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

Here senior citizens with the fortitude of Mongolian nomads dole out coffee through the thick part of the night, night after night, for unfathomable reasons. They want you to tell them your story and are satisfied even if it only concerns what you saw in the Eurymart. In particular they like hearing about the new colors the vegetables come in, yellow tomatoes and purple bell peppers; they like gathering data that proves how strange the world’s become. Then they’ll let you beg off to use the pay phone on the far side of the parking lot: if there’s anything strange about a woman using the pay phone at two a.m., they don’t let on. Two a.m. is Castle Ethel’s idea of broad daylight.
    The pay phone sits on a post beyond which is wilderness, the receiver cable just long enough to reach into the car if you pull up close beside it. And you can sit here in comfort, dialing the sunny places fed by 1-800 lines: Tampa, Scottsdale, the catalogues spread out on your lap. “If my foot is ten inches long and four inches wide, would I take the Sunday Strider in a size eight and a half or nine? And exactly what color is mulberry — are we talking like a raspberry or would you say more of a grape?” It’s nice to hear yourself addressed as Ma’am . When you want to terminate these conversations, all you have to do is tell them that your credit card is Diners Club.
    Or sometimes you call the husband-and-wife TV Jesus team to ask if they’d let you come live on their Florida compound — you’ve seen the spread in People magazine, you know about the private jet. Unrepentant, the wife still wears her Grandpa Munster makeup even though the husband has recently been publicly tarred for leading a circle jerk with some other members of his flock. The members pulling on their members. “It’s not a crime, I don’t hold it against him,” you tell the young voice that answers the phone; still, she will not give you any information until you provide her with an estimate of the dollar value of your net assets.
    And only once were you ever frightened there, staring into the forest that skirts Castle Ethel, your Styrofoam cup paused on your lip when suddenly you realized that what you’d thought were two empty skin-colored plastic grocery bags were in fact two sets of limbs intertwined among the shadows. “Gotta go,” you told the Jesus person as you leaned way out the window to recradle the phone. For a minute you were quite sure one of the sets of limbs was your son’s, tangled inside the plaid coat worn by the other set of limbs. Their hair shone like that of beautiful long-haired dogs while they strained against each other and keened as if bits of glass were running through their bowels.
    It was a vision you drove away from as fast as you could, though on the way home you reconsidered: it could have been some flesh-tone plastic grocery bags, and an old sleeping bag flapping in the wind; the coat you thought you saw was just its plaid interior and the hair was its nylon shell. You were still mulling it over in your own kitchen at three a.m., unloading the groceries only to discover that once again you had forgotten milk.

    THE NIGHT is a tunnel that shrinks as the year draws to a close, contracting to fit inside the circumference of your headlights. Then the world becomes only what the car can itself contain: the radio, the heat, the bottle of cough syrup on the seat beside you like an obedient child.
    And if the night is a tunnel, what awaits you at the other end? An opening into light? A wreck? Pulling off at Castle Ethel? Or simply going home? On the road home there’s a sign for New Woodland Marsh, a nature sanctuary on the edge of town, which you’ve driven by who knows how many nights and dawns until on one of them you turn here. Three miles of gravel road that plunges through the gulleys, the fearsome thump and scratch of tree limbs on the roof. At the end a parking lot and a sign that shows the layout of the nature trail,