Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

knocked it over.” He thought his mother would be mad, but she just shrugged as she studied the cup.
    “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.

DOCTOR VICKS
    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