Bearded Women Read online

  “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.

  Combust

  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.

  I inherited my father’s slight build, but I have my mother’s temper, her tendency to erupt without warning. At first I thought I’d be able to avoid those explosions, but the best I can do is hide them. There are times when I have to throw things. Stomp around. At work after a terse discussion with my boss/co-worker/client I step into the ladies’ room and lock the door so I can slam my shoe against the counter several times. More than once I’ve come out of the restroom and found a concerned-looking colleague. I just smile and say there was a problem with the toilet.

  During my lunch break I call my sister. It’s been a week since we last spoke. She and Mother have never gotten along. I was the firstborn, had four years experience with Mother before my sister came along, and I learned how to talk back. My sister wasn’t a fighter, just crumpled. Mother didn’t understand people who wouldn’t argue. After high school graduation my sister moved as far away as she could, to Seattle. Mother has not forgiven her for the distance. My sister doesn’t understand why Mother is so mad.

  “I hate her,” says my sister. “Tell her to stop calling me.”

  “Last night a nurse pulled me aside,” I say. “They’re sure Mother has had a few little heart attacks. Diabetics can get those and not feel pain because of nerve damage. When she goes it’ll be sudden. You’ll feel like crap if you don’t call her. She wants to hear from you.”

  “So she can yell at me about how I don’t love her,” says my sister. “We’ve both become childless spinsters because of her. She turned us off to that whole marriage-and-kids thing.”

  “I’m not a spinster.” I think you have to be at least sixty to be a real spinster, and I’m only forty-three.

  “I’m a spinster,” says my sister, “and it’s because of Mom.”

  “She loves you,” I say.

  “She never loved me enough to figure out why I didn’t love her. She never cared to figure out how I operate.”

  “Mother isn’t a detail person,” I say.

  “I’m her kid,” says my sister. “She should care how I operate.”

  “I know,” I say.

  I have been a mediator between my mother and sister for years and I’m not happy about it. After hanging up with my sister there’s no time to go into the bathroom and hit something. I have to push that anger back down, return to work.

  My first afternoon customer is a lady who wants to set up a certificate of deposit.

  “I’m putting money aside for my kids to go to college,” she says, an excuse to show me wallet-sized photographs of her daughters. One kid is in second grade and the other is four years old. About the same age difference as my sister and me.

  I type up the paperwork for the certificate of deposit and feel the heat in my fingertips, the anger that’s released after a good shoe-banging and a few expletives. I should excuse myself and go scream, but that wouldn't be professional. Just a few minutes and I can escape . . .

  The lady tells me one of her daughters wants to be a ballerina. The other wants to be an astronaut.

  I want to drag my sister from Seattle to see Mother. They’re both good people. I love them very much. But they’re too fucking obstinate to be nice to each other.

  I feel a stab of pain in my left ankle, smell char and nylon, glance down and see fire sprouting from a patch of skin big as my palm. The flames are two inches high, red-orange at the tips and blue near my skin. I scream, roll out of my chair and on to the floor, and yell for my client to call 911.

  In the hospital bed I sit cross-legged to examine the blister. It’s small, maybe two inches in diameter, and looks like a burn someone would get from a splash of hot oil. I can’t explain why it’s not worse. The nylons are ruined. My ankle hurts like hell. I try not to cry.

  A nurse takes a few more vials of blood. A doctor runs four interns through the room.

  “This is the first case of spontaneous combustion our hospital has ever observed,” she says.

  The interns squint at me, Combusting Woman A, and scribble on notepads. They linger in the room for five minutes, check their watches, fiddle with their stethoscopes, and clip out the door when I’m no longer interesting.

  I slam my empty plastic water glass against the bed so hard it cracks. I slam it again and again until it shatters and plastic shards fly across the room.

  A nurse pokes his head in the room and asks what’s wrong.

  I tell him that aside from catching on fire, I’m just peachy.

  I don’t know how I’ll explain this to my boss or to Mother. She’ll blame Da
d’s genes. A nurse unhooks some of the tubes and lets me sit in a plastic chair in the shower. I feel a bit safer, though I don’t think I’ll combust again soon. I also feel drained, but that’s been happening a lot. I get tired easily, need more sleep, more coffee, more makeup under my eyes in the morning.

