Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (19 page)

MORE RECENTLY, when Prairie Rose got on a jag and pestered her about the list of candidates, Ruth said there had been a meat cutter named Bill with a bubble of curly hair and a blond boy named Phil who lived with his mother off Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, where Ruth had briefly attended nursing school in 1976. Or maybe she had the Phil and Bill mixed up, she wasn’t sure anymore. During the month in question, she’d also traveled with her girlfriends to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where she had to admit there had been indiscretions.

“What do you mean, indiscretions?”

“Oh, honey, think about what you did when you were twenty.”

Then Prairie Rose was quiet for a moment, as if she really were thinking. “So it’s the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker,” she finally erupted peevishly. “Or maybe it’s Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who just happened to roar into town on their choppers!”

The problem was that Prairie Rose never wanted the kind of information Ruth remembered, particularly the car upholstery, in one case a maroon brocade deeply quilted with silver fixtures — door handle, ashtray, button for the electric window. This was where the boy, whoever he was, suddenly glided his hand under her bra, and in the midst of the squirming she usually did at this juncture, a new thought occurred to her: Why not?

It must have been twelve-string guitars that came into fashion that year and made those jangling sounds on the radio, sounds the boy used as an accompaniment when he performed his trick, like the
fwap-fwap
fluttering of a dozen doves pulled from a hat. Good God, what noises he was able to draw from her, and with only that one simple piece of equipment: his hand. It amazed her, doubly so when she learned about the portability of the trick, how it did not have to be
this
particular hand in
this
particular car, it didn’t even have to be in a car at all but also could be made to happen under the live oaks in New Orleans, the moss spongy underneath her and no music there at all.

Now part of the reason Prairie Rose has to spend her days poking at trash left behind by the miracle’s viewers is that she’s recently entered into a contractual agreement with an outfit called BioFinders, and this costs big money. BioFinders guarantees that they will be able to locate Prairie Rose’s father, no matter what slim pickings she’s giving them to go on. The logo on their stationery reads,
The World Is Small for the Persistent
.

What comes first in the mail is a thick trifold of green xeroxed sheets, to be completed by Ruth in as much detail as she can remember. They want to know every incident she’d been a party to between January and April of 1976 “that either culminated in the discharge of semen
or
vaginal penetration without apparent ejaculative discharge.” Start with January and work forward. Eight pages provided in all, with the instructions to use plain lined paper if additional sheets are needed.

“Must we do this?” Ruth asks, after skimming over the forms.

“Darn tootin’,” is Prairie Rose’s response. “Ma, you have no idea what it’s like to go through life without a father.”

“What was wrong with Mr. Lindquist?”

“Nothing!” Prairie Rose rolls her pupils back into her head and drops her eyelids over them. “This has nothing to do with Mr. Lindquist. This is about my life, Ma. The world doesn’t revolve around your inadequacies.”

Later, Ruth has to fight her way to sleep, against the clank and growl that is Prairie Rose bench-pressing more than her own weight.

WHEN RUTH FOUND herself pregnant, instinct told her to run. She packed her things and headed west, and when she hit the ocean and could go no farther she tossed a coin and made a right-hand turn. So Prairie Rose grew up on Puget Sound, and happily it seemed, and Ruth was happy during her years with Mr. Lindquist, who drove a Chrysler and liked the big bands, not what he called “that caterwauling on the radio.”

Of course, when he died she’d grieved, though her sadness was tempered by her not being sure whether he himself would have been sorry. He was getting old after all, and the Air Force body he had been so proud of was starting to fail, his prostate removed the year before. At least he’d been able to finish the plane before the cancer could make him weak, for Mr. Lindquist — who’d dropped bombs and been a POW — was not afraid of anything except maybe dying before he got the last piece into place.

Some people are like that, she thought: They need to get all the pieces into place. They want the precise orchestration of the big bands, not the jangling.

And it was remembering this that finally caused Ruth to spread out the green sheets and commence writing. Her entries varied from a few sentences to pages of her large script. All told, she remembered clearly just four boys from the months in question, though one’s semen had only landed on the outside of her panties and she was not sure whether this should count.

WHAT MARCO PLAYS at the exercise class is Mr. Lindquist’s music, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”: the women march and skip while Ruth, the deaf woman, includes herself at neither the tail nor the head of the line but settles someplace in the middle, a position she deems least conspicuous. She no longer needs their postural corrections when they lie on the floor for pelvic tilts, nor do her muscles resist with such vehemence that she can think of nothing else. Instead while she exercises she can let her mind wander to Mr. Lindquist, and how she’d loved him in a way that was not jangly at all.

