Invisible Monsters

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

What you get with the Rhea sisters is three skin-andbone white men who sit around a suite at the Congress Hotel all day in nylon slips with the shoulder straps fallen off one shoulder or the other, wearing high heels and smoking cigarettes. Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer and egg- white facials, they listen to that step-to-three cha-cha music you only hear on elevators anymore. The Rhea sister hair, their hair is short and flat with grease and matted down bristling with bobby pins, flat on their heads. Maybe they have a wig cap stretched on over the pins if it's not summer outside. Most of the time, they don't know what season it is. The blinds aren't ever open, and there are maybe a dozen of those chacha records stacked on the automatic record changer.

All the furniture is blonde and the big four-legged RCA Philco console stereo. The stereo, you could plow a field with that old needle, and the metal tone arm weighs about two pounds.

May I present them:

Kitty Litter.

Sofonda Peters.

The Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

AKA the Rhea sisters when they're onstage, these are her family, Brandy Alexander told me in the speech therapist office. Not the first time we met, this wasn't the time I cried and told Brandy how I lost my face. This wasn't the second time, either, the time Brandy brought her sewing basket full of ways to hide my being a monster. This was one of the other tons of times we snuck off while I was still in the hospital. The speech therapist office was just where we'd meet.

"Usually," Brandy tells me, "Kitty Litter is bleaching and tweezing away unwanted facial hair. This unsightly hair thing can tie up a bathroom for hours, but Kitty would wear her Ray-Bans inside out, she loves looking at her reflection so much."

The Rheas, they made Brandy what she is. Brandy, she owes them everything.

Brandy would lock the speech therapist door, and if somebody would knock, Brandy and me, we'd fake loud orgasm noises. We'd scream and yip and slap the floor. I'd clap my hands to make that special spanking sound that everybody knows. Whoever knocks, they'd go away fast.

Then we'd go back to just us using up make-up and talking.

"Sofonda," Brandy would tell me, "Sofonda Peters, she's the brains, Sofonda is. Miss Peters is all day with her porcelain nails stuck in the rotary-dial princess phone to an agent or a merchandiser, selling, selling, selling."

Somebody would knock on the speech therapist door, so I'd give out with a cat scream and slap my thigh.

The Rhea sisters, Brandy would tell me, she'd be dead without them. When they'd found her, the princess queen supreme, she'd been a size twenty-six, lip-synching at amateur-night, open-mike shows. Lip-synching "Thumbelina."

Her hair, her figure, her hippy, hippy forward Brandy Alexander walk, the Rhea sisters invented all that.

Jump to two fire engines passing me in the opposite direction as I drive the freeway toward downtown, away from Evie's house on fire. In the rearview mirror of Manus's Fiat Spider, Evie's house is a smaller and smaller bonfire. The peachy-pink hem of Evie's bathrobe is shut in the car door, and the ostrich feathers whip me in the cool night air pouring around the convertible's windshield.

Smoke is all I smell like. The rifle on the passenger seat is pointing at the floor.

There's not one word from my love cargo in the trunk.

And there's only one place left to go.

No way could I call and just ask the operator to ring Brandy. No way would the operator understand me, so we're on our way downtown to the Congress Hotel.

Jump to how all the Rhea sister money comes from a doll named Katty Kathy. This is what else Brandy told me between faking orgasms in the speech therapist office. She's a doll, Katty Kathy is one of those foot-high flesh-tone dolls with the impossible measurements. What she would be as a real woman is 46-16-26. As a real woman, Katty Kathy could buy a total of nothing off the rack. You know you've seen this doll. Comes naked in a plastic bubble pack for a dollar, but her clothes cost a fortune, that's how realistic she is. You can buy about four hundred tiny fashion separates that mix and match to create three tasteful outfits. In that way, the doll is incredibly lifelike. Chilling, even.

Sofonda Peters came up with the idea. Invented Katty Kathy, made the prototype, sold the doll, and cut all the deals. Still, Sofonda is about married to Kitty and Vivian and there's enough money to support them all.

What sold Katty Kathy is that she's a talking doll, but instead of a string, she's got this little gold chain coming out of her back. You pull her chain, and she says:

"That dress is fine, I mean, if that's really how you want to look.”

"Your heart is my pinata."

"Is that what you're going to wear?"

"I think it would be good for our relationship if we dated other people."

"Kiss kiss."

And, "Don't touch my hair!"

The Rhea sisters, they made a bundle. Katty Kathy's little bolero jacket alone, they have that jacket sewn in Cambodia for a dime and sell it here in America for sixteen dollars. People pay that.

