#622 Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain- Lucia Perillo

#622 Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain- Lucia Perillo

A woman believes her husband is having an affair, and she is in a depressed state. She tries to sniff our who the woman is, but she cannot track the person down, if in fact she exists at all. In her depression, she hints strongly at suicide, but doesn’t seem keen on acting on the threat. At times she is serenely introspective:

“If you dwelled on sadness you’d never get even one foot out the door. What was sadness, after all, but the fibrous stuff out of which a life was woven? And what was happiness but a chemical in the brain?”

At other times she is snide and sarcastic:

“He would never bring his mistress to our house, though in fact I thought this might be all right: it’s a big house and we could all play cribbage after.”

The woman is in a very dark, depressing mental state. This is a pretty cynical look at marriage and infidelity, one I’m sure that is more real than those that suffer depression would likely admit to themselves. Not at all uplifting, but it is well written. This is the last story I will read from this collection (same title as this story). It was an overall good read.

Notable Passage: "The mind is a dog that the body walks on its short leash.” 

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#594 Anyone Else But Me- Lucia Perillo

#594 Anyone Else But Me- Lucia Perillo

Prairie Rose doesn’t know who her father is. Her mother Ruth either doesn’t know or won’t tell her enough information for her to track him down. After all these years, it is becoming harder and less likely she will ever find out. It would, in a way, take a miracle.

Oddly enough, Rose’s current job is working maintenance for the town’s Miracle Management Response Team. Chemical runoff and environmental conditions has caused the image of the Virgin Mary to appear on a seawall causing all sorts of havoc for the area. People coming from all around just for a look, usually leaving trash and spending money—and isn’t that a perfect description of modern life: leaving trash, spending money, and staring at a wall looking for meaning, waiting for a miracle.

The woman are polar opposites and are each in need of different things. Ruth is looking for peace, while Rose is looking for answers. “Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how her mother could be satisfied with so little; Ruth doesn’t understand how a person’s life could accommodate much more.”

Ruth is kind of a modern take of people’s view of the Virgin Mary. She keeps pretty silent and yet everyone has an opinion about her—she is promiscuous, she is a nun, she is deaf, etc. Eventually unless protected and bolstered by faith, all miracles fade and wash back into the ocean.

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#562 St. Jude is Persia- Lucia Perillo

#562 St. Jude is Persia- Lucia Perillo

The narrator is a recovering addict just out of St. Jude’s rehab. She hopes some time at home will do her good.

“A little animal interaction, a few weeks of my mother’s cream cheese and chutney sandwiches, an I figured I’d be back to my old life.”

Home isn’t exactly the calming influence she was hoping for. He father has left, leaving her mother confused, irate and literally murderous: “My mother may be short and squat, a victim of too many shortbreads with her tea, but she’s still not a woman you want to go up against when she’s got a bee in her bonnet and a gun in her hands.”

The mind can create chaos, and it can create peace if you use your imagination. It can also create walls that both protect and isolate. After experiencing rehab, being left by her father, and watching her mother go a little crazy, she was feeling a bit on her own. “And somehow it was thrilling…to be the last remnant of a dying outpost while the enemy encroaches on all sides.”

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#531 The Water Cycle- Lucia Perillo

#531 The Water Cycle- Lucia Perillo

A crazy man abducts his own daughter by gunpoint, takes her right from her classroom. She is gone seventeen days; it is a national story. Now she is returned and can barely walk down the street without someone recognizing her and pointing:

“She’s the ghost girl, the one from the TV.”

Aurora is the biggest story to hit this town, and the other girls in her class know that everything has changed. They are told not to treat Aurora any different, but in doing so, they are in fact, treating her different. What starts out as deference and will turn to pity and eventually resentment. No matter the reason, school children hate someone who gets too much attention.

“New clothes, new barrettes, new Hello Kitty plastic purse. New way of looking older when she looked out from her bangs. New dance steps from MTV new way of putting your hands on your hips and jerking them forward like you were in the middle of a car crash. New stupid world new stupid us. She ruled our lives and was our ruin.”

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#496 Ashes- Lucia Perillo

#496 Ashes- Lucia Perillo

Tim’s father has died and it’s his job to take care of the ashes. His father was intently unsentimental, but Tim finds himself taking stock of his own life and his strained relationship with his dad. He remembers his father coming to visit and taking him to the trails he helped build as a Forest Ranger—and he remembers his father being supremely unimpressed.

“A water bar was an insignificant thing, Tim realized, but its worth was easily measured: you kicked it and right away whether or not it would hold…they were responsible for nothing less than the shape of the landscape, for the sides of the mountain staying up…he wanted his father to understand this, but Sam hadn’t, or Tim hadn’t tried hard enough to explain.”

