Bearded Women (16 page)

The three-legged man’s granddaughter works in a costume shop, does alterations and makes simple garments. The three-legged man is proud of her, but he knows his daughter is mad that his granddaughter did not go into medicine.

“We need more women in the field,” she says. She blames the three-legged man for her daughter’s love of costumes. He showed his granddaughter sideshow pictures and encouraged her to make hats and masks when he cared for her after school. The three-legged man’s granddaughter says she is trying to convince her mother to come to the gallery show, but so far her efforts have proved fruitless.

The three-legged man and his daughter were each married for ten years. It took that long for the three-legged man’s wife to run off with the human pincushion. It took that long for his son-in-law to tire of his daughter’s twice-monthly bottles of wine. The three-legged man’s son-in-law left his daughter on the night she said his trombone sounded like a sick donkey and she was going to sell it for scrap metal.

The three-legged man’s son-in-law came to his house and asked to spend the night.

The three-legged man asked where his granddaughter was. He was worried, you see.

The three-legged man’s son-in-law said he had tried to bring his daughter, but she wanted to stay with her mother.

The three-legged man let his son-in-law make a bed on the couch. He called his daughter’s apartment and spoke with his granddaughter. She was seven, said her mother was sleeping, and refused the three-legged man’s offer to come and get her. You may think the three-legged man should have insisted his granddaughter spend the night at his house. He would agree with you, as he had a difficult time sleeping that night.

After his daughter’s divorce, the three-legged man cared for his granddaughter from three in the afternoon when she got out of school until seven at night when her mother picked her up. This was when the three-legged man gave his granddaughter construction paper and paper plates and markers and feathers and beads and glitter and lots of glue. She made hats and masks, went home sticky and sequined. His daughter rolled her eyes but kept silent.

The three-legged man’s granddaughter lived with her mother until she was eighteen, but she spent holidays and every other weekend with her father. She has always known her mother needed more care than her father, which the three-legged man finds admirable. The three-legged man knows his daughter is a kind and generous person twenty-eight days every month. He and his granddaughter do not speak about the wine. They sit quietly and wait for something to change. Understand the three-legged man has learned there isn’t anything else he can do.

The three-legged man invites Odelle to dinner once or twice a week because it is better than eating alone, and because she has painted lovely pictures of him and not asked for a penny in return. Odelle has slim fingers and arthritic knees, which means she must sit when she paints. She is not squeamish about nakedness and neither is the three-legged man. He thinks the wrinkles of age have made him more interesting to look at, like a partially burned candle. Odelle is not his girlfriend, although sometimes the three-legged man is wishful.

“Would you like to be a couple?” Odelle asks him the day before the gallery show while they eat beef stroganoff over noodles. Odelle is always straightforward.

“A couple of what?” says the three-legged man. The thought of romantic relationships both excites him and causes him to make bad jokes. You understand that sort of nervousness.

Odelle rolls her eyes. You understand that sort of exasperation.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m old.”

“I know,” she says.

“Are you offended?” he says.

“Not by your age,” she says.

The three-legged man would like to have a girlfriend. The three-legged man is terrified at the prospect of having a girlfriend. Embracing new things makes him worried. Not embracing new things makes him feel stodgy.

“Can we just keep on like this?” he says.

Odelle nods. He cannot tell if she expected this response or if she is disappointed.

“Are you nervous about the show tomorrow?” she asks.

“My body has never made me nervous,” he says.

“But the same can’t be said for other people.”

“Other people have never made me nervous,” he says, thinking of his daughter who makes him not so much nervous as wistful.

The three-legged man has regrets. After his wife left, he told his daughter she would return. He was hopeful. He kept his daughter hopeful. She started to hate him for it, blamed her father for her mother’s departure. She wasn’t comfortable being the child of a three-legged man, but perhaps not many people could be.

Once when the three-legged man’s daughter was drunk, she told him she’d been terrified her daughter would inherit a recessive gene, have three legs.

