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

But when the shot cracks out, instead of dropping, Mister Chester fixes my mother with a look that is clearly his horse-language way of telling her that she can go fuck off. When she fires again, Mister Chester picks up his pace only the merest notch as he saunters toward the woods. I realize then that my mother’s got the rifle tipped toward the sky, that she’s not trying to kill him but only drive him off. Life does not require your participation. Being a curmudgeon is no sin. Once Mister Chester blurs into the landscape’s sepia-colored edge, she twirls and empties the rest of the bullets into the barn before throwing the gun into the dirt.

“What’s Mum shooting now?” Louisa asks, without too much concern: Louisa’s memory is like a wake that closes up behind her as soon as she moves on.

“Just the barn,” I say to my sister, who doesn’t look up because she’s mesmerized and letting her body sway. She’s watching MTV again, standing so close the jump cuts splash their colors into the white screen of her face.

“Why’s Mummy want to kill the barn?”

The amazing thing is what happens next, when my mother stomps from the barn to the backhoe sitting some thirty yards off, parked among the burn barrels like the skeleton of something that had just been exhumed from the dirt, its yellow spots reduced to freckles, its tires caked with last year’s mud. What’s amazing is the magic she works to get the ignition to turn over, and the way that, after much fiddling with the shift, she somehow manages to bring the machine to life. Suddenly she’s in gear, moving chink chink chink toward the barn from the far side of the pasture, her raincoat flaring from the ancient driver’s seat while the bucket scrapes along the ground. It looks as if she’s trying to build enough speed so that when she plows into the barn the whole thing will go down; she’s angling toward one corner where the footings are especially cracked.

By now it’s dusk, and dribbling out of the backhoe’s seat are particles of foam rubber that look like snow as they’re seized and carried by the wind, over and through the crowns of the naked alders. An A-1 sunset has just started to creep from cloud to cloud, and I have to yell above the music for my sister to come get a load of this, as our mother, furious and wild-haired and small, steadies herself behind the wheel.

“Don’t try to make anything burn” is Marco the instructor’s first piece of advice to the class, which the YMCA catalogue had listed as “Skipping Through Life”: somebody’s idea of an upbeat name for the senior citizens’ women’s exercise group. Ruth’s enrollment fee had been a gift from her daughter, who said, “Ma, you’re turning into a lump.” And indeed, Ruth is hard in the running for fattest person in the class, though, her daughter’s opinions aside, she is not all that fat. It’s just that the other women are surprisingly firm for a bunch of. . well, old ladies.

Ruth also guesses that she’s the youngest old lady here, fifty-six, barely squeaking over the wire that was the minimum age for the class. Marco himself looks some years younger, husky but toned, a city bus driver who leads the class during his lunch hour, he explains—“to keep the pizza out of my mouth.” Soon Ruth realizes that these introductory comments are meant for her, the rest of the group having been through this routine on countless noons. Her outsider status is also made clear by her sweatpants, which no one else but Marco is wearing. The rest of the women are dressed in coordinated leotards.

“I won’t be giving much instruction,” he tells her as he warms up, lunging from side to side with his fists on his hips and his legs spread. “I think you’ll be able to follow along. But if you have any questions, give a shout.”

Then Marco punches a button on his tape deck, from which bursts the trumpet intro of an Andrews Sisters number, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Abruptly the women line up and begin to march in a circle, swinging their arms. As Ruth imitates their movements, she can’t help thinking about the goose step she play-marched with, back when she was just a kid. And how did it happen that one day you’re playing Hitler in the alley and before you know it you’re in the senior citizens’ women’s exercise class, where the instructor’s calling out, “Big steps, ladies! Big steps!”?

PRAIRIE ROSE, her daughter, works for the town’s Miracle Management Response Team, which has been made necessary by the appearance of the Virgin Mary in the dark stains running down the concrete seawall that can be seen from the bridge over the inlet that bisects town. Prairie Rose complains about how working for the MMRT is not all it’s cracked up to be: mostly you just walk around in an orange vest, picking up trash. The viewers of the miracle gather on the bridge and in the marina parking lot, where concessionaires charge five dollars for a ride out to the base of the seawall to touch Her. In the parking lot the viewers leave behind not just rosaries and candles but also a surprising number of wadded hamburger wrappers. “I mean, personally, I think of Mary and I think salad,” Prairie Rose says, “but the evidence suggests that she’s got everyone else hankering for red meat.”

Prairie Rose took the job with hopes of being transferred to the city grounds crew once the apparition fades. She has visions of herself kneeling in bark mulch, changing the flower bed that spells the city’s name from tulips to marigolds as the seasons cycle through. In the interim, she says she’s just biding her time—“until ol’ Mary decides to beam herself back up.”

Of course, Prairie Rose has explanations, some kind of chemical the concrete was treated with, but Ruth is not so ready to write the Virgin off. More than once, she’d found herself standing on the bridge whose stone balustrades were now globbed with candle wax. All around her, people muttered prayers and worried their rosaries, while below them a flotilla of boats vied for position, overloaded with spectators who made the small crafts lurch as arms strained toward the seawall.

Being part of so much humbled humanity, even Ruth felt her heart begin to stretch until the bag of it touched the underside of her skin, and the contact discharged something on the order of a static shock. It was all she could do to keep from crying out.

“Oh, Ma, you’re like all the other nutballs,” Prairie Rose told her. “You believe it because you’ve got nothing else going on in your life.” But Ruth had to fight her impulse to go to the bridge too often, because she worried that the miracle would be rendered meaningless through overexposure, as she concluded it had been for Prairie Rose.

WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was growing up, Ruth had lived with a Mr. Lindquist, a formal man whose formal name Ruth first started using as a joke, before it stuck. He was some years older than she, an Air Force pilot in WWII, and Ruth had thought it odd — and so did not allow herself to think about it too much — that a man of his generation would never have proposed to her a formal marriage. Perhaps this had to do with Prairie Rose, to whom Mr. Lindquist’s advice was usually prefaced with, “Look, now, I know I’m not your father. .”

During all the years of his not-quite-fatherhood, Mr. Lindquist had spent his early mornings tinkering with a light aircraft he was building in the garage, which was what killed him in the end. The search and rescue squad found him dangling from a tree limb, pieces of the fuselage dotting the evergreens like shiny ornaments.