So the thing Tim is most proud of, the most tangible thing he has done, hadn’t met to his father’s approval. The thing his father was impressed with, briefly, was an old growth tree six feet wide, so that’s where they spread his ashes. I liked the symbolism of the bottle of whiskey saved until Tim got married—wasn’t so hot on the symbolism of the kneeling at the end.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#454 Cavalcade of the Old West- Lucia Perillo

#454 Cavalcade of the Old West- Lucia Perillo

Two sister’s have a yearly tradition: they go to the pier for the carnival. It’s cheap, dirty and not aging well, but they go anyway. When they were younger, their was a revue called the Cavalcade of the Old West. They were fascinated by this show, but because of the insensitive and racist portrayals of several of the characters, the show has long since been cancelled.

Ginny is the younger, more responsible of the two and Stella is definitely on the wild side. This has been a sore point between them over the years. Stella drinking too young and too much, being loose with the carnival workers and having now divorced several husbands, Ginny resents having to be the adult for her older sister.

But, Stella lives her life without regret. “Here’s the difference between you and me…you’d be embarrassed if you were me, but I’m not.” Just like the old show, they hang on to their memories but it’s not like it used to be.

Rating: 7-6-6-6 Total= 25

#434 The Ghost Story- Lucia Perillo

#434 The Ghost Story- Lucia Perillo

This is not my favorite story from this collection. A woman right out of college, can only get work as a flagger on a road crew. She’s unsatisfied, bored and allows herself to have a fling with an older man. She knows it’s going nowhere.

She refers to him as a ghost, something I guess to mean a bad decision that haunts her. Or maybe it's something unseen, un-provable, formless that floats through her life and only she can see it. Then she gets her life together and goes to law school. Like I said, there is not much here, at least nothing that I connected with.

Rating: 7-4-5-4 Total= 20

#406 Report from the Trenches- Lucia Perillo

#406 Report from the Trenches- Lucia Perillo

We all have our demons, and our bad decisions. Some of us are lucky to see a sign, or get some help that gets us past them.

Jimmy has cheated on her again, and she flips out. She breaks her good set of dishes and drives Jimmy away with a curtain rod. Jill comes in to help calm her down. "Don’t clean this up", she advises, "sometimes you have to wallow in it to remind you how bad it can get."

She doesn’t need to be reminded, she wants to hear about Jill’s bad decisions which sound so much more romantic and wild than just having a philandering husband. Maybe Jill’s bad decisions are just the sign she needs to get past her own.

Rating: 8-6-7-7 Total= 28

#386 Doctor Vicks- Lucia Perillo

#386 Doctor Vicks- Lucia Perillo

A life without fulfillment always finds a way to fill the emptiness. A woman, a mother, and a housewife floats through life with her demons always hovering. They have moved to the country to protect their son from the dangers of growing up, it doesn’t work. She struggles with this life. She takes walks to flee her emptiness.

“When the wind picks up and makes the limbs click, you can find a place to stand where the birches will accommodate your arms’ spread, your head thrown back and your roar drowned by the louder roaring of the creek. So how come everybody thinks it’s you and not the creek who’s crazy?”

All three of them are troubled and seek space and freedom to find themselves, soothe themselves or outright flee themselves.

Notable Passage: “The night is a tunnel that shrinks as the year draws to a close, contracting to fit inside the circumference of your headlights."

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#365 Big-Dot Day- Lucia Perillo

#365 Big-Dot Day- Lucia Perillo

Arnie and his mother are moving again. This time from Las Vegas to Washington State. New year, new state, new boyfriend for Mom. This one is called Jay, not Ray, that was the last guy.

“Arnie new the guy’s name was Jay, but the old guy’s name had been Ray and Arnie was afraid of mixing them up. Like the lizard and the attack ship [the toys he brought] they were mostly interchangeable: same body…but with different heads. Over the years, the guys stayed the same age while his mother got older. In this way they were the one constant she maintained.”

I like that idea: change being the only constant. Arnie also liked fishing, and hoped hat being so close to the ocean meant better fishing. He sees quickly that he has a learning curve ahead of him.

“Suddenly Arnie realized that they hadn’t just come to the end of the earth but another planet where he didn’t even know the basic rules of life.”

Rating: 8-7-9-7 Total= 28

#344 Bad Boy Number Seventeen- Lucia Perillo

#344 Bad Boy Number Seventeen- Lucia Perillo

Starting a new collection with this story. Happiness is a Chemical was listed as one of the best books of 2012. Good start with Bad Boy Number Seventeen. A woman is at a bar with her sister—the one with Down Syndrome—and ruminates on all the bad decision relationships she has had.

“Inside every dissolute romantic there’s a brooding Schopenhauer, with a chronic melancholy that he nurses like a sourball in his cheek. He can see the whole arc of his life—from the uphill curve that is his present freedom to the downhill slope that’ll lead him to some evangelical storefront church where he’ll suddenly find himself swaying with his hands raised in the air. And the one’s who come without this flaring sense of precognition are just losers, plain and simple.”

Ouch! That’s quite a bar to set. As she finds herself number seventeen, we learn more about her sister. The story is as much about that connection than about her wayward love life. This is both funny, and touching.

Rating: 8-8-8-9 Total= 34