Jump to me parking the Fiat with its trunk full of my love cargo on a side street, and me walking up Broadway toward the doorman at the Congress Hotel. I'm a woman with half a face arriving at a luxury hotel, one of those big glazed terra cotta palace hotels built a hundred years ago, where the doormen wear tailcoats with gold braid on the shoulders. I'm wearing a peignoir set and a bathrobe. No veils. Half the bathrobe has been shut in a car door, dragging on the freeway for the past twenty miles. My ostrich feathers smell like smoke, and I'm trying to keep it a big secret that I have a rifle tucked up crutch-like under my arm.

Yeah, and I lost a shoe, one of those high-heeled mules, too.

The doorman in his tailcoat doesn't even look at me. Yeah, and my hair, I see it reflected in the big brass plaque that says The Congress Hotel. The cool night air has pulled my butter creme frosting hairdo out into a ratted stringy mess.

Jump to me at the front desk of the Congress Hotel where I try and make my eyes alluring. They say what people notice first about you is your eyes. I have the attention of what must be the night auditor, the bellman, the manager, and a clerk. First impressions are so important. It must be the way I'm dressed or the rifle. Using the hole that's the top of my throat, my tongue sticking out of it and all the scar tissue around it, I say, "Gerl terk nahdz gah sssid."

Everybody is just flash frozen by my alluring eyes.

I don't know how, but then the rifle's up on the desk, pointing at nobody in particular.

The manager steps up in his navy blue blazer with its little brass Mr. Baxter name tag, and he says, "We can give you all the money in the drawer, but no one here can open the safe in the office."

The gun on the desk points right at the brass Mr. Baxter nametag, a fact that hasn't gone unnoticed. I snap my fingers and point at a piece of paper for him to give me. With the guest pen on a chain, I write:

which suite are the rhea sisters in? don't make me knock on every door on the fifteenth floor, it's the middle of the night.

"That would be Suite 15-G," says Mr. Baxter, both his hands full of cash I don't want and reached out across the desk toward me. "The elevators," he says, "are to your right."

Jump to me being Daisy St. Patience the first day Brandy and I sat together. The day of the frozen turkey after the whole summer I waited for somebody to ask me what happened to my face, and I told Brandy everything.

Brandy, when she sat me in the chair still hot from her ass and she locked the speech therapist door that first time, she named me out of my future. She named me Daisy St. Patience and never wanted to know what name I walked in the door with. I was the rightful heir to the international fashion house, the House of St. Patience.

Brandy she just talked and talked. We were running out of air, she talked so much, and I don't mean just we, Brandy and me. I mean the world. The world was running out of air, Brandy talked that much. The Amazon Basin just could not keep up.

"Who you are moment to moment," Brandy said, "is just a story."

What I needed was a new story.

"Let me do for you," Brandy said, "what the Rhea sisters did for me."

Give me courage.

Flash.

Give me heart.

Flash.

So jump to me being Daisy St. Patience going up in that elevator, and Daisy St. Patience walking down that wide carpeted hallway to Suite 15-G. Daisy knocks and nobody answers. Through the door, you can hear that cha-cha music.

The door opens six inches, but the chain is on so it stops.

Three white faces appear in the six-inch gap, one on top of the other, Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer. Their short dark hair is matted down flat with bobby pins and wig caps.

The Rhea sisters.

Who's who, I don't know. The drag queen totem pole in the door crack says:

"Don't take the queen supreme from us."

"She's all we have to do with our lives."

"She isn't finished yet. We're not half done, and there's just so much more we have to do on her."

I give them a peekaboo pink chiffon flash of the rifle, and the door slams.

Through the door, you can hear the chain come off. Then the door opens all the way.

Jump to one time, late one night, driving between Nowhere, Wyoming, and WhoKnowsWhere, Montana, when Seth says how your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you.

"Then puberty makes you Satan," he says, "just because you want something better."

Jump to inside suite 15-G with its blonde furniture and the bossa-nova cha-cha music and cigarette smoke, and the Rhea sisters are flying around the room in their nylon slips with the shoulder straps off one shoulder or the other. I don't have to do anything but point the rifle.

"We know who you are, Daisy St. Patience," one of them says, lighting a cigarette, "With a face like that, you're all Brandy talks about anymore."

All over the room are these big, big 1959 spatter glaze ashtrays so big you only have to empty them every couple years.

The one with the cigarette gives me her long hand with its porcelain nails and says, "I'm Pie Rhea."

"I'm Die Rhea," says another one, near the stereo.

The one with the cigarette, Pie Rhea, says, "Those are our stagenames." She points at the third Rhea, over on the sofa, eating Chinese out of a takeaway carton. "That," she says and points, "This Miss Eating Herself To Fat, you can call her Gon Rhea."

With her mouth full of nothing you'd want to see, Gon Rhea says, "Charmed, I'm sure."

