Bearded Women (3 page)

“If my husband will still have me,” I mutter.

The station manager ignores me, says it would be a great career move.

After three months of hassles and tests, I’m more resolute about having the operation than I was before. The gynaecologist says even though it will take me a long time to recover, the procedure itself will be easier than expected—Bianca’s liver and kidneys and intestines function separately from mine, and won’t be as difficult to detach as they thought.

Of course Doug and Bianca don’t want me to have surgery. Even the station manager has changed his mind since I refused to do the television special, says it would be best if I’d just deliberate forever to keep it in the news.

Then Bianca doesn’t have her period when my walking half does. I wait a week. Two. At the beginning of the third week I feel a little sick in the evening after I wake up.

“I think I’m pregnant,” I whisper to Doug at dinner. Both of us are wide-eyed, as if saying it any louder will make it not true. He hugs me tight and we both hold our breath. I squeeze Bianca’s legs tight to keep the baby inside, keep it growing. I don’t talk about surgery for days and Doug seems cheery even though he has to have sex with my walking half because we don’t want to disturb Bianca.

The foetus miscarries after six weeks.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub, naked from the waist down, my nightgown hitched up over Bianca. I grip her bloody underwear in both hands and cry. This is how Doug finds me. He sits beside me, wraps his arms around my shoulders, rocks Bianca and me back and forth.

“We could always adopt,” he whispers.

I cry harder. I want a baby from my body, yet I’m afraid that even without Bianca I won’t be able to carry a child to term. What if this pregnancy is Bianca trying to stay with me, trying to conceive to pacify me? I want to keep Bianca. I want to have a baby. I can’t have both.

The accountant in the parking lot is still asking for toenail clippings. I see him once a week. Everywhere I go people are watching me. I can feel their prying eyes. Before my possible surgery made news, it seemed like people had almost gotten used to Bianca. Or at least everyone everywhere didn’t gape. Now at the gym I think a few dozen people have bought memberships just to watch me work out. They walk on treadmills going one and a half miles an hour and stare as Bianca does her deep knee bends against the wall.

The television ratings are up, haven’t been this high since I joined the station.

Doug convinces me to let him have sex with Bianca two days after the miscarriage. He says the pregnancy is a sign that we should keep trying and prove the gynaecologists wrong. Bianca shudders pleasure when he touches her, as if she’d been worried Doug would no longer find her attractive after the miscarriage. He caresses her with a gentleness that is somehow unlike the way he touches my walking legs. I sear with jealously. I know he sees her as a part of me, but how can he understand that she is and she isn’t? I feel the hot waves of her orgasm that is mine and not mine. When I start crying Doug hugs me and all I can do is shake my head.

After Doug has fallen asleep I talk to Bianca. I tell her that part of her essence would still be with me even after she was removed. The blood in my body would have run through both of our bodies. She would be a mother along with me. In the back of my mind I wonder wispily if Doug would leave me if I had the surgery. How to explain to him that she would still be there, a phantom pull at my side? In sleep Doug slides his arm over my stomach and across to Bianca, his fingers grazing both of our hips. I wiggle Bianca’s toes and wonder what it will be like without her, how long it will take to forget the feel of her legs against bedsheets, Doug’s hand on her knee. I grit my teeth, close my eyes, concentrate on wiggling the toes on my walking legs, the ones I know are mine.

Martin Wyss had not planned to carve for the dead. He wanted to carve horses and bears and ducks—hooves so hard they could run, fur so soft the chest could rise and fall, wings so strong they could fly. Martin knew he was meant to uncover what was hidden in wood, wanted to pull life from it just as Michelangelo had grabbed David’s marble hands and tugged. Michelangelo loved David because he found him in stone, and for the same reason Martin loved the ducks he discovered preening their oaken feathers.

Sometimes, late at night in his garage workshop, Martin was sure he could hear sleepy quacks from the wooden beaks and tired pawing from the hooves of deer. But in spite of his attainment of the near-perfect duck, Martin had to work part time at a hardware store because his art barely sold. Perhaps a dog here or there at craft shows, a fawn from time to time, but most people smiled and nodded and walked by.

