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Chapter 25

here you’re supposed to be is the weekly Dangerous Writing workshop in Tom Spanbauer’s tiny living room in 1991 with writing students and half-written novels all over the house. It costs twenty dollars to attend each Thursday night even if you bring a bottle of wine, which a lot of people do, even if you come on weekends to help Tom clear the rusty junk and thorny blackberries from his property. Which I do. Monica Drake is also here, and because she can’t afford to pay the tuition in cash, each week she brings Tom a table lamp, a clock, some piece of furniture in trade. Tom’s house is filling up while Monica’s is almost empty.

For twenty dollars, Tom Spanbauer tells us, “Establish your authority on the page, and you can make anything happen.”

For another twenty, he tells us, “No Latinates!”

Tom tells us, “Unpack your objects.” And we love Tom so much that we print his advice on buttons, like big campaign buttons, we can wear pinned to our shirts. We’re not teenagers; we’re thirty, thirty-two, thirty-five years old. What’s even more amazing is …we do wear these buttons. In exchange for our cash and our lamps and clearing blackberries, Tom gives us copies of a short story called “The Harvest” by a writer named Amy Hempel. It demonstrates every excellent thing he hopes we’ll learn. Monica is the star of our Thursday nights. Suzy Vitello is a star. Erin Leonard and Joanna Rose and Rick Thompson are stars. Candace Mulligan is a star, but we all want to play the role of Amy Hempel.

I’ve given up all hope of ever being published so I’m writing a loopy tale about a fashion model without a face. My inspiration is the loopy descriptions that narrators read off note cards during fashion shows: a hundred adjectives in search of a noun. “A sumptuous crimson melding of shimmering perfumed extravagance demanding unequaled glamour, demanding liquid romance, ensuring lucid transcendent …” Oh, you get the picture. I pronounce hyperbole as “hiper-bowl.” I pronounce Hermés, the Italian fashion house, as “her-mees”; I’m so obviously stupid that Tom is delighted. I bring in the first draft of a chapter about cosmetic reconstructive surgery, and Erin Leonard brings me a magazine article by a young woman who, as a child, lost much of her face to cancer. Her name is Lucy Grealy, and she’s written the most extraordinary memoir called Autobiography of a Face, which I don’t read, not for years and years, then only after I’ve invented my goofus road trip novel which no one wants to publish. In the interim, I write Fight Club. I write Survivor. Jump to ten years gone by, and I fly to New York to read my work at the KGB literary bar in the East Village. A decade after those twenty-dollar lessons, two pretty women walk into the bar. Like the lead-in to a joke, two pretty women walk into the KGB Bar, and one of them is Amy Hempel and the friend accompanying her is—the only person she could possibly be in this strange, magical, dreamy, miraculous, impossible world—Lucy Grealy.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter 26

ump 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 Westinghouse 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. “You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?” she says.

He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the pipe, you put big potatoes from this year’s crop. Inside the pipe you put last year’s soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can’t see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price, you’re making money.

We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.

Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on the rack, and says, “You ever hear of anything in your whole life so underhanded?”

Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot-pink organza or ice-blue velveteen.

These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to poke and tear their way out.

Princess Princess, she says, “It will take at least three Darvons to get me into this dress.”

She opens her hand, and I shake out the prescription.

Her father, Brandy says, he used to grind his beef with crushed ice to force it full of water before he sold it. He’d grind beef with what’s called bull meal to force it full of cereal.

“He wasn’t a bad person,” she says. “Not outside of following the rules a little too much.”

Not the rules about being fair and honest, she says, so much as the rules about protecting your family from poverty. And disease.

Some nights, Brandy says, her father used to creep into her room while she was asleep.

I don’t want to hear this. Brandy’s diet of Provera and Darvon has side-effected her with this kind of emotional bulimia where she can’t keep down any nasty secret. I smooth my veils over my ears. Thank you for not sharing.

“My father used to sit on my bed some nights,” she says, “and wake me up.”

Our father.

The ball gown is resurrected glorious on Brandy’s shoulders, brought back to life, larger than life and fairy-tale impossible to wear anyplace in the past fifty years. A zipper thick as my spine goes up the side to just under Brandy’s arm. The panels of the bodice pinch Brandy off at her waist and explode her out the top, her breasts, her bare arms and long neck. The skirt is layered pale yellow silk faille and tulle. It’s so much gold embroidery and seed pearls would make any bit of jewelry too much.

“It’s a palace of a dress,” Brandy says, “but even with the drugs, it hurts.”

The broke ends of the wire stays poke out around the neck, poke in at the waist. Panels of plastic whalebone, their corners and sharp edges jab and cut. The silk is hot, the tulle, rough. Just her breathing in and out makes the clashing steel and celluloid tucked inside, hidden, just Brandy being alive makes it bite and chew at the fabric and her skin.

Jump to at night, Brandy’s father, he used to say, Hurry. Get dressed. Wake your sister.

Me.

Get your coats on and get in the back of the truck, he’d say.

And we would, late after the TV stations had done the national anthem and gone off the air. Concluded their broadcast day. Nothing was on the road except us, our folks in the cab of the pickup and us two in the back, Brandy and his sister, curled on our sides against the corrugated floor of the truck bed, the squeak of the leaf springs, the hum of the driveline coming right into us. The potholes bounce our pumpkin heads hard on the floor of the bed. Our hands clamp tight over our faces to keep from breathing the sawdust and dried manure blowing around, left over. Our eyes shut tight to keep out the same. We were going we didn’t know where, but tried to figure out. A right turn, then a left turn, then a long straight stretch going we didn’t know how fast, then another right turn would roll us over on our left sides. We didn’t know how long. You couldn’t sleep.