Bearded Women (11 page)

I’m ill for four more days, have several delirious one-sided conversations with my father. I tell him about the bakery girl and the rent-to-own guy, know he understands my uncertainty because he felt the same way when he met my mother. I know his colds were this bad since both of us have too much body to rid of the virus.

In most of the pictures I’ve seen my father is close to my age, but I can imagine twenty-some years added to his frame, imagine his hair greying and thinning, imagine us sitting side by side on the couch with heating pads on our knees after long days of commercial-making and paperclip-selling. After I’ve taken my cold medicine and am floating in that hazy space between wakefulness and sleep, I can feel his long thin fingers brush against my hands and face.

When Mr. Wilson deems I am well he brings me takeout, extra spicy Thai food. The curry is so hot I use half a box of tissues, but Mr. Wilson says the spices are cleaning out nasty things in my sinuses. I flush bright as a chilli pepper, but feel better afterwards. Less clogged. My father smiles from the armchair.

Cellophane wrappers from two packages of shoelaces.

Dale says that at the ice rink they don’t care if you skate in your shoes. I buy new ones for the occasion. Mom is happy to hear I have a date. I wonder how my father courted her, what they talked about since she’d spent a semester’s art class staring at him naked.

We arrive at the rink at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning because Dale says most people won’t come until after ten. Ice makes me even less graceful than usual. Dale has chunky hockey-playing skates, whirls around the rink for twenty minutes while I tiptoe at the edge. He grabs my hand, tugs me away from the side, says he won’t let me fall. I let go and slide toward him, peer down at my shoes. His hands hold mine, pull me gently. For about fifteen feet. I slip. Pitch forward because I don’t want to land on my rear again. Careen on top of him. He did not realise my weight, curses as we both go down. Dale’s knee twists in a painful way, although not one that requires medical attention. We hobble to his car. I am excruciatingly apologetic. So is he. This is because we both work in customer service.

I don’t see Dale in the stationery store the next day, almost walk to the rent-to-own place to find him and apologize again. He was such a bright possibility. He bought me pizza. That night I mope and use a few tissues. He doesn’t come to the store the day after that. I tell myself he was probably one of the creepy guys, repeat this idea for five days until I believe it.

“I’ll call my nephew,” Mr. Wilson says when I explain the incident with Dale. “He’s a strong boy. Lifts weights. Could pick you up and cart you around town with one hand.”

My mother gives me sympathy. “That’s too bad,” she says, “but not your fault.”

I think on the other end of the line she’s smiling. After a week I can smile, too. If Dale would hold a grudge just because I fell on him, the relationship wouldn’t have worked. Beside me on the couch, my father shrugs. I know he waited twenty-seven years to find my mother.

Mr. Wilson says his nephew will visit soon and we’ll go out for dinner.

Mom’s absence isn’t comfortable, but it’s usual. Something I can accept if I break it into small increments. She will be gone another week. That idea is manageable. Larger periods of time are still difficult, so I don’t think about them.

Bakery bag with two-day-old sugar cookie crumbs.

The bakery girl has a break at four-thirty. If I only take a half-hour for lunch, I can leave work early and have a muffin when she does. I learn the bakery girl likes crocheting and her cat is named Cinnamon. I tell her I like sewing. She compliments my new lavender pantsuit and says the colour goes well with my complexion. No one has ever said anything about my complexion before.

When I look away I know her arms and legs are growing. Her shoulders widen. Her back straightens until I am certain she is at least eight feet tall and our hands are the same size.

The second pair of ears are on the sides of my neck. They’re a little smaller than my head ears and can’t actually hear anything. All four of my ears are pierced, four holes each in the top ones, two holes each in the bottom. Most of the time I forget about the second pair, don’t even notice them when I’m looking in the mirror. When I go out I wear turtlenecks and scarves because I’d rather not be stared at, but when I’m at work at the tattoo parlour I let them show. Customers tend to think they’re some sort of self-imposed body modification.

