Parker’s big hand swallows my little hand, big fish and little fish, whole.
Parker’s starched white shirt makes you think of eating off a clean tablecloth, so flat and stuck out you could serve drinks off the shelf of his barrel chest.
“This,” Brandy nods toward Seth, “is Miss Scotia’s half-brother, Ellis Island.”
Parker’s big fish eats Ellis’s little fish.
Brandy says, “Miss Scotia and I would like to tour the house ourselves. Ellis is mentally and emotionally disturbed.”
Ellis smiles.
“We had hoped you would watch him,” Brandy says.
“It’s a go,” Parker says. He says, “Sure thing.”
Ellis smiles and tugs with two fingers at the sleeve of Brandy’s suit jacket. Ellis says, “Don’t leave me too long, miss. If I don’t get enough of my pills, I’ll have one of my fits.”
“Fits?” says Parker.
Ellis says, “Sometimes, Miss Alexander, she forgets I’m waiting, and she doesn’t get me any medication.”
“You have fits?” Parker says.
“This is news to me,” Brandy says and smiles. “You will not have a fit,” Brandy tell my new half-brother. “Ellis, I forbid you to have a fit.”
Jump to us camped out in the undersea grotto.
“Hit me.”
The floor under Brandy’s back, it’s cold tile shaped like fish and laid out so they fit together, one fish tail between the heads of two fish, the way some sardines are canned, all the way across the bathroom floor.
I drop a Valium between Plumbago lips.
“Did I ever tell you how my family threw me out?” says Brandy after her little blue swallow. “My original family, I mean. My birth family. Did I ever tell you that messy little story?”
I put my head between my knees and look straight down at the queen supreme with her head between my feet.
“My throat was hurting for a couple of days, so I got out of school and everything,” Brandy says. She says, “Miss Arden? Hello?”
I look down at her. It’s so easy to imagine her dead.
“Miss Arden, please,” she says. “Hit me?”
I drop another Valium.
Brandy swallows. “It was like I couldn’t swallow for days,” she says. “My throat was that sore. I could barely talk. My folks, they thought, of course, it was strep throat.”
Brandy’s head is almost straight under mine as I look down. Only Brandy’s face is upside down. My eyes look right into the dark interior of her Plumbago mouth, dark wet going inside to her works and organs and everything behind the scenes. Brandy Alexander Backstage. Upside down she could be a complete stranger.
And Ellis was right, you only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.
“The culture,” Brandy says. “The swab they did for Strep Throat came back positive for the clap. You know, the third Rhea sister. Gonorrhea,” she says. “That little tiny gonococcus bug. I was sixteen years old and had the clap. My folks did not deal with it well.”
No. No, they didn’t.
“They freaked,” Brandy says.
They threw him out of the house.
“They yelled about how diseased I was being,” Brandy says.
Then they threw him out.
“By ‘diseased’ I think they meant ‘gay’,” she says.
Then they threw him out.
“Miss Scotia?” she says. “Hit me.”
So I hit her.
“Then they threw me out of the damn house.”
Jump to Mr. Parker outside the bathroom door saying, “Miss Alexander? It’s me, Miss Alexander. Miss Scotia, are you in there?”
Brandy starts to sit up and props herself on one elbow.
“It’s Ellis,” Mr. Parker says through the door. “I think you should come downstairs. Miss Scotia, your brother’s having a seizure or something.”
Drugs and cosmetics are spread out all over the aquamarine countertops, and Brandy’s sprawled half-naked on the floor in a sprinkling of pills and capsules and tablets.
“He’s her half-brother,” Brandy calls back.
The doorknob rattles. “You have to help me,” Parker says.
“Stop right there, Mr. Parker!” Brandy shouts and the doorknob stops turning. “Calm yourself. Do not come in here,” Brandy says. “What you need to do,” Brandy looks at me while she says this, “what you need to do is pin Ellis to the floor so he doesn’t hurt himself. I’ll be down in a moment.”
Brandy looks at me and smiles her Plumbago lips into a big bow. “Parker?” she says, “Are you listening?”
“Please, hurry,” comes through the door.
“After you have Ellis pinned to the floor,” Brandy says, “wedge his mouth open with something. Do you have a wallet?”
There’s a moment.
“It’s eel skin, Miss Alexander.”
“Then you must be very proud of it,” says Brandy. “You’re going to have to jam it between his teeth to keep his mouth open. Sit on him if you have to,” Brandy, she’s just smiling evil incarnate at my feet.
The shatter of some real lead crystal comes through the door from downstairs.
“Hurry!” Parker shouts. “He’s breaking things!”
Brandy licks her lips. “After you have his mouth pried open, Parker, reach in and grab his tongue. If you don’t, he’ll choke, and then you’ll be sitting on a dead body.”
Silence.
“Do you hear me?” Brandy says.
“Grab his tongue?”
Something else real and expensive and far away shatters.
“Mr. Parker, honey, I hope you’re bonded,” the Princess Alexander says, her face all bloated red with choking back laughter. “Yes,” she says, “grab Ellis’s tongue. Pin him to the floor, keep his mouth open, and pull his tongue out as far as you can until I come down to help you.”
The doorknob turns.
My veils are all on the vanity counter out of my reach.
The door opens far enough to hit the high-heeled foot of Brandy, sprawled giggling and half full of Valiums, there half-naked in drugs on the floor. This is far enough for me to see Parker’s face with its one grown-together eyebrow, and far enough for the face to see me sitting on the toilet.
Brandy screams, “I am attending to Miss Arden Scotia!”
