Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo Read Free Book Online

bridge.
    You cannot breathe until the last car is safely past, whereupon your knees buckle and you clatter to the ground. But the boys can’t hear this over their loud whoops and high-five slaps. Eventually, when they pack up the radio and continue down the tracks, you leave them to it: they’ve worn you out. Later, you will find the wrappers in his pocket and know that they hitchhiked to McDonald’s, eight miles away by the interstate. Which is how they celebrate their finding themselves not dead.

    SO NOW you could say to your husband: I know what he’s doing, he is waiting for trains to pass over the creek, so he can hold on to the bridge. Your husband will ask why your son does this, and you will have to tell him that there is no reason. Then of course your husband will protest: And you didn’t stop him? What if he was injured? What if he was killed! He’s right: maternal instinct should have led you to throw your body down on the tracks, the mother bird sacrificing herself. But somehow your son is no longer susceptible to your protection; he’s a bird that has already fledged. You see him out there and can almost not remember how it was when he was inside your body. If you were a hawk, he might even be the one you’d eat.
    You could try explaining this to your husband, but he has lost patience with your theories: you have quit drinking, you are supposed to be shaping up, no more talking about ghosts or hawks or angels, which in his mind are equally winged, all of them versions of the same thing, namely signs that you are going off. So you keep quiet when at night he sits at his drawing table, thinking onto paper the buildings that will become the city. The city is in good hands, because your husband has unerring taste: it was he who bought the Mission-style antiques that fill the house. Furniture for looking at, the sofa priceless yet spare as a bench. This is why you have held out for the ugly patch of orange shag: something to roll yourself into, something that will accept you without question. And now, with the Denby, its scalp turns up no crumbs. Clean is your surrender to domestic life; ugly is your protest. Clean but ugly. But clean is your protest too.

    AT NIGHT you go driving, for your husband doesn’t like to shop. Eight miles away by the north-south interstate, by the McDonald’s and the truck stop where the semis squeal, there is also a giant Eurymart where every possible thing gets the chance to gleam as if electricity were pulsing through it. This is only a trick of light, the Saint Elmo’s fire of fluorescence, but still it comforts you at midnight to see civilization buzzing — buzzed but yet still orderly, spaced-out but ultra-clean.
    Your husband cannot bear the Eurymart because he says the building has no soul. But he is wrong; the problem is that the Eurymart’s soul is so big that you have to be willing to let yourself be swallowed by it. The Eurymart makes you manic, giddy; you can lose yourself for hours. Red boxes of laundry soap tower overhead, look up at them and you’re liable to swoon. Enough food to stock all the underground bunkers of all the paramilitarists in these hills. You can’t just march around with a shopping cart; instead, they give you a sledge you have to tow behind you like a barge. When you polish off your Doctor Vicks you can just buy yourself another — hell, you can buy a dozen bottles, shrink-wrapped together in the family-sized pack.
    An elderly gentleman in a yellow Eurymart apron helps you load into your car this week’s teenage-boy-stomach’s-worth of food. Afterward, the trunk sags visibly, like a woman whose hips have given birth to many kids. When you try to give the man a dollar his face turns redder in the redness of the taillight glow. No, he says, he can’t take tips.
    You should go home now, but instead you head south on the interstate, where halfway between the towns of Ethel and Castle Rock there’s a sign for a rest stop named Castle Ethel.