Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (24 page)

With the wind died down, I could smell that he must have taken at least one bong-hit in the cabin, the water so still that when we spit the seeds overboard I heard the tiny sizzle of them dropping:
pli-pli-plip
. The jar went round, the shoreline began to tilt, and Doctor Doodle started calling my sister
Ramon Fernandez
.

“That’s not my name.”

“It’s your new name — I just gave it to you.” Then he recited from memory: “
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, why, when the singing ended and we turned toward the town
blah blah blah, I can’t remember
the lights of the fishing boats at anchor mastered the night and portioned out the sea
.”

This is what Doctor Do sounds like when he’s stoned and flapping off. He went to the hippie state college that was built in the seventies in the woods outside of town: no grades, and everyone gets to make up his or her own course of study. With Doctor D, it was a combination of poetry and plant genetics. After all these years, he often gets the two of them mixed up.

“You’re talking like a crazy man,” Louisa said.

“No, I’m talking like a businessman. Wallace Stevens, to be exact.”

Unlike most of us, Louisa has learned how to cover her confusions. “You don’t look like a businessman” was all she said.

The doctor spit some seeds out with a
ffft
.

“That’s just your rage for order, pale Ramon. Now everybody shut up for a minute and listen to the sea.”

YOU CAN IMAGINE how disconcerting it is when he’s there in the kitchen with me and the Doobies, though usually he keeps out of their way by burying himself in his machines, whistling “Rule, Britannia!” as he inserts a wrench into the donut maker’s guts. But sometimes behind my mother’s back he’ll start making googly eyes at me, stroking his beard and rubbing the gold ring that he wears in one ear like Mr. Clean.

And what with these distractions, you can understand why I do not notice right away the man who’s sitting with my sister in a booth. It’s after four, and I can’t tell if he’s a hard-core bramble inhabitant — he could have just lucked out in the haberdashery department at the Goodwill store. He’s wearing a brown sport coat and a brown hat with a green plaid band. It’s hard to reconcile the hat with the man, whose pink face is a little too squirelly for a word like
dapper
. And his head looks sort of deflated and slack, as if a little air has been let out of him.

When I first spot him, I’m in back in the kitchen, helping my mother with an emergency batch of chocolate fudge. At last she glances up, then out where I’m looking through the pass-through slot.

“Don’t even think it,” she warns.

“Think what?”

“That the two of them look in any way cute.”

My sister is following her usual inclination to put four sugar packets in her tea, and when the man dips his spoon into her cup to taste he makes a face that makes Louisa laugh.

Mum wipes her hands on a dish towel before going out to issue some directive that’ll take my sister from the booth, in this case a task involving ketchup — I can see my mother demonstrating how to wipe the bottle rims. But as soon as she’s back in the kitchen, my mother’s plot is foiled: the man gets up and helps Louisa with the ketchup, ha! In five minutes, they’re both seated again.

I say, “He looks like Mr. Peepers.”

“Those are the ones I’m afraid of.”

“I don’t think he’s worth the worry, Mum. No self-respecting psychopath would wear a hat like that.”

Then she gives me a look that’s like the knife she sticks in the fudge to see if it’s hardened up.

“Those are the ones who think they might be happy with someone like your sister.” That said, she tells Louisa it’s time to load up, even though by the clock there are still officially twenty minutes left to Stinky Tea.

THAT NIGHT on
The Elsie
and on subsequent nights since, I have climbed the mountain that is Doctor Doodle, his skin shining wherever it’s not covered in the corkscrew curls of his black fur. His great bulk fills
The Elsie
’s tiny foredeck, so, positionwise, it usually comes down to this: me on top with nipples stiff from the rank wind off the sewage plant. It’s not a pretty picture, but for the inlet we’re floating in, and it sure ain’t love, I will admit. Something more instinctive and tribal. Something you do because you can.

“While you figure it out, I’ll just be grateful,” he says. “
Om mani padme hum
. These days I’ll take what I can get.”

But things are never as simple as guys like Doctor Doodle make them out to be — like when, after these exertions, mainly his gyrating up and down like a marine mammal trying to walk on dry land, Doctor Doodle extracts himself from me. He climbs into the cabin and comes back with something resembling a plastic tackle box.

“Sleep apnea,” he explains.

The mask has a breather bag and flex hose running from the mouthpiece. In it, he is a cross between a robot and a pachyderm. From underneath, his voice is Elmer Fudd’s broadcast from space: “If I dowen’t do dish I fawl ashweep awl day.”

