Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (2 page)

Number Eight OD’d on a speedball when the snake was just about complete but for the eye sockets that he hadn’t gotten around to filling, which was about the same time I realized that putting a snake’s head on your hand means that you have chosen an idiosyncratic road to head down in life, unless you plan to wear little white gloves all the time like Mr. Peanut. Though a butterfly or a rose won’t raise anyone’s brow, Bad Snake gives you a hundred demerits in all but a few select kinds of job interviews; where they finally took me in was at the boat shop. Boat people have a tendency to forgive what other people might consider sluttishness. There are few sluts in the boat world, the way there are few sluts at the Handy Rental, or working in Accounts Payable at Karl’s Kustom Kar Kustomizing, maybe because these industries top-heavy with losers are willing to extend women a quid pro quo of retroactive grace.

Of course, the tattoo was what convinced my mother I had finally gone around the bend: ever since, she’s been afraid I have an unsettling influence on Louisa. Her preference would be for the two of us not to be left alone, but she waffles on this because I am Louisa’s cheapest chaperone. When mum wanted to go on a cruise, for instance, she had no choice but to ask me to move into the trailer for two weeks. This makes Louisa happy because she knows we’ll turn the radio up full blast and eat from Styrofoam clamshells of take-out food and launch into a cleaning frenzy just minutes before my mother walks back through the door.

So I’m staying there on a drizzly Sunday, when what Louisa wants to do is see a movie. We commit the ultimate sin by spreading the newspaper out on the white carpet, and after Louisa scrutinizes the movie ads her finger stabs one called
Primal Reflex
, starring Hollywood’s latest flavor-of-the-month in some pretty steamy scenes. At junctures like these my mother’s voice cuts in, and I point out the comedies instead.

Louisa’s mind is made up. “I want to see this girl do the hula-hula,” she says. In the advertisement, Latest Flavor’s got a hibiscus flower pinned behind one ear, her face framed in the crosshairs of a gun.

“It’s not a hula movie,” I explain. “You’re thinking of like Annette Funicello.”

“No. I’m thinking of
her
.” Louisa trots into her room to retrieve a movie magazine that’s got a picture of Flavor wearing a lei and a thong bikini, bodysurfing off the coast of Waikiki.

“Toldja,” Louisa says.

WITH LOUISA, you can never go into the obvious, the
this has nothing to do with anything, oh my dearest darling one
. Louisa’s brain moves like a jackrabbit, and when she’s threatened she uses the jackrabbit’s zigzag to escape. Like after she makes her point, Louisa immediately starts preparing, digging out this folding plastic rainhat Mum gave her last Christmas.
What kind of gift
, I said,
do you call a piece of plastic that you got free from the beauty shop?
 — to which my mother sniped that Louisa wouldn’t know the difference. And it irked me to realize my mother had been right, because the rainhat is one of Louisa’s prized possessions. She wears it proudly as we board the bus downtown, which I suggest in order to make the trip seem like more of an adventure. Or maybe I’m subconsciously stalling so we’ll have to catch the three-fifteen show instead, which features dogs that speak with famous voices.

No luck: we get there right on time, and during the movie I hear Louisa giggle whenever the woman appears naked on-screen. Of course, we don’t get to see the men naked, and for once I’m grateful for Hollywood’s injustices. Afterward Louisa gives the movie two thumbs up and can’t wait to boogie—
I want a happy beer
, she says, the Reef being just a few blocks from the theater.

When I give her all my quarters for the jukebox, my sister punches in a rock-and-roll number called “Jesus Is Just Alright” and comes back to the table knowing all the words, which surprises me because I’ve never heard Louisa say anything about Jesus. Our mother sometimes drags her to the Church of the Parted Waters, a Baptist outfit Mum joined because of its zeal for coffee klatches and potlucks, though often she returns home with her own dishes barely touched.

I think the Baptists are afraid my mother’s hexed: why else would she have given birth to a Down’s kid when she was only in her twenties, the other one don’t even mention — they’ve heard about the snake. I also suspect Mum’s main interest in the church is that she thinks it’ll dignify the ugly rituals of cruising men. She’s sailing to Nassau with the Baptists as we speak, even though I didn’t have the heart to tell her what any woman with two working eyeballs should be able to see: that the Church of the Parted Waters is a magnet for losers. And I mean the capital-
L
Losers — we’re talking bankruptcy and Thorazine. Personally I think she’s got better odds of scoring heroin among them than a husband.

But I should talk. I’m not even going to tell you about Black Clouds Nine through Sixteen, though my not mentioning them doesn’t mean they’re not etched permanently in my brain along with all the ways I behaved shamelessly in their presence. They’re printed inside my skull with such big block letters that when the next one walks into the Reef — and I know he’s the next one, don’t ask how I know — the word rolls up my throat and into my mouth without the slightest calculation.
Seventeen
. Straightaway that culprit gland starts spewing acid in my gut.

