Flash.
Give me empathy.
Flash.
Oh, I wish I could make my poor heart just bust.
I say, “Vswf siws cm eiuvn sincs.”
No, it’s okay, Brandy says. She doesn’t want to reward anybody for exploiting children. She got it on sale.
Caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and georgette, the idea that I can’t share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.
“Oh, and don’t worry,” Brandy says. “You’ll still get attention. You have a dynamite tits-and-ass combo. You just can’t talk to anybody.”
People just can’t stand not knowing something, she tells me. Especially men can’t bear not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.
“Behind a veil, you’re the great unknown,” she says. “Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you’re a real person, and some will just ignore you.”
The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.
Even if somebody is only wearing an eye patch, you always want to look. To see if he’s faking. The man in the Hathaway shirt. Or to see the horror underneath.
The photographer in my head says:
Give me a voice.
Flash.
Give me a face.
Brandy’s answer was little hats with veils. And big hats with veils. Pancake hats and pillbox hats edged all around with clouds of tulle and gauze. Parachute silk or heavy crepe or dense net dotted with chenille pom-poms.
“The most boring thing in the entire world,” Brandy says, “is nudity.”
The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty.
“Think of this as a tease. It’s lingerie for your face,” she says. “A peekaboo nightgown you wear over your whole identity.”
The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed past. So Brandy never asked me anything. Bulldozer alpha bitch she can be, we meet again and again in the speech therapist office and Brandy tells me everything I need to know about myself.
Chapter 38
ump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident when I go home to eat dinner with my folks. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by solid food. On the dining room table, covering it all over, is a tablecloth I don’t remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace edge. This isn’t something I’d expect my mom to buy, so I ask, did somebody give this to her?
Mom’s just pulling up to the table and unfolding her blue damask napkin with everything steaming between us: her, me, and my dad. The sweet potatoes under their layer of marshmallows. The big brown turkey. The rolls are inside a quilted cozy sewed to look like a hen. You lift the wings to take a roll out. There’s the cut-glass tray of sweet pickles and celery filled with peanut butter.
“Give what?” my mom says.
The new tablecloth. It’s really nice.
My father sighs and plunges a knife into the turkey.
“It wasn’t going to be a tablecloth at first,” Mom says. “Your father and I pretty much dropped the ball on our original project.”
The knife goes in again and again and my father starts to dismember our dinner.
My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?”
Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.
“I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane,” Mom says. “We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it.”
Give me amnesia.
Flash.
Give me new parents.
Flash.
“Your mother didn’t want to step on any toes,” Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. “With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn’t want to give people the wrong idea.”
My mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, “Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado- and masochism.” She says, “Really these panels are to help the people left behind.”
“Strangers are going to see us and see Shane’s name,” my dad says. “We didn’t want them thinking things.”
The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce.
“I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles,” my mom says. “It’s the symbol for Nazi homosexuals.” She says, “Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like the female pubic hair. The black triangle does.”
My father says, “Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute.”
My mom says, “We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn’t figure which.”
“Yellow,” my father says, “means watersports.”
“A lighter shade of blue,” Mom says, “would mean just regular oral sex.”
“Regular white,” my father says, “would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear.” He says, “I can’t remember which.”
My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.
We’re supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.
“Finally we just gave up,” my mom says, “and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material.”
Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, “Do you know about rimming?”
I know it isn’t table talk.
“And fisting?” my mom asks.
I say, I know. I don’t mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.
We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock-full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.
“Would you pass the butter, please?” my mother says. To my father she says, “Do you know what felching is?”
This, it’s too much. Shane’s dead, but he’s more the center of attention than he ever was. My folks wonder why I never come home, and this is why. All this sick horrible sex talk over Thanksgiving dinner, I can’t take this. It’s just Shane this and Shane that. It’s sad, but what happened to Shane was not something I did. I know everybody thinks it’s my fault, what happened. The truth is Shane destroyed this family. Shane was bad and mean, and he’s dead. I’m good and obedient and I’m ignored.
Silence.
All that happened was I was fourteen years old. Somebody put a full can of hairspray in the trash by mistake. It was Shane’s job to burn the trash. He was fifteen. He was dumping the kitchen trash into the burn barrel while the bathroom trash was on fire, and the hairspray exploded. It was an accident.
Silence.
Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. I’d tell them how Evie and me were shooting a new infomercial. My modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he’s good or bad, alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is angry.
“Listen,” I say. This just blurts out. “Me,” I say, “I’m the last child you people have left alive so you’d better start paying me some attention.”
Silence.
“Felching …” I lower my voice. I’m calm now. “Felching is when a man fucks you up the butt without a rubber. He shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and feces are present. That’s felching. It may or may not,” I add, “include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into your mouth.”
Silence.
Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint.