The photographer in my head says: Give me patience.
Flash.
Give me control.
Flash.
The situation is I have half a face.
Inside my bandages, my face still bleeds tiny little spots of blood onto the wads of cotton. One doctor, the one making rounds every morning who checks my dressing, he says my wound is still weeping. That’s his word.
I still can’t talk.
I have no career.
I can only eat baby food. Nobody will ever look at me like I’ve won a big prize ever again.
nothing, I write on my pad.
nothing’s wrong.
“You haven’t mourned,” Sister Katherine says. “You need to have a good cry and then get on with your life. You’re being too calm about this.”
I write:
don’t make me laugh. my face, I write, the doctor sez my wound will weep.
Still, at least somebody had noticed. This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.
The instant the accident happened, I knew I would die if I didn’t take the next exit off the freeway, turn right on Northwest Gower, go twelve blocks, and turn into the La Paloma Memorial Hospital Emergency Room parking lot. I parked. I took my keys and my bag and I walked. The glass doors slid aside before I could see myself reflected in them. The crowd inside, all the people waiting with broken legs and choking babies, they all slid aside, too, when they saw me.
After that, the intravenous morphine. The tiny operating room manicure scissors cut my dress up. The flesh-tone little patch panties. The police photos.
The detective, the one who searched my car for bone fragments, the guy who’d seen all those people get their heads cut off in half-open car windows, he comes back one day and says there’s nothing left to find. Birds, seagulls, maybe magpies, too. They got into the car where it was parked at the hospital, through the broken window. The magpies ate all of what the detective calls the soft tissue evidence. The bones they probably carried away.
“You know, miss,” he says, “to break them on rocks. For the marrow.”
On the pad, with the pencil, I write:
ha, ha, ha.
Jump to just before my bandages come off, when a speech therapist says I should get down on my knees and thank God for leaving my tongue in my head, unharmed. We sit in her cinderblock office with half the room filled by her steel desk between us, and the therapist, she teaches me how a ventriloquist makes a dummy talk. You see, the ventriloquist can’t let you see his mouth move. He can’t really use his lips, so he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth to make words.
Instead of a window, the therapist has a poster of a kitten covered in spaghetti above the words:
Accentuate the Positive
She says that if you can’t make a certain sound without using your lips, substitute a similar sound, the therapist says; for instance, use the sound eth instead of the sound eff. The context in which you use the sound will make you understandable.
“I’d rather be thishing,” the therapist says. then go thishing, I write.
“No,” she says, “repeat.”
My throat is always raw and dry even after a million liquids through straws all day. The scar tissue is rippled hard and polished around my unharmed tongue.
The therapist says, “I’d rather be thishing.”
I say, “Salghrew jfwoiew fjfowi sdkifj.”
“No, not that way,” the therapist says. “You’re not doing it right.”
I say, “Solfjf gjoie ddd oslidjf?”
She says, “No, that’s not right, either.”
She looks at her watch.
“Digri vrior gmjgi g giel,” I say.
“You’ll need to practice a lot, but on your own time,” she says. “Now, again.”
I say, “Jrogier fi fkgoewir mfofeinf fcfd.”
She says, “Good! Great! See how easy?”
On my pad with my pencil, I write:
fuck off.
Jump to the day they cut off the bandages.
You don’t know what to expect, but every doctor and nurse and intern and orderly, janitor and cook in the hospital stopped by for a peek from the doorway, and if you caught them they’d bark, Congratulations, the corners of their mouths spread wide apart and trembling in a stiff, watery smile. Bug eyed. That’s my word for it. And I held up the same cardboard sign again and again that told them:
thank you.
And then I ran away. This is after my new cotton crepe sundress arrives from Espre. Sister Katherine stood over me all morning with a curling iron until my hair was this big butter crème frosting hairdo, this big off-the-face hairdo. Then Evie brought some make up and did my eyes. I put on my spicy new dress and couldn’t wait to start sweating. This whole summer, I hadn’t seen a mirror or if I did I never realized the reflection was me. I hadn’t seen the police photos. When Evie and Sister Katherine were done, I say, “De foil iowa fog geoff.”
And Evie says, “You’re welcome.”
Sister Katherine says, “But you just ate lunch.”
It’s clear enough, nobody understands me here.
I say, “Kong wimmer nay pee golly.”
And Evie says, “Yeah, these are your shoes, but I’m not hurting them any.”
And Sister Katherine says, “No, no mail yet, but we can write to prisoners after you’ve had your nap, dear.”
They left. And. I left, alone. And. How bad could it be, my face?
And sometimes being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with piercings and tattoos and brandings and scarification…What I mean is, attention is attention.
