The First Lady Escapes

by Verity Speeks

  “You thought what I said was funny,” said Moon. As if she hadn’t heard her, Hilda ducked back into the servant’s pantry alcove. “Girlfriend, you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  Hilda returned with a wet towel. “No speak English,” she said in a thick Slovak accent. With another grunt, she hunkered down on her hands and knees, her enormous ass in the air, and delicately patted the strawberry stain with the towel.

  “Bullshit!”

  Hilda stopped patting the stain and nervously pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up on her nose.

  “C’mon, Hilda. You understand every word that is said in the First Lady’s bedroom, Slovak or English. You pretend you only speak Slovak, but the First Daughter got you this job so you could play ‘dumb Slovak maid’ and spy on Natalia.” Hilda didn’t look up, focused on patting the stain. “It’s okay, Hilda. You can tell me,” she said. “By tomorrow this time, FLOTUS will be back in the White House, or the White House will announce she went to Slovakia to visit her ailing babika. Either way, I’ll be counting geckos on the ceiling in Git-mo.”

  Hilda looked up at Moon. “They will send you to prison? Not fair. You do more for President’s ratings than real First Lady.”

  “Tell me about it.” She flopped back against the pillows.

  Hilda nervously pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Can I ask—?”

  “What?”

  “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like? Guantanamo prison? Ask me in a week.”

  “No. You are man who wants to be woman.” She pushed her glasses up again and took a cautious step closer. “What’s it like?”

  Moon hadn’t been this close to Hilda before. She saw that the maid wore no makeup and that her wire-rimmed glasses were men’s glasses, a size too big. Her short brown hair was shaggy, as if she had cut it herself. The “moustache” of black hair on her upper lip could easily have been wiped off with Nair. And why didn’t she wax off the bear fur on her stubby arms?

  “You know what you really want, Hilda?”

  “What?”

  “You want to know if a woman can become a man.”

  Hilda’s chubby cheeks reddened. “I love woman, but I would like to be man loving woman. Is it possible?”

  “You mean, can you get your very own one-eyed trouser snake?

  “One-eyed trouser snake?”

  “A Mr. Winky, a tallywhacker, a shlong!”

  Hilda still didn’t get it.

  “Girlfriend, would you like to have a penis?”

  “A vták?” She thought a moment, then nodded, her cheeks turning purple. “Do you still have vták, or did they cut it off?

  “First of all, they do not cut off a man’s…vták…when he is transitioning to female,” said Moon. “There’s a surgical procedure where they sort of turn it inside out to create a vagina.”

  “Do you have vagina?”

  “No!” said Moon. “I still have my vták and I intend to keep it.”

  Hilda thought that over. “But you want to be woman.”

  “I want other people to look at me and see a woman. I need more surgery on my face for that,” said Moon. “If all goes well, people will be looking at my face, not my vták. So I’ll keep it, thank you very much. I need it to have sex with my girlfriend.”

  “You have girlfriend?”

  Moon nodded. “She’s a nurse, like me. Eliza. She’s from Trinidad. Eliza loves me whether I’m a man or a woman.”

  Hilda smiled for the first time. “I have girlfriend in Slovakia,” she said wistfully. “Kveta loves me whether I’m woman or man. But if I have vták, when I go back to Slovakia I can fuck Kveta with it.”

  Moon chuckled. “I think you’re asking me to recommend a good gender-reassignment doctor.” Hilda nodded.

  “How about this? I will personally take you to see mine in Miami. She is the best gender-reassignment surgeon in the world. In return, you do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Help me escape from this bedroom, from the goddamn White House!”

  To her surprise, Hilda didn’t flinch at the offer. She was about to push her wire-rimmed glasses up on her nose again. She touched her finger to her lip instead. Moon hoped that it meant she was seriously considering it.

  Chapter 33

  Tucson, AZ

  December 18, 6:00 p.m.

  Elegant in her red Valentino gown, Natalia nervously descended the grand staircase of the White House, feeling for the carpet beneath the toe of her red Manolos before taking each step. Rex and the entire Funck family were watching from the foyer below, as if waiting for her to stumble. She focused on the moment so that she wouldn’t lose her balance, remembering her yoga teacher’s calming routine: “What do you smell?” The pine scent of the Christmas tree. “What do you feel?” The smoothness of the polished-oak banister. “What do you hear?” The whisper of my silk gown.