Then he plugs the extension cord into one of the power poles on the dock, and the box begins to make a rhythmic
whush-whoosh
as the air moves in and out. Somehow he’s able to balance it on the trembling mesa of his belly. And that’s how Doctor Doodle sleeps — spread-eagled on
The Elsie
, his bicep a small ham that fills the hollow of my neck.

WHEN THE MAN with the feather in his brown hat returns, I tell my mother, “Don’t worry, it’s only Hangman.” He’s sitting with my sister again, business so slow on this fine day that my mother can’t even scold Louisa for shirking. “Wino weather” is what Doctor D calls it, weather into which he himself has taken off, leaving a folded scrap that reads,
Grab some cocoa butter and meet me at the Elsie
. From the way my mother hands it over I can tell she’s read the note, but is too busy pacing — and every few seconds craning her head toward the pass-through slot — to worry about what’s going on with me and Doctor D.

I tell her a little Hangman’s never gotten anyone knocked up.

“That’s not funny,” she says.

They’re drawing the Hangman on a paper place mat Louisa’s retrieved from the kitchen, one of the pretensions of High Tea being that the only paper products that can be on view are the doilies on the plates; everything else must be replaced by the Doobies’ flowered chintz. Sometimes it touches me to see the melting pot in action via the microcosm of Stinky Tea, the men from the shelter passing the butter patties to the ladies from the fancy condos down the block, while the Doobies glide in white pinafores across the grimy linoleum.

When she came back for the place mat, Louisa also slapped some marmalade on a scone, moving quickly so as not to give my mother a chance to stop her. Afterward, my mother mused tartly, “Is Frederick paying for that, I wonder?”

From Louisa, Mum learned that he goes by the name Frederick.

“Isn’t that odd? Not Fred? Not Rick?” she asks.

“You’re being paranoid.”

“What about the way he never takes off his hat?”

“Maybe he’s cold.”

She bristles. “I’ve had a hundred discussions with Leonard about the heat. The thermostat’s set at seventy.”

“Maybe he’s bald. Maybe he’s afraid she couldn’t love a hairless man.”

“Oh, please.”

“What?”

“The day your sister moves in with you we’ll start having these conversations. Until then, I want you to get out there and intervene.”

But instead of doing my mother’s dirty work, I stop for a quality moment with Florence Pratt, one of the pastel-haired ladies who come in every week, her skin as fragile as a baby bird’s.

“Ooch,” I say, parking myself in her booth by the window. “That sun is murder.”

The way the years have loosened her tongue has made it hard for Florence to find a lunch date — she doesn’t want to share air-time with anyone. Now she starts telling me about how being inside on a day like this always reminds her of the London Blitz: “We were always inside, blinds drawn, the plaster raining on our heads. You kids have no idea what it’s like to be trapped in your own home in a city under siege.” But my attention is two booths away where the man in the hat is pantomiming a word. Which is, apparently,
chicken
.

“. . my father insisted that meals go on as always. He was not about to let the Germans interrupt his dinner.” Pointing to a scar on her lip, Florence says, “This is where I once stabbed myself with a fork.”

The man in the hat flaps his elbows.

“Once there was a strike across the street that blew two of our windows out, and my father just sat there, picking glass from his cup. He waited until the rest of us had gotten up from underneath the table, so we’d be sure to see him swallowing the last drop of his tea.”

While she’s saying this, I try to ESP Louisa about the chicken, but instead of
C
she goes for
S
. And that does it, she’s hanged, and while the man in the hat draws the noose, my sister dies in a fit of laughter.

YOU CAN PICK your word for what he is: a weirdo, a wino, a loser, a tard. No one knows for sure what label to slap on him, since the Doobies say as little as they can get away with saying to the unwashed men who stumble in. Oh, yeah, you can talk about the melting pot in action, just like Doctor Doodle can extol the virtues of the bottomless cup, but let’s face it: open your heart to those who sleep in the hobo weeds and all it’ll get you nine times out of ten is a story that begins with the guy’s brain being controlled from outer space and ends with your being hit up for your spare change.

So when on the third week Louisa’s suitor comes back, I can understand why Mum announces she’s had enough. She’s got her sandwiches arranged on a serving platter with a silver stalk that rises from the middle, and she heads out of the kitchen swinging it like a priest swinging incense, something to purify the space when she orders my sister to start cleaning up.