Going outside is the first time I feel I’ve missed something. I mean, a whole summer had just disappeared. All those pool parties and lying around on metal-flake speedboat bows. Catching rays. Finding guys with convertibles. I get that all the picnics and softball games and concerts are just sort of trickled down into a few snapshots that Evie won’t have developed until around Thanksgiving.
Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It’s going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven’t played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French’s Mustard, Rice A Roni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention.
All that color. A whole shift in the beauty standard so that no one thing really stands out.
The total being less than the sum of its parts.
All that color all in one place.
Except for that name-brand product rainbow, there’s nothing else to look at. When I look at people, all I can see is the back of everybody’s head. Even if I turn super fast, all I can catch is somebody’s ear turning away. And folks are talking to God.
“Oh, God,” they say. “Did you see that?”
And, “Was that a mask? Christ, it’s a bit early for Halloween.”
Everybody is very busy reading the labels on French’s Mustard and Rice A Roni.
So I take a turkey.
I don’t know why. I don’t have any money, but I take a turkey. I dig the big frozen turkeys around, those big flesh-tone lumps of ice in the freezer bin. I dig around until I find the biggest turkey, and I heft it up baby style in its yellow plastic netting.
I haul myself up to the front of the store, right through the check stands, and nobody stops me. Nobody’s even looking. They’re all reading those tabloid newspapers as if there’s hidden gold there.
“Sejgfn di ofo utnbg,” I say. “Nei wucj iswisn sdnsud.”
Nobody looks.
“EVSF UYYB IUH,” I say in my best ventriloquist voice.
Nobody even talks. Maybe just the clerks talk. Do
you have two pieces of I.D.? they’re asking people writing checks.
“Fgjrn iufnv si vuv,” I say. “Xidi cniwuw sis sacnc!”
Then it is, it’s right then a boy says, “Look!”
Everybody who’s not looking and not talking stops breathing.
The little boy says, “Look Mom, look over there! That monster’s stealing food!”
Everybody gets all shrunken up with embarrassment. All their heads drop down into their shoulders the way they’d look on crutches. They’re reading tabloid headlines harder than ever.
Monster Girl Steals Festive Holiday Bird
And there I am, deep fried in my cotton crepe dress, a twenty-five pound turkey in my arms, the turkey sweating, my dress almost transparent. My nipples are rock hard against the yellow-netted ice in my arms. Me under my butter crème frosting hairdo. Nobody looking at me as if I’ve won a big anything.
A hand comes down and slaps the little boy, and the boy starts to wail.
The boy’s wailing the way you cry if you’ve done nothing wrong but you got punished anyway. The sun’s setting outside. Inside, everything’s dead except this little voice screaming over and over: Why did you hit me? I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me? What did I do?
I took the turkey. I walked as fast as I could back to La Paloma Memorial Hospital. It was almost dark.
The whole time I’m hugging the turkey, I’m telling myself: turkeys. Seagulls. Magpies.
Birds.
Birds ate my face.
Back in the hospital, coming down the hallway toward me is Sister Katherine leading a man and his I.V. stand, the man all wrapped in gauze and hung with drain tubes and plastic bags of yellow and red fluids leaking into and out of him.
Birds ate my face.
From closer and closer, Sister Katherine shouts, “Yoo-hoo! I have someone special here you’d just love to meet!”
Birds ate my face.
Between me and them is the speech therapist office, and when I go to duck inside, there’s Brandy Alexander for the third time. The queen of everything good and kind is wearing this sleeveless Versace kind of tank dress with this season’s overwhelming feel of despair and corrupt resignation. Body conscious yet humiliated. Buoyant but crippled. The queen supreme is the most beautiful anything I’ve ever seen so I just vogue there to watch from the doorway.
“Men,” the therapist says, “stress the adjective when they speak.” The therapist says, “For instance, a man would say, ‘You are so attractive, today’.”
Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany’s and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.
“A woman would say, ‘You are so attractive, today’,” the therapist says. “Now, you, Brandy. You say it. Stress the modifier, not the adjective.”
Brandy Alexander looks her Burning Blueberry eyes at me in the doorway and says, “Posing girl, you are so Godawful ugly. Did you let an elephant sit on your face or what?”
Brandy’s voice, I barely hear what she says. At that instant, I just adore Brandy so much. Everything about her feels as good as being beautiful and looking in a mirror. Brandy is my instant royal family. My only everything to live for.
I go, “Cfoieb svns ois,” and I pile the cold, wet turkey into the speech therapist’s lap, her sitting pinned under twenty-five pounds of dead meat in her roll-around leather desk chair.
From closer down the hallway, Sister Katherine is yelling, “Yoo-hoo!”
“Mriuvn wsi sjaoi aj,” I go, and wheel the therapist and her chair into the hallway. I say, “Jownd winc sm fdo dcncw.”
