“Sir,” Brandy says, and her new voice is as bland and drawled out as grits without salt or butter. She says, “Sir, we are citizens of the United States of America, what used to be called the greatest country on earth until the homosexuals and child pornographers—”
“Your names?” says the border guy.
Brandy leans across Alfa to look up at the border guy. “My husband,” she says, “is an innocent man.”
“Your name, please,” he says, no doubt looking up our license plate, finding it’s a rental car, rented in Billings, Montana, three weeks ago, maybe even finding the truth about who we really are. Maybe finding bulletin after bulletin from all over western Canada about three nutcases stealing drugs at big houses up for sale. Maybe all this is spooling onto his computer screen, maybe none of it. You never know.
“I am married,” Brandy is almost yelling to get his attention. “I am the wife of the Reverend Scooter Alexander,” she says, still half laid across Alfa’s lap.
“And this,” she says and draws the invisible line from her smile to Alfa, “this is my son-in-law, Seth Thomas.” Her big hand flies toward me in the backseat. “This,” she says, “is my daughter, Bubba-Joan.”
Some days, I hate it when Brandy changes our lives without warning. Sometimes, twice in one day, you have to live up to a new identity. A new name. New relationships. Handicaps. It’s hard to remember who I started this road trip being.
No doubt this is the kind of stress the constantly mutating AIDS virus must feel.
“Sir?” the border guy says to Seth, formerly Alfa Romeo, formerly Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Wells Fargo, formerly Eberhard Faber. The guard says, “Sir, are you bringing any purchases back with you into the United States?”
My pointed little toe of my shoe reaches under the front seat and gooses my new husband. The details of everything have us surrounded. The mudflats left by low tide are just over there, with little waves arriving one after another. The flower beds on our other side are planted to spell out words you can only read from a long ways off. Up close, it’s just so many red and yellow wax begonias.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never watched our Christian Healing Network?” Brandy says. She fiddles with the little gold cross at her throat. “If you just watched one show, you’d know that God in his wisdom has made my son-in-law a mute, and he cannot speak.”
The border guy keyboards some quick strokes. This could be CRIME he’s typed. Or DRUGS. Or SHOOT. It could be SMUGGLERS. Or ARREST.
“Not a word,” Brandy whispers next to Seth’s ear, “You talk and in Seattle, I’ll change you into Harvey Wallbanger.”
The border guy says, “To admit you to the United States, I’m going to have to see your passports, please.”
Brandy licks her lips wet and shining, her eyes moist and bright. Her brocade scarf slips low to reveal her cleavage as she looks up at the border guy and says, “Would you excuse us a moment?”
Brandy sits back in her own seat, and Seth’s window hums all the way up.
Brandy’s big torpedoes inhale big and then exhale. “Don’t anybody panic,” she says, and pops her lipstick open. She makes a kiss in the rearview mirror and pokes the lipstick around the edge of her big Plumbago mouth, trembling so much that her one big hand has to hold her lipstick hand steady.
“I can get us back into the States,” she says, “but I’m going to need a condom and a breath mint.”
Around her lipstick she says, “Bubba-Joan, be a sweetheart and hand me up one of those Estraderms, will you?”
Seth gives her the mint and a condom.
She says, “Let’s guess how long it takes him to find a week’s supply of girl juice soaking into his ass.”
She pops the lipstick shut and says, “Blot me, please.”
I hand her up a tissue and an estrogen patch.
Chapter 4
n the planet Brandy Alexander, the universe is run by a fairly elaborate system of gods and she-gods. Some evil. Some are ultimate goodness. Marilyn Monroe, for example. Then there’s Nancy Reagan and Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some of the gods and she-gods are dead. Some are alive. A lot are plastic surgeons.
The system changes. Gods and she-gods come and go and leapfrog each other for a change of status.
Abraham Lincoln is in his heaven to make our car a floating bubble of new-car–smelling air: driving as smooth as advertising copy. These days, Brandy says Marlene Dietrich is in charge of the weather. Now is the autumn of our ennui. We’re carried down Interstate 5 under gray skies, inside the blue casket interior of a rented Lincoln Town Car. Seth is driving. This is how we always sit, with Brandy up front and me in the back. Three hours of scenic beauty between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle is what we’re driving through. Asphalt and internal combustion carry us and the Lincoln Town Car south.
Traveling this way, you might as well be watching the world on television. The electric windows are hummed all the way up so the planet Brandy Alexander has an atmosphere of warm, still, silent blue. It’s an even seventy degrees Fahrenheit, with the whole outside world of trees and rocks scrolling by in miniature behind curved glass. Live by satellite. We’re the little world of Brandy Alexander rocketing past it all.
Driving, driving, Seth says, “Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”
Our rule is that when Seth’s driving, no radio. What happens is a Dionne Warwick song comes on, and Seth starts to cry so hard, crying those big Estinyl tears, shaking with those big Provera sobs. If Dionne Warwick comes on singing a Burt Bacharach song, we just have to pull over or it’s sure we’ll get car-wrecked.
The tears, the way his dumpling face has lost the chiseled shadows that used to pool under his brow and cheekbones, the way Seth’s hand will sneak up and tweak his nipple through his shirt and his mouth will drop open and his eyes roll backward, it’s the hormones. The conjugated estrogens, the Premarin, the estradiol, the ethinyl estradiol, they’ve all found their way into Seth’s diet cola. Of course, there’s the danger of liver damage at his current daily overdose levels. There could already be liver damage or cancer or blood clots, thrombosis if you’re a doctor, but I’m willing to take that chance. Sure, it’s all just for fun. Watching for his breasts to develop. Seeing his macho babe-magnet swagger go to fat and him taking naps in the afternoon. All that’s great, but his being dead would let me move on to explore other interests.
Driving, driving, Seth says, “Don’t you think that somehow television makes us God?”
This introspection is new. His beard growth is lightened up. It must be the antiandrogens choking back his testosterone. The water retention, he can ignore. The moodiness. A tear slips out of one eye in the rearview mirror and rolls down his face.
“Am I the only one who cares about these issues?” he says. “Am I the only one here in this car who feels anything real?”
Brandy’s reading a paperback book. Most times, Brandy is reading some plastic surgeon’s glossy hard-sell brochure about vaginas complete with color pictures showing the picture-perfect way a urethra should be aligned to ensure a downward stream of urine. Other pictures show how a top-quality clitoris should be hooded. These are five-figure, ten- and twenty-thousand-dollar vaginas, better than the real thing, and most days Brandy will pass the pictures around.