“These are my lucky lifeguard ’kinis,” he’d tell me. “Be honest.”
And this is what I kept telling myself was love.
Be honest? I wouldn’t know where to start. I was so out of practice.
After Las Vegas, we rented one of those family vans. Eberhard Faber became Hewlett Packard. Brandy wore a long white cotton piqué dress with open strappy sides and a high slit up the skirt that was totally inappropriate for the entire state of Utah. We stopped and tasted the Great Salt Lake.
This just seemed like the thing to do.
I was always writing in the sand, writing in the dust on the car:
maybe your sister is in the next town.
Writing: here, take a few more Vicodins.
It was after Manus couldn’t get guys to approach him for sex that he started into buying man-on-man sex magazines and going out to gay clubs.
“Research,” he’d say.
“You can come with,” he’d tell me, “but don’t stand too close, I don’t want to send out the wrong signal.”
After Utah, Brandy turned Hewlett Packard into Harper Collins in Butte. There in Montana, we rented a Ford Probe and Harper drove with me squashed in the backseat, and every once in a while Harper would say, “We’re going one hundred and ten miles an hour.”
Brandy and me, we’d shrug.
Speeding didn’t seem like anything in a place as big as Montana.
maybe your sister’s not even in the united states, I wrote in lipstick on a bathroom mirror in a motel in Great Falls.
So to keep Manus’s job, we went out to gay bars, and I sat alone and told myself that it was different for men, the good looks thing was. Manus flirted and danced and sent drinks down the bar to whoever looked like a challenge. Manus would slip onto the barstool next to mine and whisper out the side of his mouth.
“I can’t believe he’s with that guy,” he’d say.
Manus would nod just enough for me to figure out which guy.
“Last week, he wouldn’t give me the time of day,” Manus would rant under his breath. “I wasn’t good enough, and that trashy, bottle-blond piece of garbage is supposed to be better?”
Manus would hunch over his drink and say, “Guys are so fucked up.”
And I’d be, like, no duh.
And I told myself it was okay. Any relationship I could be in would have these rough times.
Jump to Calgary, Alberta, where Brandy ate Nebalino suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they were Almond Roca. She got so ripped, she turned Harper Collins into Addison Wesley. Most of Calgary, Brandy wore a white, quilted ski jacket with a faux-fur collar and a white bikini bottom by Donna Karan. The look was fun and spirited and we felt light and popular.
Evenings called for a black-and-white-striped floor-length coat dress that Brandy could never keep buttoned up, with black wool hot pants on underneath. Addison Wesley turned into Nash Rambler, and we rented another Cadillac.
Jump to Edmonton, Alberta, Nash Rambler turned into Alfa Romeo. Brandy wore these crinoline shorty-short square dance petticoats over black tights tucked into cowboy boots. Brandy wore this push-up bustier made of leather with local cattle brands burned all over it.
In a nice hotel bar in Edmonton, Brandy says, “I hate it when you can see the seam in your martini glass. I mean, I can feel the mold line. It’s so cheap.”
Guys all over her. Like spotlights, I remember that kind of attention. That whole country, Brandy never had to buy her own drinks, not once.
Jump to Manus losing his assignment as an independent special contract vice operative to the detective division of the Metropolitan Police Department. My point is, he never really got over it.
He was running out of money. It’s not like there was a lot in the bank to begin with. Then the birds ate my face.
What I didn’t know is, there was Evie Cottrell living alone in her big lonesome house with all her Texas land and oil money, saying, hey, she had some work that needed doing. And Manus with his driving need to prove he can still pee on every tree. That mirror-mirror kind of power. The rest you already know.
Jump to us on the road, after the hospital, after the Rhea sisters, and I keep slipping the hormones, the Provera and Climara and Premarin, into what he ate and drank. Whiskey and estradiol. Vodka and ethinyl estradiol. It was so easy it was scary. He was all the time making big cow eyes at Brandy.
We were all running from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.
Jump to Los Angeles.
Jump to Spokane.
Jump to Boise and San Diego and Phoenix.
Jump to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we were Italian expatriates speaking English as a second language until there wasn’t a native tongue among us.
“You have two of the breasts of a young woman,” Alfa Romeo told a realtor I can’t remember in which house.
From Vancouver, we reentered the United States as Brandy, Seth, and Bubba-Joan via the Princess Princess’s very professional mouth. All the way to Seattle, Brandy read to us how a little Jewish girl with a mysterious muscle disease turned herself into Rona Barrett.
All of us looking at big rich houses, picking up drugs, renting cars, buying clothes, and taking clothes back.
“Tell us a gross personal story,” Brandy says en route to Seattle. Brandy all the time being the boss of me. Being this close to death herself.
Rip yourself open.
Tell me my life story before I die.
Sew yourself shut.
Chapter 29
ump 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.
This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them talking to each other during morning rounds.
And people find me hard to understand.
What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could die anytime I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not wake up. A quick, painless death.
On my pad with my pen, I wrote:
don’t tease.
Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, “It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says.
Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.
“My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt-ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says.