Sometimes after class instead of changing buses at the transfer station she stays on Marco’s bus, his route taking her west to the bridge over the inlet and beyond that, the shopping mall. Sometimes she rides with him all the way to the mall but more often she gets off at the bridge to stand and gaze at Mary, whose features, Ruth realizes one day with dismay, are definitely, slowly fading. The folds of her wimple have all but disappeared and her toothy smile has lost its outer edges, becoming so blurry that it’s hard to tell if her lips are turned up or held level or, indeed, whether the Mother of God is frowning.

But Ruth’s concentration is broken when she also realizes that it’s Prairie Rose on duty behind the seawall, wearing her reflective orange vest, megaphone in hand. She is telling the people jockeying in boats below to sit down and keep their life vests fastened. “Oh, yeah?” yells a man standing up in a Boston Whaler, “and what if we don’t?” Prairie Rose bullhorns back that noncompliance is a maritime offense for which she’s authorized to issue summonses.

“I think I heard that kind of talk before,” hollers the man in the boat. “From a guy by the name of Pontius Pilate!”

THE SUDDEN FADING of the miracle causes battle lines to be drawn among the citizens of town. There are those who believe the Miracle Management Response Team ought to be given the task of erecting a tarp to shade Mary’s face from the sun, a sort of visor for which a frame would have to be built atop the seawall. This proposal is supported mostly by the shopkeepers, whose tills have been fattened by the constant flow of tourists. And then there are those who are sick of the town’s being inundated by cars with I BRAKE FOR RAPTURE bumper stickers. Poison-pen letters start appearing in the local paper; the anti-miracle faction is accused of having a pro-homosexual agenda, the sunshade contingent of crass commercialism sailing under the flag of piety.

One good thing about the fading, at least according to Prairie Rose, is that it’s caused the amount of litter to decline: “I guess they think it’s Mary’s way of telling them the party’s over.” But she herself has grown nervous about what will happen when the apparition disappears. She’s heard a rumor that there are no openings on the grounds crew, that the odds are more likely she’ll be laid off once the Virgin flies the coop. And this worries her, especially since she’s just plonked down eight hundred dollars for a computer so that she didn’t have to head down to the library every time she needed to communicate with the BioFinders.

So far what they’ve done is place personal ads in the newspapers of St. Louis and New Orleans, ads inquiring after anyone who knew one Ruth Horowitz in the mid-seventies, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, five-foot-six, 110-pound nursing student. They’ve also made inquiries via the meat cutters’ union and posted notices on the “Mardi Party” website, a chat group for people who attended the Mardi Gras in years past and want to reminisce. All of which Prairie Rose could have done herself, but BioFinders also guarantees that they will screen the crackpots and forward only those respondents who are Prairie Rose’s IPBFs (“identified potential biological fathers”).

Late at night, Ruth can hear the keys being tapped in the walk-in closet, where Prairie Rose sits on the futon with the computer planted between her legs. The idea of Prairie Rose telling the whole wide world about her mother’s behavior, so long past, makes Ruth feel as though there are worms entering between her own legs and crawling up inside her. Worms that are not even real words or worms, but particles zapping through the air, zapping right in front of her nose as she tries to sleep while all night Prairie Rose’s computer keys go tippy-tippy-tap.

With nights like these, the hour she spends each day skipping through life becomes her raft. Marco yells, “Big steps, ladies, shoot those knees up to the moon!” and they march around in circles, they sashay from side to side, they skip through an obstacle course of hula hoops. One Wednesday the headbanded woman skips so exuberantly that centrifugal force sends her crashing into a wall, which her head strikes with a hollow whomp that echoes off the cinder blocks. In its wake, the woman lies motionless, her mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Marco asks her, “Can you speak?” as the woman struggles to get something out.

“No,” she says weakly.

The women gather around to help their classmate to her feet, Ruth among them and suddenly piping up, insisting that they not move her. And while they wait for the paramedics, Ruth holds traction on the woman’s head, Mr. Lindquist having insisted that she always keep her first-aid card current. It was the duty of women who hitch their carts to older men, he said, just in case they ever needed CPR.

“Or the kiss of life,” he said, poking her.

And now, bracing the woman’s head between her palms, Ruth looks down at the face and is ashamed. . because even after all these weeks she doesn’t know the woman’s name, she simply hasn’t paid attention.
Angela
, the other women chant as they try to call their comrade back into the world, her lips testing and rejecting many of the common prefixes as if she cannot decide which word it would be worth her breath to speak. “Angela,” Ruth repeats with them, holding the woman’s head and stunned by the thought of what this skull in turn might hold, the whole contents of a woman’s life.

“Angela, say something,” she says.