Bearded Women (8 page)

I give him a granite stare, say that he’s reached his limit and I’m cutting off his booze. If someone hadn’t come up with that turn-to-stone bullshit, I would have been able to get a better job, maybe in a high-end retail store, and not have to work two part-time gigs. Understand that I’m bitter.

Tips have been bad tonight, which doesn’t improve my mood. I’m hoping to make enough this week to finish paying down my credit card bill. Between tending bar and shelving books at the library I can get by, but the tips give me a little room to breathe and buy a couple chocolate bars at the grocery.

It’s April, a rainy night, and I have to walk home. The snakes don’t like getting wet, and when they’re too cold or warm I get a headache. My car gave out six months ago and it wasn’t worth repairing, but winter was hell. I had to walk around with a big fleece head wrap that kept the snakes warm enough for the ten-minute walks from my apartment to the bar and the library.

I budget as I walk, figure this month I’ll have just enough. So much for the credit card bill. Last year I was optimistic about the future, bought a new couch, then I had to get the brakes and heater on my car replaced. A waste of money since it died a few months later.

I’m also paying for one class a semester at the college, which means no new car soon, just books and tuition. I want to get a degree in biology and a job doing plant research. I like studying cells and reproduction, started taking classes four years ago, but I’m only a sophomore. I remind myself I don’t have to be in a hurry to finish, but it feels like I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to quit my jobs and get student loans and end up paralyzed by debt I might not be able to pay off. A couple friends of mine who work at the bar tell me every night how they’re never going to be in the black.

“Just because you go to college doesn’t mean you’ll have a great career,” Katie says. She has a degree in history and fifty thousand dollars in loans. Before I got the job at the library and just worked at the bar, I was really scrimping. Ran up two credit cards in the process. Every night my snakes got headaches as I thought about the bills I couldn’t pay off. I don’t want to be in that position again.

But night after night I collapse in my apartment, too tired to study because I’ve been working all day, but if I don’t study I won’t be able to pass my classes and get a degree that might win me a better job (though Katie is quick to remind me it’s not guaranteed). Tonight I have reading homework for my Greek mythology class. (It’s one of my electives. I took it because I hoped I could dispel a couple myths, mostly ones about me.)

My upstairs neighbours have decided to throw one of their parties. I have to be up at eight, and it sounds like my ceiling is about to give because of the boozy thumping. I stomp to the second floor and feel like a crotchety old woman, but dammit, I need to get work done. Intoxicated people loll out the apartment door. One of my upstairs neighbours (there are two guys and a girl) wavers towards me, stepping over a couple of bodies.

“Would you keep it down,” I say. “I have to work in the morning.”

“Sure thing,” she says. She’s wasted. I hear someone vomit.

Back in my apartment I still can’t concentrate, decide I might as well sleep, but I have to lie in bed with a pillow over my head. I want to break the damn lease and move because all the other people in the building are twenty-something college students whose parents are paying for their degrees. They could care less about studying. But this is the cheapest apartment I could find that’s within walking distance of both my jobs. I don’t have extra money, can only hold the pillow more tightly over my head. The snakes lean against the wall, feel the vibrations from the partygoers upstairs.

My snakes are cranky in the morning, nip at each other as I dress and wash my face. I give them bits of toast and grape jelly. They nibble pieces out of my fingers but are still in a sour mood, so I buy a double mocha for us on the way to work. Whatever they eat goes into the rest of me, whether it’s toast or coffee or mosquitoes, but I only taste what I put into my own mouth. By the time I get to the library my snakes are so hyped up on caffeine they bump into the big glass door at the entrance, reminding me why I don’t give them coffee too often. When my snakes get nicked or squeezed it hurts like hell.

In the afternoon I go to City Park to help the Garden Society with our annual weeding and planting. Being outside cheers me a bit, and it cheers my snakes because they get to eat the little bugs that circle my head. I love plants but can’t have many in my apartment because there’s too little light and not enough room.

