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

“Good thing it wasn’t our TV,” she said, her mouth full of crust. Then she wandered out onto the balcony, trying to lick a spot of cherry goop on her chin that lay just beyond her tongue’s reach.

“See how the magic works?” she hollered, her bare legs reminding him of the white bellies of two fish. “You come to the end of the earth and then you catch a bird.” Her face still had the spot of cherry goop, and now it also had that misty look, so Arnie knew what was coming next.

“Hey, c’mere.” She spread her arms for him, and from experience he knew it was useless trying to avoid her. She would chase him around the room if she had to, he could run outside but then she would chase him around the parking lot.

So he went out and let her trap him with her damp plaid arms, swinging him gently from side to side. “You catch a bird,” she said, rocking him, “and then you set the bird free. It’s all part of the plan: movement, stasis. Where else could this have happened?”

Arnie did his best to ignore her. “So when are we going fishing?” he asked Jay, the question muffled against her breasts.

“Soon.” Jay had picked up his jeans and was feeling the pockets.

“You said first thing. You promised.”

Outside on the balcony, Arnie’s mother held him and would not let go. Rocking and rocking.

“He’s right, Ray,” she said. “A promise is a promise.”

“It’s Jay,” said the new guy, lighting up a cigarette.

Funny how you can go your whole life without something, and then one day that very thing starts descending on you in droves. As if suddenly the universe has gotten fed up with your renunciations and has decided to make damn sure that you relent to what it sends.

Take, for example, a vacuum cleaner: maybe you’ve always made do with the carpet sweeper (not even electric) that your mother handed you like a bayonet when you first headed off to college. Life was simple: you pushed the sweeper, its bristles spun around and ate up all the crumbs. And somehow twenty years go by without your ever feeling any need to upgrade the sweeper. . until one day when this guy shows up on your front porch, lugging a vacuum with an iron snout and a plaid cloth bag like a bagpipe. He comes bearing the news that you’ve won a free one-room carpet cleaning, and you’re trying to tell him: Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots, whoever you are, my life’s just fine the way it is. .

But say he barges in anyway, sticks his foot in the door, as the expression used to go back in the days when people were willing to be more literal. Now the foot in the door is this man’s speech: Don’t worry, there’s no money up front, no risk . He’s screaking the vacuum down your hall, trying to hunt himself up some carpet, which is difficult, your house being planked in wide pine boards except for in the living room where there’s some ugly orange mid-depth shag that you have a fondness for lying on when brooding and so have resisted your husband’s rallying against it.

Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots, whoever you are, there’s always some kind of risk.

The vacuum guy is short and wide, maybe fifty but a hard-earned fifty, his short-sleeved shirt pee-yellow and fraying, a gray tattoo escaping from each hem. One bicep’s got two bird feet clenching a crumpled flag; on the other some runes that you decode as the bottom half of U.S. NAVY. He reminds you of Popeye, especially when single-handedly he attempts to lift the sofa in the middle of the room, and though it’s only a joke what you say next — about him being careful not to rupture himself — it makes him puff up like a rooster. Apparently you have insulted him, and in retaliation he hoists a chair as if it were a marshmallow. As if to prove you cannot stop him. Rupture himself indeed!

Before you know it, he’s got the cleaning attachment mounted on top of the vacuum’s snout and is laying down the foam in stripes, saying, Now, what would you pay for this kind of cleaning power? as the foam dries into dust. What would this kind of cleaning power be worth to you? It’s a question he will not let you off the hook of, until finally you guess, Four hundred dollars? just to try the number out. It’s the wrong one, though, a number that makes the man squint at you with one eye bugged, as if he wants to punch you. But then he swallows the big gob in his throat and picks up his spiel where he left off, at the part about the Denby Company’s installment plan. Five years at only forty-five dollars a month — that’s what you’d pay for this kind of cleaning power!

You sit on the stairs, watching the man grunt in the wake of his machine while his whole story assembles inside your brain in flashes. How he did not think it would come down to this, humping vacuums on and off of porches, how he thought his pension was in the bag. . until downsizing cut him short. And he is humiliated by his day-in, day-out need to proclaim the virtues of the Denby, or it’s you on the stairs who imagines that he is, or it’s you imagining that you imagine: who can tell when by late afternoon you’re always buzzed? When the man squats to adjust the pile-depth feature, and you see the spot where the sole of his black loafer is worn clean through, you resign yourself to doing what you can to save him. Forty-five dollars a month is not much, after all. And cleaning has always held your interest.

ACTUALLY it’s the crevices that interest you, the creases on the front door of the stove, for example, where the dirt congeals, combines with grease, and changes form. There it becomes durable to the harshest solvent, a matter stronger than mere dirt. You have to stab it with a knife and pry it out like the old mortar in the stone walls that snake their pathways through these woods.

The idea had not appealed to you at first — your husband’s suggestion, then insistent lobbying, that you all move out here to the woods. You all: husband, wife, son. The woods: scrubby forest, logged off long ago. The rationale was that your son had started hooking up with trouble, had committed break-and-entry and been caught. But something about this explanation sounded fishy, sounded like a cover for some other story about what’s going on, a story that has to do with you, though you are not sure what it is. Oh, no, Mr. Slyboots or the equivalent of which you were about to say, when your husband tricked you by bringing you here to see this house, with its clean plank floors and their umber grain, the intricacies of which you could spend a lifetime studying. And the front porch that overlooked an old mill creek, which flashed by white and silver where it passed over stones, the same round stones whose fellows have been mortared into the foundation upon which the house itself sits. First thing you did was go down to the creek and yell to see how loud a yelling it had the power to drown out, which had embarrassed your husband (beside him the realtor standing on the porch in heels), but he let you do it because he knew it would win you over, another trick.

So now in the morning your husband drives off, a funnel cloud of dry leaves and gravel. Somehow fate has afforded your marriage just one car. (Your husband chalks it up to money, but this is the kind of simple explanation you distrust.) You console yourself with the notion that stuck is another way of saying off the hook : all day you can let the ghosts tell you the story of every ding in the floorboards as you wax them down on your hands and knees. Like the ghosts, you would be glad to die here in this nothing town: New Woodland, not even a name but a promise of one, a promise of something that has not happened yet. Your husband likes it, you suspect, because the town has no liquor store, no boys wearing baggy jeans and slantwise ballcaps. Therefore he thinks you and your son are safe here. Ha ha ha.