→ CHAPTER 1
Where you’re supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house. This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who’s alive, who’s dead. This is Evie Cottrell’s big wedding reception moment. Evie is standing halfway down the big staircase in the manor house foyer, naked inside what’s left of her wedding dress, still holding her rifle.
Me, I’m standing at the bottom of the stairs but only in a physical way. My mind is, I don’t know where.
Nobody’s all-the-way dead yet, but let’s just say the clock is ticking.
→ CHAPTER 2
Don’t expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then.
What happens here will have more of that fashion magazine feel, a Vogue or a Glamour magazine chaos with page numbers on every second or fifth or third page. Perfume cards falling out, and full-page naked women coming out of nowhere to sell you make-up.
Don’t look for a contents page, buried magazine-style twenty pages back from the front. Don’t expect to find anything right off. There isn’t a real pattern to anything, either. Stories will start and then, three paragraphs later:
Jump to page whatever.
Then, jump back.
→ CHAPTER 3
Until I met Brandy, all I wanted was for somebody to ask me what happened to my face.
“Birds ate it,” I wanted to tell them.
Birds ate my face.
But nobody wanted to know. Then nobody doesn’t include Brandy Alexander.
Just don’t think this was a big coincidence. We had to meet, Brandy and me. We had so many things in common. We had close to everything in common. Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday. Brandy was in the hospital for months and months, and so was I, and there’s only so many hospitals where you can go for major cosmetic surgery.
→ CHAPTER 4
Jump to the Canadian border.
Jump to the three of us in a rented Lincoln Town Car, waiting to drive south from Vancouver, British Columbia, into the United States, waiting, with Signore Romeo in the driver’s seat, waiting with Brandy next to him in the front, waiting, with me alone in the back.
“The police have microphones,” Brandy tells us.
→ CHAPTER 5
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.”
→ CHAPTER 6
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.
→ CHAPTER 7
Jump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident when I go home to eat dinner with my folks. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by solid food. On the dining room table, covering it all over is a tablecloth I don’t remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace edge. This isn’t something I’d expect my mom to buy so I ask, did somebody give this to her?
Mom’s just pulling up to the table and unfolding her blue damask napkin with everything steaming between us: her, me, and my dad. The sweet potatoes under their layer of marshmallows. The big brown turkey. The rolls are inside a quilted cozy sewed to look like a hen. You lift the wings to take a roll out. There’s the cut-glass tray of sweet pickles and celery filled with peanut butter.
“Give what?” my mom says.
→ CHAPTER 8
Don’t look for me to ever tell my folks about the accident. You know, a whole long-distance telephone crying jag about the bullet and the emergency room. That’s not anywhere we’re going. I told my folks, as soon as I could write them a letter that I was going on a catalogue shoot in Cancun, Mexico, for Espre.
Six months of fun, sand, and me trying to suck the lime wedges out of long-necked bottles of Mexican beer. Guys just love watching babes do that. Go figure. Guys.
She loves clothes from Espre, my mom writes back. She writes how, since I’ll be in the Espre catalogue, could I maybe get her a discount on her Christmas order.
Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.
→ CHAPTER 9
Jump to us going down fast in a TWA return trip home from the moon, Brandy and Seth and me dancing our dance party frug in the zero-gravity brass and glass go-go cage elevator. Brandy makes a big ring-beaded fist and tells the poly-blend service droid who tries to stop us to chill out unless he wants to die on reentry.
Back on earth in the twenty-first century, our rented Lincoln with its blue casket interior is waiting to take us to a nice hotel. On the windshield is a ticket, but when Brandy storms over to tear it up, the ticket is a postcard from the future.
Maybe my worst fears.
→ CHAPTER 10
Jump to Brandy Alexander tucking me into a Seattle bed. This is the night of the Space Needle, the night the future doesn’t happen. Brandy, she’s wearing yards and yards of black tulle wrapped around her legs, twisted up and around her hourglass waist. Black veil crosses her torpedo breasts and loops up and over the top of her auburn hair. All this sparkle that bends over beside my bed could be the trial-sized mock-up for the original summer night sky.
Little rhinestones, not the plastic ones pooped out by a factory in Calcutta but the Austrian crystal ones cut by elves in the Black Forest, these little star-shaped rhinestones are set all over the black tulle. The queen supreme’s face is the moon in the night sky that bends over and kisses me good night. My hotel room is dark, and the television at the foot of my bed is turned on so the handmade stars twinkle in all the colors the television is trying to show us.
