Bearded Women (13 page)

“Even Mrs. Simon makes more sense than Mom does,” Izzy mutters.

I bite my lip.

I have Sunday and Monday off work. Because I can’t stand the thought of watching Mrs. Simon in the front yard, I take the kids to the zoo after lunch. We have dinner out and go see a movie, get home at nine-thirty. There’s a message from Lee on the answering machine. She says Izzy can stay with us for a couple of days, and I figure Lee is feeling guilty because deep down she knows Burke is an idiot. I also figure Burke wants a break from Izzy.

Monday the kids walk to school together. I go grocery shopping and to the laundromat, come home just before they get back. When they walk in the door, both of them are wearing plastic ears on the sides of their neck. Izzy’s are pink and Jake’s are green. They show me how they attach with little adhesive strips.

“We got them at the drugstore,” says Izzy. “Everyone at school is wearing them now. They have all colours. Pink and blue and red and green.”

“Oh Lord,” I say. “Take them off.”

“No,” says Jake, touching his green ears with the tips of his fingers, pressing them against his neck. “They’re cool. I like them. They’re like yours.”

“My ears are not toys,” I say, stepping toward him. “Take them off.”

“We paid a dollar for them,” says Jake, clamping his hands over the green ears as if they’re hearing some awful sound his other ears can’t pick up.

“All the kids are wearing them,” Izzy repeats.

“God,” I say, leaning my head against the doorframe. The kids glare at me, their arms crossed, their ears bright. Dammit. I always said I’d be the sort of parent who wouldn’t care about dyed hair, tattoos, or piercings. Even though I don’t like the ears, I let the kids keep them on. They can be removed. And I’ve always tried to think of my own ears as something of an accessory. It would be funny if I weren’t pissed, didn’t have the urge to swipe Jake’s ears off his neck when he walks past me in the kitchen.

Mrs. Simon and a little boy arrive at our house around four-thirty. I figure the boy is Isaiah. Jacob waves to him and they start playing Frisbee in the yard. Izzy talks with Mrs. Simon on the porch, keeps glancing at the driveway like her mother and Burke are going to materialize.

“You were right to leave that place,” says Mrs. Simon to Izzy, but she looks at me and squints hard, like since I’m a sign of the second coming I should have the power to right things.

Sorry, lady, I think. I’m not as magical as I look.

Even if Lee hasn’t left Burke yet, Izzy is safe and that’s what matters for now.

Tuesday afternoon at the tattoo parlour, people with plastic ears filter through the store to get pictures with me. After the eighth or ninth photo it starts to get annoying. Part of me feels like I’m being appreciated. Part of me feels like I’m being mocked. Zip stares at the plastic ears and I tell him about the ones Izzy and Jake were wearing. Zip nods and rubs his hands together. I know he’s going to make a few calls, find a plastic ear supplier. Izzy and Jake arrive at the parlour still wearing their extra ears. I don’t think they took them off for bed last night.

When we arrive home for dinner, Mrs. Simon and Isaiah are on the porch. I give them a nod and troop inside. Izzy chats with Mrs. Simon. I hear them through the open window.

Mrs. Simon says, “That’s how he’s going to be known, as the kid whose mother tells the future. That’s what I’m giving him. Maybe he’ll have a gift, too.”

I shake my head, keep my fingers crossed that Isaiah can just live down his mother’s reputation. Everything she says sounds so earnest, I can’t help but feel bad for her. Maybe she really thinks this is a good thing for Isaiah. But she doesn’t hear the playground teasing. Or she ignores it well.

Back at the tattoo parlour Lee troops in around seven. Izzy locks herself in the restroom in back. Lee knocks on the door until her knuckles are red.

“Dammit,” she says, “you need to come home. Things are going to get better. They are getting better. Burke and I are going to counselling next week.”

“No, you’re not,” I say, leaning against the wall by the bathroom door.

“If that bastard yells at you again I’m going to punch him even harder,” says Izzy.

“Counselling,” says Lee, pounding on the door. “I’m going to make an appointment.”

“That’s bullshit,” Izzy says. “You said you’d make an appointment last week and the asshole said no way in hell was he going.”

Lee gives up after a half-hour, has to get to work. She’s near hoarse and Zip is giving her dark looks, says she’s going to scare away customers.

I watch her leave. On the way out she passes three people with plastic ears coming in.

