Invisible Monsters

  “And this,” she says and draws the invisible line from her smile to Alfa, “this is my son-in-law, Seth Thomas.” Her big hand flies toward me in the backseat. “This,” she says, “is my daughter, Bubba-Joan.”

  Some days, I hate it when Brandy changes our lives without warning. Sometimes, twice in one day, you have to live up to a new identity. A new name. New relationships. Handicaps. It’s hard to remember who I started this road trip being.

  No doubt, this is the kind of stress the constantly mutating AIDS virus must feel.

  “Sir?” the border guy says to Seth, formerly Alfa Romeo, formerly Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Wells Fargo, formerly Eberhard Faber. The guard says, “Sir, are you bringing any purchases back with you into the United States?”

  My pointed little toe of my shoe reaches under the front seat and gooses my new husband. The details of everything have us surrounded. The mud flats left by low tide are just over there, with little waves arriving one after another. The flower beds on our other side are planted to spell out words you can only read from a long ways off. Up close, it’s just so many red and yellow wax begonias.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never watched our Christian Healing Network?” Brandy says. She fiddles with the little gold cross at her throat. “If you just watched one show, you’d know that God in his wisdom has made my son-in-law a mute, and he cannot speak.”

  The border guy keyboards some quick strokes. This could be “CRIME” he’s typed. Or “DRUGS.” Or SHOOT. It could be SMUGGLERS. Or ARREST.

  “Not a word,” Brandy whispers next to Seth’s ear, “You talk and in Seattle, I’ll change you into Harvey Wallbanger.”

  The border guy says, “To admit you to the United States, I’m going to have to see your passports, please.”

  Brandy licks her lips wet and shining, her eyes moist and bright. Her brocade scarf slips low to reveal her cleavage as she looks up at the border guy and says, “Would you excuse us a moment.”

  Brandy sits back in her own seat, and Seth’s window hums all the way up.

  Brandy’s big torpedoes inhale big and then exhale. “Don’t anybody panic,” she says, and pops her lipstick open. She makes a kiss in the rearview mirror and pokes the lipstick around the edge of her big Plumbago mouth, trembling so much that her one big hand has to hold her lipstick hand steady.

  “I can get us back into the States,” she says, “but I’m going to need a condom and a breath mint.”

  Around her lipstick she says, “Bubba-Joan, be a sweet-heart and hand me up one of those Estraderms, will you?”

  Seth gives her the mint and a condom.

  She says, “Let’s guess how long it takes him to find a week’s supply of girl juice soaking into his ass.”

  She pops the lipstick shut and says, “Blot me, please.”

  I hand her up a tissue and an estrogen patch.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jump way back to one day outside Brumbach’s Department Store where people are stopped to watch somebody’s dog lift its leg on the Nativity scene, Evie and me included. Then the dog sits and rolls back on its spine, licks its own lumpy dog-flavored butthole, and Evie elbows me. People applaud and throw money.

  Then we’re inside Brumbach’s, testing lipsticks on the back of our hands, and I say, “Why is it dogs lick themselves?”

  “Just because they can…,” Evie says. “They’re not like people.”

  This is just after we’ve killed an eight-hour day in modeling school, looking at our skin in mirrors, so I’m like, “Evie, do not even kid yourself.”

  My passing grade in modeling school was just because Evie’d dragged down the curve. She’d wear shades of lipstick you’d expect to see around the base of a penis. She’d wear so much eye shadow you’d think she was a product testing animal. Just from her hair spray, there’s a hole in the ozone over the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy.

  This is way back before my accident when I thought my life was so good.

  At Brumbach’s Department Store, where we’d kill time after class, the whole ninth floor is furniture. Around the edges are display rooms: bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, dens, libraries, nurseries, family rooms, china hutches, home offices, all of them open to the inside of the store. The invisible fourth wall. All of them perfect, clean and carpeted, full of tasteful furniture, and hot with track lighting and too many lamps. There’s the hush of white noise from hidden speakers. Alongside the rooms, shoppers pass in the dim linoleum aisles that run between the display rooms and the down-lighted islands that fill the center of the floor, conversation pits and sofa suites grouped on area rugs with coordinated floor lamps and fake plants. Quiet islands of light and color in the darkness teeming with strangers.