  I stay in the hospital while doctors conduct blood tests, bone marrow tests, hormone tests, kidney and liver function tests, and take endless urine specimens. I destroy three more glasses and a potted plant sent by my co-workers, and start igniting again when there’s nothing more to smash (because the nurses said I went through my plastic glass quota). Each episode of combustion is correlated to a rise in my blood pressure and thoughts of Mother.

  I call Mother from the hospital. She blames Dad like I knew she would.

  “There was something wrong with him,” she says.

  “Mother,” I say, “I don’t care whose fault this is. I just want to stop igniting.”

  “All I’m saying is that you’re not going to find the answer on my side of the family,” she says. “Your father was the one who played with fire.”

  My dad was a welder who worked on farm equipment, grain silos and elevators and other big pieces of metal. He travelled all over the country, was good at what he did and made quite a bit of money doing it. When I was little Dad wasn’t home much. The amount of time he stayed with my mom and sister and me shrank and shrank until he didn’t come back.

  “The lawyer called me today,” says Mother. “We might have a case.”

  “Lovely,” I say and feel that familiar burn sensation in my ankle. I don’t have anything else I can break, and the nurses warned me about ripping the sheets. I guess they’d rather I set the bed aflame. I tell Mother I need to hang up. There’s about twenty seconds of pain before a certain area catches fire, so I can grit my teeth and grab a damp towel. When the fire erupts it’s like a release, a good ache even if it’s an intense one.

  After ten days the doctors can’t find anything physically wrong with me, and send me home with a large tub of ointment.

  Even after he left, my dad was faithful financially. He sent cashier’s cheques to supplement Mother’s income until my sister turned eighteen, then we never heard from him again. Mother put together reasonable outfits from Goodwill and brought home day-olds from the bakery every night. We feasted on cookies and brownies and muffins. I had my father’s metabolism, nothing stuck to me, while Mother gained all the weight I should have had.

  My sister was different, her digestive system was easily disturbed, but Mother didn’t understand why she didn’t eat like we did.

  “You’re too nervous,” said Mother. “You need more meat on your bones.” She made my sister sit at the kitchen table until she finished three blueberry muffins. Too much. My sister threw up. Mother thought she had an eating disorder.

  “She’s embarrassed by my size,” said Mother. “She doesn’t want to become this large.”

  “She’s not embarrassed,” I said. “She just can’t eat like you.”

  My sister was terrified of Mother, though Mother didn’t believe me when I tried to explain it to her.

  “Why the hell should she be scared of me,” said Mother. “I’m her mother for God’s sake.”

  Dad would have understood my sister, but he left when she was three. Mother needed a sparring partner, a role my sister couldn’t comprehend and my father couldn’t fill. Sometimes I’m mad at him, but it’s hard to sustain that anger because I know Mother is impossible.

  I wear a bathrobe around the house, sleep in the bathroom on an air mattress covered with a fire-retardant blanket with a bucket of wet towels by my side. I hide all of my good dishes and glasses on a high shelf in my closet, use paper plates and cups instead. I catch fire every other day, don’t know when I’ll be able to return to work. I take wet towels in the car when I drive to the nursing home to see Mother. She looks much better than I feel, plump and pink-cheeked even though she’s got a cough.

  “You need to eat more,” Mother tells me when the orderlies deliver her lunch. “You’re too thin. Your body doesn’t have enough food to burn. That’s why you’re catching fire.”

  “I thought it was because of Dad,” I say.

  “Him too,” says Mother, “but you’re also skinny.”

  She coughs hard. I sit up straight in my chair, but she waves her hand at me and shakes her head. Mother has developed a heavy cough—she calls it her heart cough—and it’s the same one her sister and brother got before they died. After twenty seconds the spasms stop.

  “That gets the bad stuff out of my system,” says Mother and takes a large bite of mashed potato.

  Three weeks after I start combusting, my sister sends a plane ticket to visit her in Seattle.

  “You need time to relax,” she says. “That job stresses you out too much.”

  “Mother is dying,” I say. “That stresses me out too much.”

