Invisible Monsters

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Jump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a realtor's office with our own Mr. White Westing-house gone inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs just before he took them to market. She says how he used to feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking distance.

Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses.

"You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?" she says.

He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the pipe, you put big potatoes from this year's crop. Inside the pipe you put last year's soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can't see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price, you're making money.

We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.

Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on the rack and says, "You ever hear of anything in your whole life so underhanded?"

Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot pink organza or ice blue velveteen.

These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to poke and tear their way out.

Princess Princess, she says, "It will take at least three Darvons to get me into this dress."

She opens her hand, and I shake out the prescription.

Her father, Brandy says, he used to grind his beef with crushed ice to force it full of water before he sold it. He'd grind beef with what's called bull meal to force it full of cereal.

"He wasn't a bad person," she says. "Not outside of following the rules a little too much."

Not the rules about being fair and honest, she says, so much as the rules about protecting your family from poverty. And disease.

Some nights, Brandy says, her father used to creep into her room while she was asleep.

I don't want to hear this. Brandy's diet of Provera and Darvon has side-effected her with this kind of emotional bulimia where she can't keep down any nasty secret. I smooth my veils over my ears. Thank you for not sharing.

"My father used to sit on my bed some nights," she says, "and wake me up."

Our father.

The ball gown is resurrected glorious on Brandy's shoulders, brought back to life, larger than life and fairy tale impossible to wear any place in the past fifty years. A zipper thick as my spine goes up the side to just under Brandy's arm. The panels of the bodice pinch Brandy off at her waist and explode her out the top, her breasts, her bare arms and long neck. The skirt is layered pale yellow silk faille and tulle. It's so much gold embroidery and seed pearls would make any bit of jewelry too much.

"It's a palace of a dress," Brandy says, "but even with the drugs, it hurts."

The broke ends of the wire stays poke out around the neck, poke in at the waist. Panels of plastic whalebone, their corners and sharp edges jab and cut. The silk is hot, the tulle, rough. Just her breathing in and out makes the clashing steel and celluloid tucked inside, hidden, just Brandy being alive makes it bite and chew at the fabric and her skin.

Jump to at night, Brandy's father, he used to say, hurry. Get dressed. Wake your sister.

Me.

Get your coats on and get in the back of the truck, he'd say.

And we would, late after the TV stations had done the national anthem and gone off the air. Concluded their broadcast day. Nothing was on the road except us, our folks in the cab of the pickup and us two in the back, Brandy and his sister, curled on our sides against the corrugated floor of the truck bed, the squeak of the leaf springs, the hum of the driveline coming right into us. The potholes bounce our pumpkin heads hard on the floor of the bed. Our hands clamp tight over our faces to keep from breathing the sawdust and dried manure blowing around leftover. Our eyes shut tight to keep out the same. We were going we didn't know where, but tried to figure out. A right turn, then a left turn, then a long straight stretch going we didn't know how fast, then another right turn would roll us over on our left sides. We didn't know how long. You couldn't sleep.

Wearing the dress to shreds and holding very still, Brandy says, "You know, I've been on my own pretty much since I was sixteen."

With every breath, even her taking shallow Darvon overdosed little gulps of air, Brandy winces. She says, "There was an accident when I was fifteen, and at the hospital, the police accused my father of abusing me. It just went on and on. I couldn't tell them anything because there was nothing to tell."

She inhales and winces, "The interviews, the counseling, the intervention therapy, it just went on and on."

The pickup truck slowed and bounced off the edge of the blacktop, onto gravel or washboard dirt, and the whole truck bounced and rattled a while farther, then stopped.

This is how poor we were.

Still in the truck bed, you took your hands off your face, and we'd be stopped. The dust and manure would settle. Brandy's father would drop the tailgate of the truck, and you'd be on a dirt road alongside a looming broken wall of boxcars laying this way and that off their tracks. Boxcars would be broken open. Flatcars would be rolled over with their loads of logs or two-by-fours scattered. Tanker cars buckled and leaking. Hoppers full of coal or wood chips would be heaved over and dumped out in black or gold piles. The fierce smell of ammonia. The good smell of cedar. The sun would be just under the horizon with light coming around to us from underneath the world.

There'd be lumber to load on the truck. Cases of instant butterscotch pudding. Cases of typing paper, toilet paper, double-A batteries, toothpaste, canned peaches, books. Crushed diamonds of safety glass'd be everywhere around car carriers tipped sideways with the brand-new cars inside wrecked, with their clean, black tires in the air.