His aunt requested the first casket. She was seventy and a chain smoker, knew he was hard up for money, so she asked him to carve a four-foot-high hollow teacup with a hinged lid. It was like she knew in six more months she would need to curl inside. His teary uncle paid Martin handsomely. A librarian aunt asked for a casket shaped like a row of books. A mechanic uncle wanted a toolbox coffin. It did not take long for word of Martin’s artistry to spread like a plague. Calls came from eight states, orders for a windmill, a race car, a violin case, all big and with hinged tops. It was too popular, Martin thought, the idea that in death one could lie in what one had loved. He quit the hardware store to carve full-time, but each coffin was labour-intensive, made just enough to pay for his food, mortgage, car loan, and buy materials for the next casket.

“You must be so happy now,” his friends said, “able to carve for a living.”

Martin shrugged. He still saw deer and bears sitting in the wood, still wanted to carve life but had to serve those who sat nervously at its edge, people who were wilting. Usually he had clients to his workshop twice—once to view his work and place an order, and again for a casket fitting since it was only proper to make sure he had sized them correctly. Martin kept these appointments to a polite fifteen minutes, averted his eyes when his clients rested their wizened legs inside the coffin and either pronounced it comfortable or a little too tight. By the time they left, Martin’s fingers had started aching and his knuckles appeared slightly knobbed.

He had the earthy build of a carver, short thick arms and legs and a sturdy torso, but Martin knew even the healthiest of bodies only allowed for so much time, so much completed work. Around the perimeter of his garage, wooden ducks watched him in sympathy.

Odessa Crouch wanted to be buried in a big purple scallop shell. She was sixty-seven and on disability, a recently retired legal secretary at Hummer, Hummer, and Huller. The law firm was downtown, next to the pink marble art museum. Odessa wandered the museum’s halls during her lunch hour, strolling past Egyptian mummies and Roman sarcophagi, browsing the gift shop and flipping through poster-sized prints. Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” was her favourite, the goddess rising from the sea in her oversized shell. A lovely way to be born. A lovely way to die. It had been fifteen years since Odessa’s body had started hurting, really hurting, and now it always tried to curl in on itself. Her hands, her feet, her arms, her legs, wanted to wind in tight spirals close to her torso, condense into a ball.

Odessa had felt useful at work before pain cut her off. She’d organized legal papers and made phone calls about divorces, custody battles, alimony, and DUI. She was someone who helped sort things out. When Odessa’s husband left her for an older woman ten years ago, she got free legal services. Her two daughters were grown, had demanding babies of their own, and Odessa managed to get fifty-five percent of everything because her lawyers were vultures and her husband a wimp. Half of her possessions were willed to her two daughters and three grandchildren, the other half were supposed to be sold upon her death and the proceeds given to the museum. Odessa believed in art and free admission.

She’d heard of Martin Wyss’s caskets from a friend of a friend whose aunt had been buried in one shaped like a giant candy bar. The box was white pine but everyone at the funeral swore they smelled chocolate. Odessa wondered if, when she was buried in her scallop shell, people would smell the sea.

When Odessa called Martin to inquire about coffin prices she thought his voice was too high, too weary. Odessa bit her lip. She wanted someone who carved caskets to sound like God.

“I’m thinking of dying sometime soon,” said Odessa. “I want a casket shaped like a shell.”

“What kind of shell?” said Martin. “Abalone? Conch? Clam?”

“Scallop,” said Odessa. “Like Venus.”

She wanted to be laid out in the foetal position. Now her wretched spine ached and made her hobble through the grocery store hunchbacked, but she thought that in death the curve would be beautiful, even graceful, once it did not mean pain. She wanted Martin to react to her saying she was thinking of dying soon. Instead he asked where she lived.

“You should probably come to my workshop,” he said. “It’s not too far, maybe an hour’s drive, and you could see a few of my works, decide if it’s what you really want.”