  Suddenly the whisper of silk was coming from an identical red Valentino gown worn by an identical First Lady. Natalia’s doppelganger was stepping toward Rex and the line-up of Funcks posing in front of the Christmas tree. Natalia hastened down the steps so that she could get to them first.

  “Hey, wait! I’m the real First Lady,” she called.

  The photographer motioned to everyone to move closer together. “Smile like you really mean it,” he said. That was hard for this family, but Natalia realized it shouldn’t be. When Rex was elected President, they got exactly what they dreamed of: the opportunity to quadruple their riches and to make Rex’s self-centered worldview real, with his bloated ego at the top. The thought made her stop just short of them. Did she really want to be part of the Funck dynasty? Did she really want to bring another Funck child into the world?

  She turned to leave, but a foot shot out and tripped her.

  As Natalia fell, in the flare of the photographer’s lights she looked up at the culprit: Gretchen.

  Natalia startled awake from her dream and squinted into an overpowering radiance. She straightened up in the Mustang passenger seat and shielded her eyes. The sunset was pouring in through the windshield; bands of red, orange, and purple hovering over the stark desert, like a mirage. “You’ve got to see this!”

  No answer from the driver’s seat. Angel was gone.

  Panicking, she climbed out of the car. The parking lot was empty except for a few dirty pickup trucks. Where am I? she thought. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was Angel cruising past a “Welcome to Arizona” sign and pointing out the window to a lone, towering cactus. “That’s a saguaro,” he had said, pointing to its uplifted arm. “It’s saying ‘Hi,’ to you.”

  There were more saguaros surrounding the parking lot, some with one, others with two or more “arms.” They looked like giants. She noticed sharp spines on the cactus closest to her. Dangerous giants.

  Where was Angel?

  As the dusk deepened, a light flashed on over a sign: “Home Depot.” To her relief, she spotted Angel by the store entrance. He was talking with a group of Latino men in dusty jeans, T-shirts, and work boots, some wearing faded camouflage jackets and either baseball caps or straw cowboy hats. They huddled under the torn canvas awning of a taco stand made from nailed-together two-by-fours.

  A weathered Latina woman in a patched cowboy shirt, a torn apron over her faded jeans, was cooking tortillas over a rusty barrel that Natalia guessed held dried-out brush. She remembered seeing poor women in Slovakia cooking flattened potato dough over stoves like that on the banks of the Váh River in Žilina. Sometimes, on schooldays, if her brother Franc hadn’t come home for dinner, her mother would send her out to find him. Natalia knew he spent Sundays smoking dope on the riverbank with his friends, so she always looked there first. The sunsets in Žilina are not as beautiful as they are here in the desert, she thought. In Žilina, usually the sun sinks quickly behind a cold gray cloudbank, as if swallowed whole by the darkness.

  Angel walked over to the Mustang, the hems of Moon’s to
o-long jeans dragging on the ground now that he was wearing flip-flops instead of his beloved red-alligator cowboy boots. Cody, the pawnbroker, had generously thrown in the flip-flops as part of the deal.

  “Want me to roll up your cuffs for you?” Natalia asked.

  “No, but thanks,” he said. “I tried. They rolled right back down. Maybe they like the taste of dirt. Here, have a taco.” He handed her one of the two newspaper-wrapped packets he was carrying.

  “Thanks.” She unwrapped the greasy taco. It was scantily filled with beans, rice, and salsa.

  “I hope you like your salsa on fire.”

  Natalia took a bite. “Ooooeeee,” she gasped. “That’s spicier than Slovak paprika!” The mouth-searing peppers didn’t stop her from scarfing down the taco.

  “The poorer the Mexican, the hotter the sauce,” he said between bites. “You forget that all you’re eating is rice, beans, and corn, that you can’t afford meat.” He nodded towards the taco stand. “See that woman? That used to be my mom.”

  “Your mom?”

