Bearded Women Read online

  ChiZine Publications

  Copyright

  Bearded Women: Stories © 2011 by Teresa Milbrodt

  Cover artwork © 2011 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design © 2011 by Samantha Bieko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-902-6

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited and copyedited by Samantha Beiko

  Proofread by Colleen Anderson

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For my parents,

  who taught me the value of laughter and imagination

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Bianca’s Body

  The Shell

  Mr. Chicken

  Cyclops

  Snakes

  Seventeen Episodes in the Life of a Giant

  Ears

  Combust

  Three

  Butterfly Women

  Markings

  To Fill

  Skin

  Holes

  Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

  Mothers

  Copyrights

  Acknowledgements and Gifts

  About the Author

  Bianca’s Body

  My second lower torso grows out two inches to the left of my navel. I call her Bianca. She is at a forty-five-degree angle to my body and an eighty-degree angle to the ground. When I sit down, part of her back rests on my left knee and her legs dangle off the ground. Bianca has her own navel, a crotch, the necessary reproductive organs, and a nice pair of legs. I can move them when I concentrate. She is twenty-nine inches long and if she were a whole person I figure she would have been short, maybe four feet tall. I don’t know how much she weighs; it’s hard to balance her on a scale, but I’d guess forty-five pounds. Her hips are a bit narrow.

  Bianca wears pants and skirts. I have to buy two of everything so she matches my walking legs, but I don’t bother with pantyhose or matching shoes. Bianca wears black flats because they go with everything. Over thirty-five years I’ve grown accustomed to the extra pull on my abdomen, but I have a little rolling cart I rest Bianca on when I’m walking, push it with my left hand like a baby stroller.

  It is our third trip to this gynaecologist, the seventh Doug and I have seen. In the office my husband sits on my right, holds my hand. Bianca is supported on a stool to my left. Doug still smells of french fry grease from working the graveyard shift at the diner. I picked him up after I got off work at the television station, have dark crescents below my eyes because I’ve been up for seventeen hours, since five yesterday afternoon. I do the eleven o’clock news as well as the five AM broadcast. Our newscasts have the best ratings in the state for a market our size, about 500,000 people. The station manager keeps telling me it’s because of my bright personality and clear speaking voice, not because Bianca is hidden under the table.

  “I think you’ll need to have it removed if you want to have a child,” says the gynaecologist. “Removal would take the stress of extra weight from your body and improve blood circulation and probably fertility. I wouldn’t have advised it ten or even five years earlier, but medical technologies have been improving at such a rapid pace that your risk of serious complications has dramatically decreased.”

  “But there is still risk,” says Doug.

  I lay my hand on Bianca’s stomach.

  We’ve been having this problem for six years, ever since we started trying to get pregnant. Doug prefers to have sex with Bianca and for a long time I did not mind this. I feel what Bianca feels, and to be honest she has better orgasms. Bianca has gotten pregnant twice and both times the foetus miscarried. For two years we’ve tried impregnating my walking half. It’s not easy since Bianca grows out of my body at a diagonal. She gets in the way if Doug tries to lie on top of me or if I’m on top of him. The necessary parts can’t quite reach. We’ve tried all sorts of alternate positions, none of them comfortable. The one that’s worked best so far is when I squat over Doug and move up and down while he thrusts. Bianca has to put her legs on the mattress and bow out her torso. It strains her muscles after a while, but it wouldn’t be so bad if my walking half didn’t take forever to orgasm. Sex with Bianca is better, easier than with my walking half, even though we have to do it standing, often in the shower. Doug hugs me close to him; I wrap Bianca’s legs around his waist, and he supports her with both arms so my side doesn’t ache. It works well enough.

  But this gynaecologist sings the same song as her six predecessors. Bianca will never be able to bear children because of complications with her uterus—it will always reject the embryo shortly after implantation. If she is removed, there is a greater chance my walking half will be able to become pregnant. The gynaecologist explains this in terms of hormone concentrations. I don’t quite understand it, but she seems to suggest that Bianca is leeching estrogen and progesterone away from the rest of my body. I’ve been injected with hormones and it hasn’t worked, but all the doctors say things would balance out if Bianca were removed.

  “So I would be able to get pregnant,” I say.

  “There would be a greater chance,” says the gynaecologist.

  “But just a chance,” says Doug. “You couldn’t guarantee anything.”

  “If it didn’t work we could try artificial insemination,” says the gynaecologist.

  “Just a chance,” says Doug.

  “A chance.” I try to smile.

  “They’re a bunch of quacks,” Doug says in the car on the way home. “They’ve never dealt with anything like this. They have no idea what would happen if you got it removed.”