Odessa agreed even though she didn’t drive much anymore, didn’t do much of anything anymore without a lot of ibuprofen and sometimes Vicodin on top of her monthly cortisone shots. The pain flowed through her like blood, up her fingers to her arms, down her back to her legs and knees and toes. She’d worked as long as she could at the law firm, longer than her aching body wanted to allow, until the afternoon Mr. Huller brought her a cup of coffee and said quietly that perhaps it was time to take a rest. She was a hard worker, he said, and she’d earned a break after thirty-seven years with the firm. Odessa was certain her arms never hurt more than when she had to clean out her desk. The heat of that pain never left. Odessa hated the way her fingers arched into claws when she didn’t take her medication. She hated the way her legs ached in the morning, the way her veins popped out blue against the peach of her skin. She hated the way her feet felt like she was walking on popcorn kernels. Her insides had been replaced, muscle by muscle and bone by bone, with someone else’s aching interior, and deceitfully covered with her own skin.

Odessa took a triple dose of ibuprofen on the day she drove to meet Martin. Her doctor said it would harm her stomach eventually. Odessa didn’t care, just wanted to keep her body at bay. She focused on the shell, imagined it was just a pen flick away, the writing of one small cheque and she’d figure out the rest from there.

Martin Wyss was one of the most disappointing men she had ever met. Despite his too-weary voice, Odessa had still hoped for a man who looked like he’d been peeled off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Martin was five feet tall if that, had a bit of a paunch, was balding slightly, had arms thick as tree trunks, and not enough wrinkles to be over forty. He was the sort of man she’d expect to come and repair her sink. Martin showed her his garage workroom. It smelled not of wood but dead forests, burned things. One casket was in progress on the wooden bench, a seven-foot-long ice cream cone wide enough for a human body.

“You realise that in a shell they couldn’t lay you out to your full height,” said Martin.

“Of course,” said Odessa. She was five foot nine, taller than he was. Odessa explained her idea for the foetal position.

“When do you plan on dying?” said Martin.

Odessa wrinkled her nose. “One month.”

“If you could hold off for one more,” he said, “make it two, I would be finished by then. Have to get this one done, you know.” He nodded at the cone.

“Of course,” Odessa said. She wrote him a cheque, a down payment on her shell.

“I guess that’s about it,” said Martin, folding the check in half and slipping it in his pocket.

“You don’t need to ask me anything else?” said Odessa. “Measure me?”

“I have a good eye for size,” said Martin, tapping his head with a sad finger. “I’ll remember.”

On the drive home, to take her mind off the pain searing back into her fingers, Odessa reconsidered the possible means of her demise. She thought about jumping off a bridge or tall building, but that would be rather disgusting, and they’d have to dredge her body or put pieces of her in the shell. She didn’t want to send workmen home retching tales to their wives. There was always a gun or a knife, but those were violent, involved too much blood, and she did want to be presentable when tucked in her shell. As much as she hated her body, she figured that it might as well look halfway decent once it stopped hurting. Poison would taste bad, and there was always the chance she’d vomit it up. She could take sleeping pills, but what if someone found her and took her to get her stomach pumped, or what if she didn’t take enough?

Odessa gritted her teeth. She wasn’t going to simply lie on her couch and wait for death. She wanted to attend to these matters while she still could, but she finally decided, as she usually did, to put off the question of how she would die until later. The means itself was not that important. What mattered was the shell.

After Odessa left, Martin kept sanding the ice cream cone coffin. It was for a man who’d owned three sweet shops and was not a small fellow. He had heart disease and the doctors didn’t give him long. Martin smoothed a sheet of four-hundred-grit sandpaper along the wood grain. Nearly done. It was not a bad sculpture, but all of his caskets felt unnatural, like they were forced out of the wood. They did not flow with the same grace as his animals. He was usually pleased enough with the finished coffin because his customers were happy and that mattered a great deal to him, but carving a casket was not truly satisfying. He opened a can of stain, Satin Woodberry, mixed it with a stirring stick, and began to rub it on the cone with a rag. The wood turned the colour of graham crackers.

He thought of Odessa and her thin knobbed frame. Hers was a body that made one uncomfortably aware of bones and joints. Even though he was not old, he felt the pressure of age, the urge to find things in wood while his hands could still firmly grip the chisel. Martin worried about his body hurting, hardening, paining with life as Odessa surely pained.