Given the choice between grabbing a strange tongue and watching a monster poop into a giant snail shell, the face retreats and slams the door behind it.
Football scholarship footsteps charge off down the hallway.
Then pound down the stairs.
The big tooth that Parker is, his footsteps pound across the foyer to the living room.
Ellis’s scream, real and sudden and far away, comes through the floor from downstairs. And, suddenly, stops.
“Now,” says Brandy, “where were we?”
She lies back down with her head between my feet.
“Have you thought any more about plastic surgery?” Brandy says. Then she says, “Hit me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.
This only looks like generosity.
That Brandy Alexander, she’s always on me about plastic surgery. Why don’t I, you know, just look at what’s out there. With her chest siliconed, her hips lipo-sucked, the 46-16-26 Katty Kathy hourglass thing she is, the fairy godmother makeover, my fair lady, Pygmalion thing she is, my brother back from the dead, Brandy Alexander is very invested in plastic surgery.
And visa versa.
Bathroom talk.
Brandy’s still laid out on the cold tile floor, high atop Capitol Hill in Seattle. Mr. Parker has come and gone. Just Brandy and me all afternoon. I’m still sitting on the open end of a
huge ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. Trying to kill her in my half-assed way. Brandy’s auburn head of hair is between my feet. Lipsticks and Demerols, blushes and Percocet-5, Aubergine Dreams and Nembutal Sodium capsules are spread out all over the aquamarine countertops around the vanity sink.
My hand, I’ve been holding a handful of Valiums so long my palm has gone Tiffany’s light blue. Just Brandy and me all afternoon with the sun coming in at lower and lowers angles through the big brass porthole windows.
“My waist,” Brandy says. The Plumbago mouth looks a little too blue, Tiffany’s light blue if you ask me. Overdose baby blue. “Sofonda said I had to have a sixteen-inch waist,” Brandy says. “I said, ‘Miss Sofonda, I am big-boned. I am six feet tall. No way am I getting down to a sixteen-inch waistline.”
Sitting on the snail shell, I’m only half listening.
“Sofonda,” Brandy says, “Sofonda says, there’s a way, but I have to trust her. When I wake up in the recovery room, I’ll have a sixteen-inch waist.”
It’s not like I haven’t heard this story in a dozen other bathrooms. Another bottle off the countertop, Bilax capsules, I look it up in the Phyicians’ Desk Reference book.
Bilax capsules. A bowel evacuant.
Maybe I should drop a few of these into that nonstop mouth between my feet.
Jump to Manus watching me do that infomercial. We were so beautiful. Me with a face. Him not so full of conjugated estrogens.
I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long, long sex thing that could end at any moment because, after all, it’s just about getting off. Manus would close his power blue eyes and twist his head just so, side to side, and swallow.
And, Yes, I’d tell Manus. I came right when he did.
Pillow talk.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them.
This only looks like love.
Jump to Brandy on the bathroom floor, saying, “Sofonda and Vivienne and Kitty were all with me at the hospital.” Her hands curl up off the tile, and she runs them up and down the sides of her blouse. “All three of them wore those baggy green scrub suits, wearing hairnets over their wigs and with those Duchess of Windsor costume jewelry brooches pinned on their scrub suits,” Brandy says. “They were flying around behind the surgeon and the lights, and Sofonda was telling me to count backwards from one hundred. You know…99…98…97…”
The Aubergine Dreams eyes close. Brandy, pulling long, even breaths, says, “The doctors, they took out the bottom rib on each side of my chest.” Her hands rub where, and she says, “I couldn’t sit up in bed for two months, but I had a sixteen-inch waist. I still have a sixteen-inch waist.”
One of Brandy’s hands opens to full flower and slides over the flat land where her blouse tucks into the belt of her skirt. “They cut out two of my ribs, and I never saw them again,” Brandy says. “There’s something in the Bible about taking out your ribs.”
The creation of Eve.
Brandy says, “I don’t know why I let them do that to me.”
And Brandy, she’s asleep.
Jump back to the night Brandy and I started this road trip, the night we left the Congress Hotel with Brandy driving the way you can only drive at two-thirty AM in an open sports car with a loaded rifle and an overdosed hostage. Brandy hides her eyes behind Ray-Bans so she can drive in a little privacy. Instant glamour from another planet in the 1950s, Brandy pulls an Hermès scarf over her auburn hair and ties it under her chin.
All I can see is myself reflected in Brandy’s Ray-Bans, tiny and horrible. Still strung out and pulled apart by the cold night air around the windshield. Bathrobe still dragging shut in the car door. My face, you touch my blasted, scar-tissue face and you’d swear you were touching chunks of orange peel and leather.
Driving east, I’m not sure what we’re running from. Evie or the police or Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if by running we won’t have to get on with our lives. I’m with Brandy right now because I can’t imagine getting away with this without Brandy’s help. Because, right now, I need her.
Not that I really love her. Him. Shane.
Already the word love is sounding pretty thin.
Hermès scarf on her head, Ray-Bans on her head, make-up 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 LockedInTheTrunk, Manus TryingToKillMe, 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 fiancé.
My fiancé 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 Physicians’ Desk Reference, I show her Bilax, bowel evacuant.
“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.
Thank you for not sharing.
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, yo
u 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’s 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 TWENTY
About plastic surgery, I spent a whole summer as property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital looking into what plastic surgery could do for me.
There were plastic surgeons, a lot of them, and there were the books the surgeons brought. With pictures. The pictures I saw were black and white, thank You, God, and the surgeons told me how after years of pain I might look.
Almost all plastic surgery starts with something called pedicles. Recipe to follow.