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

the trail an elevated boardwalk that lets you walk atop the marsh, the dark eroding below you as your boots plunk along the boards.
    Eventually it leads to a dry island in the middle of the marsh, where wrens flitter and herons squawk from the highest limbs of the scraggly alders. Oddly enough, you smell the remnant of a fire and realize that you’ve stumbled into a clearing, a clearing full of frosted stones the color of jewels. Maybe they are hunks of marble. Maybe the trees here were petrified and turned to minerals a million years ago. Then one of the stones shifts and changes shape, and you hear a rustling as if from a lady’s ballroom gown. And more of the stones shift, change shape. . by now you’re backing toward the boardwalk again.
    It’s too late to run: suddenly you’re struck by a flashlight beam, and you know now that the moving stones are children wrapped in sleeping bags, a dozen who have spent the night here. One girl calls out, “It’s Jason’s mother!” and a low singsong wafts your way: Whoa-oh, Ja-suh-uhn’s busted. . Jay-suh-uhn’s busted . The woods ring with the song while you try to think of an appropriate thing to say, but by the time you can dredge up the words your son has already said them: What are you doing here?

    CHERRY TONGUE is the giveaway, that fuzzy, red, iridescent tongue whose scent you camouflage by chewing Life Savers. In any case your husband can tell the scent doesn’t come from gin. So when he asks, “Have you been drinking?” you can answer him indignantly. He is wrong and he knows it, you have not had a real drink for months. And there is a difference: Gin sent you down like a rock kicked off a cliff. Gin was the tall man standing up there while you fell too fast too far for there to be any use in crying out.
    But Doctor Vicks you could speak to and he would talk back; your head might grow yards from your feet but even then the squat red man was there to look you in the face. Or rather your feet might grow yards from your head, for the feeling was not as if you floated but rather as if you waded through the real, the real having thickened into jelly around your legs. Doctor Vicks engulfed you in a warm swirl like the sweat underneath a man’s armpit, which you could curl yourself into. With your husband, this had stopped happening long ago. And sure, you used to love him, but how can you love anyone to whom you are an embarrassment? Next question: are you an embarrassment to your son Jason? Hard to tell. For now, you are two dogs circling each other, using your paws to travel sideways. Knowing that you are not really going anywhere, knowing that you are only headed back to where you were.

    THE SUNDOG LADY shows up at the wrong time of year for vacuum sales. Now the rain falls steadily and instead of leaf crumbs what you have is mud against which the Denby is powerless so long as the mud stays in liquid form. So this is what occupies your day: waiting for the mud to dry so that it can be sucked. You haven’t the heart to tell the Sundog lady that not two months ago you bought a Denby. Instead you are thinking about all those years with just the carpet sweeper, and now this glut of vacuum salesmen — salespeople. How strange life’s feast or famine.
    Still, the Sundog lady importunes on you to let her give you a demonstration—“then you’ll know what I’m talking about.” Brown-skinned and wearing great padded silver boots, the Sundog lady responds to your invitation across the threshold: “Honey, if you don’t mind, I think I better get these moonboots off my feet.”
    Underneath, she’s wearing pantyhose, and you walk her quickly to the carpet. You’ve noticed that she has no vehicle, and she explains that she walked from the crossroads where her husband dropped her off, with the intention of demonstrating — she calls it “demo-ing”—the Sundog along the way. She has the vacuum strapped to a rolling luggage cart with a complicated web of bungee