“Three fucking legs,” she said.

Because his daughter was drunk, the three-legged man did not take a great deal of offense. He was a bit relieved and a bit dismayed that his granddaughter had two legs.

His granddaughter says, “I never thought having three legs would be a bad thing.”

You may or may not agree, but remember that if you lived in the same town as the three-legged man, you would have grown up thinking three-legged men delivered the mail, so your thoughts on three-leggedness would have been closely related to your impressions of the postal service.

The three-legged man often sits on a stool in the living room in front of a full-length wall mirror. He draws himself, practises foreshortening on his legs. There are five sketchbooks on the three-legged man’s coffee table. Drawings of him sitting and standing and walking, both front and side views. Drawings of Odelle as a fat lady, a sword swallower, and a tattooed woman. Drawings of his wife and daughter and granddaughter, always a three-quarters view. They have the same small nose and small ears and pronounced chin. The three-legged man last saw his wife when she was thirty-one, a year older than his granddaughter and twenty-one years younger than his daughter. In the drawings of his wife, she has aged to look more like his daughter.

The three-legged man’s daughter stares at pictures of the insides of people all day—their bones and organs and muscles. She diagnoses images. Sees what makes people work. What has gone wrong. She is good at what she does. A very intelligent woman. All sorts of nurses and doctors have told him so. Understand the three-legged man is very proud of his daughter. She wants to help people.

His granddaughter says that on some nights when she was growing up, her mother came home and had three glasses of wine. Not the whole bottle. Maybe half.

“When I asked if something was wrong,” says his granddaughter, “she shook her head and said she had a rough day at work.”

Your mother or father probably told you the same thing on many occasions.

The three-legged man’s granddaughter says her mother reads the obituaries every morning. Sometimes she follows under the text with her finger, mouths the words. After three cups of coffee she nods to herself and drives to the hospital.

At the gallery opening, Odelle wears a peach-coloured dress made of gauzy material that flows around her hips. The three-legged man wears a suit and tie. He has three suits and doesn’t wear them often because he has to get them specially made. If you saw him in one of his suits you would think he looked very dapper. The three-legged man would say that he should look dapper because three-legged suits are not cheap.

The three-legged man’s dentist and barber compliment the pictures, as do several retired mail carriers who only have two legs. If you saw the paintings you would agree—his third leg looks so normal, so natural, so expected, you could think all humans were tripod people. The three-legged man says he’s glad he wasn’t born in a time when doctors would have tried to take the leg off. He was saved by poor technology.

After the show, the three-legged man and his granddaughter and Odelle go out for coffee and cheesecake. Rich desserts are one of his weaknesses. He was pleased with the show but keeps glancing out the café window to see who is walking by.

On Sunday the three-legged man’s daughter and granddaughter come for dinner. His daughter brings a bottle of wine. The three-legged man knows he should say something, but he doesn’t. Understand that saying something would not change anything. They eat grilled chicken breast and discuss the costumes his granddaughter is making for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

The three-legged man’s daughter sees his sketchbook lying on a corner of his desk, open to one of the pictures of Odelle. She is drawn like Eve, standing beside the tree of knowledge, ignoring the snake and the apple. The three-legged man thinks it is one of his best drawings. (You probably would, too, or you might prefer the one of Odelle as a tattooed woman.) His daughter picks up the sketchbook and stares at the picture. She takes a pen from the pocket of her jeans, uncaps it, and starts scribbling over the picture, a four-year-old’s scrawl.

The three-legged man and his granddaughter gape. The three-legged man is not entirely sure what his daughter thinks of Odelle beyond normal dislike, but he has wondered if his daughter still thinks he should be married to her mother.

His granddaughter stands up, grabs his daughter’s arms, wretches the sketchbook away, and holds his daughter’s hands behind her back.

“Too tight,” says his daughter.

“Good,” says his granddaughter who is not usually a violent person.