Brandy lifts the gown's neckline and peeks inside at her Estraderm patch on one breast. She peels the backing off another patch and pastes it on her other breast, then takes another stabbing breath and winces.

"The whole mess died down after about three months, the whole child abuse investigation," Brandy says. "Then one basketball practice, I'm getting out of the gym and a man comes up. He's with the police, he says, and this is a confidential follow-up interview."

Brandy inhales, winces. She lifts the neckline again and takes out a Methadone disket from between her breasts, bites off half of it and drops the rest back inside.

The fitting room is hot and small with the two of us and that huge civil engineering project of a dress packed together.

Brandy says, "Darvon." She says, "Quick, please." And she snaps her fingers.

I fish out another red and pink capsule, and she gulps it dry.

"This guy," Brandy says, "he asks me to get in his car, to talk, just to talk, and he asks if I have anything I'd like to say that maybe I was too afraid to tell any of the child service people.”

The dress is coming apart, the silk opening at every seam, the tulle busting out, and Brandy says, "This guy, this detective, I tell him, 'No,' and he says, 'Good.' He says he likes a kid who can keep a secret."

At a train wreck you could pick up pencils two thousand at a time. Light bulbs still perfect and not rattling inside. Key blanks by the hundreds. The pickup truck could only hold so much, and by then other trucks would be arrived with people shoveling grain into car backseats and people watching us with our piles of too much as we decided what we needed more, the ten thousand shoelaces or one thousand jars of celery salt. The five hundred fan belts all one size we didn't need but could re-sell, or the double-A batteries. The case of shortening we couldn't use up before it went rancid or the three hundred cans of hairspray

"The police guy," Brandy says, and every wire is rising out of her tight yellow silk, "he puts his hand on me, right up the leg of my shorts, and he says we don't have to re-open the case. We don't have to cause my family any more problems." Brandy says, "This detective says the police want to arrest my father for suspicion. He can stop them, he says. He says, it's all up to me."

Brandy inhales and the dress shreds, she breathes and every breath makes her naked in more places.

"What did I know," she says. "I was fifteen. I didn't know anything."

In a hundred torn holes, bare skin shows through.

At the train wreck, my father said security would be here any minute.

How I heard this was: we'd be rich. We'd be secure. But what he really meant was we'd have to hurry or we'd get caught and lose it all.

Of course I remember.

"The police guy," Brandy says, "he was young, twenty- one or twenty-two. He wasn't some dirty old man. It wasn't horrible," she says, "but it wasn't love."

With more of the dress torn, the skeleton springs apart in different places.

"Mostly," Brandy says, "it made me confused for a long time."

That's my growing up, those kind of train wrecks. Our only dessert from the time I was six to the time I was nine was butterscotch pudding. It turns out I loathe butterscotch. Even the color. Especially the color. And the taste. And smell.

How I met Manus was when I was eighteen a great-

looking guy came to the door of my parents' house and asked, did we ever hear back from my brother after he ran away?

The guy was a little older, but not out of the ballpark. Twenty-five, tops. He gave me a card that said Manus Kelley. Independent Special Contract Vice Operative. The only thing else I noticed was he didn't wear a wedding ring. He said, "You know, you look a lot like your brother." He had a glorious smile and said, "What's your name?"

"Before we go back to the car," Brandy says, "I have to tell you something about your friend. Mr. White Westing- house."

Formerly Mr. Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Denver Omelet, formerly independent special contract vice operative Manus Kelley. I do the homework:

Manus is thirty years old. Brandy's twenty-four. When Brandy was sixteen I was fifteen. When Brandy was sixteen, maybe Manus was already part of our lives.

I don't want to hear this.

The most beautiful ancient perfect dress is gone. The silk and tulle have slipped, dropped, slumped to the fitting room floor, and the wire and boning is broken and sprung away, leaving just some red marks already fading on Brandy's skin with Brandy left standing way too close to me in just her underwear.

"It's funny," Brandy says, "but this isn't the first time I've destroyed somebody's beautiful dress," and a big Aubergine Dreams eye winks at me. Her breath and skin feel warm, she's that close.

"The night I ran away from home," Brandy says, "I burned almost every stitch of clothing my family had hanging on the clothesline."

Brandy knows about me, or she doesn't know. She's confessing her heart, or she's teasing me. If she knows, she could be lying to me about Manus. If she doesn't know, then the man I love is a freaky creepy sexual predator.

Either Manus or Brandy is being a sleazy liar to me, me, the paragon of virtue and truth here. Manus or Brandy, I don't know who to hate.

Me and Manus or Me and Brandy. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love.