Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (25 page)

“No, it’s not time yet,” my sister says. Her words ring in the nearly empty shop, causing the rest of the Doobies to freeze like a Greek chorus.

“Okay, fine,” my mother grumbles. “Make me do all the work.” When she starts whisking the cloths off the tables, Frederick stands up to help. He sweeps the ketchup — and the salt-and-pepper shakers, the little rack that holds the Sweet’N Low — onto the booth’s seat, then grabs one side of the tablecloth whose other side my mother’s already clutching.

“Thank you, I’ve got it,” she says.

“Let me help you, please.”

But she insists, “I’m perfectly capable,” and to prove it she gives a yank to the cloth, which separates with a chirruping sound. This puts Frederick off balance — he stumbles backward with half the tablecloth in his hands, as mortified as if he’d been caught holding a pair of women’s panties. He’s off balance enough that he falls into the booth, his feet sticking out, his hat flopping into the abyss under the table.

And it’s the hairline that gives him away when he sits up: a peninsula of red hair growing down the middle of his scalp. I know that I know him, only I don’t know from where, until finally the voice of Florence Pratt stabs at the air like the fork that once went through her lip:

“Oh, dear, it’s him.”

“Him who?” the Doobies scream.

“From the paper,” she says, raising a finger of one hand while her other hand sets down her porcelain cup. “I very distinctly remember him. In the photo, that forelock was combed to the left—”

“For god’s sake, get to it,” my mother snaps.

Here Florence withers. After lowering her pointer finger, she brings her napkin to her lips.

“Good lord,” she stage-whispers into the cloth. “He’s the pervert who’s been sent down here to live.”

IMAGINE WHAT it must be like to walk his walk, how the past must ride him like a half-ton jockey who will not be shaken loose. Every town he comes to will run another sidebar in the paper, announcing that another pervert has been set free in our midst. And he’ll carry that rider everywhere — to the grocery store, the library. The mailman will see him and think: Pervert. The bus driver: Pervert. The police will give flyers to all the people on his street, and they’ll squawk the word like chickens:
pervert pervert pervert.

The Doobies too came from the back of the room like chickens, as if some corn had been scattered at Frederick’s feet. They squawked him toward the exit, though what they said was only,
We think it’s time for you to leave
. Even when they’re dealing with a deviant, the Doobies adhere to their
Masterpiece Theatre
manners.

So you kind of have to hand it to Florence for at least having the courage to come right out and say it. The rest of us would have left him to fester around the P-word like a piece of fruit with a rotten pit. In hindsight I guess this was why he looked kind of shriveled, and also it explained why he’d want my sister for a friend. Someone who wouldn’t know the word, someone who didn’t read the paper, someone who’d think he looked like a million bucks.

His picture had appeared in the local section, along with the usual chunk of text. Just one and a half vertical inches, enough for us to get the gist: that little boys have to this point been Frederick’s weakness. So am I right in thinking that he only wanted my sister to be his friend?

Well, there are billions of people in the world. Let him get another friend.

His mug shot shows him unshaven, his lower lids drooping, his lower lip puffed. This is the hatless version of him that Louisa thumps the next week when I stop into the shop: one of the Doobies must have rooted it out of her recycling heap so we could all cluck over it.

“He tried to trick me,” Louisa says as she thumps him with her finger. I can tell that Mum’s been drilling her all week, like a prisoner in one of Mao Tse-tung’s reeducation camps.

“So long as you were only playing Hangman, you weren’t being tricked.” I don’t know why I’m defending this guy. Even Louisa’s impatient with me for being so thick: “I’m
talking
about the way that he
pretended
that he
liked
me.” Love — that’s what she’s getting at.

At least love lite.

“Well, maybe he did,” I say. “Like you, I mean.”

“But he was bad!” she says — and then I hear my mother’s skirts come swishing up behind me.

“Your sister can tell you all about the joys of having criminals for boyfriends,” says Mum. “Then she’ll show you a copy of her credit report.”

With a sigh that’s a braid of fatigue and scorn, my mother hands over another folded scrap.
It’s ski-time, not tea-time. There’s parts of me just itching for you to rub them with some baby oil
.