  “They have a pretty good idea,” I say. He doesn’t know her name is Bianca. No one else does.

  “They’re still quacks,” says Doug. “I don’t want you going under the knife and putting yourself at risk for the sake of a baby. We can adopt.”

  “I don’t want to,” I say quietly.

  “Why the hell not?” he says, though we have had this argument before. “There are lots of kids out there who need good parents. Those doctors are vultures. Do you have any idea how much this will cost? How it’ll put them in the news? You’re a famous face.”

  “Locally. Just
locally.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says, “it would still be in press releases all over the country. I don’t see why you need to do this whole pregnancy thing. Having a kid is so taxing on a woman’s body, and you’ll be taxed enough after having surgery. What if they go in there and botch things up with your other uterus? Or what if you still can’t have kids even with it off?”

  “I haven’t decided to remove it yet,” I say, “I don’t know if I want to try.”

  “You shouldn’t,” says Doug. “What would I do if I lost you?”

  We lapse into silence. I don’t know who to believe. The doctors. My husband. Everyone has an agenda. I know the doctors would be celebrities. I know Doug is afraid for my health. I also think he’s afraid of losing Bianca. Sometimes I get jealous. Bianca is sexier than my walking half. Her legs and hips are smooth and slender, belonging to a twenty-year-old girl, while my walking legs belong to a thirty-five-year-old woman. Even though I work out at the gym and my walking legs are muscular, there is a little cellulite and some varicose veins.

  I align myself more with my walking half. I don’t know why. It has always felt like me, while Bianca felt like someone else. I gave her a name when I was very little, four or five. She is like a younger sibling, a person I love, a person I can envy. If she were removed there are a lot of things I would not miss. Grocery shopping would be less cumbersome. I wouldn’t have to alter all my clothes, make slits in skirts and pants to accommodate her. I wouldn’t have to stand leaning over a toilet while Bianca does her business. We wouldn’t have to keep ordering special cars with the steering wheel on the right side so I have room for Bianca’s body. I wouldn’t have a near-constant strain on my left side.

  In the car I touch Doug’s hand and he doesn’t pull away. It is difficult to explain to him why I want a child of my own. It is difficult to explain it to myself, why I feel a need to grow round with the weight of an infant, why I want my body to create another body. I keep trying to come up with reasons but wonder why I have to explain myself to anybody. I always wanted to have a baby, and I wanted to be in my thirties when I did it, have a career and be able to take time off. Sometimes I think my drive to conceive has become stronger the more problems we have encountered, the more gynaecologists we have seen. My body should be able to reproduce. I have all the right equipment. Two sets in fact. But neither works.

  By the time Doug and I get home, I’m confused and hungry and not a little cross. Bianca and my walking legs have the same menstrual cycle and it’s getting close to their time of the month. It’s crazy trying to change Bianca’s pad and my walking half’s pad in a little restroom stall, even when I use the wheelchair access ones. Doug and I eat cereal at eleven in the morning, too tired to make anything else for breakfast. I keep a little stool beside the kitchen table so I can rest Bianca while I eat. We need to catch a few hours’ rest, have to get up at eight in the evening, and by the time we’ve sorted through the mail and had our cereal it’s past noon. We’re both tired and irksome. The appointment, the infertility, the possibility of Bianca’s removal, is still on my mind. Even though I know it’s a bad idea, I want to have sex.

  “Can I just do it with your extra parts?” Doug sighs.

  “We have to use my walking legs,” I say.

  “Too early in the morning for that,” he grumbles.

  “Maybe this time it will work and the hormone shots will finally kick in.”

  So we end up on the bed—me kneeling over Doug, Bianca arching her lower back and legs with her feet on the mattress, Doug grimacing up at me the whole time. It takes twice as long as usual before he comes. I fall off of him, to the side, hoping to catch it all and clamp it inside me. Become a baby, dammit. Bianca pulls at my side, her legs flailing in the air.

  “Feel better now?” he says.

  “Sure.” We go to sleep, get up at seven-thirty, later than we should, have just enough time to shower and dress and make dinner before heading off to work.

  Doug and I met because we were nocturnal creatures. I was in college, a sophomore majoring in communications, and he worked at the all-night diner where I went to study. At first he gave me free coffee when he saw me sitting at the counter or alone at a table. That progressed to donuts, pie, milkshakes if I wanted them, then burgers and fries and even breakfast at five AM. In the meantime I was being prodded into a career in newscasting.