Putting her cigarette everywhere but in her mouth, Pie Rhea says, "The queen just does not need your problems, not tonight." She says, "We're all the family the top girl needs."

On the stereo is a picture in a silver frame of a girl, beautiful in front of seamless paper, smiling into an unseen camera, an invisible photographer telling her:

Give me passion.

Flash.

Give me joy.

Flash.

Give me youth and energy and innocence and beauty.

Flash.

"Brandy's first family, her birth family, didn't want her, so we adopted her," says Die Rhea. Pointing her long finger at the picture smiling on the blonde stereo, Die Rhea says, "Her birth family thinks she's dead."

Jump to one time back when I had a face and I did this magazine cover shoot for BabeWear magazine.

Jump back to Suite 15-G and the picture on the blonde stereo is me, my cover, the BabeWear magazine cover, framed with Die Rhea pointing her finger at me.

Jump back to us in the speech therapist office with the door locked and Brandy saying how lucky she was the Rhea sisters found her. It's not everybody who gets a second chance to be born again and raised a second time, but this time by a family that loves her.

"Kitty Litter, Sofonda, and Vivienne," Brandy says, "I owe them everything."

Jump to Suite 15-G and Gon Rhea waving her chopsticks at me and saying, "Don't you try and take her from us. We're not finished with her yet."

"If Brandy goes with you," says Pie Rhea, "she can pay for her own conjugated estrogens. And her vaginoplasty. And her labiaplasty. Not to mention her scrotal electrolysis."

To the picture on the stereo, to the smiling stupid face in the silver frame, Die Rhea says, "None of that is cheap." Die Rhea lifts the picture and holds it up to me, my past looking me eye to eye, and Die Rhea says, "This, this is how Brandy wanted to look, like her bitch sister. That was two years ago, before she had laser surgery to thin her vocal cords and then her trachea shave. She had her scalp advanced three centimeters to give her the right hairline. We paid for her brow shave to get rid of the bone ridge above her eyes that the Miss Male used to have. We paid for her jaw contouring and her forehead feminiza-tion."

"And," Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up Chinese, "and every time she came home from the hospital with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam's apple shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of her for those two years?"

Jump to nay folks asleep in their bed across mountains and deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn't want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn't say where or when and then he laughed and hung up.

Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old picture of me in my face and saying, "This is how she wanted to look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how she looks."

Gon Rhea says, "Hell. Brandy looks better than that."

"We're the ones who love Brandy Alexander," says Pie Rhea.

"But you're the one Brandy loves because you need her," says Die Rhea.

Gon Rhea says, "The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person." She says, "Brandy will leave us if she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”

The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee. My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane's being dead was just too good to be true.

First the exploding hairspray can didn't kill him.

Then our family couldn't just forget him.

Now even the deadly AIDS virus has failed me.

My brother is nothing but one bitter fucking disappointment after another.

You can hear a door opening and shutting somewheres, then another door, then another door opens and Brandy's there saying, "Daisy, honey," and steps into the smoke and cha

cha music wearing this amazing sort of Bill Blass First Lady type of traveling suit made out of solid kelly green trimmed with white piping and green high heels and a really smart green purse. On her head is an eco-incorrect tasty sort of spray of rainforest green parrot feathers made into a hat, and Brandy says, "Daisy, honey, don't point a gun at the people who I love."

In each of Brandy's big ring-beaded hands is a sassy off- white American Tourister luggage. "Give us a hand, somebody. These are just the royal hormones." She says, "My clothes I need are in the other room."

To Sofonda, Brandy says, "Miss Pie Rhea, I have just got to get."

To Kitty, Brandy says, "Miss Die Rhea, I've done everything we can do for now. We've done the scalp advance-merit, the brow lift, the brow bone shave. We've done the trachea shave, the nose contouring, the jawline contouring, the forehead realignment ..."

Like it's any wonder I didn't recognize my old mutilated brother.

To Vivienne, Brandy says, "Miss Gon Rhea, I've got months left on my Real Life Training and I'm not spending them holed up here in this hotel."

Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross- country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family vacations, only backwards. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories, shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load so's they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.

This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy's luggage down the fire stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You know. The transformation.

This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering,

Shane?

"It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a girl, you know. Forever."

Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.

And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I would be boo-hooing too, if I didn't know Brandy was my dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me, plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.

Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

Flash.

Just give me my first opportunity.

Flash.

Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, "Do you know what the Benjamin Standard Guidelines are?"

Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, "I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training."

Brandy pulls out into the street and we're almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.

There's a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There's still Manus in the trunk, and we're already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.

Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.

Arson, kidnapping, I think I'm up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.

Monster Girl Slays Secret Brother Gal Pal

"I've got eight months left to my R.L.T. year," Brandy says. "Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”