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 mud flats 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.

Jump way back to one day outside Brumbach's Department Store where people are stopped to watch somebody's dog lift its leg on the Nativity scene, Evie and me included. Then the dog sits and rolls back on its spine, licks its own lumpy dog-flavored butthole, and Evie elbows me. People applaud and throw money.

Then we're inside Brumbach's, testing lipsticks on the back of our hands, and I say, "Why is it dogs lick themselves?"

"Just because they can ... ," Evie says. "They're not like people."

This is just after we've killed an eight-hour day in modeling school, looking at our skin in mirrors, so I'm like, "Evie, do not even kid yourself."

My passing grade in modeling school was just because Evie'd dragged down the curve. She'd wear shades of lipstick you'd expect to see around the base of a penis. She'd wear so much eye shadow you'd think she was a product testing animal. Just from her hair spray, there's a hole in the ozone over the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy.

This is way back before my accident when I thought my life was so good.

At Brumbach's Department Store, where we'd kill time after class, the whole ninth floor is furniture. Around the edges are display rooms: bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, dens, libraries, nurseries, family rooms, china hutches, home offices, all of them open to the inside of the store. The invisible fourth wall. All of them perfect, clean and carpeted, full of tasteful furniture, and hot with track lighting and too many lamps. There's the hush of white noise from hidden speakers. Alongside the rooms, shoppers pass in the dim linoleum aisles that run between the display rooms and the down-lighted islands that fill the center of the floor, conversation pits and sofa suites grouped on area rugs with coordinated floor lamps arid fake plants. Quiet islands of light and color in the darkness teeming with strangers.

"It's just like a sound stage," Evie would say. "The little sets all ready for somebody to shoot the next episode. The studio audience watching you from the dark.”

Customers would stroll by and there would be Evie and me sprawled on a pink canopy bed, calling for our horoscopes on her cell phone. We'd be curled on a tweedy sofa sectional, munching popcorn and watching our soaps on a console color television. Evie will pull up her T-shirt to show me another new belly button piercing. She'll pull down the armhole of her blouse and show me the scars from her implants.

"It's too lonely at my real house," Evie would say, "And I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching."

She says, "I don't hang around Brumbach's for privacy."

At home in my apartment I'd have Manus with his magazines. His guy-on-guy porno magazines he had to buy for his job, he'd say. Over breakfast every morning, he'd show me glossy pictures of guys self-sucking. Curled up with their elbows hooked behind their knees and craning their necks to choke on themselves, each guy would be lost in his own little closed circuit. You can bet almost every guy in the world's tried this. Then Manus would tell me, "This is what guys want."

Give me romance.

Flash.

Give me denial.

Each little closed loop of one guy flexible enough or with a dick so big he doesn't need anybody else in the world, Manus would point his toast at these pictures and tell me, "These guys don't need to put up with jobs or relationships." Manus would just chew, staring at each magazine. Forking up his scrambled egg whites, he'd say, "You could live and die this way."

Then I'd go downtown to the Taylor Robberts Modeling Academy to get myself perfected. Dogs will lick their butts. Evie will self-mutilate. All this navel gazing. At home, Evie had nobody except she had a ton of family money. The first time we rode a city bus to Brumbach's, she offered the driver her credit card and asked for a window seat. She was worried her carry-on was too big.

Me with Manus or her alone, you don't know who of us had it worse at home.

But at Brumbach's, Evie and me, we'd cat nap in any of the dozen perfect bedrooms. We'd stuff cotton between our toes and paint our nails in chintz-covered club chairs. Then we'd study our Taylor Robberts modeling textbook at a long polished dining table.

"Here's the same as those fakey reproductions of natural habitats they build at zoos," Evie would say. "You know, those concrete polar ice caps and those rainforests made of welded pipe trees holding sprinklers."

Every afternoon, Evie and me, we'd star in our own personal unnatural habitat. The clerks would sneak off to find sex in the men's room. We'd all soak up attention in our own little matinee life.

All's I remember from Taylor Robberts is to lead with my pelvis when I walk. Keep your shoulders back. To model different-sized products, they'd tell you to draw an invisible sight line from yourself to the item. For toasters, draw a line through the air from your smile to the toaster. For a stove, draw the line from your breasts. For a new car, start the invisible line from your vagina. What it boils down to is professional modeling means getting paid to overreact to stuff like rice cakes and new shoes.