  “She’s going to keep kicking for another ten years,” says my sister. “That’s how she is.”

  “Mother isn’t immortal,” I say.

  “Thank God,” mutters my sister.

  “If you keep talking like that I won’t come.”

  “I’ll be nice,” she sighs. “I want to see you. A vacation will do you good.”

  Mother isn’t happy when she hears I’m going to visit my sister rather than my sister taking time off work to fly back to Ohio.

  “Your sister hates me,” says Mother.

  “You and her don’t see things the same way,” I say.

  “Which is why she hates me and never visits,” says Mother.

  “Have you called her?” I say.

  “When I call she doesn’t answer,” says Mother.

  “When I answer she yells at me for not visiting,” says my sister later that evening. “I don’t want to visit someone who’s going to yell at me.”

  Nobody wants to be the first to be civil. My sister is passive-aggressive. Mother’s just aggressive. Dad was like my sister. Quietly rebellious. He moved farther away rather than risk confrontation. I’m not sure why he married Mother, but she has a surety about her that he might have liked. Mother doesn’t hesitate, was probably convinced they should be together, and made my dad believe the same thing.

  I’m mad at him for leaving my sister with no one who was calm. She could have curled with Dad on the recliner chair while Mother and I fought. I don’t understand why my dad thought that my sister and I would be able to deal with Mother if he couldn’t handle her on his own. I don’t understand why he stopped communicating with us after that last cheque.

  I have to take a couple sedatives before the plane trip to Seattle, too worried my anxiety over catching fire will make me catch fire. I’m afraid the flight attendants will somehow divulge the risk I pose, not let me on the plane, but I get shoved into a seat along with everyone else. The trip passes in a haze. I feel floaty, not really in my body. The flight attendant has to shake my shoulder so I remember to get off.

  I stumble into the airport and see my sister and am struck by how much she looks like Mother without the padding of weight. She is almost but not quite too thin. My sister grabs my shoulders and hugs me, but I can feel the hardness of her shoulder blades while Mother is all alarming softness.

  “You look tired,” she says. I tell her I’m just coming to. She clicks her tongue at me for taking the sedatives but I tell her it was that or spend the whole flight in terror of combusting.

  Seattle is a pleasant change. The air is cooler and wetter than Ohio’s. My sister thinks the chill will help with my temperament and the combustion. We spend the weekend chatting and watching movies and going out for brunch. She even pays for a massage, says I need it to get rid of stress.

  I try to talk about Mother, but she doesn’t want to hear it.

  “Th
e nurses are serious,” I say after we get home from my massage.

  “I don’t care,” says my sister. “I don’t want to see her.”

  “She loves you,” I say, “just not in a way that’s easy for you to understand.”

  “What good is it then?”

  “It’s love,” I say. “That has to count for something.”

  Pain in my ankle. Before I can run to the kitchen and grab a damp washcloth, I’ve ignited again. I burn for a couple moments while my sister sprints to the bathroom for an old towel. I stand up, get away from her couch so it doesn’t burn, but the fabric that was near my leg has already charred. Fuck.

  “You’re not supposed to think about her,” my sister says as I swaddle my leg in the towel. “She gets you worked up.”

  “You both get me worked up,” I say.

  She drives me to the ER. The burn is more serious than usual, will probably leave a blister. In the waiting room my sister isn’t as mad over the couch as I thought she’d be.

  “I’ll pay for the damage,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “It’s part of the risk I accepted when I invited you to visit. I just wish you could get this stress out of your system.”

  “You and Mom are responsible for it,” I say. “You won’t even have a civil conversation over the phone.”

  “She can’t have a civil conversation over the phone,” says my sister. “This is all her anger coming out of you.”

  “It’s how she communicates,” I say.

  “Not with me she doesn’t,” says my sister.

  “You should let me pay for the couch,” I say again.

  “No,” she says. I think she feels a little guilty about the situation, realises that she and Mother play a role in my combustion, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.

  The nurse calls my name. My sister and I explain we were frying fish and the pan with the hot oil got knocked off the stove and splashed on my ankle. The doctor examines my wound while my sister folds her arms and grimaces. I’d tell her how much she looks like Mother, but she’d hit me.