I become a tattoo parlour mascot on the day my roommate Lee moves out to live with her asshole fiancé. We live on the bottom floor of three-storey house—Lee and her daughter share a bedroom, and my son shares a bedroom with me. Lee’s fiancé has stayed the night at our place several times. Her daughter sleeps on the couch then, but usually ends up in bed cuddled next to me because Lee and the asshole fight so loudly. Even in my bedroom with the door closed you can hear the names he calls her. More than once I’ve told Lee that she and Prince Caustic have to keep it down. I don’t want my son or her daughter to be hearing such things. Lee says the kids are asleep, but I know that’s not true.

By the time Lee is packing her last few belongings I’ve known about the move for two weeks, but it’s still a shock.

“You can’t move in with that jerk,” I say for the twentieth time while Lee loads her collection of stuffed animals into a milk crate. “He’s abusive.”

“He’s small,” she says. Burke is an inch shorter than Lee and maybe ten pounds lighter, but Lee’s body is hunched in the morning after Burke’s been yelling at her. “He always feels like people are challenging his manhood or something. I can’t yell at Burke. It would hurt him too much.”

“The bastard’s not made of glass,” I say.

“We’re going to get counselling,” she says. “He agreed.”

My ex-boyfriend did, too, but I never managed to drag him within a mile of the counsellor’s office. It took me six damn years to figure out he was a loser. He’d yell at me one minute and say he loved me the next. He claimed it was stress from his job and from us having a little kid that made him moody. I thought I’d marry him. He was Jacob’s dad after all. Jake was three when we moved out. I had to do it while my ex was at work. We’ve been living with Lee ever since.

Lee is thirty-four and can barely read, convinces Jake or her daughter Izzy to help her understand her mail. I think she has some form of dyslexia and I’m not sure how she managed to graduate high school, but Lee is determined to a fault and won’t get tested for a learning disability. She says she gets along well enough, but I know she’s too embarrassed to admit to anything. That’s why she’s been working third shift at the auto parts factory for sixteen years. That’s why she hates dating. It involves someone else finding out she can’t read. Burke is Lee’s first boyfriend since Izzy’s dad left five years ago and moved to California. I’m pretty sure part of the reason they broke up was because she refused to get help and he refused to keep reading everything to her.

Burke is impossibly kind when it comes to helping Lee, reads her letters and books and magazines aloud, and follows under the print with his finger so she can pretend she’s reading along. I don’t understand these men we choose, how they can be so sweet about one thing, the thing that is most painful, but they’re bastards about everything else. Lee and me, we both want to hold on to that drop of sweetness, but it nearly kills us in the process.

Izzy is clinging to her bed, refusing to leave.

“I want to stay here,” she yells. “I won’t go live in his stupid apartment. It smells funny. I hate Burke.”

“Everything is going to be fine,” says Lee, putting her hand over her daughter’s fingers, probably in the hopes of easing them off the mattress. “You’ll have your own bedroom and a new daddy.”

“That jerk is not going to be my daddy,” yells Izzy.

I’m tempted to stay and see how Lee resolves this dilemma, but Jacob and I have to get to the tattoo parlour. I work Tuesday through Saturday, eleven to five, take a dinner break and go back with Jake at six-thirty. We stay ’til nine-thirty on school nights, eleven on weekends. Lee waves good-bye to us and promises Izzy the moon if she’d only sit up.

At the tattoo parlour I work the register, do bookkeeping, sterilize equipment, and draw tattoos. My boss Zip is great at tracing pictures on skin and getting the colours right, but says he can’t draw worth shit. Jacob climbs up on a red leather stool and sits still as a sphinx while Zip inks half a birch tree on some guy’s back. Zip doesn’t have a wife or kids and likes Jake, has already told me Jake can come to the tattoo parlour after school instead of going home to wait for me. I’d rather not let Jake be a latchkey kid, and I figure watching people get tattooed is just as educational as anything he could see on TV.

For months Zip has been asking me if he can use my face to advertise the tattoo parlour. He’s a good guy and never pressured me about it, but he’s mentioned the possibility from time to time. I’ve never been desperate enough to sell my picture before, but now I’ve got to figure out how to cover twice the usual rent plus make car payments and add to Jake’s college fund. So with Lee and Izzy on the road to Burke’s, I agree to be the store’s mascot.

