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 tells 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 12
bout 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.
This will get gruesome. Even here in black-and-white.
For all I learned, I could be a doctor.
Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.
Manus once said that your folks are God. You love them and want to make them happy, but you still want to make up your own rules.
The surgeons said, you can’t just cut off a lump of skin one place and bandage it on another. You’re not grafting a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries, just wouldn’t be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump would just die and fall off.
It’s scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn’t: Oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.
Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt sander. What you’re paying for most is the mess.
To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the base of your neck, but don’t sever the skin at the top.