Brandy inhales, winces. She lifts the neckline again and takes out a Methadone disket from between her breasts, bites off half of it and drops the rest back inside.
The fitting room is hot and small with the two of us and that huge civil engineering project of a dress packed together.
Brandy says, “Darvon.” She says, “Quick, please.” And she snaps her fingers.
I fish out another red and pink capsule, and she gulps it dry.
“This guy,” Brandy says, “he asks me to get in his car, to talk, just to talk, and he asks if I have anything I’d like to say that maybe I was too afraid to tell any of the child service people.”
The dress is coming apart, the silk opening at every seam, the tulle busting out, and Brandy says, “This guy, this detective, I tell him, ‘No,’ and he says, ‘Good.’ He says he likes a kid who can keep a secret.”
At a train wreck you could pick up pencils two thousand at a time. Light bulbs still perfect and not rattling inside. Key blanks by the hundreds. The pickup truck could only hold so much, and by then other trucks would be arrived with people shoveling grain into car backseats and people watching us with our piles of too much as we decided what we needed more, the ten thousand shoelaces or one thousand jars of celery salt. The five hundred fan belts all one size we didn’t need but could re-sell, or the double-A batteries. The case of shortening we couldn’t use up before it went rancid or the three hundred cans of hairspray.
“The police guy,” Brandy says, and every wire is rising out of her tight yellow silk, “he puts his hand on me, right up the leg of my shorts, and he says we don’t have to re-open the case. We don’t have to cause my family any more problems.” Brandy says, “This detective says the police want to arrest my father for suspicion. He can stop them, he says. He says, it’s all up to me.”
Brandy inhales and the dress shreds, she breathes and every breath makes her naked in more places.
“What did I know,” she says. “I was fifteen. I didn’t know anything.”
In a hundred torn holes, bare skin shows through.
At the train wreck, my father said security would be here any minute.
How I heard this was: we’d be rich. We’d be secure. But what he really meant was we’d have to hurry or we’d get caught and lose it all.
Of course I remember.
“The police guy,” Brandy says, “he was young, twenty-one or twenty-two. He wasn’t some dirty old man. It wasn’t horrible,” she says, “but it wasn’t love.”
With more of the dress torn, the skeleton springs apart in different places.
“Mostly,” Brandy says, “it made me confused for a long time.”
That’s my growing up, those kind of train wrecks. Our only dessert from the time I was six to the time I was nine was butterscotch pudding. It turns out I loathe butterscotch. Even the color. Especially the color. And the taste. And smell.
How I met Manus was when I was eighteen a great-looking guy came to the door of my parents’ house and asked, did we ever hear back from my brother after he ran away?
The guy was a little older, but not out of the ballpark. Twenty-five, tops. He gave me a card that said Manus Kelley. Independent Special Contract Vice Operative. The only thing else I noticed was he didn’t wear a wedding ring. He said, “You know, you look a lot like your brother.” He had a glorious smile and said, “What’s your name?”
“Before we go back to the car,” Brandy says, “I have to tell you something about your friend. Mr. White Westinghouse.”
Formerly Mr. Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Denver Omelet, formerly independent special contract vice operative Manus Kelley. I do the homework: Manus is thirty years old. Brandy’s twenty-four. When Brandy was sixteen I was fifteen. When Brandy was sixteen, maybe Manus was already part of our lives.
I don’t want to hear this.
The most beautiful ancient perfect dress is gone. The silk and tulle have slipped, dropped, slumped to the fitting room floor, and the wire and boning is broken and sprung away, leaving just some red marks already fading on Brandy’s skin with Brandy left standing way too close to me in just her underwear.
“It’s funny,” Brandy says, “but this isn’t the first time I’ve destroyed somebody’s beautiful dress,” and a big Aubergine Dreams eye winks at me. Her breath and skin feel warm, she’s that close.
“The night I ran away from home,” Brandy says, “I burned almost every stitch of clothing my family had hanging on the clothesline.”
Brandy knows about me, or she doesn’t know. She’s confessing her heart, or she’s teasing me. If she knows, she could be lying to me about Manus. If she doesn’t know, then the man I love is a freaky creepy sexual predator.
Either Manus or Brandy is being a sleazy liar to me, me, the paragon of virtue and truth here. Manus or Brandy, I don’t know who to hate.
Me and Manus or Me and Brandy. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
There had to be some better way to kill Brandy. To set me free. Some quick permanent closure. Some kind of cross-fire I could walk away from. Evie hates me by now. Brandy looks just like I used to. Manus is still so in love with Brandy he’d follow her anywhere, even if he’s not sure why. All I’d have to do is get Brandy cross-haired in front of Evie’s rifle.
Bathroom talk.
Brandy’s suit jacket with its sanitary little waist and mod three-quarter sleeves is still folded on the aquamarine countertop beside the big clamshell sink. I pick up the jacket, and my souvenir from the future falls out. It’s a postcard of clean, sun-bleached 1962 skies and an opening day Space Needle. You could look out the bathroom’s porthole windows and see what’s become of the future. Overrun with Goths wearing sandals and soaking lentils at home, the future I wanted is gone. The future I was promised. Everything I expected. The way everything was supposed to turn out. Happiness and peace and love and comfort.
When did the future, Ellis once wrote on the back of a postcard, switch from being a promise to a threat?
I tuck the postcard between the vaginoplasty brochures and the labiaplasty handouts stuck between the pages of the Miss Rona book. On the cover is a satellite photo of Hurricane Blonde just off the West Coast of her face. The blonde is crowded with pearls and what could be diamonds sparkle here and there.
She looks very happy. I put the book back in the inside pocket of Brandy’s jacket. I pick up the cosmetics and drugs scattered across the countertops and I put them away. Sun comes through the porthole windows at a low, low angle, and the post office will be closing soon. There’s still Evie’s insurance money to pick up. At least a half million dollars, I figure. What you can do with all that money, I don’t know, but I’m sure I’ll find out.
Brandy’s lapsed into major hair emergency status so I shake her.
Brandy’s Aubergine Dreams eyes flicker, blink, flicker, squint.
Her hair, it’s gotten all flat in the back.
Brandy comes up on one elbow. “You know,” she says, “I’m on drugs so it’s all right if I tell you this.” Brandy looks at me bent over her, offering a hand up. “I have to tell you,” Brandy says, “but I do love you.” She says, “I can’t tell how this is for you, but I want us to be a family.”
My brother wants to marry me.
I give Brandy a hand up. Brandy leans on me, Brandy, she leans on the edge of the countertop. She says, “This wouldn’t be a sister thing.” Brandy says, “I still have some days left in my Real Life Training.”
Stealing drugs, selling drugs, buying clothes, renting luxury cars, taking clothes back, ordering blender drinks, this isn’t what I’d call Real Life, not by a long shot.
Brandy’s ring-beaded hands open to full flower and spread the fabric of her skirt across her front. “I still have all my original equipment,” she says.
The big hands are still patting and smoothing Brandy’s crotch as she turns sideways to the mirror and looks at her profile. “It was
supposed to come off after a year, but then I met you,” she says. “I had my bags packed in the Congress Hotel for weeks just hoping you’d come to rescue me.” Brandy turns her other side to the mirror and searches. “I just loved you so much, I thought maybe it’s not too late?”
Brandy spreads pot gloss across her top lip and then her bottom lip, blots her lips on a tissue, and drops the big Plumbago kiss into the snail shell toilet. Brandy says with her new lips. “Any idea how to flush this thing?”
Hours I sat on that toilet, and no, I never saw how to flush it. I step out into the hallway so if Brandy wants to blab at me she’ll have to follow.
Brandy stumbles in the bathroom doorway where the tile meets the hallway carpet. Her one shoe, the heel is broken. Her stocking is run where it rubbed the doorframe. She’s grabbed at a towel rack for balance and chipped her nail polish.
Shining anal queen of perfection, she says, “Fuck.”
Princess Princess, she yells after me, “It’s not that I really want to be a woman.” She yells, “Wait up!” Brandy yells, “I’m only doing this because it’s just the biggest mistake I can think to make. It’s stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I’m wrong. That’s why I have to go through with it.”
Brandy says, “Don’t you see? Because we’re so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes.” Brandy says, “I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I’ll have to break out and live a real life.”
Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the edge of the world.
Like Fleming and his bread mold.
“Our real discoveries come from chaos,” Brandy yells, “from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
Her imperial voice everywhere in the house, she yells, “You do not walk away from me when I take a minute to explain myself!”
Her example is a woman who climbs a mountain, there’s no rational reason for climbing that hard, and to some people it’s a stupid folly, a misadventure, a mistake. A mountain climber, maybe she starves and freezes, exhausted and in pain for days, and climbs all the way to the top. And maybe she’s changed by that, but all she has to show for it is her story.
“But me,” Brandy says, still in the bathroom doorway, still looking at her chipped nail polish, “I’m making the same mistake only so much worse, the pain, the money, the time, and being dumped by my old friends, and in the end my whole body is my story.”
A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don’t want one, it’s the ultimate form of self-mutilation.
She says, “Not that it’s bad being a woman. This might be wonderful, if I wanted to be a woman. The point is,” Brandy says, “being a woman is the last thing I want. It’s just the biggest mistake I could think to make.”
So it’s the path to the greatest discovery.
It’s because we’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and same two arms and two legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want.
“My first idea was to have one arm and one leg amputated, the left ones, or the right ones,” she looks at me and shrugs, “but no surgeon would agree to help me.”
She says, “I considered AIDS, for the experience, but then everybody had AIDS and it looked so mainstream and trendy.” She says, “That’s what the Rhea sisters told my birth family, I’m pretty sure. Those bitches can be so possessive.”