  I always thought I’d like to work in television, but never pictured myself in front of the camera for obvious reasons. I figured I would do things behind the scenes, but ended up sitting at a news desk when no one else in my camera-shy television production class wanted to anchor the newscast for our campus station. It was only a half-hour broadcast, aired twice a week, and focused on local and university news. The other students convinced me it would be fine, Bianca would remain hidden, her feet balanced on a milk crate.

  I worked for the campus station for five years, even after graduation. Viewership to our program increased tenfold and we expanded to a three-day-a-week and then a five-day-a-week show with me as the primary news anchor. I applied for my current job on a lark. They didn’t know about the extra body when I was hired because I sent broadcast demo tapes and did a phone interview. I figured only the upper half of my body would be important to them, anyway. I’ve had the job for twelve years now and think most viewers know about Bianca even though it’s just my upper half on the billboards all over town. Sometimes, though, when I’m at the grocery store or out to eat, someone smiles at me, gives a wave of recognition, and then her jaw drops when she sees Bianca.

  The evening newscast is the same as usual—house fires, a gas station robbed, a dog that had twelve puppies and someone assumes it must be a county record. Overnight I’m working on more national and local news developments for the morning broadcast. During a coffee break at two AM, I make the mistake of telling Lottie, the night receptionist, that I’m considering having Bianca removed. She says her lips are sealed.

  By five in the morning half the station knows. Lottie swears up and down she only told one other person. I want to strangle her. After my morning broadcast, the station program manager asks if they can do a special on the operation and my recovery.

  “But this isn’t a done deal,” I say. “I don’t know if I’m getting the surgery.”

  “Really?” He scratches his moustache. “I’d think an extra bottom half would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “It’s dangerous to have it removed,” I say before marching out to the parking lot.

  Everyone always asks why I don’t get Bianca cut off. I tell them our internal organs are mingled, which is true enough, but so many other things are mingled, too. I have always sensed her sexual desire. It is something instinctual, gut-level thinking. I don’t know how I would feel without her. Maybe lost. I’ve read about this happening with Siamese twins when they were separated, how they spent so long feeling what the other twin felt it was a near-devastating absence when that connection was gone. Bianca has always been more passionate than me. If I lost her, lost that, what else might change?

  Beside my car in the parking lot I’m approached by a nice-looking man in a trench coat. He hands me a business card and asks if he can buy toenail clippings from Bianca.

  “I’d pay a premium for them,” he whispers not unkindly. “More if I could watch you cut them, but just the toenails would be okay as well.” I stare at him. He smiles, tells me to think about it, touches the brim of his hat. I get into my car quickly and lock the door, sit in the driver’s seat for a moment. His business card says he’s an accountant. I wonder how he would know which body I sent the clippings from. If they were my toenails at all. There are always a few odd ducks wandering around the studio trying to catch a glimpse of me. There are often a few protestors, too, people who say the only reason I’ve had this job for twelve years is because of my body, because I am a secret spec
tacle.

  If it were seventy years ago I could be exhibiting myself in a sideshow, painted larger-than-life on a poster on the side of a canvas tent. Freakish people used to be thought of as magical. Bianca could have been an economic asset. Now I’m just made to feel bad.

  When Doug and I got married, both of our families were aghast. My mother did not want me to wed someone who planned on a career as a short-order cook, no matter how well-read I said he was. Doug’s mother was sure we were going to have kids with three arms. Doug and I had been dating for two years. Our parents met twice before the wedding to have dinner, meals that involved several pointed questions and long periods of silence. His mother asked my mother when I was going to get the extra bits removed. My mother asked his mother when Doug was going back to school. I will never be sure why we didn’t elope, why I let my mother insist on a church wedding. I don’t think anyone in his family said anything to anyone in my family the entire evening. But I loved Doug because he was a smart person, because we both liked travelling, because he was happy cooking and working nights and reading private eye novels. He didn’t mind that we would need to follow my news anchor career, go where I could find work, and he was proud that I had the confidence to keep Bianca. I’d known that I needed to marry a man who saw Bianca as a part of me, not something extra. And maybe that plan worked too well.

  I was planning on going to the gym, and after the accountant incident I really need to work out, relieve some of the stress. They’re used to me at Perfect Body Gym, appreciate that I can bring people in at six-thirty in the morning. I have a free membership as long as I come in at least twice a week. They keep a little stool for Bianca behind the desk, one with a seat I can raise or lower depending on the equipment I’m using. I do some curls, work on my triceps, and do a few sets on the leg extension machine with my walking half. Then I take Bianca’s shoes off, place her bare feet against the wall, and lean all of my weight against her. I bend her knees and straighten them again. It’s kind of like doing sideways push-ups, keeps her legs and ass toned. Of course people are always looking at me, whispering behind my back, and over time I’ve learned to tell myself that I don’t care that much.