By Thursday morning the ear trend is all over town. At the grocery store there are little kids, toddlers, with tiny ears on the sides of their necks. Even some of their mothers have two sets of ears. Elementary school kids running past the tattoo parlour window on their way home have two sets of ears. Half of our customers are wearing them, too. It’s so pervasive that the ears start looking normal to me. Expected. When the kids and I get home, Isaiah and mother are in the front yard arguing about ears.

“I don’t understand why I can’t wear them,” he says. His fists are clenched. Mrs. Simon is trying to pry his hands open and not having much success. Isaiah writhes out of her grasp, tucks his arms close to his chest, and pretty soon he’s in a tight ball on our lawn. Mrs. Simon looks down at him, frowns and shakes her head.

When she sees me and the kids, she blushes.

“Isaiah,” she says, “you need to stand up.”

“No,” he says, his voice muffled since he’s in a tiny ball. “Not until you let me wear my ears. Not until you stop standing on the corner and yelling things and making the kids laugh. Not until you get a real job and move out of the stupid apartment. I hate you.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” she says. “There are people here. Jake. Your friend.”

Isaiah raises his head, sees Jake, uncurls from his ball and runs toward my son.

Mrs. Simon watches him, hands on hips, says, “I’m sorry about that” to me.

Mothers embarrass their kids. Kids embarrass their mothers. Such is life. I shrug. By the time I call the kids in for dinner, Jake has helped Isaiah attach the ears to the sides of his neck. Mrs. Simon mutters something about the devil under her breath but doesn’t make him take the ears off.

Friday afternoon the middle-aged guy comes in with his camera and starts taking pictures of me. I stare at him for a moment. Most people realise their audacity and stop photographing me when I glare. Not this one. He snaps six photos then turns around. I think he’s going to leave, but he starts taking picture of Jake sitting on his red stool.

“Hey,” I say, “my kid is off limits.” I march over to my son but the paunchy guy is still clicking away, gets a couple of pictures of me and Jake before I get between them.

“Quit it,” I say, but the guy skirts to the side a bit, gets shots of us both before he puts down his camera. I’m trying to decide if I should lunge for the camera or not when he fishes in his jeans pocket and hands me a twenty, then tousles Jake’s hair.

“Thanks,” he says cheerfully.

Maybe if it were the 1920s and I were in a sideshow with fat ladies and bearded ladies and skeleton women, I would be fine with the fact he doesn’t ask to take pictures, just gives me cash and figures that makes everything okay. Even now, maybe if I didn’t have a kid I wouldn’t mind weirdos like him as long as I was paid enough to be on display. But I do have a kid. I am a mother. And mothers do a lot of things because of their children that they wouldn’t do otherwise. I left my boyfriend because I was worried about the effect it would have on Jake to hear his mother being called all those awful names. And now middle-aged men are patting my son’s head like Jake is just another exhibit.

I lose it.

“You are not fucking touching my kid.” I wrest the camera from his hand and grab his arm, grip it hard enough to make him wince and writhe and clutch at the air trying to escape.

“Lady,” he yelps, “you’re hurting me.”

The middle-aged man is bigger than me, maybe six foot and two hundred pounds to my five foot four and one-twenty, so I’m not quite sure how I manage to haul him past Zip, four staring customers, and thirty feet of wall covered with tattoo flash pictures. Must be adrenalin.

I fling him out the door and throw the camera after him. It cracks against the sidewalk.

“To hell with it,” I tell Zip. “This is it. No more shirts. No more logo.”

Izzy and Jake and I take all the shirts and there’s nothing Zip can do about it. Of course there are already lots of ears and shirts in circulation and I can’t do a damn thing about it, but I can stop more from being sold. Kids and mothers and tattoo shop patrons will wear the ears for another week or two until everyone has them, until they look so normal they are old, and then everyone will move on to the next fad.

When we arrive home, Lee and Burke are standing beside Lee’s car in the driveway. Mrs. Simon and Isaiah are at the edge of the driveway, maybe five paces away from them. Lee marches up to Izzy as soon as she gets out of the car, grabs her daughter’s arm.

“Honey, you need to come home,” says Lee, tugging.

“Not if you’re going to put up with all the shit from that bastard,” says Izzy.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” says Lee.

“He does,” says Izzy, glaring at Burke. “Just learn to read already. It’s not some big fucking secret that you can’t.”

“I love Burke,” says Lee, but her throat catches.

