts lurch as arms strained toward the seawall.

Being part of so much humbled humanity, even Ruth felt her heart begin to stretch until the bag of it touched the underside of her skin, and the contact discharged something on the order of a static shock. It was all she could do to keep from crying out.

“Oh, Ma, you’re like all the other nutballs,” Prairie Rose told her. “You believe it because you’ve got nothing else going on in your life.” But Ruth had to fight her impulse to go to the bridge too often, because she worried that the miracle would be rendered meaningless through overexposure, as she concluded it had been for Prairie Rose.

WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was growing up, Ruth had lived with a Mr. Lindquist, a formal man whose formal name Ruth first started using as a joke, before it stuck. He was some years older than she, an Air Force pilot in WWII, and Ruth had thought it odd — and so did not allow herself to think about it too much — that a man of his generation would never have proposed to her a formal marriage. Perhaps this had to do with Prairie Rose, to whom Mr. Lindquist’s advice was usually prefaced with, “Look, now, I know I’m not your father. .”

During all the years of his not-quite-fatherhood, Mr. Lindquist had spent his early mornings tinkering with a light aircraft he was building in the garage, which was what killed him in the end. The search and rescue squad found him dangling from a tree limb, pieces of the fuselage dotting the evergreens like shiny ornaments.

What money he left Ruth was modest (the bulk of it went to his son, a stand-offish man not much younger than she was): enough to support a woman who does not drive and who shops the canned goods stacked in the supermarket’s Wall of Value. Prairie Rose had already left home and embarked on a series of disastrous relationships with men she would in the end denounce as helpless.
Helpless!
In her segues between boyfriends, she often moved back into the walk-in closet off the living room in Ruth’s apartment, where she slept on a futon mattress.

She was a strapping girl who could run for miles along the inlet without breaking a sweat, and she kept her weight bench on the sagging front porch of the old house whose upstairs Ruth occupied. Even when Prairie Rose was not living in the closet, sometimes Ruth would wake in the night to the loud clink of the barbell being set down in its keeper.

So when Prairie Rose said,
Ma, you’re turning into a lump
, Ruth knew this was not just an appraisal of her body but also of her life, for the truth was that ever since Mr. Lindquist died — okay, since even before Mr. Lindquist died — she’d really never (as they say) “done much.” She’d raised a daughter, for a while she’d worked part-time at the library shelving books: wasn’t that enough? But the answer was no, at least not according to Prairie Rose. Just one class, just one hour each day, Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how anyone can be overwhelmed by this.

Ruth tries to explain how first there are the preparations to attend, the purchase of exercise clothes and the daily packing of one’s duffel bag, then the getting dressed, the breakfast, the bus ride, the transfer, the other bus ride, the class and the shower and the reversal of bus rides until finally the getting home and fixing lunch.

After this, she is tired enough to indulge herself in a little nap, then maybe in the afternoon she ventures out to the library or walks down to the inlet, before returning home to fix dinner for herself and (often) Prairie Rose, for whom she buys vegetables and assembles them into a meal whose creation and cleaning up will fill her evening. Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how her mother could be satisfied with so little; Ruth doesn’t understand how a person’s life could accommodate much more.

And then there is not just the exercising itself but also the mandatory socializing that comes with it. When they lie down for leg lifts, the women clump in groups to rehash the events of the twenty-four hours since they last lay down together. They know the routine so well they have no need to look at Marco or hear what he’s saying, nothing to impede the speed and fluency of their chatter. And Ruth panicked when she first realized that signing on with the exercise group obligated her to participate: at first the women were satisfied simply to instruct her in technique, winching up her leg like a dog’s for the exercise that Marco called “The Fire Hydrant.”

But when the women turned onto their backs for pelvic tilts, a headband-wearer in a nearby clump called out, “So what’s your story, hon? You a widow?” Ruth wiggled her head in a manner that she hoped could be read as either yes or no.

“Kids?” the woman persisted, but this time Ruth could not even muster the hint of a shrug as she lay flat on her back.

Then she heard the woman whisper to the pelvic-tilter next to her, “I think she’s deaf.”

Within the hour this rumor had worked its way from clump to clump, and from then on the women no longer tried to speak to her but merely torqued her body into position whenever they were of the opinion that she was not correctly emulating Marco. Ruth didn’t see the need to disabuse anyone about her deafness; she didn’t want even one drop of whatever power was left in her creaky body to be dissipated by jawing. Being deaf streamlined her commerce with the other women to its bare essentials. Being the deaf woman set her free.

And when Ruth walked out of the Y that first day and boarded the bus for home, she was surprised to find Marco behind the wheel, wearing a blue city jacket and driver’s cap in addition to his sweatpants. He seemed to avoid her gaze deliberately, which made her wonder if the code of conduct for exercise instructors was anything like that of therapists: you did not acknowledge your clients outside the session, giving them the courtesy of not giving them away. But later Marco caught her gaze in the rearview mirror, and when they stopped for a traffic light he took his hands from the wheel and began making peculiar gestures. This bewildered Ruth until she realized that Marco was speaking to her in sign language. In response to which she tried to nod inscrutably, as if she understood what was being said.

WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was a child, she took Mr. Lindquist in stride, but as she grew up that stride became a typically teenagerly sulk in pursuit of what Prairie Rose came to refer to as the Truth. Finally, Ruth made the mistake of admitting that, as far as Prairie Rose’s biological father was concerned, there were several possibilities.

“So what you’re telling me is you were easy,” said Prairie Rose,
easy
being a word whose connotations in this regard she’d just picked up in high school. Ruth remembers exactly: they were sitting in Prairie Rose’s bedroom, in the “regular” house they’d occupied when Mr. Lindquist was alive, the room’s pretty lilac walls only a few months away from being repainted black and covered with posters of heavy metal bands.

“Well, I guess that’s how your grandmother looked at it,” Ruth said.

The upside of the “easy” remark was that it gave her an excuse to stalk self-righteously from the room, as if she had been wounded. And acting wounded saved her from having to explain — how when Prairie Rose was a baby Ruth had stared at her for hours and still not been able to reach a conclusive verdict. By the time Prairie Rose grew out of her baby flesh, Ruth could no longer remember much about the faces of the contenders.

“Look at me, Ma,” Prairie Rose would say from time to time over the years. Then she’d hold Ruth’s face between her palms while Ruth stared back while Prairie Rose squeezed, as if the information were in there somewhere and could be extracted like orange juice.

“Honey, I’m drawing a blank, I’m sorry,” was all that Ruth could say. And Prairie Rose would squeeze her face for a moment longer, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make sure it hurt, before she’d finally let her mother go.