The speech therapist, she’s smiling up at me and says, “You don’t have to thank me, it’s just my job is all.”
The nun’s arrived with the man and his I.V. stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who’d be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life.
I slam the office door and lock myself inside with Brandy Alexander. There’s the speech therapist’s notebook on her desk, and I grab it.
save me, I write, and wave it in Brandy’s face. I write:
please.
Jump to Brandy Alexander’s hands. This always starts with her hands. Brandy Alexander puts a hand out, one of those hairy pig-knuckled hands with the veins of her arm crowded and squeezed to the elbow with bangle bracelets of every color. Just by herself, Brandy Alexander is such a shift in the beauty standard that no one thing stands out. Not even you.
“So, girl,” Brandy says. “What all happened to your face?”
Birds.
I write:
birds. birds ate my face.
And I start to laugh.
Brandy doesn’t laugh. Brandy says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
And I’m still laughing.
i was driving on the freeway, I write.
And I’m still laughing.
someone shot a 30-caliber bullet from a rifle.
the bullet tore my entire jawbone off my face.
Still laughing.
i came to the hospital, I write.
i did not die.
Laughing.
they couldn’t put my jaw back because seagulls had eaten it.
And I stop laughing.
“Girl, your handwriting is terrible,” Brandy says. “Now tell me what else.”
And I start to cry.
what else, I write, is i have to eat baby food.
i can’t talk.
i have no career.
i have no home.
my fiancé left me.
nobody will look at me.
all my clothes, my best friend ruined them.
I’m still crying.
“What else?” Brandy says. “Tell me everything.”
a boy, I write.
a little boy in the supermarket called me a monster.
Those Burning Blueberry eyes look right at me the way no eyes have all summer. “Your perception is all fucked up,” Brandy says. “All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened.”
She says, “You can’t base your life on the past or the present.”
Brandy says, “You have to tell me about your future.”
Brandy Alexander, she stands up on her gold lamé leg-hold trap shoes. The queen supreme takes a jeweled compact out of her clutch bag and snaps the compact open to look at the mirror inside.
“That therapist,” those Plumbago lips say, “the speech therapist can be so stupid about these situations.”
The big jeweled arm muscles of Brandy sit me down in the seat still hot from her ass, and she holds the compact so I can see inside. Instead of face powder, it’s full of white capsules. Where there should be a mirror, there’s a close up photo of Brandy Alexander smiling and looking terrific.
“They’re Vicodins, dear,” she says. “It’s the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.”
She says, “Dig in. Help yourself.”
The thin and eternal goddess that she is, Brandy’s picture smiles up at me over a sea of painkillers. This is how I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.
“Now,” those Plumbago lips say, “You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night.” That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me.
“When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Jump to the Canadian border.
Jump to t
he three of us in a rented Lincoln Town Car, waiting to drive south from Vancouver, British Columbia, into the United States, waiting, with Signore Romeo in the driver’s seat, waiting with Brandy next to him in the front, waiting, with me alone in the back.
“The police have microphones,” Brandy tells us.
The plan is if we make it through the border, we’ll drive south to Seattle where there are nightclubs and dance clubs where go-go boys and go-go girls will line up to buy the pockets of my purse clean. We have to be quiet because the police, they have microphones on both sides of the border, United States and Canadian. This way, they can listen in on people waiting to cross. We could have Cuban cigars. Fresh fruit. Diamonds. Diseases. Drugs, Brandy says. Brandy, she tells us to shut up a mile before the border, and we wait in line, quiet.
Brandy unwinds the yards and yards of brocade scarf around her head. Brandy, she shakes her hair down her back and ties the scarf over her shoulders to hide her torpedo cleavage. Brandy switches to simple gold earrings. She takes off her pearls and puts on a little chain with a gold cross. This is a moment before the border guard.
“Your nationalities?” the border-guard guy sitting inside his little window, behind his computer terminal with his clipboard and his blue suit behind his mirrored sunglasses, and behind his gold badge says.
“Sir,” Brandy says, and her new voice is as bland and drawled out as grits without salt or butter. She says, “Sir, we are citizens of the United States of America, what used to be called the greatest country on earth until the homosexuals and child pornographers—”
“Your names?” says the border guy.
Brandy leans across Alfa to look up at the border guy, “My husband,” she says, “is an innocent man.”
“Your name, please,” he says, no doubt looking up our license plate, finding it’s a rental car, rented in Billings, Montana, three weeks ago, maybe even finding the truth about who we really are. Maybe finding bulletin after bulletin from all over western Canada about three nut cases stealing drugs at big houses up for sale. Maybe all this is spooling onto his computer screen, maybe none of it. You never know.
“I am married,” Brandy is almost yelling to get his attention. “I am the wife of the Reverend Scooter Alexander,” she says, still half laid across Alfa’s lap.