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

fact that the girl was willing — whenever she sent people down the road SLOW when the sign should have said STOP —to throw herself onto the trunks of cars, sounding a thunk loud enough to make them halt.
    This happened a couple of times, the driver glancing back in terror to discover the flagger girl splayed across his rear windshield. This was how she met the man she dated briefly that summer, who had a convertible in whose tiny jump seat she ended up, screaming, “Look out!” because there was a mail truck approaching the other way.
    “Don’t worry, I see it,” he said. After swerving around the traffic cones while the truck went past, he continued down the street.
    “Are you always this hysterical?” he asked, when she finally managed to sit up. She explained to him how she had simply made an error for which she was taking the responsibility by rectifying it herself. Not hysteria but self-reliance. As in Ralph Waldo Emerson.
    “We’ll go for coffee,” he said; then, “No wait a minute, you don’t want coffee. What you want is a drink.” Yes. The man was nice-enough-looking. He had one of those big mustaches like the good cop in a TV show. So the girl stashed her hard hat and orange vest in the trunk of his MG while they went for a drink in one of the seedy Chinese restaurants downtown, which were just opening for lunch. She wasn’t too worried about leaving the job site — it was a state job and the infraction process was so complex that basically she would have to commit a felony to get the boss to work up sufficient energy to fire her.
    And now, after all these years, the girl can’t remember much of the dialogue that passed between them. Except that at one point she asked what he did: just filler, a substitute for an actual thought. But he used what she said as a springboard for his own interrogation: “Why is everyone so obsessed with ‘do’? Why is it assumed we all need to ‘do’ something? What exactly do you mean by ‘do’ anyway?”
    She said, “Just forget it.”
    Then he teased one of her legs off the stalk of the barstool and used it as a lever to spin her around. “Let’s just say I’m a househusband,” he said. “Without the wife. Without the house.” And while she found this slyly sexy, even in the dim of the bar she could tell that the man had used a blow-dryer to style his pepper-colored hair. And in those days blow-drying was a quality she distrusted in men.
    But nothing happened: the man simply paid for their drinks and then drove her back to the job site, where the boss grumbled about her explanation — that she’d gone to the emergency room to be checked out after the impact — but did not contest it. “You gotta be the worst flagger girl ever,” he said.
    A few days later, the man drove by again around quitting time and took her to dinner at a chic French place. They went dutch, which the girl made a big stink about, though privately she resented his not lobbying harder for the bill. But it must not have been a sufficient degree of resentment to keep her from inviting him home, which in those days was what you did after a date, which you did not call a date. The sex you called “fucking,” which was supposed to prove you were a woman who had torn the veils from her eyes. The girl called herself a woman, although the word felt like a thistle in her mouth.
    As for the man, he was old enough to be one, with a thicker body than those few college boys whom she’d seen in the buff. And the sex was thicker too when it parked itself atop her like some not-quite-solid mass. She assumed this was one of natural consequences of aging, that the whitewater of sex would slow to a dribble, giving one time to get the adult work of life accomplished — like making grocery lists or calculating the number of days to the next paycheck — while the act itself took place. And when it was done he fell asleep, which the girl counted as an improvement over the college boys too, who