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

“Ivan, no,” Tim groaned. “Let’s not subject ourselves to this again.” They’d stopped here maybe a half dozen times before, once for each friend who got married, which in the course of things meant fewer visits as the years passed. Last time, as they were leaving, Ivan stopped to help one of the girls jump-start her car, and they’d driven off as she watched her engine box go up in flames.

“We’ll just stay a minute, honest,” Ivan assured him. “Let Sam catch a little pooty before we set him free.”

No time to say that Sam had caught enough pooty back in the days when he could better appreciate it, because already Ivan was out and staggering toward the door. In his haste he’d kicked the bottle out of the truck and sent it rolling toward the dumpster. But Ivan didn’t notice, focused as he was on the club’s front door, where the bouncer made him open the box.

“Looks like mud, stinks like whiskey,” the bouncer was saying when Tim caught up. “Okay, I’m stumped.”

The bouncer was about to dip his fingers into the box for a taste when his flashlight struck the label, which caused his hand to snap back as if it had been burnt.

“What kind of kink is this?” he asked.

It was Ivan who looked down at his rubber sneaker tips before he answered:

“Grief.”

INSIDE, THE BASS NOTES throbbed at a frequency that interfered with the swallowing mechanism in Tim’s throat. First thing, he looked at the flimsy stage to see if the woman dancing was indeed wearing a cowboy hat. No, he saw with some relief, but she was wearing cowboy boots, white cowboy boots that she seemed afraid of stamping down too hard lest the entire stage collapse. Everyone looked as if they were packed in heavy syrup: a few girls traipsed around in their underwear, their trays bearing cups of coffee and glasses of soda pop. When Ivan finally recognized the girl from the library, planted like a lily in a forest of stumps, he shot up his hand and hailed her: “Dang Kim Nhung!” But her only response was to curl her lip and turn her back.

Tim saw that her buttocks were flat like a boy’s, separated into their precincts by a purple satin ribbon. When he realized that she was dancing for two lummoxes who had been in his class a few years back, he tried to press himself flat against the darkness like a shadow. Still one of them cried out: “Yo Mister Fitz!”

The walls echoed: Mister Fitz Yo Mister Fitz Yo Mister Fitz. . Or could have been a dozen of his students.

What she did was barely a ripple, waves traveling up her arms and then back down. Meanwhile, methodically, she touched various parts of her body, but not the parts he expected: instead her hip, her shoulder, an elbow, her knee. As far as Tim could tell, her legs were necessary only to hold up her torso within viewing range.

When the song was over, she approached them testily, grinding her gum between her teeth. “Library Man,” she said, adding in a voice that would have been underneath her breath except that she was shouting to be heard above the din, “You have to call me Tiffany. What are you doing?”

“We were in the neighborhood,” Ivan shouted back. “I was telling my friend about you.”

She gave a shrug in Tim’s direction before setting one hand on her hip. “Can’t talk now; I’m working. But I could get you guys a soda. You still have to pay five dollars for them, though. Each.” So they ordered two Sprites and watched the stage, where the girl in the boots took two steps in each direction, then agitated her hips. Stomp stomp hips. Stomp stomp hips.

“We came to see you naked,” Ivan blurted cheerfully, when Dang Kim Nhung Tiffany returned with their drinks. By mashing her small breasts up toward her throat, her purple bra was able to manufacture the facsimile of a cleavage. To keep from staring at it, Tim watched the stage where the girl was wrapping up. Stomp stomp hips one last time, and then she curtsied.

Dang Kim Tiffany shook her head. “They don’t want to put too much Asian onstage: I just do tables. And sorry, Library Man, but I think dancing for you would do a number on my head.”

There were no stairs for the girl onstage to get down, so she had to inch off the edge while wriggling her white boots in the air. They had fringe that reminded Tim of the undercarriage of a carpet sweeper. Meanwhile, Ivan yodeled happily, But that’s the beauty!

“You wouldn’t be dancing for us, it’d be for his dad.”

She glanced around the room then, as if expecting to find him abandoned in a corner with a portable oxygen tank, until Ivan shook the box to make the clod thump.

“He’s just ashes, see? Nothing you have to worry about.”

Dang Kim Tiffany did not believe it until he opened the box and let her look, and even then she would not dance until Ivan offered her the contents of his wallet: twenty-six dollars. Plus his change. The bills she stuffed into her bra with the coins wrapped inside them. “Okay, Library Man,” she said. “Just to show you I’m not sentimental about the dead.”

She took the box and set it on a chair, and when the next song rose up, her wavery-arm dancing began, and again she touched strange places on her body. Tim could see, in profile, the restless movement of her lips, could hear her reciting the names of the bones: tibia, fibula, femur. “Cat Scratch Fever” was the name of the song the random universe had delivered up, and Tim watched the box shimmy along with the rumble of the bass, as if there were something live inside it.

When the song ended, she turned and handed the box to Tim. “Anatomy test tomorrow,” she explained.

“You must have taken one of those time-management courses.”

“You be surprised how much work I get done here. And practical experience: the other girls always want me to palpate their breasts.” This all she shouted through the megaphone of her hands: “That means I feel them up! Everybody here is always freaking out that they got lumps! They bought themselves boobs, and now those bought-boobs are leaking! The bigger the boob, the more poison oozing out!”

A WATER BAR was an insignificant thing, Tim realized, but its worth was easily measured: you kicked it and right away you knew whether or not it would hold. Water bars may have been at the low end of technology’s food chain, sure, but still they were responsible for nothing less than the shape of the landscape, for the sides of mountains staying up, for one’s way becoming or not becoming impassable with mud.

He’d wanted his father to understand this, but Sam hadn’t, or Tim hadn’t tried hard enough to explain. He was hoping that explanations somehow wouldn’t have been necessary, that Sam would look down at the water bar and suddenly understand: how Archimedes was wrong about the size of the lever you’d need to hold up the world, how even a two-foot length of cedar could, with the proper placement, perform this feat. And then Sam would have looked up and seen the mountains rumpling and rerumpling for mile after mile, and he would have understood why his son had left Chicago.

But instead, to get out of the rain they’d gone to a diner in Packwood, where all Tim could think about was how his young mean father was now old and mean and weak, and it was Ivan who’d finally perked up with an idea over dessert.

“I know! I know!” he said as he tucked into his second slice of pie. “We’ll take your father to see the Patriarch.” The Patriarch was a tree that could be found on old maps, named by the forest’s first explorers, an ancient douglas fir located on an unmarked deer path that took off from behind the trailers where they’d lived. When their work for the day was done, they used to sit between the roots of the tree with their backs propped against its trunk, drinking beer while the raindrops rustled in the branches. Silently, they would pay homage to their muscles flecked with dander from the woods. They would press the cold cans against their bruises.