“Make no mistake, I think Leonard’s a good boy,” she says. But she thinks I could do better.

This is when I dare my mother to help herself to a good look: the blue bags under my eyes, my hair falling out from so many bad dye jobs that I look like someone in the early stages of chemotherapy. Plus on my arm there’s this pretty rough-looking tattoo that was the handiwork of one of my hoodlum ex-boyfriends: score one for Mum. True, I could get it removed, but I figure wearing my sleeves rolled down the rest of my life is cheaper. Luckily, the snake’s head on my hand is not too ragged, and not so much of an embarrassment now that even the schoolteachers have greetings in an Asian language written above their ass cheeks, revealed whenever they bend down.

My mother smoothes her skirts and looks away. “There’s no law saying that you couldn’t get yourself fixed up.”

Louisa chimes in with, “Who’s Leonard?”

WINO WEATHER AGAIN, and we get down to the marina just as
The Elsie
’s pushing off, and the Doctor floors it the ten miles until we’re behind Skoquamish Island in a dead patch of water. I’ve brought two big cans of Australian beer, one of which the Doctor chugs while I catch him up on Frederick. The other one I’m splitting with Louisa, who demands that I say, “Excuse me,” when I burp.

For his part, the Doctor is waxing tender toward his fellow man. “Suppose the guy was honestly trying to make a clean break with his past? He might have chosen the Donut Den as his best chance for a little forgiveness and love, but you hens had to get in there and muck up his redemption.”

“I’m not a hen,” Louisa protests. “And I never loved that boy.”

“I’m not talking about that kind of love.”

“I didn’t love him with any kind. That boy was bad.”

Then I ask what the hell the Doctor knows about love, and he tells me I’d be surprised what I could learn from a donut shop: “People rising at dawn, delivering their albas, and then what they want is a jelly ball. And they’ll walk away with this strange prickly feeling on their skin, wondering: Why is today so different from every other day?”

The hippie state college: that’s where he learned a word like
alba
, the song of lovers parting at dawn. You can also blame the college for changing Leonard Katzenberg into Doctor Doodle, and I’d say the odds are against his ever changing back.

“And you know what?” he continues. “That strange feeling is just the powdered sugar on their faces. The whole day, it’s only donuts. They think it’s love, and what’s the difference? Donuts, love, that’s the sweetness they taste on their lips.”

So much for love, from the mouth of Doctor Doodle. I know someday he’ll get sick of living on a boat, and the next woman who comes along with a house of her own, that’ll be the one he loves. She’ll be eighty-five and wear glasses with a lazy eye patch, but to him she’ll be the most beautiful woman in the world, and all because her mortgage is paid off.

But it’s hard to see how anyone could get sick of boats on a day like this. Sleep apnea aside, one thing you can put in the plus column of being a fat guy is that you don’t need a wetsuit to swim in the Sound. Doctor D has got his butt stuffed into a pair of pink Hawaiian shorts, and, out of nowhere, he does a cannonball off
The Elsie
’s deck. The splash is enormous. His crocheted hat bobs in the waves like a bouquet of flowers.

“Hey, Pale Ramon, throw me the skis,” and he also wants the tow rope and for me to take the driver’s seat. Then he’s squatting there in the water with his ski tips up, preparing for whatever happens next.

What happens next is poetry: William Carlos Williams, a man born with the same name twice, another verse from his days at the hippie college. I know that this poem’s not for me but is his recitation to the whole wide universe:
The pure products of America go crazy!

No, my poem comes a second later, when I slam the throttle and he rises dripping from the Sound, the fur on his body lathered up with drops. Then Louisa lets out a scream of joy that rises above the engine noise, as the Doctor yells for me to give it everything I’ve got.

These stories first appeared, in variant forms, in the following publications:

American Voice, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, New England Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, River City, River Styx, Salt Hill Journal, Sycamore Review
, and
Pushcart Prize XXIII: Best of the Small Presses
.

Lucia Perillo’s fifth book of poems,
Inseminating the Elephant,
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Washington State Book Award and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. She has also written a book of essays,
I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing,
published by Trinity University Press. Her stories have appeared in literary magazines and have been reprinted in the
Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
anthology. A new book of poems,
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.