Ellis is standing in the open doorway to the hotel hallway, looking like a superhero that I want to crawl into 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 blond. Evelyn Cottrell, Inc., everybody’s favorite write-off, 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.
The camera stays on Evie, and what I can almost hear Evie saying is, Love me.
Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I’ll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.
Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junkyard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We’d go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she’s so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she’s just like me. What I really hate is me, so I hate pretty much everybody.
Jump to the next day we hit a few houses, a mansion, a couple palaces, and a chateau full of drugs. Around three o’clock we meet a realtor in the baronial dining room of a West Hills manor house. All around us are caterers and florists. The dining room table is spread and heaping with silver and crystal, tea sets, samovars, candelabras, stemware. A woman in dowdy scarecrow social-secretary tweeds is unwrapping these gifts of silver and crystal and making notes in a tiny red book.
A constant stream of arriving flowers eddies around us, buckets of irises and roses and stock. The manor house is sweet with the smell of flowers and rich with the smell of little puff pastries and stuffed mushrooms.
Not our style. Brandy looks at me. Way too many folks around.
But the realtor’s already there, smiling. In a drawl as flat and drawn-out as the Texas horizon, the realtor introduces herself as Mrs. Leonard Cottrell. And she is so happy to meet us.
This Cottrell woman takes Brandy by the elbow and steers her around the baronial first floor while I decide to fight or flight.
Give me terror.
Flash.
Give me panic.
Flash.
This has to be Evie’s mother, oh, you know it is. And this must be Evie’s new house. And I’m wondering how it is we came here. Why today? What are the chances?
The realty Cottrell steers us past the tweedy social secretary and all the wedding gifts. “This is my daughter’s house. But she spends almost all her days in the furniture department at Brumbach’s, downtown. So far we’ve gone along with her little obsessions, but enough’s enough, so now we’re gonna marry her off to some jackass.”
She leans in close. “It was more difficult than you’d ever imagine, trying to settle her down. You know, she burned down the last house we bought her.”
Beside the social secretary, there’s a stack of gold-engraved wedding invitations. These are the regrets. Sorry, but we can’t make it.
There seem to be a lot of regrets. Nice invitations, though, gold engraved, hand-torn edges, a three-fold card with a dried violet inside. I steal one of the regrets, and I catch up with the realty Cottrell woman and Brandy and Ellis.
“No,” Brandy’s saying. “There are too many people around. We couldn’t view the house under these conditions.”
“Between you and me,” says the realty Cottrell, “the biggest wedding in the world is worth the cost if we can shove Evie off onto some poor man.”
Brandy says, “We don’t want to keep you.”
“But, then,” the Cottrell woman says, “there’s this subgroup of ‘men’ who like their ‘women’ the way Evie is now.”
Brandy says, “We really must be going.”
And Ellis says, “Men who like insane women?”
“Why, it plumb broke our hearts the day Evan came to us. Sixteen years old, and he says, ‘Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a girl,’” says Mrs. Cottrell.
“But we paid for it,” she says. “A tax deduction is a tax deduction. Evan wanted to be a world-famous fashion model, he told us. He started calling himself Evie, and I canceled my subscription to Vogue the next day. I felt it had done enough damage to my family.”
Brandy says, “Well, congratulations,” and starts tugging me toward the front door.
And Ellis says, “Evie was a man?”
Evie was a man. And I just have to sit down. Evie was a man. And I saw her implant scars. Evie was a man. And I saw her naked in fitting rooms.
Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.
Flash.
Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!
Flash!
Evie’s mother looks hard at Brandy. “Have you ever done any modeling?” she says. “You look so much like a friend of my son’s.”
“Your daughter,” Brandy growls.
And I finger the invitation I stole. The wedding, the union of Miss Evelyn Cottrell and Mr. Allen Skinner, is tomorrow. At eleven ante meridiem, according to the gold engraving. To be followed by a reception at the bride’s home.
To be followed by a house fire.
To be followed by a murder.