  “It’s just like a sound stage,” Evie would say. “The little sets all ready for somebody to shoot the next episode. The studio audience watching you from the dark.”

  Customers would stroll by and there would be Evie and me sprawled on a pink canopy bed, calling for our horoscopes on her cell phone. We’d be curled on a tweedy sofa sectional, munching popcorn and watching our soaps on a console color television. Evie will pull up her T-shirt to show me another new belly button piercing. She’ll pull down the armhole of her blouse and show me the scars from her implants.

  “It’s too lonely at my real house,” Evie would say, “And I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.”

  She says, “I don’t hang around Brumbach’s for privacy.”

  At home in my apartment I’d have Manus with his magazines. His guy-on-guy porno magazines he had to buy for his job, he’d say. Over breakfast every morning, he’d show me glossy pictures of guys self-sucking. Curled up with their elbows hooked behind their knees and craning their necks to choke on themselves, each guy would be lost in his own little closed circuit. You can bet almost every guy in the world’s tried this. Then Manus would tell me, “This is what guys want.”

  Give me romance.

  Flash.

  Give me denial.

  Each little closed loop of one guy flexible enough or with a dick so big he doesn’t need anybody else in the world, Manus would point his toast at these pictures and tell me, “These guys don’t need to put up with jobs or relationships.” Manus would just chew, staring at each magazine. Forking up his scrambled egg whites, he’d say, “You could live and die this way.”

  Then I’d go downtown to the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy to get myself perfected. Dogs will lick their butts. Evie will self-mutilate. All this navel gazing. At home, Evie had nobody except she had a ton of family money. The first time we rode a city bus to Brumbach’s, she offered the driver her credit card and asked for a window seat. She was worried her carry-on was too big.

  Me with Manus or her alone, you don’t know who of us had it worse at home.

  But at Brumbach’s, Evie and me, we’d cat nap in any of the dozen perfect bedrooms. We’d stuff cotton between our toes and paint our nails in chintz-covered club chairs. Then we’d study our Taylor Robberts modeling textbook at a long polished dining table.

  “Here’s the same as those fakey reproductions of natural habitats they build at zoos,” Evie would say. “You know, those concrete polar ice caps and those rainforests made of welded pipe trees holding sprinklers.”

  Every afternoon, Evie and me, we’d star in our own personal unnatural habitat. The clerks would sneak off to find sex in the men’s room. We’d all soak up attention in our own little matinee life.

  All’s I remember from Taylor Robberts is to lead with my pelvis when I walk. Keep your shoulders back. To model different-sized products, they’d tell you to draw an invisible sight line from yourself to the item. For toasters, draw a line through the air from your smile to the toaster. For a stove, draw the line from your breasts. For a new car, start the invisible line from your vagina. What it boils down to is professional modeling means getting paid to overreact to stuff like rice cakes and new shoes.

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; We’d drink diet colas on a big pink bed at Brumbach’s. Or sit at a vanity, using contouring powder to change the shape of our faces while the faint outline of people watched us from the darkness a few feet away. Maybe the track lights would flash off somebody’s glasses. With our every little move getting attention, every gesture, everything we said, it’s easy to pick up on the rush you’d get.

  “It’s so safe and peaceful, here,” Evie’d say, smoothing the pink satin comforter and fluffing the pillows. “Nothing very bad could ever happen to you here. Not like at school. Or at home.”

  Total strangers would stand there with their coats on, watching us. The same’s those talk shows on television, it’s so easy to be honest with a big enough audience. You can say anything if enough people will listen.

  “Evie, honey,” I’d say. “There’s lots worse models in our class. You just need to not have an edge to your blusher.” We’d be looking at ourselves in a vanity mirror, a triple row of nobodies watching us from behind.

