Lucia Perillo: Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

“Look, Louisa,” I say, watching Finger’s drool run from his downhill cheek. “You’ve got to start looking out for yourself. There’s a lot of boys out there who are not nice boys.”

Her face darkens. “Like the boys who yell at me at the bus stop. Mummy says they aren’t nice.”

“You know what I call them? Creeps.” And then I ask her, “What did Mum tell you to do about them?”

Louisa answers ambivalently, and I can tell that despite their terrors the bus stop boys still glitter. “Mummy said just ignore them. She said for me to pretend their voices are the wind.” This she demonstrates by blowing our cocktail napkins off the table.

“Goodbye, creeps!” Louisa whooshes.

NOW, LET ME CONFESS I haven’t always proved to be the shrewdest judge of human nature. My romances have left me with a recurring dream in which I’m slashing tires and the tires’ blood is spilling out. In my freshman year of high school I encountered Bad Boy Number One, who had me doing his pre-algebra problems half the night while he worked out the science of breaking-and-entering. Number Two was old enough to drive a car, and this romance (with the car more than the boy per se) left me with a greenstick fracture of my collarbone. Number Six was the one who suckered me into cosigning the loan on his new Mustang — how this story ends you don’t need me to say — and Number Eight was the proud owner of a set-yourself-up-in-the-creative-and-lucrative-world-of-tattooing-with-EZ-monthly-payments kit, which he’d ordered from the back of a comic book.

Don’t ask me why I couldn’t see he had loser written all over him, not until after I let him go to work on my left arm, on a rattlesnake whose rattle he inked on the inside of my elbow. It was supposed to be a little snake, but Number Eight had not yet mastered his craft, and the tail came out blotched and broken. Which compelled Number Eight to keep on keeping on, zigzagging it down the length of my forearm so that he could get the most practice in. No way I could shut him down without leaving a lopped-off reptile on my body, and by the time he got to my wrist I have to admit the snake was starting to look pretty good, and the head — which he ran onto the back of my hand, too large for the rest of its body by half — was a masterpiece, with a mosaic of scales and a flicking tongue.

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.