“The owner of this house,” Brandy says, “is very old and supplementing her hormones and still lives here.”
The carpet is so thick under my feet I could be climbing loose dirt. One step after another, loose and sliding and unstable. We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we’ve been speaking English as a second language so long that we’ve forgotten it is our first.
I have no native tongue.
We’re eye level with the dirty stones of a dark chandelier. On the other side of the handrail, the hallway’s gray marble floor looks as if we’ve climbed a stairway through the clouds. Step after step. Far away, Alfa’s demanding talk goes on about wine cellars, about kennels for the Russian wolfhounds. Alfa’s constant demand for the realty woman’s attention is as faint as a radio call-in show bouncing back from outer space.
“…the Princess Brandy Alexander,” Alfa’s warm, dark words float up, “she is probable to remove her clothes and scream like the wild horses in even the crowded restaurants …”
The queen supreme’s voice and the shadow of L’Air du Temps says, “Next house,” her Plumbago lips say, “Alfa will be the mute.”
“…your breasts,” Alfa is telling the realty woman, “you have two of the breasts of a young woman …”
Not one native tongue is left among us.
Jump to us being upstairs.
Jump to now anything being possible.
After the realtor is trapped by the blue eyes of Signore Alfa Romeo, jump to when the real scamming starts. The master bedroom will always be down the hallway in the direction of the best view. This master bathroom is paneled in pink mirror, every wall, even the ceiling. Princess Brandy and I are everywhere, reflected on every surface. You can see Brandy sitting on the pink counter at one side of the vanity sink, me sitting at the other side of the sink.
One of us is sitting on each side of all the sinks in all the mirrors. There are just too many Brandy Alexanders to count, and they’re all being the boss of me. They all open their white calfskin clutch bags, and hundreds of those big ring-beaded Brandy Alexander hands take out new copies of the Physicians’ Desk Reference with its red cover, big as a Bible.
All her hundreds of Burning Blueberry eye shadow eyes look at me from all over the room.
“You know the drill,” all her hundreds of Plumbago mouths command. Those big hands start pulling open drawers and cabinet doors. “Remember where you got everything, and put it back exactly where you found it,” the mouths say. “We’ll do the drugs first, then the makeup. Now start hunting.”
I take out the first bottle. It’s Valium, and I hold the bottle so all the hundred Brandys can read the label.
“Take what we can get away with,” Brandy says, “then get on to the next bottle.”
I shake a few of the little blue pills into my purse pocket with the other Valiums. The next bottle I find is Darvon.
“Honey, those are heaven in your mouth.” All the Brandys look up to peer at the bottle I’m holding. “Does it look safe to take too many?”
The expiration date on the label is only a month away, and the bottle is still almost full. I figure we can take about half.
“Here.” A big ring-beaded hand comes at me from every direction. One hundred big hands come at me, palms up. “Give Brandy a couple. The princess is having lower back pain again.”
I shake ten capsules out, and a hundred hands toss a thousand tranquilizers onto the red carpet tongues of those Plumbago mouths. A suicide load of Darvon slides down into the dark interior of the continents that make up a world of Brandy Alexander.
Inside the next bottle are the little purple ovals of 2.5-milligram–sized Premarin.
That’s short for Pregnant Mare Urine. That’s short for thousands of miserable horses in North Dakota and central Canada, forced to stand in cramped dark stalls with a catheter stuck on them to catch every drop of urine and only getting let outside to get fucked again. What’s funny is that describes pretty much any good long stay in a hospital, but that’s only been my experience.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Brandy says. “My not taking those pills won’t bring any baby horses back from the dead.”
In the next bottle are round, peach-colored little scored tablets of one-hundred-milligram Aldactone. Our homeowner must be a junkie for female hormones.
Painkillers and estrogen are pretty much Brandy’s only two food groups, and she says, “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” She snacks on some little pink-coated Estinyls. She pops a few of the turquoise-blue Estrace tablets. She’s using some vaginal Premarin as a hand cream when she says, “Miss Kay?” She says, “I can’t seem to make a fist, sweetness. Do you think maybe you can wrap things up without me while I lie down?”
The hundreds of me cloned in the pink bathroom mirrors, we check out the makeup while the princess goes off to catnap in the cabbage rose and old canopy bed glory of the master bedroom. I find Darvocets and Percodans and Compazines, Nembutals and Percocets. Oral estrogens. Antiandrogens. Progestons. Transdermal estrogen patches. I find none of Brandy’s colors, no Rusty Rose blusher. No Burning Blueberry eye shadow. I find a vibrator with the dead batteries swollen and leaking acid inside.
It’s an old woman who owns this house, I figure. Ignored and aging and drugged-out old women, older and more invisible to the world every minute, they must not wear a lot of makeup. Not go out to fun hot spots. Not boogie to a party froth. My breath smells hot and sour inside my veils, inside the damp layers of silk and mesh and cotton georgette I lift for the first time all day; and in the mirrors, I look at the pink reflection of what’s left of my face.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?
The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White’s game. There’s an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.
I’m living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live.
I tell myself: I deserved this.
This is exactly what I wanted.
Chapter 2
ump 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.
The plan is if we make it through the border, we’ll drive south to Seattle, where there are nightclubs and dance clubs where go-go boys and go-go girls will line up to buy the pockets of my purse clean. We have to be quiet because the police, they have microphones on both sides of the border, United States and Canadian. This way they can listen in on people waiting to cross. We could have Cuban cigars. Fresh fruit. Diamonds. Diseases. Drugs, Brandy says. Brandy, she tells us to shut up a mile before the border, and we wait in line, quiet.
Brandy unwinds the yards and yards of brocade scarf around her head. Brandy, she shakes her hair down her back and ties the scarf over her shoulders to hide her torpedo cleavage. Brandy switches to simple gold earrings. She takes off her pearls and puts on a little chain with a gold cross. This is a moment before the border guard.
“Your nationalities?” the border-guard guy sitting inside his little window, behind his computer terminal with his clipboard and his blue suit, behind his mirrored sunglasses, and behind his gold badge says.