→ CHAPTER 11
Jump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a career or a fiance or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie’s big house, her real house where even she didn’t like to live, it was so lonely, stuck way out in some rainforest with nobody paying attention.
Jump to me being on Evie’s bed, on my back that first night, but I can’t sleep.
Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie’s furniture is that curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There isn’t a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie’s house, the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands against the bedspread—are all either black or gray.
→ CHAPTER 12
Jump way back to the last Christmas before my accident, when I go home to open presents with my folks. My folks put up the same fake tree every year, scratchy green and making that hot poly-plastic smell that gives you a dizzy flu headache when the lights are plugged in too long. The tree’s all magic and sparkle, crowded with our red and gold glass ornaments and those strands of silver plastic loaded with static electricity that people call icicles. It’s the same ratty angel with a rubber doll face on top of the tree. Covering the mantel is the same spun fiberglass angel hair that works into your skin and gives you an infected rash if you even touch it. It’s the same Perry Como Christmas album on the stereo. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by singing Christmas carols.
→ CHAPTER 13
Jump to around midnight in Evie’s house where I catch Seth Thomas trying to kill me.
The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you’d look if you got the cherry pie in a pie eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down, you can see the roof of my mouth, pink arid smooth as the inside of a crab’s back, and hanging down around the roof is the white vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left. There are times to wear a veil and there are not. Other than this, I’m stunning when I meet Seth Thomas breaking into Evie’s big house at midnight.
What Seth sees coming down the big circular staircase in Evie’s foyer is me wearing one of Evie’s peachy-pink satin and lace peignoir sets pieced on the bias. Evie’s bathrobe is this peachy-pink retro Zsa Zsa number that hides me the way cellophane hides a frozen turkey. At the cuffs and along the front of the bathrobe is the peachy-pink ozone haze of ostrich feathers that match the feathers on the high-heeled mules I’m wearing.
→ CHAPTER 14
Jump way back to the last time I ever went home to see my parents. It was my last birthday before the accident. What with Shane still being dead, I wasn’t expecting presents. I’m not expecting a cake. This last time, I go home just to see them, my folks. This is when I still have a mouth so I’m not so stymied by the idea of blowing out candles.
The house, the brown living room sofa and reclining chairs, everything is the same except my father’s put big Xs of duct tape across the inside of all the windows. Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway where they usually park it. The car’s locked in the garage. There’s a big deadbolt I don’t remember being on the front door. On the front gate is a big “Beware of Dog” sign and a smaller sign for a home security system.
→ CHAPTER 15
Jump to the moment around one o’clock in the morning in Evie’s big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.
Evie is in Cancun, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house-sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she’s shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.
You know that Evie’s wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie’s trying to figure out if there’s a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I’m stabbed to death, dead, and Cancun, where Evie’s supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It’s not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancun in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.
→ CHAPTER 16
Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this junkyard full of dirty wrecked cars where Evie and me have to climb around on the wrecks wearing Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you have to wear a “pussy strip” of surgical tape underneath, and Evie starts in with, “About your mutilated brother . . . ?”
It’s not my favorite photographer or art director, either.
And I’m going back to Evie, “Yeah?” Busy sticking out my butt.
And the photographer goes, “Evie? That’s not pouting!
→ CHAPTER 17
What 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-to-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.
→ CHAPTER 18
Half my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.
Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I’m sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don’t kill the pain but at least you’re not pissed off about being hurt.
“Hit me,” Brandy says and makes a fish lips.
→ CHAPTER 19
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.
→ CHAPTER 20
Now Manus peers at me, sits up and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn’t anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says.
Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.
I hate this.
Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you’ll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.
That’s the word the plastic surgeons used.
→ CHAPTER 21
Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and
me in the speech therapist office when Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I’m touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck, and Brandy says not to watch myself too close.
“Honey,” she says, “times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.”
The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It’s the same feel as the top edge of a strapless dress or maillot, held up with wire or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.
→ CHAPTER 22
In Seattle, I’ve been watching Brandy nap in our undersea grotto for more than one hundred and sixty years. Me, I’m sitting here with a glossy pile of brochures from surgeons showing sexual reassignment surgeries. Transitional transgender operations. Sex changes.
The color pictures show pretty much the same shot of different-quality vaginas. Camera shots focused straight into the dark vaginal introitus. Fingers with red nail polish cupped against each thigh to spread the labia. The urethral meatus soft and pink. The pubic hair clipped down to stubble on some. The vaginal depth given as six inches, eight inches, two inches. Unresected corpus spon-giosum mounding around the urethral opening on some.
→ CHAPTER 23
So this is life in the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.
