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

A few days ago, I’d shown him the half dozen used boats we had sitting on the lot. I trailed behind so I could make a careful study of his hips, and now, as he’s walking in, I get the full-on view: black T-shirt with a breast pocket, breast pocket with a cigarette pack, cigarette pack a quarter full and crumpled. Right away he recognizes me and sits down to give me an update, something like, Yesterday I decided on the Bayliner and went over and gave Milty some money down. What I liked about the Bayliner was that it came stocked with this Mercury outboard that you could tear down with both eyes closed and one arm tied behind your back .

I say, Let me see if the gasoline smell’s still on your hand . No, just kidding, I don’t say that — the last thing he wants is a woman who’s off her rocker, despite that urban legend about the secret sexual positions known only to female lunatics.

“You got a good buy,” I say. And something like: “We haven’t had that Bayliner for a week.” The reason I have a hard time tracking what we say is because Louisa’s sitting beside me, singing “Jesus Is Just Alright” with her eyes closed. In a place like the Reef a woman singing won’t turn anybody’s head, at least not until she starts a fistfight, but when Louisa finally opens her eyes and sees Seventeen, her face flushes purple as an eggplant.

“Keep singing,” he says. “You sing good.”

Louisa’s afraid he’s teasing. “Naw. .” she demurs.

But he says, “No really, I like this song. And when it comes on the radio I can never understand the words because the guy mumbles. But you don’t mumble. Shoot, you sing better than he does.”

This must be one of Louisa’s all-time famous moments. She trembles but retains enough composure to keep singing, and after the song’s over Seventeen applauds and volunteers to buy us all another round.

Reading the label on Louisa’s bottle, he whistles. “You got expensive taste, sister.”

It’s a word Louisa grabs on to joyfully. “I’m her big sister,” she announces, elbowing me. “I get to boss her around.”

“I bet you do,” he says. The beer comes; he and I pass the time debating the merits of Mercury versus Evinrude outboards while Louisa beams in and out of the conversation. When he goes to the can, Louisa leans toward me and says, “I think this one will be my boyfriend.”

“Oh, yeah? How can you tell?”

“I think he’s nice to me.”

It’s Mum talking when I hear myself say, “Why, you don’t know the first thing about that guy,” which makes Louisa go silent, tracing out letters in her spilled beer.

Finally she says, “You’re my sister, but you know what?” And she goes on to answer herself without looking at me: “You don’t always know everything.”

THE THREE OF US leave the Reef buzzed and giddy from what has been a very happy hour, Louisa with the dopey rainhat accordioned on her head and almost swooning when Seventeen volunteers to tie the plastic flaps in a bow beneath her chin. We’re walking to Seventeen’s pickup so he can give us a ride home, Louisa hanging on his arm, and though it doesn’t seem physically possible, her happiness escalates by yet another order of magnitude when she sees what’s bounding in the truck bed: some kind of animal resembling a cross between a mountain goat and an old upholstered chair.

“That’s Red,” says Number Seventeen. “I bet he’s glad to see us.”

“He’s white!” Louisa declares. “How come you call him Red?”

“Well, I’m glad someone’s on her toes. But if I tell you the story you’ve got to promise you won’t cry.” As he shoves and scruffs the dog, who’s chained to an old tire plus its rim, he tells us how he paid four hundred dollars for a purebred he was going to use for hunting ducks “. . and I ended up with this thing. Now, does this look anything like a golden retriever to you?”

No! No! we shout half drunkenly. And again when he starts to drive us home— No! No! — Louisa and I riding in the back with a tarp pulled up to our chins. The truck is just an old rice-burner, and when we all wouldn’t fit in the cab I watched Louisa wrestle with her loyalties: she wanted to pat the dog, she wanted to stick with her sister, she wanted to ride up front with the boy who’s as glamorous to her as any movie star. In the end that made two against one and Louisa got in back with the dog and me.

“Take us to see the boat!” I holler into the open driver’s window. But Seventeen hollers back about how he hasn’t picked it up yet.

Instead he takes us to see where he’s going to keep it berthed, the air misting just enough that we can feel it on our faces as we lie in the truck bed so no one can see. There’s clouds swooshing overhead and firs to our starboard until Steamboat Harbor cuts into them ten miles from town, where the Sound picks up current and breaks into chop, and it’s there that Seventeen pulls up in the gravel parking lot. When he comes crunching around the truck bed, he’s shouldering a six-pack that he’s pulled from behind the seat. “It’s shit beer, ladies,” he says as he climbs in. “But it’s all I got.”

Louisa’s getting wasted, way past the two-beer limit I usually hold her to. But today I say oh, what the hell: she’s happy, the boy is lying underneath the tarp between us, and the dog is nosing the folds of her rainhat — until he discovers skin and starts making big slurps up and down her face.

HERE’S THE LAST THING I learned from my romances: bad boys are lousy lays. Going into it you have to understand they’re not the kind of guys who’ll care whether or not you come. That part of the equation goes right over their head, the whole idea of female orgasm reminding them of high school math class and having to solve for x . What they do best is look out for themselves, which means popping a beer or falling asleep or — and perhaps this is the epitome of their postcoital tristesse — turning on the TV and discovering a replay of the Indy 500, cars going round and round and round.

This is how the world is starting to look when we finish the last of Seventeen’s beer, dusk settling on the water, which seems to whirl in a slow eddy that spins the boats and ricochets the stars. After Seventeen takes us out for cheeseburgers and doesn’t even squawk when Louisa uses about forty of those little packs of ketchup, ripping them open with her teeth and shooting the contents in jags that scribble her with red, the three of us end up, where else, at the trailer, where Louisa, despite her happiness or maybe sated with it, falls on the sofa and commences snoring like a man. In my mother’s bedroom Seventeen says, Now you gotta let me see the rest of that snake , and when I roll up my sleeve he starts to improvise his murmurs . . Let’s see if you got any other secret pitchers. . and I show him it all to prove there’s no more pictures.

Let me say flat-out that, despite these promising overtures, sex with Seventeen is not a memorable event. The alcohol makes his athleticism sloppy, and when he touches me he’s wide on all his marks. Sure you could heap some of the blame on me, but the woman is generally not held accountable once she’s tilted off the upright. And that’s not laziness but a female way of lending grace: you’ve got to give these guys control of one thing when everything else about their lives is veering off its course, the one thing they think is most important, the one thing they think’ll turn them into men.

What I’m trying to explain is why I’m not crestfallen in the morning when I discover Number Seventeen is gone. Only for a moment does his vanishing come as a surprise, until I remember that sometime during his examination of my marked and unmarked skin he told me that he’d have to be at a roofing job by six. In fact when I first wake up I think I’m lying in a strange motel until I realize that it’s just my mother’s bedroom with its Johnny Carson drapes.