Brandy pulls a pair of white gloves out of her handbag, the kind of gloves with a white pearl button on the inside of each wrist. She works each hand into a glove and does the button. White is not a good color choice. In white, her hands look transplanted from a giant cartoon mouse.
“Then I thought, a sex change,” she says, “a sexual reassignment surgery. The Rheas,” she says, “they think they’re using me, but really I’m using them for their money, for their thinking they were in control of me and this was all their idea.”
Brandy lifts her foot to look at the broken heel, and she sighs. Then she reaches down to take off the other shoe.
“None of this was the Rhea sisters’ pushing. It wasn’t. It was just the biggest mistake I could make. The biggest challenge I could give myself.”
Brandy snaps the heel off her one good shoe, leaving her feet in two ugly flats.
She says, “You have to jump into disaster with both feet.”
She throws the broken heels into the bathroom trash.
“I’m not straight, and I’m not gay,” she says. “I’m not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure.”
A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die.
“When I met you,” she says, “I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be.”
I start down the stairs. Brandy in her new flats, me in my total confusion, we get to the foyer, and through the drawing room doors you can hear Mr. Parker’s long, deep voice belching over and over, “That’s right. Just do that.”
Brandy and me, we stand outside the doors a moment. We pick the lint and toilet paper off each other, and I fluff up the flat back of Brandy’s hair. Brandy pulls her pantyhose up her legs a little and tugs down the front of her jacket.
The postcard and the book tucked inside her jacket, the dick tucked in her pantyhose, you can’t tell either one’s there.
We throw open the drawing room double doors and there’s Mr. Parker and Ellis. Mr. Parker’s pants are around his knees, his bare hairy ass is stuck up in the air. The rest of his bareness is stuck in Ellis’s face. Ellis Island, formerly Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelley.
“Oh, yes. Just do that. That’s so good.”
Ellis’s getting an A in job performance, his hands are cupped around Parker’s football scholarship power-clean bare buns, pulling everything he can swallow into his square-jawed Nazi poster boy face. Ellis grunting and gagging, making his comeback from forced retirement.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The man at General Delivery who asked to see my ID pretty much had to take my word for it. The picture on my driver’s license might as well be Brandy’s. This means a lot of writing on scraps of paper for me to explain how I look now. This whole time I’m in the post office, I’m looking sideways to see if I’m a cover girl up on the FBI’s most wanted poster board.
Almost half a million dollars is about twenty-five pounds of ten-and twenty-dollar bills in a box. Plus, inside with the money is a pink stationery note from Evie saying blah, blah, blah, I will kill you if I ever see you again. And I couldn’t be happier.
Before Brandy can see who it’s addressed to, I claw off the label.
One part of being a model is my phone number was unlisted so I wasn’t in any city for Brandy to find. I was nowhere. And now we’re driving back to Evie. To Brandy’s fate. The whole way back, me and Ellis, we’re writing postcards from the future and slipping them out the car windows as we go south on Interstate 5 at a mile and a half every minute. Three miles closer to Evie and her rifle every two minutes. Ninety miles closer to fate every hour.
Ellis writes: Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
The electric window of the Lincoln Town Car hums down a half inch, and Ellis drops the card out into the I-5 slipstream.
I write: You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.
Ellis writes: When you don’t share your problems, you resent hearing the problems
of other people.
I write: All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Jump to us reading the real estate section of the newspaper, looking for big open houses. We always do this in a new town. We sit at a nice sidewalk café and drink cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles and read the paper, then Brandy calls all the realtors to find which open houses have people still living in them. Ellis makes a list of houses to hit tomorrow.
We check into a nice hotel, and we take a cat nap. After midnight Brandy wakes me up with a kiss. She and Ellis are going out to sell the stock we picked up in Seattle. Probably they’re screwing. I don’t care.
“And no,” Brandy says. “Miss Alexander will not be calling the Rhea sisters while she’s in town. Anymore, she’s determined the only vagina worth having is the kind you buy yourself.”
Ellis is standing in the open doorway to the hotel hallway, looking like a superhero that I want to crawl in to bed and save me. Still, since Seattle, he’s been my brother. And you can’t be in love with your brother.
Brandy says, “You want the TV remote control?” Brandy turns on the television, and there’s Evie scared and desperate with her big pumped-up rainbow hair in every shade of blonde. Evelyn Cottrell, Inc., everybody’s favorite writeoff, is stumbling through the studio audience in her sequined dress begging folks to eat her meat by-products.
Brandy changes channels.
Brandy changes channels.
Brandy changes channels.
Evie is everywhere after midnight, offering what she’s got on a silver tray. The studio audience ignores her, watching themselves on the monitor, trapped in the reality loop of watching themselves watch themselves, trying the way we do every time we look in a mirror to figure out exactly who that person is.
That loop that never ends. Evie and me, we did this infomercial. How could I be so dumb? We’re so totally trapped in ourselves.