Happy Looking People

Michael Harper

Most of the time I feel like I end up places without knowing how I got there. My life is a series of decisions I don’t remember making. 

My wife comes into the room quickly. She eyeballs me from the doorway. She is always trying to catch me doing something. Drinking, watching porn, feverishly shoveling the children’s fruit snacks into my mouth, I don’t know exactly what. Since I’m simply sipping Iced Tea at the open window, she pretends to be looking for the girls’ backpacks. 

She lingers. I try ignoring her by looking out the window. She comes over and glances into the yard. 

“What are you looking at?”

“I’m watching the grass grow.”

She checks her phone while I respond. 

“I’m thinking about sending Matti to a therapist.”

“Why?”

“She’s depressed.”

“She’s taller than every boy in her class and has braces and acne. She’s not depressed. She’s a teenager.”

I know she doesn’t understand what I mean, but she gets mad when I explain myself. We have a unique relationship because we both think the other is an idiot. I’m right but try convincing an idiot they are an idiot. You would have a better chance convincing water it is wet.

“Everyone sees a therapist and everyone seems happy. Dorothy and her daughter see one and they go camping and work in the garden. It seems like they are always doing stuff together.”

“Is that how you show you are happy?”

“They look happy in the photos.”

“Are you sure the therapy is making them happy or could it be their happiness isn’t so happy and that’s why they need therapy.”

She looks up from her phone to make a sour face. Lately she’s started substituting words with facial expressions. She can do most emojis. She imitates them quite well. It’s incredibly efficient. “It won’t hurt to try.” She glances out the window again. “The grass needs cutting.”

After she leaves, I splash two glugs of vodka into my iced tea from a flask sized bottle I had hidden in the chair cushion. The melted ice and warming tea make a swampy mix with the vodka. It tastes like a damp log. I grow to like it after a few drinks. 

The girls launch themselves through the backdoor and into the yard. They don’t know I’m watching. Matti, the eldest, lectures Karen on the rules of some complicated role-playing game. I wonder if she is too old to be playing make-believe. Karen ignores her and does cartwheels. During each turn, her Pokémon shirt falls over her face.

“Karen! Karen! Stop! Listen! I’m an explorer and you’re my assistant, but you’re a dinosaur.”

“I’m a gymnast.”

“No. You’re a dinosaur.”

“I not playing that.”

“OK. OK. You’re a gymnast and I’m your coach.”

“OK.”

“Practice cartwheels.”

Karen continues doing cartwheels unperturbed. Matti stalks around her, arms crossed, yelling instructions which Karen ignores. I wonder if this is a healthy example of conflict management. 

I check my watch. 1:30. Only seven hours of Sunday until bedtime. I wish it were football season, so I had something to do.

I was an only child. During summer, my mother would kick me out of the house. All she ever said was, go play. I’d mope. Most of the time I lounged in the yard, starring at bees through the wisps of grass in the lawn. My childhood felt like it lasted forever. Now time passes so fast. It feels like the girls were born yesterday. 

The riding lawnmower is the only tool in my garage I ever use. My father always did home repairs himself but never let me help. He said it was too dangerous.  I could climb a tree to the frail top branches but helping change the car’s oil was suicide. 

The lawn mower is a power red. It’s impressive looking, like you could ride it into battle. I snort a key bump from my snuff tube. Then I slam my can of Diet Coke and sink it into the trash with a jump shot. I celebrate more than I would like to admit. Janice will make it seem like I am a holocaust denier for not using the recycling but whatever. She is crazy. She always finds things in the trash, even if I hide it in the bottom. She lives for catching me in the act and keeping lists of my misdeeds. 

I ride out of the garage. The afternoon sun stings my eyes. The rumble of the engine wraps me in a shroud of silence. My neighbor is out with his manual push mower. 

He waves. I want to flip him off, but I wave back. Most days he stops to tell me how much gas my lawn mower uses. I can’t hear him over the engine’s roar today. He has to stop every three feet and untangle fallen sticks from the blades. He always seems to be smiling though. 

I make inefficient triangles and circular designs, chasing the girls in at a menacing crawl. They scream and run away like their lives are in danger. Karen gets the hose out and douses me. I yell a little to abruptly about how she’s going to ruin my phone. It scares her. I apologize by chasing her again. 