Dress formal.
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Nineteen
here you’re supposed to be is the weekly Dangerous Writing workshop in Tom Spanbauer’s tiny living room in 1991 with writing students and half-written novels all over the house. It costs twenty dollars to attend each Thursday night even if you bring a bottle of wine, which a lot of people do, even if you come on weekends to help Tom clear the rusty junk and thorny blackberries from his property. Which I do. Monica Drake is also here, and because she can’t afford to pay the tuition in cash, each week she brings Tom a table lamp, a clock, some piece of furniture in trade. Tom’s house is filling up while Monica’s is almost empty.
For twenty dollars, Tom Spanbauer tells us, “Establish your authority on the page, and you can make anything happen.”
For another twenty, he tells us, “No Latinates!”
Tom tells us, “Unpack your objects.” And we love Tom so much that we print his advice on buttons, like big campaign buttons, we can wear pinned to our shirts. We’re not teenagers; we’re thirty, thirty-two, thirty-five years old. What’s even more amazing is . . . we do wear these buttons. In exchange for our cash and our lamps and clearing blackberries, Tom gives us copies of a short story called “The Harvest” by a writer named Amy Hempel. It demonstrates every excellent thing he hopes we’ll learn. Monica is the star of our Thursday nights. Suzy Vitello is a star. Erin Leonard and Joanna Rose and Rick Thompson are stars. Candace Mulligan is a star, but we all want to play the role of Amy Hempel.
I’ve given up all hope of ever being published so I’m writing a loopy tale about a fashion model without a face. My inspiration is the loopy descriptions that narrators read off note cards during fashion shows: a hundred adjectives in search of a noun. “A sumptuous crimson melding of shimmering perfumed extravagance demanding unequaled glamour, demanding liquid romance, ensuring lucid transcendent . . .” Oh, you get the picture. I pronounce hyperbole as “hiper-bowl.” I pronounce Hermés, the Italian fashion house, as “her-mees”; I’m so obviously stupid that Tom is delighted. I bring in the first draft of a chapter about
cosmetic reconstructive surgery, and Erin Leonard brings me a magazine article by a young woman who, as a child, lost much of her face to cancer. Her name is Lucy Grealy, and she’s written the most extraordinary memoir called Autobiography of a Face, which I don’t read, not for years and years, then only after I’ve invented my goofus road trip novel which no one wants to publish. In the interim, I write Fight Club. I write Survivor. Jump to ten years gone by, and I fly to New York to read my work at the KGB literary bar in the East Village. A decade after those twenty-dollar lessons, two pretty women walk into the bar. Like the lead-in to a joke, two pretty women walk into the KGB Bar, and one of them is Amy Hempel and the friend accompanying her is—the only person she could possibly be in this strange, magical, dreamy, miraculous, impossible world—Lucy Grealy.
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Forty-two
ump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a realtor’s office with our own Mr. White Westinghouse gone inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs just before he took them to market. She says how he used to feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking distance.
Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses. “You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?” she says.
He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the pipe, you put big potatoes from this year’s crop. Inside the pipe you put last year’s soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can’t see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price, you’re making money.
We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.
Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on the rack, and says, “You ever hear of anything in your whole life so underhanded?”
Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot-pink organza or ice-blue velveteen.
These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to poke and tear their way out.
Princess Princess, she says, “It will take at least three Darvons to get me into this dress.”
She opens her hand, and I shake out the prescription.
Her father, Brandy says, he used to grind his beef with crushed ice to force it full of water before he sold it. He’d grind beef with what’s called bull meal to force it full of cereal.
“He wasn’t a bad person,” she says. “Not outside of following the rules a little too much.”
Not the rules about being fair and honest, she says, so much as the rules about protecting your family from poverty. And disease.
Some nights, Brandy says, her father used to creep into her room while she was asleep.
I don’t want to hear this. Brandy’s diet of Provera and Darvon has side-effected her with this kind of emotional bulimia where she can’t keep down any nasty secret. I smooth my veils over my ears. Thank you for not sharing.
