Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

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 anyplace 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, left over. 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.”