  “She had a taco stand like this at Home Depot in Tijuana. Every Home Depot where there are Mexicans has one. Trabajadores, workers, who need a job, show up before the store opens at six. They need something to eat so they’ll have energy to grind all day working, like, construction, landscaping, or painting houses. If they’re lucky enough to get a gig.”

  “‘Lucky enough?’”

  “These are guys with, like, no jobs, no money. At the U.S. Home Depots, most of them are illegal. They live in some shack with dozens of family members whose mouths gotta get fed. So they walk to the nearest Home Depot in the dark before sunrise, so they’ll arrive before the pickups start showing up. They know the drivers are looking for a work crew. Most of the time the drivers are Chicanos, guys who are legal. They’re, like, the jefes, the bosses of the workers. They report to the gringos who own the trucks. The jefes look for guys who are fuerte, strong, to do a tough day’s work. If you’re small, or old, olvídalo, forget it. The ‘lucky’ guys go off with the jefe in his truck. At the end of the day, right about now, when the sun is setting so it’s too dark to work anymore, the jefe drops them back off in the Home Depot parking lot. If they’re lucky, the jefe pays them for the work they did.

  “Sometimes they don’t pay them?”

  “Yeah, like, sometimes the redneck boss tells the jefe, ‘Stiff ’em! What the fuck are they gonna do? Come after me?’ Sometimes the jefe keeps the money himself.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “My mom always saved a few tortillas for the guys who got stiffed, so they didn’t go to sleep that night hungry.”

  “That was so generous of her.”

  “Pretty soon, she got to know which jefes were pendejos, motherfuckers, and wouldn’t pay a dude for an honest day’s work. In the morning, if a worker got picked for a job, he’d look over at my mom at the taco stand. If my mom nodded her head, that meant the jefe was honest. If the worker did a good job that day, he’d get paid. If my mom shook her head, it meant don’t get on the pinche truck. You’re gonna work your pinche ass off all day and get pinche nada, nothing!”

  A banged-up gray Chevy Sierra pickup pulled into the parking lot, its wheels spitting gravel. Eight Latino workmen were huddled in the truck bed. The driver climbed out, walked around to the back, and unhitched the tailgate. The men jumped down. The jefe pulled a wad of cash from his back pocket and paid them, one at a time.

  “I think we got an honest one,” said Angel. He glanced over at the woman behind the taco stand. The woman nodded her head. “Be right back!”

  A faint purple stain, the last trace of sunset, lingered in the sky. Sitting in the passenger seat of the Chevy Sierra pickup, Natalia stretched out her legs. A lot more room than Angel’s Mustang. She wore the dusty work boots, jeans, and a “Corona” T-shirt of one of the workmen they’d met in the Home Depot parking lot. Over it, his ragged camouflage jacket. His faded camouflage hat hid her bald head. She pulled the brim low and studied her reflection in the mirror on the sun visor. “How do I look?”

  Angel glanced at her from the driver’s seat. “Chica, I’d pick you for a construction crew anytime.” He laughed. “But I’m not sure I’d pay you at the end of the day. I mean, dude, you’d have to really crush it!”

  “I would crush it!” She looked Angel up and down. He was wearing a nearly identical “Mexican worker” outfit, taken from another one of the men at the taco stand. “I’m not sure I’d hire you for construction. Painting a bathroom, maybe.”

  “Yo, I’m a pinche great painter.”

  “I’m sure you are.” She laughed. “I’m picturing the guy who traded clothes with you. He’s wearing Moon’s stuff right now. I hope his jeans aren’t dragging in the dirt! And the guy who traded clothes with me is wearing Moon’s nurse’s scrubs and clogs. What will his wife say?”

  “His wife will go nuts for Moon’s fancy female-impersonator gown. She’ll shorten it so her daughter can wear it for her fiestas de quince años.”

  “What’s a fiestas de quince años?”

  “When girls in Mexico turn fifteen, their families throw a big party. The quince girls dress up in these long pink dresses and wear tiaras, like little crowns.”

  “I would have loved that when I was fifteen!”

  “Can I tell you a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  “When I was fifteen, I, like, really wanted a fiesta de quince años. I wanted to wear one of those dresses.”