“My father used to sit on my bed some nights,” she says, “and wake me up.”
Our father.
The ball gown is resurrected glorious on Brandy’s shoulders, brought back to life, larger than life and fairy-tale impossible to wear anyplace in the past fifty years. A zipper thick as my spine goes up the side to just under Brandy’s arm. The panels of the bodice pinch Brandy off at her waist and explode her out the top, her breasts, her bare arms and long neck. The skirt is layered pale yellow silk faille and tulle. It’s so much gold embroidery and seed pearls would make any bit of jewelry too much.
“It’s a palace of a dress,” Brandy says, “but even with the drugs, it hurts.”
The broke ends of the wire stays poke out around the neck, poke in at the waist. Panels of plastic whalebone, their corners and sharp edges jab and cut. The silk is hot, the tulle, rough. Just her breathing in and out makes the clashing steel and celluloid tucked inside, hidden, just Brandy being alive makes it bite and chew at the fabric and her skin.
Jump to at night, Brandy’s father, he used to say, Hurry. Get dressed. Wake your sister.
Me.
Get your coats on and get in the back of the truck, he’d say.
And we would, late after the TV stations had done the national anthem and gone off the air. Concluded their broadcast day. Nothing was on the road except us, our folks in the cab of the pickup and us two in the back, Brandy and his sister, curled on our sides against the corrugated floor of the truck bed, the squeak of the leaf springs, the hum of the driveline coming right into us. The potholes bounce our pumpkin heads hard on the floor of the bed. Our hands clamp tight over our faces to keep from breathing the sawdust and dried manure blowing around, left over. Our eyes shut tight to keep out the same. We were going we didn’t know where, but tried to figure out. A right turn, then a left turn, then a long straight stretch going we didn’t know how fast, then another right turn would roll us over on our left sides. We didn’t know how long. You couldn’t sleep.
Wearing the dress to shreds and holding very still, Brandy says, “You know, I’ve been on my own pretty much since I was sixteen.”
With every breath, even her taking shallow Darvon-overdosed little gulps of air, Brandy winces. She says, “There was an accident when I was fifteen, and at the hospital, the police accused my father of abusing me. It just went on and on. I couldn’t tell them anything because there was nothing to tell.”
She inhales and winces. “The interviews, the counseling, the intervention therapy, it just went on and on.”
The pickup truck slowed and bounced off the edge of the blacktop, onto gravel or washboard dirt, and the whole truck bounced and rattled a while farther, then stopped.
This is how poor we were.
Still in the truck bed, you took your hands off your face, and we’d be stopped. The dust and manure would settle. Brandy’s father would drop the tailgate of the truck, and you’d be on a dirt road alongside a looming broken wall of boxcars laying this way and that off their tracks. Boxcars would be broken open. Flatcars would be rolled over with their loads of logs or two-by-fours scattered. Tanker cars buckled and leaking. Hoppers full of coal or wood chips would be heaved over and dumped out in black or gold piles. The fierce smell of ammonia. The good smell of cedar. The sun would be just under the horizon with light coming around to us from underneath the world.
There’d be lumber to load on the truck. Cases of instant butterscotch pudding. Cases of typing paper, toilet paper, double-A batteries, toothpaste, canned peaches, books. Crushed diamonds of safety glass’d be everywhere around car carriers tipped sideways with the brand-new cars inside wrecked, with their clean black tires in the air.
Brandy lifts the gown’s neckline and peeks inside at her Estraderm patch on one breast. She peels the backing off another patch and pastes it on her other breast, then takes another stabbing breath and winces.
/> “The whole mess died down after about three months, the whole child abuse investigation,” Brandy says. “Then one basketball practice, I’m getting out of the gym and a man comes up. He’s with the police, he says, and this is a confidential follow-up interview.”
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. Lightbulbs 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 resell, 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 reopen 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.”
Invisible Monsters Remix Page 11