  “Here, sweetie,” I’d say, and give her a little sponge, “blend.”

  And Evie would start to cry. Your every emotion goes right over the top with a big audience. It’s either laughter or tears, with no in-between. Those tigers in zoos, they must just live a big opera all the time.

  “It’s not just my wanting to be a glamorous fashion model,” Evie would say. “It’s when I think of my growing up, I’m so sad.” Evie would choke back her tears. She’d clutch her little sponge and say, “When I was little, my parents wanted me to be a boy.” She’d say, “I just never want to be that miserable again.”

  Other times, we’d wear high heels and pretend to slap each other hard across the mouth because of some guy we both wanted. Some afternoons we’d confess to each other that we were vampires.

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “My parents used to abuse me, too.”

  You had to play to the crowd.

  Evie would turn her fingers through her hair. “I’m getting my guiche pierced,” she’d say. “It’s that little ridge of skin running between your asshole and the bottom of your vagina.”

  I’d go to flop on the bed, center stage, hugging a pillow and looking up into the black tangle of ducts and sprinkler pipes you had to imagine was a bedroom ceiling.

  “It’s not like they hit me or made me drink satanic blood or anything,” I’d say. “They just liked my brother more because he was mutilated.”

  And Evie would cross to center stage by the Early American nightstand to upstage me.

  “You had a mutilated brother?” she’d say.

  Somebody watching us would cough. Maybe the light would glint off a wristwatch.

  “Yeah, he was pretty mutilated, but not in a sexy way. Still, there’s a happy ending,” I’d say. “He’s dead now.”

  And really intense, Evie would say, “Mutilated how? Was he your only brother? Older or younger?”

  And I’d throw myself off the bed and shake my hair. “No, it’s too painful.”

  “No, really,” Evie would say. “I’m not kidding.”

  “He was my big brother by a couple years. His face was all exploded in a hairspray accident, and you’d think my folks totally forgot they even had a second child,” I’d dab my eyes on the pillow shams and tell the audience. “So I just kept working harder and harder for them to love me.”

  Evie would be looking at nothing and saying, “Oh, my shit! Oh, my shit!” And her acting, her delivery would be so true it would just bury mine.

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “He didn’t have to work at it. It was so easy. Just by being all burned and slashed up with scars, he hogged all the attention.”

  Evie would go close-up on me and say, “So where’s he now, your brother, do you even know?”

  “Dead,” I’d say, and I’d turn to address the audience. “Dead of AIDS.”

  And Evie says, “How sure are you?”

  And I’d say, “Evie!”

  “No, really,” she’d say. “I’m asking for a reason.”

  “You just don’t joke about AIDS,” I’d say.

  And Evie’d say, “This is so next-to-impossible.”

  This is how easy the plot gets pumped out of control. With all these shoppers expecting real drama, of course, I think Evie’s just making stuff up.

  “Your brother,” Evie says, “did you really see him die? For real? Or did you see him dead? In a coffin, you know, with music. Or a death certificate?”

  All those people were watching.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Pretty much.” Like I’d want to get caught lying?

  Evie’s all over me. “So you saw him dead or you didn’t?”

  All those people watching.

  “Dead enough.”

  Evie says, “Where?”

  “This is very painful,” I say, and I cross stage right to the living room.

  Evie chases after me, saying, “Where?”

  All those people watching.

  “The hospice,” I say.

  “What hospice?”

  I keep crossing stage right to the next living room, the next dining room, the next bedroom, den, home office, with Evie dogging me and the audience hovering along next to us.

  “You know how it is,” I say. “If you don’t see a gay guy for so long, it’s a pretty safe bet.”

  And Evie says, “So you don’t really know that he’s dead?”

  We’re sprinting through the next bedroom, living room, dining room, nursery, and I say, “It’s AIDS, Evie. Fade to black.”

  And then Evie just stops and says, “Why?”

  And the audience has started to abandon me in a thousand directions.

