It used to be I was a real college student. I have about sixteen hundred credits toward an undergraduate degree in personal fitness training. What I hear from my parents is that I could be a doctor by now.
Sorry, Mom.
Sorry, God.
There was a time when Evie and me went out to dance clubs and bars and men would wait outside the ladies' room door to catch us. Guys would say they were casting a television commercial. The guy would give me a business card and ask what agency I was with.
There was a time when my mom came to visit. My mom smokes, and the first afternoon I came home from a shoot, she held out a matchbook and said, "What's the meaning of this?"
She said, "Please tell me you're not as big a slut as your poor dead brother.”
In the matchbook was a guy's name I didn't know and a telephone number.
"This isn't the only one I found," Mom said. "What are you running here?"
I don't smoke. I tell her that. These matchbooks pile up because I'm too polite not to take them and I'm too frugal to just throw them away. That's why it takes a whole kitchen drawer to hold them, all these men I can't remember and their telephone numbers.
Jump to no day special in the hospital, just outside the office of the hospital speech therapist. The nurse was leading me around by my elbow for exercise, and as we came around this one corner, just inside the open office doorway, boom, Brandy Alexander was just so there, glorious in a seated Princess Alexander pose, in an iridescent Vivienne Westwood cat suit changing colors with her every move.
Vogue on location.
The fashion photographer inside my head, yelling:
Give me wonder, baby.
Flash.
Give me amazement.
Flash.
The speech therapist said, "Brandy, you can raise the pitch of your voice if you raise your laryngeal cartilage. It's that bump in your throat you feel going up as you sing ascending scales." She said, "If you can keep your voice-box raised high in your throat, your voice should stay between a G and a middle C. That's about 160 Hertz."
Brandy Alexander and the way she looked turned the rest of the world into virtual reality. She changed color from every new angle. She turned green with my one step. Red with my next. She turned silver and gold and then she was dropped behind us, gone.
"Poor, sad misguided thing," Sister Katherine said, and she spat on the concrete floor. She looked at me craning my neck to see back down the hall, and she asked if I had any family.
I wrote: yeah, there's my gay brother but he's dead from
AIDS.
And she says, "Well, that's for the best, then, isn't it?"
Jump to the week after Manus's last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ.
"You know," Evie tells me across a stack of Vogues, and Glamour magazines in her lap she brings me, "I talked to the agency and they said that if we re-do your portfolio they'll consider taking you back for hand work."
Evie means a hand model, modeling cocktail rings and diamond tennis bracelets and shit.
Like I want to hear this.
I can't talk.
All I can eat is liquids.
Nobody will look at me. I'm invisible.
All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then, I'll get on with my life.
Evie tells the stack of magazines, "I want you to come live with me at my house when you get out." She unzips her canvas bag on the edge of my bed and goes into it with both hands. Evie says, "It'll be fun. You'll see. I hate living all by my lonesome."
And says, "I've already moved your things into my spare bedroom."
Still in her bag, Evie says, "I'm on my way to a shoot. Any chance you have any agency vouchers you can lend me?"
On my pad with my pencil, I write:
is that my sweater you're wearing?
And I wave the pad in her face.
"Yeah," she says, "but I knew you wouldn't mind."
I write:
but it's a size six.
I write:
and you're a size nine.
"Listen," Evie says. "My call is for two o'clock. Why don't I stop by some time when you're in a better mood?"
Talking to her watch, she says, "I'm so sorry things had to go this way. It wasn't all of it anybody's fault.”
Every day in the hospital goes like this:
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Sister Katherine falls in between.
On television is one network running nothing but infomercials all day and all night, and there we are, Evie and me, together. We got a raft of bucks. For the snack factory thing, we do these big celebrity spokesmodel smiles, the ones where you make your face a big space heater. We're wearing these sequined dresses that when you get them under a spotlight, the dress flashes like a million reporters taking your picture. So glamorous. I'm standing there in this twenty-pound dress, doing this big smile and dropping animal wastes into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory. This thing just poops out little canapes like crazy, and Evie has to wade out into the studio audience and get folks to eat the canapes.
Folks will eat anything to get on television.
Then, off camera, Manus goes, "Let's go sailing."
And I go, "Sure."
It was so stupid, my not knowing what was happening all along.
Jump to Brandy on a folding chair just inside the office of the speech therapist, shaping her fingernails with the scratch pad from a book of matches. Her long legs could squeeze a motorcycle in half, and the legal minimum of her is shrink wrapped in leopard-print stretch terry just screaming to get out.
The speech therapist says, "Keep your glottis partially open as you speak. It's the way Marilyn Monroe sang "Happy Birthday" to President Kennedy. It makes your breath bypass your vocal chords for a more feminine, helpless quality."
The nurse leads me past in my cardboard slippers, my tight bandages and deep funk, and Brandy Alexander looks up at the last possible instant and winks. God should be able to wink that good. Like somebody taking your picture. Give me joy. Give me fun. Give me love.
Flash.
Angels in heaven should blow kisses the way Brandy Alexander does and lights up the rest of my week. Back in my room, I write:
who is she?
"No one you should have any truck with," the nurse says. "You'll have problems enough as it is."
but who is she? I write.
"If you can believe it," the nurse says, "that one is someone different every week."
It's after that Sister Katherine starts matchmaking. To save me from Brandy Alexander, she offers me the lawyer without a nose. She offers a mountain climbing dentist whose fingers and facial features are eaten down to little hard shining bumps by frostbite. A missionary with dark patches of some tropical fungus just under his skin. A mechanic who leaned over a battery the moment it exploded and the acid left his lips and cheeks gone and his yellow teeth showing in a permanent snarl.
I look at the nun's wedding ring and write:
i guess you got the last really buff guy.
The whole time I was in the hospital, no way could I fall in love. I just couldn't go there yet. Settle for less. I didn't want to process through anything. I didn't want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn't want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. I just wanted my face fixed, if that was possible, which it wasn't.
When it's time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it's pureed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed.