ump back to the day Brandy chucks a handful of shimmering nothing into the air above my head, and the speech therapist office around me turns gold.
Brandy says, “This is cotton voile.”
She throws another handful of fog, and the world blurs behind gold and green.
“Silk georgette,” Brandy says.
She throws a handful of sparkle, and the world, Brandy sitting in front of me with her wicker sewing basket open in her lap. The two of us alone, locked in the speech therapist office. The poster of a kitten on the cinder-block wall. All this goes star-filter soft and bright, every sharp edge erased or smeared behind the green and gold, and the fluorescent light coming through in broken exploded bits.
“Veils,” Brandy says as each color settles over me. “You need to look like you’re keeping secrets,” she says. “If you’re going to do the outside world, Miss St. Patience, you need to not let people see your face,” she says.
“You can go anywhere in the world,” Brandy goes on and on.
You just can’t let people know who you really are.
“You can live a completely normal, regular life,” she says.
You just can’t let anybody get close enough to you to learn the truth.
“In a word,” she says, “veils.”
Take-charge princess who she is, Brandy Alexander never does ask my real name. The name who I was born. Miss Bossy Pants right away gives me a new name, a new past. She invents another future for me with no connections, except to her, a cult all by herself.
“Your name is Daisy St. Patience,” she tells me. “You’re the lost heiress to the House of St. Patience, the very haute couture fashion showroom, and this season we’re doing hats,” she says. “Hats with veils.”
I ask her, “Jsfssjf ciacb sxi?”
“You come from escaped French aristocrat blood,” Brandy says.
“Gwdcn aixa gklgfnv?”
“You grew up in Paris, and went to a school run by nuns,” Brandy says.
Hard at work, planning stylist that she is, Brandy Alexander is already pulling tulle out of her purse, pink tulle and lace and crochet doily netting, and settling it over my head.
She says, “You don’t have to wear makeup. You don’t even have to wash. A good veil is the equivalent of mirrored sunglasses, but for your whole head.”
A good veil is the same as staying indoors, Brandy tells me. Cloistered. Private. She throws sheer yellow chiffon. She drapes red patterned nylon over me. In the way our world is, everybody shoulder to shoulder, people knowing everything about you at first glance, a good veil is your tinted limousine window. The unlisted number for your face. Behind a good veil, you could be anyone. A movie star. A saint. A good veil says:
You’re the prize behind door number three.
You’re the lady or the tiger.
In our world where nobody can keep a secret anymore, a good veil says:
“Don’t worry,” Brandy says. “Other people will fill in the blanks.”
The same as how they do with God, she says.
What I never told Brandy is I grew up near a farm. This was a farm that grew pigs. Daisy St. Patience used to come home from school every sunny afternoon and had to feed the pigs with her brother.
Give me homesickness.
Flash.
Give me nostalgic childhood yearnings.
Flash.
What’s the word for the opposite of glamour?
Brandy never asked about my folks, were they living or dead, and why weren’t they here to gnash their teeth.
“Your father and mother, Rainier and Honoraria St. Patience, were assassinated by fashion terrorists,” she says.
B.B., before Brandy, my father took his pigs to market every fall. His secret is to spend all summer driving his flatbed truck around Idaho and the other upper left-hand corner states, stopping at all the day-old bakery outlets selling expired snack foods, individual fruit pies and cupcakes with creamy fillings, little loaves of sponge cake injected with artificial whipped cream, and lumps of devil’s food cake covered with marshmallow and shredded coconut dyed pink. Old birthday cakes that didn’t sell. Stale cakes wishing
My father who Brandy didn’t want to hear about, his secret is to feed the pigs these pies and cakes and snacks the last two weeks before they go to market. The snacks have no nutrition, and the pigs gobble them until there isn’t an expired snack left within five hundred miles.
These snacks don’t have any real fiber to them so every fall, every three-hundred-pound pig goes to market with an extra ninety pounds in its colon. My father makes a fortune at auction, and who knows how long after that, but the pigs all take a big sugary crap when they see inside whatever slaughterhouse where they end up.
I say, “Kwvne wivnuw fw sojaoa.”
“No,” Brandy says and puts up her foot-long index finger, six cocktail rings stacked on just this one finger, and she presses her jeweled hot dog up and down across my mouth the moment I try and say anything.
“Not a word,” Brandy says. “You’re still too connected to your past. Your saying anything is pointless.”
From out of her sewing basket, Brandy draws a streamer of white and gold, a magic act, a layer of sheer white silk patterned with a Greek key design in gold she casts over my head.
Behind another veil, the real world is that much farther away.
“Guess how they do the gold design,” Brandy says.
The fabric is so light my breath blows it out in front; the silk lays across my eyelashes without bending them. Even my face, where every nerve in your body comes to an end, even my face can’t feel it.
It takes a team of kids in India, Brandy says, four- and five-year-old kids sitting all day on wooden benches, being vegetarians, they have to tweeze out most of about a zillion gold threads to leave the pattern of just the gold left behind.
“You don’t see kids any older than ten doing this job,” Brandy says, “because by then most kids go blind.”
Just the veil Brandy takes out of her basket must be six feet square. The precious eyesight of all those darling children, lost. The precious days of their fragile childhood spent tweezing silk threads out.
Give me pity.
Flash.
Give me empathy.
Flash.
Oh, I wish I could make my poor heart just bust.
I say, “Vswf siws cm eiuvn sincs.”
No, it’s okay, Brandy says. She doesn’t want to reward anybody for exploiting children. She got it on sale.
Caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and georgette, the idea that I can’t share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.
“Oh, and don’t worry,” Brandy says. “You’ll still get attention. You have a dynamite tits-and-ass combo. You just can’t talk to anybody.”
People just can’t stand not knowing something, she tells me. Especially men can’t bear not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.
“Behind a veil, you’re the great unknown,” she says. “Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you’re a real person, and some will just ignore you.”
The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.
Even if somebody is only wearing an eye patch, you always want to look. To see if he’s faking. The man in the