  Because I really, really, really want my brother to be dead. Because my folks want him dead. Because life is just easier if he’s dead. Because this way, I’m an only child. Because it’s my turn, damn it. My turn.

  And the crowd of shoppers is bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up.

  “Why is this such a big deal to you?” I say.

  And Evie’s already wandering away from me, leaving me alone and saying, “No reason.” Lost in her own little closed circuit. Licking her own butthole, Evie says, “It’s nothing.” Saying, “Forget it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  On the planet Brandy Alexander, the universe is run by a fairly elaborate system of gods and she-gods. Some evil. Some are ultimate goodness. Marilyn Monroe, for example. Then there’s Nancy Reagan and Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some of the gods and she-gods are dead. Some are alive. A lot are plastic surgeons.

  The system changes. Gods and she-gods come and go and leapfrog each other for a change of status.

  Abraham Lincoln is in his heaven to make our car a floating bubble of new-car–smelling air: driving as smooth as advertising copy. These days, Brandy says Marlene Dietrich is in charge of the weather. Now is the autumn of our ennui. We’re carried down Interstate 5 under gray skies, inside the blue casket interior of a rented Lincoln Town Car. Seth is driving. This is how we always sit, with Brandy up front and me in the back. Three hours of scenic beauty between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle is what we’re driving through. Asphalt and internal combustion carry us and the Lincoln Town Car south.

  Traveling this way, you might as well be watching the world on television. The electric windows are hummed all the way up so the planet Brandy Alexander has an atmosphere of warm, still, silent blue. It’s an even 70 degrees Fahrenheit, with the whole outside world of trees and rocks scrolling by in miniature behind curved glass. Live by satellite. We’re the little world of Brandy Alexander rocketing past it all.

  Driving, driving, Seth says, “Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”

  Our rule is that when Seth’s driving, no radio. What happens is a Dionne Warwick song comes on, and Seth starts to cry so hard, crying those big Estinyl tears, shaking with those big Provera sobs. If Dionne Warwick comes on singing a Burt Bacharach song, we just have to pu
ll over or it’s sure we’ll get car wrecked.

  The tears, the way his dumpling face is lost the chiseled shadows that used to pool under his brow and cheekbones, the way Seth’s hand will sneak up and tweak his nipple through his shirt and his mouth will drop open and his eyes roll backward, it’s the hormones. The conjugated estrogens, the Premarin, the estradiol, the ethinyl estradiol, they’ve all found their way into Seth’s diet cola. Of course, there’s the danger of liver damage at his current daily overdose levels. There could already be liver damage or cancer or blood clots, thrombosis if you’re a doctor, but I’m willing to take that chance. Sure, it’s all just for fun. Watching for his breasts to develop. Seeing his macho babe-magnet swagger go to fat and him taking naps in the afternoon. All that’s great, but his being dead would let me move on to explore other interests.

  Driving, driving, Seth says, “Don’t you think that somehow television makes us God?”

  This introspection is new. His beard growth is lightened up. It must be the antiandrogens choking back his testosterone. The water retention, he can ignore. The moodiness. A tear slips out of one eye in the rearview mirror and rolls down his face.

  “Am I the only one who cares about these issues?” he says. “Am I the only one here in this car who feels anything real?”

  Brandy’s reading a paperback book. Most times, Brandy is reading some plastic surgeon’s glossy hard-sell brochure about vaginas complete with color pictures showing the picture-perfect way a urethra should be aligned to ensure a downward stream of urine. Other pictures show how a top-quality clitoris should be hooded. These are five-figure, ten-and twenty-thousand-dollar vaginas, better than the real thing, and most days Brandy will pass the pictures around.

  Jump to three weeks before, when we were in a big house in Spokane, Washington. We were in a South Hill granite chateau with Spokane spread out under the bathroom windows. I was shaking Percodans out of their brown bottle and into my purse pocket for Percodans. Brandy Alexander, she was digging around under the bathroom sink for a clean emery board when she found this paperback book.