Janice comes out and tells them to come inside. Their yelling is going to upset the neighbors, she says.   

Things feel tense until she leaves. I sneak a bump behind the shed. We are all being careful not to upset each other. It feels like if one beam goes, it will trigger a reaction, and everything will come crumbling down. Then we’ll be buried under the rubble of our lives. Everything seems precariously balanced, constantly threatened, always vulnerable. My life feels over. Like I already lived. The highlights burning in my memory like a house on fire. 

Now, I’m sludging through years of purgatory. I guess it was a choice, or choices, but when I look at the faces of my girls it feels like fate. There can’t be a world where they don’t exist.

I mow until nighfall, tracing figure-eights over previously shorn blades of grass. I scalp the earth in a few patches, leaving bald spots. Dusk begins settling like a magic spell across the sky. 

Judith yells from the kitchen window, “Put that damn thing away. Come tell the girls goodnight. They just got out of the bath.”  

I cut the engine. Silence hits me like a dagger. It fills me from a piercing point. It’s alive. The silence chirps, and bangs, and buzzes with activity. I feel invincible as the darkness descends. I could speak an ancient language, walk across liquid surfaces, séance with the dead. I take a quick bump before heading inside. 

In the kitchen I pour a vodka water with lime before heading to the girls’ room. They could both have their own bedrooms but prefer to share. They fight constantly but know each other more than they ever wanted. They share an acute fear of isolation. Both signed an uneasy pact to hold onto each other as the world tries whipping them into space. 

“Roooooooaaaaaaar!”

They scream as I rush into the room. I attack their bed, tossing pillows and blankets and teddy bears like confetti. I’m careful not to spill my drink. They scramble. Karen jaunts just outside my grasp. Matti hides under the bed, trying to stifle her laughs in her hand. I swoop down like a falcon and snatch Karen. She screams like my hands are coals. I grab Matti’s feet and pull her from under the bed. She clings to the bedpost by her fingernails. They both yell for help, screaming their mom’s name and hollering for the police. 

I clutch them to me, holding them fast to my chest. Their freshly shampooed hair smells like lavender. I dig my nose deep into the fragrance. I wish it would suffocate me. 

I nibble at their necks and ears. They squirm and giggle.

“Let us go!”

“Under one condition.” I steal a sip from my drink.

“Fine.”

“You don’t know what my condition is.”

“What is it?”

“I will let you go, but only if you agree to get into bed and close your eyes and be quiet and go to sleep.”

They giggle quietly. “OK.”

I tentatively release them. They jump away and then turn on me. Matti grabs my head in a front lock. She’s strong enough to cause real damage now. Karen jumps on me. Her left foot plants itself into my crotch causing me to almost throw up. I curl into the fetal position. They pound on me a bit before I surrender.

“I give up.”

“Never,” screams a blood thirsty Matti.

“Under one conditioner,” says Karen.

Matti kicks me hard in the back.

“OK. OK. What?”

“You read us Princess Potty Pants,” demands Karen.

“Yeah. And you have to really try and do the voices.”

“Deal.”

We curl up in bed and I open the book. Judith checks in on us. I hide my drink on the far side of the bed. She scowls and ducks out. After 15 pages I announce to a chorus of complaints it is time for bed.

“Goodnight. I love you.”

I switch off the lights and only hear the hissing of tiny whispers.

Judith is drinking red wine and watching someone build a homemade garden box on Youtube. Neither of us can watch the news. That requires a quotient of empathy we can’t afford. 

“Looks interesting,” I say, while refilling my glass. 

She nods and slurps from her wine. I go to the study and plug my phone into the stereo. I hit a quick bump and play Beast of Burden. 

The music hits me like an avalanche. I drink deep. My body unlocks. I turn up the volume and let all the chemical reactions colliding in my blood move me.

I’m a forest on fire. A scream from an eagle. A raindrop in a thunderstorm, whipped viciously through the sky. 

As a self-employed contractor I’m usually working in different parts of the country. I’ll spend the week in random American cities and then fly home for the weekend. There’s something magical about living in a hotel. The bed makes itself. Dust never accumulates. The trash never needs to be taken out. All the mundane parts of life vanish. I never need to clean the dishes or peel the carrots. Think how many hours of life are spent slicing, dicing, and chopping produce. All of that is eliminated. I’m free. I’m finished with my project early so I’m spending a few weeks postponing paperwork and cashing a few extra checks. 

