Not that I really love her. Him. Shane.
Already the word “love” is sounding pretty thin.
Hermes scarf on her head, Ray-Bans on her head, makeup on her face, I look at the queen supreme in the pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse, then pulse-pulse of oncoming headlights. What I see when I look at Brandy, this is what Manus saw when he took me sailing.
Right now, looking at flashes of Brandy beside me in Manus’s car, I know what it is I loved about her. What I love is myself. Brandy Alexander just looks exactly the way I looked before the accident. Why wouldn’t she? She’s my brother, Shane. Shane and I were almost the same height, born one year apart. The same coloring. The same features. The same hair, only Brandy’s hair is in better shape.
Add to this her lipo, her silicone, her trachea shave, her brow shave, her scalp advance, her forehead realignment, her rhino contouring to smooth her nose, her maxomilliary operations to shape her jaw. Add to all that years of electrolysis and a handful of hormones and antiandrogens every day, and it’s no wonder I didn’t recognize her.
Plus the idea my brother’s been dead for years. You just don’t expect to meet dead people.
What I love is myself. I was so beautiful.
My love cargo, Manus Locked in the Trunk, Manus Trying to Kill Me, how can I keep thinking I love Manus? Manus is just the last man who thought I was beautiful. Who kissed me on the lips. Who touched me. Manus is just the last man who ever told me he loved me.
You count down the facts and it’s so depressing.
I can only eat baby food.
My best friend screwed my fiance.
My fiance almost stabbed me to death.
I’ve set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent people all night.
My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me.
I’m an invisible monster, and I’m incapable of loving anybody. You don’t know which is worse.
Jump to me wetting a washcloth in the vanity sink. In the undersea bathroom grotto even the towels and washcloths are aqua and blue, with a scalloped shell motif along the hems. I put the cold wet washcloth on Brandy’s forehead and wake her up, so’s she can take more pills. Die in the car instead of this bathroom.
I haul Brandy to her feet and stuff the princess back into her suit jacket.
We have to walk her around before anybody sees her this way.
I strap her high heels back on her feet. Brandy, she leans on me. She leans on the edge of the countertop. She picks up a handful of Bilax capsules and squints down at them.
“My back is killing me,” Brandy says. “Why’d I ever let them give me such big tits?”
The queen supreme looks ready to swallow a handful of anything.
I shake my head no.
Brandy squints at me. “But I need these.”
In the
“Oh.” Brandy turns her hand over to spill the Bilax into her purse, and some capsules fall but some stick to the sweat on her palm. “After they give you the tits, your nipples are cockeyed and way too high,” she says. “They use a razor to shave the nipples off, and they relocate them.”
That’s her word.
Relocate.
The Brandy Alexander Nipple Relocation Program.
My dead brother, the late Shane, shakes the last bowel evacuant off her damp palm. Brandy says, “I have no sensation in my nipples.”
Off the counter, I get my veils and put layer after layer over my head.
We walk up and down the second-floor hallways until Brandy says she’s ready for the stairs. Step at a time, quiet, we go down to the foyer. Across the foyer, through the double doors closed on the drawing room, you can hear Mr. Parker’s deep voice saying something soft, over and over.
Brandy leaning on me, we tiptoe a slow three-legged race across the foyer, from the foot of the stairs to the drawing room doors. We crack the doors open some inches and poke our faces through the crack.
Ellis is laid out on the drawing room carpet.
Mr. Parker is sitting on Ellis’s chest with a size seventeen wingtip planted on each side of Ellis’s head.
Ellis’s hands slap Parker’s big ass, claw at the back of the double-breasted jacket. The single vent in Mr. Parker’s jacket is torn open along the seam up the middle of his back to his collar.
Mr. Parker’s hands, the heel of one hand crams a soggy, gnawed eel-skin wallet between Ellis’s capped teeth.
Ellis’s face is dark red and shining the way you’d look if you got the cherry pie in the pie-eating contest. A runny finger-painting mess of nosebleed and tears, snot and drool.
Mr. Parker, his hair is fallen over his eyes. His other hand is a fist around five inches of Ellis’s pulled-out tongue.
Ellis is slapping and gagging between Mr. Parker’s thick legs.
Broken Ming vases and other collectibles are all around them on the floor.
Mr. Parker says, “That’s right. Just do that. That’s nice. Just relax.”
Brandy and me, watching.
Me wanting Ellis destroyed, this is all just too perfect to spoil.
I tug on Brandy. Brandy, honey. We better walk you back upstairs. Rest you some more. Give you a nice fresh handful of Benzedrine spansules.
Chapter 32
hat you get with the Rhea sisters is three skin-and-bone white men who sit around a suite at the Congress Hotel all day in nylon slips with the shoulder straps fallen off one shoulder or the other, wearing high heels and smoking cigarettes. Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer and egg-white facials, they listen to that step-two-three cha-cha music you only hear on elevators anymore. The Rhea sister hair, their hair is short and flat with grease and matted down bristling with bobby pins, flat on their heads. Maybe they have a wig cap stretched on over the pins if it’s not summer outside. Most of the time, they don’t know what season it is. The blinds aren’t ever open, and there are maybe a dozen of those cha-cha records stacked on the automatic record changer.
All the furniture is blond, and the big four-legged RCA Philco console stereo. The stereo, you could plow a field with that old needle, and the metal tone arm weighs about two pounds.
May I present them:
Kitty Litter.
Sofonda Peters.
The Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.
Aka the Rhea sisters when they’re onstage, these are her family, Brandy Alexander told me in the speech therapist office. Not the first time we met, this wasn’t the time I cried and told Brandy how I lost my face. This wasn’t the second time, either, the time Brandy brought her sewing basket full of ways to hide my being a monster. This was one of the other tons of times we snuck off while I was still in the hospital. The speech therapist office was just where we’d meet.
“Usually,” Brandy tells me, “Kitty Litter is bleaching and tweezing away unwanted facial hair. This unsightly hair thing can tie up a bathroom for hours, but Kitty would wear her Ray-Bans inside out, she loves looking at her reflection so much.”