A few days ago, I’d shown him the half dozen used boats we had sitting on the lot. I trailed behind so I could make a careful study of his hips, and now, as he’s walking in, I get the full-on view: black T-shirt with a breast pocket, breast pocket with a cigarette pack, cigarette pack a quarter full and crumpled. Right away he recognizes me and sits down to give me an update, something like,
Yesterday I decided on the Bayliner and went over and gave Milty some money down. What I liked about the Bayliner was that it came stocked with this Mercury outboard that you could tear down with both eyes closed and one arm tied behind your back
.

I say,
Let me see if the gasoline smell’s still on your hand
. No, just kidding, I don’t say that — the last thing he wants is a woman who’s off her rocker, despite that urban legend about the secret sexual positions known only to female lunatics.

“You got a good buy,” I say. And something like: “We haven’t had that Bayliner for a week.” The reason I have a hard time tracking what we say is because Louisa’s sitting beside me, singing “Jesus Is Just Alright” with her eyes closed. In a place like the Reef a woman singing won’t turn anybody’s head, at least not until she starts a fistfight, but when Louisa finally opens her eyes and sees Seventeen, her face flushes purple as an eggplant.

“Keep singing,” he says. “You sing good.”

Louisa’s afraid he’s teasing. “Naw. .” she demurs.

But he says, “No really, I like this song. And when it comes on the radio I can never understand the words because the guy mumbles. But you don’t mumble. Shoot, you sing better than he does.”

This must be one of Louisa’s all-time famous moments. She trembles but retains enough composure to keep singing, and after the song’s over Seventeen applauds and volunteers to buy us all another round.

Reading the label on Louisa’s bottle, he whistles. “You got expensive taste, sister.”

It’s a word Louisa grabs on to joyfully. “I’m her big sister,” she announces, elbowing me. “I get to boss her around.”

“I bet you do,” he says. The beer comes; he and I pass the time debating the merits of Mercury versus Evinrude outboards while Louisa beams in and out of the conversation. When he goes to the can, Louisa leans toward me and says, “I think this one will be my boyfriend.”

“Oh, yeah? How can you tell?”

“I think he’s nice to me.”

It’s Mum talking when I hear myself say, “Why, you don’t know the first thing about that guy,” which makes Louisa go silent, tracing out letters in her spilled beer.

Finally she says, “You’re my sister, but you know what?” And she goes on to answer herself without looking at me: “You don’t always know everything.”

THE THREE OF US leave the Reef buzzed and giddy from what has been a very happy hour, Louisa with the dopey rainhat accordioned on her head and almost swooning when Seventeen volunteers to tie the plastic flaps in a bow beneath her chin. We’re walking to Seventeen’s pickup so he can give us a ride home, Louisa hanging on his arm, and though it doesn’t seem physically possible, her happiness escalates by yet another order of magnitude when she sees what’s bounding in the truck bed: some kind of animal resembling a cross between a mountain goat and an old upholstered chair.

“That’s Red,” says Number Seventeen. “I bet he’s glad to see us.”

“He’s white!” Louisa declares. “How come you call him Red?”

“Well, I’m glad someone’s on her toes. But if I tell you the story you’ve got to promise you won’t cry.” As he shoves and scruffs the dog, who’s chained to an old tire plus its rim, he tells us how he paid four hundred dollars for a purebred he was going to use for hunting ducks “. . and I ended up with this thing. Now, does this look anything like a golden retriever to you?”

No! No!
we shout half drunkenly. And again when he starts to drive us home—
No! No!
 — Louisa and I riding in the back with a tarp pulled up to our chins. The truck is just an old rice-burner, and when we all wouldn’t fit in the cab I watched Louisa wrestle with her loyalties: she wanted to pat the dog, she wanted to stick with her sister, she wanted to ride up front with the boy who’s as glamorous to her as any movie star. In the end that made two against one and Louisa got in back with the dog and me.

“Take us to see the boat!” I holler into the open driver’s window. But Seventeen hollers back about how he hasn’t picked it up yet.

Instead he takes us to see where he’s going to keep it berthed, the air misting just enough that we can feel it on our faces as we lie in the truck bed so no one can see. There’s clouds swooshing overhead and firs to our starboard until Steamboat Harbor cuts into them ten miles from town, where the Sound picks up current and breaks into chop, and it’s there that Seventeen pulls up in the gravel parking lot. When he comes crunching around the truck bed, he’s shouldering a six-pack that he’s pulled from behind the seat. “It’s shit beer, ladies,” he says as he climbs in. “But it’s all I got.”

Louisa’s getting wasted, way past the two-beer limit I usually hold her to. But today I say oh, what the hell: she’s happy, the boy is lying underneath the tarp between us, and the dog is nosing the folds of her rainhat — until he discovers skin and starts making big slurps up and down her face.

HERE’S THE LAST THING I learned from my romances: bad boys are lousy lays. Going into it you have to understand they’re not the kind of guys who’ll care whether or not you come. That part of the equation goes right over their head, the whole idea of female orgasm reminding them of high school math class and having to solve for
x
. What they do best is look out for themselves, which means popping a beer or falling asleep or — and perhaps this is the epitome of their postcoital tristesse — turning on the TV and discovering a replay of the Indy 500, cars going round and round and round.