I scare new Garden Society members, older ladies who are nice enough when they get to know me, but sometimes it takes a while for them to be cordial. It helps if I keep the snakes mostly covered by a big kerchief. The ladies and I have plenty to chat about since we all love plants and have to budget carefully. We all have low incomes so we’re the same sort of almost-desperate, get exactly enough money to survive each month, our hands clenched around every dollar. We all pray nothing will go wrong and force us to pay more money that we don’t have.

On Wednesdays my Garden Society friend Violet takes me grocery shopping. She knows I don’t have a car, and she’s happy to give me rides. Wednesday is senior day so she gets fifteen percent off everything.

“My oldest girl wants me to move into one of those assisted living places,” she says, “but they’re so expensive. I want to stay in my apartment. It’s pricey enough.”

I sigh. “My rent just went up. I don’t know how I’m going to balance that and my class fees and books. I can’t take time off work and just go to school.”

Last night my friend Katie was complaining about her debt again, saying that if she’d known she wouldn’t be able to do much with a bachelor’s degree in history she wouldn’t have gotten it in the first place.

“Now I have to worry about car payments and house payments and kid payments,” she says. Katie and her boyfriend just had a son, and children don’t come cheap.

Too many people who frequent the bar have student loans they’ve been supporting for ten years, which is part of the reason they want to drown their worries in beer. I can’t end up like that. I have to think about the stress I’d be causing myself and the snakes. I have to keep plugging away at my coursework. At both jobs. At my lingering credit card debt. But every time I push the stone up the hill, it rolls back down.

My Greek mythology class meets on Thursday nights. The prof is an older guy. At first I thought he was nice, but when I stopped by his office to discuss my paper on how Odysseus was a total jerk, my prof asked if I wanted to chat about our course readings over drinks.

“I didn’t think they let students and professors do that,” I said.

“It would be strictly academic,” he said, “just in a more relaxed environment.”

I told him I’d think about it.

Tonight in class he asks my opinion on the story of Orpheus and the Greek concept of the afterlife. I hate how he acts like I’m an authority on everything Greek, mumble something about the River Styx and Charon and how I picture him as a surly New York cabdriver. My prof nods and smiles and says that’s a very interesting idea. The other students roll their eyes.

“Are you fucking him or something?” mutters the guy who sits beside me.

This rankles my snakes. They start hissing, which turns the heads of everyone who wasn’t already staring at me. Shit. I slide down in my seat and leave right after class, before my prof can ask my opinion on anything else. I paid hard-earned money to take this course, and I’d drop it if I could afford to take the loss, but I’m financially committed to a creep for the rest of the semester.

I complain about him to Violet when we tend the City Park gardens on Monday.

“He sounds like my ex-husband,” she says. “He was a bastard and a flirt besides. Do you know if this professor of yours is married?”

“Don’t think so,” I say because I haven’t seen him wearing a wedding band, but sometimes people take those off if they want to give the appearance of singlehood. I work in a bar so I know all the tricks.

“Just keep away from him,” she says. “No private meetings in his office.”

I nod. I’m careful not to let him catch me alone, though it won’t do anything to relieve my in-class embarrassment.

After our gardening session Violet drives me to the store so I can buy bread and milk, then she drops me off at my apartment. I grab my sacks from the back seat and Violet closes the car door for me, but she doesn’t notice that one of my snakes is in the way.

The pain in my head is excruciating. I’m glad I can’t see the blood.

“My sweet Lord,” Violet says, grabbing a hankie from her purse and wrapping it around the end of the decapitated snake. “Doctor or vet?” she yells, shaking my shoulder.

“Vet,” I say, almost woozy from the pain.

The next half hour blurs. I wish someone would cut off my head along with the snake’s. The vet only has to use a local anaesthetic, but it knocks me out.

I wake up sitting in a padded chair in the vet’s office, listening to dogs barking in the next room. Violet sits beside me, twisting a clean hankie in her fingers.

“Oh goodness,” she says. “How do you feel? I’m so sorry.”

My head doesn’t hurt, feels like it’s full of lead marbles. The vet called my doctor and explained the situation. My doctor called a prescription for Valium in to the pharmacy.

