Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo

inside would get to see the women naked, Stella had already clued Ginny in on the fact that this was just a trick. Under the filmy gowns the women wore two-piece bathing suits made of spangly iridescent satin, with scarves attached that were also tethered to their wrists. Whenever a man tried to touch them, the women would use the scarves like dental floss, slicing between their bodies and his hand, drawing the arm away with the scarf, as though the scarf were a kind of net.
    Sooner or later the girls would be spotted peeking under the tent, and the barker would kick their heads just hard enough to drive them off. By this time it would be late enough that Stella would permit them to go to the Old West.
    One time they got there just in time to see the mynah bird go wild, the blind woman chasing it by following its squawks. The Indian stood, impassive, at the edge of the stage, while the mynah bird lunged in his direction, apparently recognizing its distant cousin in the wheel of ragged feathers that the Indian wore on his butt. And the one-armed logger was no help, drunk and goading the bird with the stub end of his ax.
    But Stella’s fixation lay with the Salmon boy, who throughout the pandemonium just sat there and smiled, swaying a little, adjusting the plane of his face until his heavy glasses caught the light and sparked. He was, in fact, an armless, legless black man of indeterminate years, who wore a green satin shirt modified to make the stumps of his arms look like fins. His act consisted of his rolling a cigarette in the trough between his nose and lip, lighting it by curling one stalk from the matchbook backward onto the flint.
    Like the rest of the crowd, Ginny drowned her horror in polite applause when at last the gray plumes shot from his nose. Over the PA there’d come a blast of scratchy trumpet as he smoked. Then everyone beat a quick retreat — everyone, that is, except for Stella. Leroy would bow for her for as long as she was willing to clap, until the barker told her to get lost.
    That was when they were young, of course, because in later years Leroy was gone, and not just Leroy but all the denizens of the Old West, who became “the disabled” or “Asian-Americans” or “First Peoples” and were moved on, fobbed off, put away, somewhere else. And in this renovation the hootchie-cootchie women were also driven underground. Ginny imagined them wandering the rainy streets — in their nugleejees, like wet moths.

    THE OLD WEST was replaced by various booths that urged civic improvement. In the new West, everyone recycled their newspapers and cans. The water district gave out low-flow inserts for people’s showerheads and the city demonstrated the newest in compost bins. Even the wildlife department came with brochures about the perils of DDT and a few mangy birds of prey, to which Stella shrieked, “Kaw! Kaw!” until the young woman on duty told her that if she was going to annoy the birds she’d have to go away.
    Ginny always insisted on being the one who drove because the fair, especially the fair, had a way of pumping Stella full of the black humors that made her manic and angry all at once. “Running on hi-test” was how Stella referred to these moods, which Stella traced back to Leroy but which Ginny suspected had more to do with the likelihood of her running into one of her ex-husbands. Sometimes it seemed that the fair existed just to give her husbands an excuse to knock each other around. More often than not, by the time the sky approached its purest dark, and the kids in safety-patrol bandoliers came through swinging their flashlights to herd the crowd home, one of the husbands would be towing Stella toward the car. Then Ginny would have to drive home while the two of them grappled in the back seat. Whenever a car pulled up behind, their bodies would flash as if a strobe light had hit them, lighting Ginny’s rearview mirror. They’d be engaged in some exotic form of either sex or