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

WHEN THE MAN with the feather in his brown hat returns, I tell my mother, “Don’t worry, it’s only Hangman.” He’s sitting with my sister again, business so slow on this fine day that my mother can’t even scold Louisa for shirking. “Wino weather” is what Doctor D calls it, weather into which he himself has taken off, leaving a folded scrap that reads, Grab some cocoa butter and meet me at the Elsie . From the way my mother hands it over I can tell she’s read the note, but is too busy pacing — and every few seconds craning her head toward the pass-through slot — to worry about what’s going on with me and Doctor D.

I tell her a little Hangman’s never gotten anyone knocked up.

“That’s not funny,” she says.

They’re drawing the Hangman on a paper place mat Louisa’s retrieved from the kitchen, one of the pretensions of High Tea being that the only paper products that can be on view are the doilies on the plates; everything else must be replaced by the Doobies’ flowered chintz. Sometimes it touches me to see the melting pot in action via the microcosm of Stinky Tea, the men from the shelter passing the butter patties to the ladies from the fancy condos down the block, while the Doobies glide in white pinafores across the grimy linoleum.

When she came back for the place mat, Louisa also slapped some marmalade on a scone, moving quickly so as not to give my mother a chance to stop her. Afterward, my mother mused tartly, “Is Frederick paying for that, I wonder?”

From Louisa, Mum learned that he goes by the name Frederick.

“Isn’t that odd? Not Fred? Not Rick?” she asks.

“You’re being paranoid.”

“What about the way he never takes off his hat?”

“Maybe he’s cold.”

She bristles. “I’ve had a hundred discussions with Leonard about the heat. The thermostat’s set at seventy.”

“Maybe he’s bald. Maybe he’s afraid she couldn’t love a hairless man.”

“Oh, please.”

“What?”

“The day your sister moves in with you we’ll start having these conversations. Until then, I want you to get out there and intervene.”

But instead of doing my mother’s dirty work, I stop for a quality moment with Florence Pratt, one of the pastel-haired ladies who come in every week, her skin as fragile as a baby bird’s.

“Ooch,” I say, parking myself in her booth by the window. “That sun is murder.”

The way the years have loosened her tongue has made it hard for Florence to find a lunch date — she doesn’t want to share air-time with anyone. Now she starts telling me about how being inside on a day like this always reminds her of the London Blitz: “We were always inside, blinds drawn, the plaster raining on our heads. You kids have no idea what it’s like to be trapped in your own home in a city under siege.” But my attention is two booths away where the man in the hat is pantomiming a word. Which is, apparently, chicken .

“. . my father insisted that meals go on as always. He was not about to let the Germans interrupt his dinner.” Pointing to a scar on her lip, Florence says, “This is where I once stabbed myself with a fork.”

The man in the hat flaps his elbows.

“Once there was a strike across the street that blew two of our windows out, and my father just sat there, picking glass from his cup. He waited until the rest of us had gotten up from underneath the table, so we’d be sure to see him swallowing the last drop of his tea.”

While she’s saying this, I try to ESP Louisa about the chicken, but instead of C she goes for S . And that does it, she’s hanged, and while the man in the hat draws the noose, my sister dies in a fit of laughter.

YOU CAN PICK your word for what he is: a weirdo, a wino, a loser, a tard. No one knows for sure what label to slap on him, since the Doobies say as little as they can get away with saying to the unwashed men who stumble in. Oh, yeah, you can talk about the melting pot in action, just like Doctor Doodle can extol the virtues of the bottomless cup, but let’s face it: open your heart to those who sleep in the hobo weeds and all it’ll get you nine times out of ten is a story that begins with the guy’s brain being controlled from outer space and ends with your being hit up for your spare change.

So when on the third week Louisa’s suitor comes back, I can understand why Mum announces she’s had enough. She’s got her sandwiches arranged on a serving platter with a silver stalk that rises from the middle, and she heads out of the kitchen swinging it like a priest swinging incense, something to purify the space when she orders my sister to start cleaning up.

“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.