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.