“You won’t be a mascot,” Zip says. He’s finished the tree and is sponging ink and blood off the guy’s back. The guy grits his teeth. Jake stares. “You’ll be more like an emblem or insignia.”

Of course this is just a nice way of saying mascot.

Zip says he’ll get an artist to do a black-and-white drawing of me and give me an extra hundred dollars every month in royalties, plus fifty percent of the profits from the sale of any merchandise with my face on it.

“I get to choose who draws the new logo and paints it on the front window,” I tell Zip, hoping that calling it a logo will make it seems less like it’s my face. “You can use it on T-shirts and business cards. That’s as far as I’ll go.” I have a certain pride in how I look, but don’t want to be on a bumper sticker or book of matches or inked on someone’s arm.

Zip snaps off his rubber gloves and scratches his nearly invisible blond goatee.

“What about bottle openers?” he says.

“No dice,” I say.

“Story in the paper?” he says.

I shrug. “If they care to do one.” I’m not figuring they will, but I’ve never been a good guesser.

Four weeks later Zip’s photo is on page seven of the local paper. He’s standing in front of the tattoo parlour beside my three-foot-high head, holding a T-shirt with the store logo on it. Me. I have to admit it came out rather nice—my black and white face looks cheerful, even attractive, and the four ears seem natural as wings on a butterfly.

Monday afternoon I’m standing in the driveway washing my car and not wearing a turtleneck or scarf, when the lady appears at my side. Or at least it seems like she appears. She probably just walks right up to me like any normal person but I don’t hear her because I’m thinking about Lee and Izzy and how they moved out a month ago and I haven’t heard from them in a couple weeks. The last time I spoke with Lee on the phone she said things were just fine and Izzy was getting used to the situation. I took that to mean she hadn’t yet tried to kill Burke.

“Are you a harlot?” The lady beside me is plump, has short brown hair permed in loose curls, is wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt, and carrying a lawn chair. She is vaguely familiar, like I might have seen her at the grocery.

“I haven’t had sex in six years,” I say. Not since I left the ex and swore off men. I think Zip may have a thing for me but he’s my boss and too nice a guy to try anything.

“You might be a sign of the apocalypse,” says the lady. “Perhaps you should have been killed at birth.”

I try to not take the last comment personally as she stands tiptoe and scrutinizes my forehead.

“Do you mind? I’m washing my car.” I swat at her with the damp sponge and she steps back but doesn’t leave.

“I’ve spoken with the angels,” she says. “They said you may be a sign of the end.”

“So?” I dip my sponge back in the bucket of suds. “They could have meant the end of jelly donuts or something.”

“But the end is near,” she says. “I knew it the moment I saw your picture in the paper.”

“I’m thirty-one for God’s sake,” I say, “I have a kid. I’m not a harbinger of destruction.”

The lady nods but sets up her lawn chair beside the sidewalk, takes a small pad of paper from her purse, and watches me with her head tilted slightly. I give her fifteen minutes of polite silence before I say anything else.

“How long are you going to sit there?” I ask.

“Until I get a sign,” she says.

“I don’t appreciate being stared at,” I say.

The lady bites her lip. “This is nothing personal against you.”

“Pardon me for feeling so goddamned insulted,” I mutter and resume washing the dead bugs off my windshield. I remind myself I’m used to worse than this.

In elementary school at recess I stood by the chain link fence with three other outcasts. The smart girl insulted all the other kids in polysyllabic words. The fat boy had the best spitting range and accuracy of any kid in the fourth grade. The six-foot-tall girl was only teased from a distance because she had a great left hook. We moved after I finished eighth grade. When I started high school my mother bought me a lot of scarves and turtlenecks. She said there was nothing wrong with me but with the rest of the world. Around then I realised my parents probably just didn’t have the money for surgery to get the ears off.

Jake’s dad and I started going out during my senior year in high school. After three years of hiding the second ears under layers of cloth, I let him be the first person outside of my family to see them. He loved my ears, thought they were beautiful, said I should show them off in public. After a few beers he’d call me a lazy cunt and a good-for-nothing bitch, but even when drunk he never made any mean comments about my ears. I never understood how he managed to hold me up and destroy me at the same time.

The strange woman is still staking out our yard from her lawn chair when Jake gets home from school.