The vet had to remove the snake at its base and put in a few stitches. She says I’ll have to be off work for a few days to give the wound time to heal. I want to protest, say I can’t afford to be away from my jobs that long, but the anaesthetic makes my tongue thick.

A nurse gives me a small cardboard box containing what’s left of my snake. It’s wrapped in a little baggie, the kind they use for pets that have been put to sleep. I stare down at the box and get weepy again. Violet pats my shoulder until I’ve exhausted my tears, then she drives me to her apartment and has me lie down on her bed. She says she’ll pay for my medical bills.

“But it was just an accident,” I say. I think of that little cardboard box, my lost snake, and start weeping again. Violet hugs me. I don’t have names for all my snakes, but there were seventy-eight of them and now there are only seventy-seven. The remaining ones will be traumatized.

Lying on Violet’s bed with a glass of ginger ale on the table beside me, I ask woozy questions. If a snake got cut off at the base, near my skull, would it die or just grow a new tail? Could the snakes exist independently of me? My snakes have been injured, my snakes have received small cuts, but none of them have died before. Maybe I’m a burden to them. Maybe they don’t want to be attached to my head, forced to breathe smoke every evening at the bar. Maybe they’d be happier writhing around in the City Park gardens, eating bugs on their own accord, not subject to my whims and part-time jobs.

I take more pills when the pain rises in my head. Violet brings me toast and eggs and sandwiches and meatloaf. The snakes and I don’t feel like eating. I can feel their sorrow, their confusion. They nip at each other, upset because they don’t know what to make of the floaty feeling we all have from the Valium.

Violet tells the Garden Society ladies about the accident and they send cards. Some bring casseroles and small potted plants to her apartment. I smile and try to thank them, but it’s difficult. The snakes and I are too depressed and dopey because of the painkillers. That haze quells some of our sadness, at least for now, but I have too much time to think. I have a responsibility to my snakes, these seventy-seven living things on my head. I have to make sure they are safe and healthy, but sometimes I don’t know how to best care for them. It makes me a little mad; I didn’t ask to be given these snakes, but now I have them and I have to negotiate that.

My snakes are like little kids. Defenceless.

The Garden Society ladies come to Violet’s apartment for a meeting, cluster around my bed and chat in quiet voices. We mourn with Olivia—she’s in a rental agreement she can’t break but her apartment is so full of dust it’s making her allergies worse. No amount of sweeping seems to help. So many of us Garden Society members are in that situation, a state of trapped. We have fixed lives—fixed incomes, fixed rental agreements, fixed expenses—and none of us can break out. We feel hopeless. Like there are no good options.

My prof leaves messages on the answering machine at my apartment (how did he get my number?) wondering why I was absent from class and saying he missed me and he hopes he didn’t do anything to make me upset. It’s too creepy.

After a week of recovery I go back to work, still grieving.

Rick, one of the bouncers who’s always trying to hit on me, asks if I’d like to come back to his apartment for a nightcap and a backrub.

“I know you lost one of . . .” he touches his head. “Maybe I could help you feel better.”

I stare at him so hard he’s perfectly still for a moment. “You have no fucking clue,” I say.

“You could tell me how you feel at my place,” he says.

I slam an empty plastic pretzel bowl against the counter. It breaks in two. Rick steps back. “You have no fucking clue,” I say again.

He doesn’t bother me for the rest of the evening.

The snakes weigh my head down, literally and physically. Tonight they are heavy with confusion. Drunk people depress me further. I can’t wait to leave the bar. My snakes drink beer out of near-empty glasses when I’m not looking. I’m toasted by the time I get off work, barely have it in me to walk home and flop on the couch. I’m mad at my snakes, prefer to medicate with chocolate, but they want booze. I go to the bathroom but can’t throw up, peer at myself in the mirror, and freeze for a moment because I look like shit. The snakes loll around my head. My eyes are dark, sunken, drunk.

That’s what makes me puke.

It’s better that way. Gets all the toxins out of my system. I rinse my mouth with warm water. I have to get away from the bar. I can’t let my snakes fall to temptation and develop some chemical dependency. They don’t have my willpower. I need to give them a better life than bartending and book sorting, but that means quitting my jobs, going to school full-time.