In Santa Barbara, Manus who was Denver taught us how to get drugs. The three of us were squeezed into that Fiat Spider from Portland to Santa Barbara, and Brandy just wanted to die. All the time, holding both hands pressed on her lower back, Brandy kept saying, “Stop the car. I got to stretch. I am spaz-am-ing. We have to stop.”
It took us two days to drive from Oregon to California, and the two states are right next door to each other. Manus being all the time looking at Brandy, listening to her, in love with her so obvious I only wanted to kill them in worse and more painful ways.
→ CHAPTER 24
Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this slaughterhouse where whole pigs without their insides hang as thick as fringe from a moving chain. Evie and me wear Bibo Kelley stainless steel party dresses while the chain zips by behind us at about a hundred pigs an hour, and Evie says, “After your brother was mutilated, then what?”
The photographer looks at his light meter and says, “Nope. No way.”
The art director says, “Girls, we’re getting too much glare off the carcasses.”
→ CHAPTER 25
Jump 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 Westing-house 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.
→ CHAPTER 26
I here had to be some better way to kill Brandy. To set me free. Some quick permanent closure. Some kind of crossfire I could walk away from. Evie hates me by now. Brandy looks just like I used to. Manus is still so in love with Brandy he’d follow her anywhere, even if he’s not sure why. All I’d have to do is get Brandy cross-haired in front of Evie’s rifle.
Bathroom talk.
→ CHAPTER 27
The man at General Delivery who asked to see my ID pretty much had to take my word for it. The picture on my driver’s license might as well be Brandy’s. This means a lot of writing on scraps of paper for me to explain how I look now. This whole time I’m in the post office, I’m looking sideways to see if I’m a cover girl up on the FBI’s most wanted poster board.
Almost half a million dollars is about twenty-five pounds of ten- and twenty-dollar bills in a box. Plus, inside with the money is a pink stationery note from Evie saying blah, blah, blah, I will kill you if I ever see you again. And I couldn’t be happier.
Before Brandy can see who it’s addressed to, I claw off the label.
→ CHAPTER 28
My dress I carry my ass around Evie’s wedding in is tighter than skin tight. It’s what you’d call bone tight. It’s that knock-off print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons all button through the stigmata. Then I’m wearing yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. My heels are nosebleed high. I wrap Brandy’s half mile of black tulle studded with sparkle up around my scar tissue, over the shining cherry pie where my face used to be, wrapped tight, until only my eyes are out. It’s a look that’s bleak and morbid. The feeling is we’ve got a little out of control.
→ CHAPTER 29
Jump to Brandy and me, we can’t find Ellis anywhere. Evie and all the Texas Cottrells can’t find their groom, either, everybody laughing that nervous laughter. What bridesmaid has run off with him, everybody wants to know. Ha, ha.
I tug Brandy toward the door, but she shushes me. Ellis and the groom both missing ... a hundred Texans drinking hard . . . that ridiculous bride in her big drag wedding dress . . . this is just too much fun for Brandy to walk out now.
→ CHAPTER 30
My life,” Brandy says. “I’m dying, and I’m supposed to see my whole life.”
Nobody’s dying here. Give me denial.
Evie’s shot her wad, dropped the rifle, and gone outside.
The police and paramedics are on their way, and the rest of the wedding guests are outside fighting over the wedding gifts, who gave what and who now has the right to take it back. All of it good messy fun.
→ CHAPTER 31
Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy almost dead on the floor and me kneeling over her -with my hands covered in her Princess Alexander partytime blood.
Brandy yells, “Evie!”
And Evie’s burned-up head sticks back in through the front doorway. “Brandy, sugar,” Evie says, “This all’s been the best disaster you’ve ever pulled off!”
To me, Evie runs up and kisses me with her nasty melted lipstick and says, “Shannon, I just can’t thank you enough for spicing up my boring old home life.”
“Miss Evie,” Brandy says, “you can act like anything, but, girl, you just totally missed shooting the bulletproof part of my vest.”
→ CHAPTER 32
Jump back to the La Paloma emergency room. The intravenous morphine. The tiny operating room manicure scissors cut Brandy’s suit off. My brother’s unhappy penis there blue and cold for the whole world to see. The police photos, and Sister Katherine screaming, “Take your pictures! Take your pictures now! He’s still losing blood!”
Jump to surgery. Jump to post-op. Jump to me taking Sister Katherine aside, little Sister Katherine hugging me so hard around the knees I almost buckle to the floor. She looks at me, both of us stained with the blood, and I ask her in writing:
please.
do this one special thing for me. please, if you really want to make me happy.