I could retire, but I like the travel. The work can also be interesting. All cities have started to look the same though. Everybody wants coffee shops and microbreweries. I’m a little too old to be comfortable anywhere that’s cool. 

I stick to dives. Dark, windowless places which smell like fried food and cigarettes, even though smoking was banned a decade ago. This is where the cities true character is revealed. Or part of it. The part I like. Not the shiny, happy young professionals eating Asian street food and buying organic hibiscus hand lotions. 

Men in crumbling suit jackets sit alone, looking forlornly at their disappearing lagers. Couples sit in silence. Women with bushy haircuts look at their husbands while the men sternly watch the baseball game on TV. 

The only single girl, a stocky blonde with breasts bursting out of a push-up halter top, sits next to me. 

“Hey, honey.”

“Hey.”

“You look lonely. Want some company?”

When I was younger and thought of myself as attractive, I would have been offended. The idea of paying for love was beneath me. Now, I feel old and soft and ugly. There’s not much to be defensive about. 

We go back to my hotel. She’s chatty in a funny way. She talks incessantly about things I’ve never heard about. Tik-tok. Burning face masks. Colonic cleanses. Some of it sounds incredibly cheap and some incredibly expensive. 

She chews gum while she sips bourbon in my room. I feel like I understand her. She quotes pop song lyrics. Each line shakes my heart like a cat in a burlap sack. It all has so much meaning. We chop up an eight ball and take lines intermittently. She lets me do a line off her breasts. It’s not sexual. More like a junior high dare. We both laugh and she changes the music. Every time she plays a new song, she tells me to really listen. It feels like we’re in a palace. We throw pillows. She tells me about her boyfriend and her period. It feels endless and dreamlike.

As dawn breaks through the window, she spreads on the bed with her eyes closed and asks if I want to do it. The phrasing is distasteful. What we have culminating in something so crass and mortal makes it feel soiled. I will still do it. She purrs. I watch the sun rise between the skyscrapers and consider killing us both.

I lift a crumbling pile of coke to my nose and snort like a vacuum. The sun burns the nighttime out of the city. My heart is bursting. It feels like its rising with the sun. Everything inside me is tight and squeezed. I get light-headed and feel myself falling. Everything goes black.

My doctor reminded me that three heart attacks by age 38 is bad. I’m glad I pay him much. They called Judith while I was unconscious. I’m not sure how much they told her. I’m still unsure of what happened. All I remember is waking up in a hospital bed on a ventilator. 

When I got home, I was greeted by a pretty cliché intervention. A few friends told me they loved me, but I needed help. Judith cried and then gave me a firm lecture on the ways I had hurt her. I agreed to go to rehab because you can’t tell everyone you love no at the same time. 

Rehab was nice. It’s how I always imagined retirement. Soft music. Water babbling lightly in the background. Lots of robes. There is a lightness there. They keep the world at bay, tiptoe around it. News is strictly forbidden. It’s also a great place to feel better about your own problems. Some of these people are really messed up. Their benders and abuses and traumas and betrayals make me look like I’ve really got my life together. 

Judith and I talked more in my first weeks back then we had in years. I told her stories about the people in my therapy group. What they had been through. What they had done to people they loved. Together they illustrated the cycle of violence we wage against ourselves in a profound way. 

She listened intently. Not checking her phone or interrupting. Afterwards, she said it was nice to really talk. We even tried having sex. My body wasn’t ready. Judith was reassuring. She told me we could get pills and that I would heal with time. 

That’s where I’m at.

I’m playing Uno in a tent in the backyard and trying not to check my watch every two minutes. Matti is cheating. The girls concentrate on the game. Judith ducks in and takes a photo of us occasionally. We all stop and look up and smile. 

I want there to be meaning. A reason I am sitting here, grinning and bearing it. But there is no why. My high school physics teacher told me that. He said, if you stop and ask why you will never get anywhere. It’s an itch that is better ignored. We can explain what happens and how but why is a fruitless endeavor. There is no why. No reason. It is just stuff happening inside a set of rules. I’m sitting here for no purpose besides ones I make for myself. And I am running out of ideas.

I feel like I died. Like I’ve already lived. Again. My life is over. At least the future is still coming. That gives me some hope.