“He gave me fucking bruises,” says Izzy.

“A great storm will strike you down,” Mrs. Simon says to Burke.

Burke fidgets.

“Your wealth will be consumed,” Mrs. Simon says. “Your stone heart will be crushed.”

Lee glances at Burke. Izzy glares at him. Lee tugs harder and Izzy’s feet slip just a bit, a couple paces closer to the car. I wonder how long they will keep this up, who will win out, and I hope it’s not Lee. Izzy should not be going back to Burke’s, whether or not he’s afraid of her. Mrs. Simon grabs Izzy’s other arm and she and Lee are both tugging.

For a very brief moment I’m certain that my second pair of ears can hear the voices of angels. Maybe it is the brightness of the sun in my eyes but I see Lee with many ears on her neck and chest and arms, plastic ears that don’t hear. I see her skin pocked with closed eyes. But as I say, the sun is bright and what I think I see only lasts a moment.

I take a deep breath because Lee is my friend. Because she is a mother. Because I want to believe she is trying to do what’s right for her child. But she’s not. I walk over to Lee and she smiles at me like she thinks I’m going to talk with Izzy and tell her to go back to Burke’s.

“If you try to take her,” I say, “I’m going to call child protective services.”

Lee’s eyes are huge. “God.” She drops Izzy’s arm. “You’re my friend. You’re supposed to support me on this.”

I shake my head. Mrs. Simon lets go of Izzy’s other arm. Izzy steps toward her and Isaiah and Jake, the plastic ears bright on the sides of their necks.

“Come on,” Lee calls over her shoulder to Burke. “We have to get her home. She’s our daughter. You said you’d help me do this.” Burke toes the ground and doesn’t move.

“Come on,” she says again, but he is still. Lee looks from me to Izzy to Mrs. Simon to Burke. She drops to her knees on our lawn, her elbows on the grass, her head on the grass, her hair spread out like a dark halo against the green. She is shaking, crying, and when I squint I can see her trying to cover her many ears, her many eyes, with one pair of hands.

Mother is not happy about the wheelchair, though it has a motor and she admits she can’t get along well on her own. She is a large woman, a strong woman. For thirty years she spent nine hours a day shaping loaves of bread, lifting trays of cookies and tins of muffins out of ovens, and wheeling carts of frosted layer cakes. She got bigger after she retired because her appetite didn’t decrease with her activity level.

Mother is even less happy about going into the nursing home, especially since her mind is working well. She expresses her displeasure by flinging stuff across the room. Greeting cards. Plastic flowers. Cups of water. Whatever she can grab.

“I don’t belong with geezers,” she says, tossing a crocheted pincushion at the wall. “They don’t know what the hell is going on.”

I tried to make her room comfortable, hung all of her posters of France on the walls, but Mother invests her time cataloguing every possible slight and threatening to call lawyers.

“I said we’d have to put you in a care facility if you didn’t find a home nurse you liked,” I say when I visit. I work full time at the bank, couldn’t care for her on my own and don’t think I’d want to.

“The twits here don’t know what they’re doing,” says Mother. “My lawyer will be calling me back tomorrow.”

“Mother,” I say, “you can’t file a lawsuit because your peas were cold.”

“You think I’m lying,” she says. “You think living here is just peachy.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad as you make it out to be,” I say.

“The lawyer will be calling tomorrow,” she says again.

I sigh. The home is okay. Everything looks clean. No patients are left drooling in the hallway. The nurses and orderlies are pleasant. I think they’re regular angels for putting up with Mother.

“They’re trying to starve me,” she says. “If my ankles didn’t feel like shit, I’d walk right out of here.” The nurses are supposed to control her diet, reduce her food intake, but this hasn’t worked. She doesn’t want to listen to them talk about her blood sugar, and they don’t want to put up with her threats to sue for elder abuse.

The only person she likes is her doctor, this young guy named Dale who has black dreadlocks, calls Mother “Miss Muffet,” and says there’s no way in hell she’s getting two pieces of apple pie at dinner.

“We won’t be able to budge you from your tuffet,” he says.

“I’m going to starve,” says Mother.

“Tell it to the spider,” says Dale.

Mother smiles. You don’t quell Mother, you spar with her and then she’s happy. Mother has always been an angry person, but she’s more upset with being in the home than with me for putting her there. It’s my job to feel awful about that part.