The three-legged man stares for a moment, oddly pleased with his granddaughter’s reaction. His notebook is on the floor, opened like a moth. The three-legged man walks around the table, picks it up, closes the pages, and lays the notebook beside his plate. He pries his granddaughter’s hands from his daughter’s wrists, hugs his granddaughter so her arms are pinned to her sides.

“Get out,” says the three-legged man to his daughter.

She doesn’t scream expletives, hangs back for a moment, perhaps waiting to see if he will shove her in the bathroom. He doesn’t. She leaves. The three-legged man watches her from the kitchen, through the living room window glass. Her head is high, her posture perfect.

The night his wife left was a usual night. She was tipsy. He ordered her out of the trailer. You would have agreed it was reasonable that he do this. He figured she’d come back when she was sober. Instead she went and found the pincushion man. The three-legged man waited for a week for her to come back. Then he waited eight years. His wife was often a good and kind and generous woman. You would have liked her.

The three-legged man and his granddaughter sit in his living room. The three-legged man wonders what he would do if his wife came back now. He wonders if he would recognize her. He wonders if she would be at all remorseful.

The skin flaps ran the length of my body from my wrists to my ankles so I looked something like a flying squirrel. The flaps were loose and full, but if I lifted my arms more than a foot above my head I felt a pull at my side.

When I was little the doctors and my father wanted to cut the flaps off, but my mother didn’t let them. She wanted to wait until I was older, let me decide.

My family went out to breakfast every Saturday at a diner three blocks from our house. Melba and Janice, the two waitresses, had brown puffs of hair, white aprons, too-red lipstick, doted on me and complimented the little pink caftans my mother made. When I was five years old I ordered a Belgian waffle for breakfast. My mother cut it and I reached for the maple syrup and knocked over a glass of orange juice with my flap. The juice flowed across the table onto my father’s lap.

“Dammit,” he yelled, standing up and letting the juice drip further down his pants. I cringed. I can’t remember exactly what he said, something about my flaps getting in the way, making me clumsy. I couldn’t finish the waffle.

My father divorced my mother a month later, left while I was asleep. Later my mother said my father would have left whether or not I had flaps. She explained that she and my father were the sort of people who could be together for a little while but not a long while. I have hazy memories of my parents yelling in the kitchen, my father saying he didn’t want to have a bat for a daughter, my mother yelling back that she did not give birth to a bat but a butterfly. I liked thinking of myself as a butterfly. It made my flaps hurt less.

I started gliding when I was five years old. Jumping off the slide in my backyard was more exciting than sliding down it, and my fall was slowed if I spread out my arms, let the wind catch under my flaps. It took a few tries to figure out how to land, but once I got the hang of it, kept my legs flexible and bent my knees, it was pretty simple. I jumped off the slide ten times before my mother saw me from the kitchen window, ran out yelling that I had to stop or I’d break a bone. I pouted on the swing set for a while, then looked back at the kitchen window. No mother. I climbed up the slide and made six more jumps before she ran out screaming again.

My mother was the school principal, one of the first women in the area to have that job, though I didn’t appreciate it until I was older. When kids at school teased me, called me flying squirrel girl, my mother said they were just jealous. I didn’t feel any better. When I was in second grade, workmen were making repairs to the roof of the school and left a ladder leaning against the brick wall. I climbed up. The building wasn’t high, just one storey, but some tattletale sprinted to the office to get my mother. She was standing on the ground surrounded by second graders when I spread my arms and jumped. I sailed down, landed without a bruise, but my mother kept me in the office for the afternoon and grounded me at home for a month.

Mom was there when I fell off my bike and bruised my flaps. She was there when I got chicken pox, made me lie still while she coated the flaps with calamine lotion. For a week I was miserable and itchy because there were as many bumps on my flaps as the rest of my body. Oatmeal baths didn’t help. My mother put mittens on my hands so I couldn’t scratch the flaps.