  “Did you?”

  “It was before I came out to my parents. Raphael and I were fooling around, but we kept it secret. He knew how much it meant to me, so he, like, stole his sister’s quince años dress and brought it to this little casita we sometimes met at, near the mayor’s big-ass hacienda. I think I told you, Raphael’s dad was, like, deputy mayor. He discovered where his dad hid the key to the mayor’s casita. Raphael figured the mayor met his sancha, his mistress, there. That maybe his dad met, like, his sancha there too. So when the mayor and Raphael’s father left town for government business, we’d sneak into the casita for, y’know… Then, on my fifteenth birthday, I show up at the casita and Raphael surprises me with his sister’s pink fiesta de quince años dress. I looked pretty pinche good in it!”

  “I bet!”

  He turned on the truck’s headlights, piercing the darkness of the empty highway ahead of them.

  “Y’know, I’m still not sure why the jefe traded his truck for your Mustang,” she said. “I mean, what’s his boss going to say? You can’t fit a lot of $5-an-hour Mexican workers in a Mustang.”

  “I figure the jefe’s got, like, two choices. Either he gives his boss the Mustang cuz he knows the dude will be totally psyched and that he’s got enough cash from all the times he stiffed his workers to buy another truck.”

  “What’s his other choice?”

  “The jefe sells the Mustang to a drug dealer who’s totally psyched. The jefe takes the money and moves back to Mexico. Yo, either way it’s not our problem.”

  “Right. Our only problem is getting into Mexico ourselves.”

  “It’s gonna happen, chica,” he said. “Sooner than you think!”

  Chapter 34

  The White House

  December 18, 7:00 p.m.

  I’m having a déjà vu, thought Moon. She looked at the President, who was wearing his bathrobe and sitting on his throne in his bedroom, his eyes glued to FOX TV. It was the same scenario that last night had launched her descent into the lower depths of First Lady Hell.

  Wait. Tonight was worse: On FOX TV, the commentators were as gleeful as flies on shit because the President’s ratings had soared today thanks to this morning’s “happy couple” Christmas photo. Gretchen was standing behind her father with her hands on his shoulders, as if he were her ventriloquist’s dummy. “We’ll set up another photo shoot for tomorrow, Daddy,” she said. “Your ratings will go through the roof!”

  Moon squirmed on the sofa, wishing t
hat she was not wearing Funck’s required latex gloves and sanitary face mask, and that she was wearing her own clothes instead of Natalia’s damn peach-terrycloth Frette bathrobe that she’d worn all day. This isn’t a déjà vu, she thought. It’s a fucking nightmare.

  “Sally-Ann, you will attend the next and every photo shoot, got that?” Gretchen turned to Natalia’s social secretary, who moments before had been sworn to secrecy as part of the “Find FLOTUS” command team.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sally-Ann said quietly. Obviously still in shock to be here, she raised her hand to her mouth, as if to nervously bite a fingernail. When her latex-glove-covered finger bumped into her sanitary-mask-covered mouth, she sheepishly glanced around the room, as if hoping no one had noticed. Her eyes met Moon’s. Moon winked at her. She quickly dipped her hand into her Tory Burch tote bag and rummaged around, as if hunting for something.

  God knows what the First Daughter threatened the former Dixie deb with if she spills the beans, thought Moon. No more African hunting safaris with her big-bucks Republican daddy and Gretchen’s macho brothers? More likely, no career in Washington or anywhere else in the whole wide world for the rest of her whole pathetic life.

  “Sally-Ann, set up a visit for the First Couple to Georgetown University Hospital tomorrow morning,” said Gretchen. “The children’s ward.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Sally-Ann, her voice muffled by her face mask. She pulled her iPad out of the tote bag and punched the “On” button.

  “Oh good,” said Moon. “I feel right at home in hospitals!”

  “Shut up! This isn’t about you!” Gretchen adjusted her own face mask. Moon found it amusing that even the First Daughter now was required by the President to wear one in his presence. The “pecker-as-hot-dog-in-a-bun” incident last night must have spooked him big time, she thought. Funck’s popularity ratings may have soared today, but his germ phobia did too.