Bearded Women Read online

  I have spent the past thirty-nine years trying to explain to my mother and sister why they can’t get along. Why can’t I say screw it, let myself accept that even though people share genes, they might not be able to stand being in the same room for more than fifteen seconds. Maybe my sister is right and Mother would only yell if she visited. I know Mother would scream out of love, because she misses my sister, because she wishes my sister lived closer to home, but my sister would not interpret Mother’s screams in that manner.

  I know if I saw my father I would react to him the same way Mother would react to my sister. Scream at him out of love.

  “Did you ever try to look for Dad?” I ask my sister as we drive home from the hospital.

  “Once,” she says.

  “Are you mad at him?” I say.

  “No,” she says.

  “Why not?” I say. “He left us.”

  “He left Mother.”

  “And us,” I say. “He doesn’t love us. Not enough to write. We don’t know if he’s alive.”

  “We’d remind him of her,” she says. “Maybe he thought we’d be the same way. Maybe he thought we’d hate him.”

  “So you feel better with no parents at all,” I say.

  “We got duds. Not all people who are parents should have been parents.”

  Maybe she has a point. There are certain people Mother was not fit to mother, and my sister was one of them. At the same time, my parents are my parents and we owe each other something. Explanations if not love.

  On Monday morning my sister has to go to work, tells me to relax and have a good time. I take a walk, go out for coffee because it’s Seattle and I want to be around people without needing to talk to anyone. In the coffee shop I watch old men doing crosswords. I want to pick one who could be my father and be mad at him. I wonder how many of them could have stood up to Mother, stayed around longer than my dad, but maybe those wouldn’t have been men she wanted to marry.

  I sit down across from one of the old men. “My father left when I was seven,” I say. “Can I be mad at you instead of him?”

  He takes off his glasses. “And where will that get you?” he says.

  “I keep wanting to explode,” I say.

  “You won’t break anything, will you?” he says.

  “No,” I say, “I’m getting better about that.” But if I don’t break things, I ignite. I hope that being mad at a father substitute, someone I can see and touch, will help.

  “Well,” he says, “go ahead.”

  I look at him, so calm and willing, and I can’t think of a damn thing to say.

  “You can start whenever,” he says.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” I say.

  “Did I hit your mother?” he says. “Did I yell at her?”

  “No,” I say, “it was the other way around. Usually I don’t blame you for leaving, but sometimes I do. I blame you a lot.” I feel my fingers getting hot, squeeze them tight against my palms. Anger builds behind my eyes, wanting to come out.

  “I’m sorry I missed your birthdays,” he says. “That’s probably something you were mad about. Birthdays and Christmas.”

  “No,” I say, “you sent money. It was okay.”

  “That was good of me,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m angry not for me, but for my sister. She needed you to be around and you weren’t.”

  “I didn’t realise that,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “And you stopped sending money after my sister turned eighteen. We never heard from you again.”

  “How sad,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you send a card?” I say. “You could have told us where you were.”

  He pauses.

  “Maybe I was scared,” he says.

  “That’s what my sister says,” I say. When I’m talking I find it’s easier to direct the heat into my hands. I grab my coffee mug, feel that anger seep into the black ceramic cup which gets a few degrees warmer.

  “Has she forgiven me?” he says.

  “You,” I say, “but not Mother.”

  “And what do you think of your mother?” he says.

  “She needs to be translated,” I say. “Not everyone understands her.”

  “I know people like that.” He nods. “When were you going to start yelling at me?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s more difficult than I thought it would be.”

  “Can I get you another coffee?” he says.

  “You don’t have to,” I say.

  “Refills aren’t expensive,” he says, tugging the cup from my fingers. “And I always hoped you’d grow up to be a coffee drinker.”

  When I call Mother that evening I don’t tell my sister. She’s just gotten home from work and her shoulders droop. Tired. Good. She flops on the couch and turns on the evening news, says we should go out for Chinese after she’s had a chance to relax.

  I dial Mother’s number in the home, wait for the ring, for her to answer, then I flick on the speaker phone. I sit on my sister before she knows what’s happening.

  “Hello, Mother,” I say.

  “What the hell,” says my sister, pushing my back. I don’t budge. I’m not really heavy, but weigh enough to keep my sister stationary.

  “Who’s this?” says Mother.

  “Me,” I say. “Us. In Seattle.” I’m holding a mug filled with cold water and a teabag. By the time we’re done with this conversation, it should have steeped and be ready to drink.

  My sister pounds my back with her small fists. “Get off me,” she says.

  “But then you’d leave the room,” I say.

  “Is that your sister?” says Mother.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Dammit,” says my sister.

  “That is no fucking way to speak to your mother,” says Mother.

  “I wasn’t speaking to you,” says my sister. “This is crazy.”

  “I’m not getting off until you say something nice,” I say. “Something without swear words. That goes for both of you.”

  I feel my sister grimace at the back of my head. On the other end of the line Mother has lapsed into rare silence. Warmth surges into my hands and feet—not a burning heat, but a powerful one, like I could light candles with my fingers. Mother and my sister sigh in unison.

  “Well,” says my sister.

  “Well,” says Mother.

  It’s a start. I hold the mug a little more tightly. I can wait a little longer.

  Three

  You’d very much like the three-legged man. Your grandparents might have seen him when he was still performing in the sideshow, might have told you about his act in which he kicked a ball with his third leg, danced three-legged jigs, and stood on his third leg while reading suggestive limericks. He was really quite spectacular.

  The three-legged man left the sideshow when he was thirty-nine and his daughter was fifteen. He liked performing, but it got tiresome and he wanted to do something else. Be a normal guy with a house and a kid. This is more difficult with three legs than with two, but the three-legged man did an admirable job of it, though he is not sure his daughter would agree. They moved to a reasonable town and bought a small home. The three-legged man planted annuals along the front walk, tomatoes in the backyard, and had a second career as a mail carrier for eighteen years.

  The three-legged man’s daughter graduated from high school and college and medical school. She was very intelligent. She became a radiologist, married a trombone-playing nurse, had a daughter, and divorced. The three-legged man and his daughter, who is now fifty-two, do not talk about the sideshow years. He invites her and his granddaughter for dinner every Sunday (although his granddaughter is young and busy and does not always come). Every other Sunday
his daughter brings a bottle of wine. The three-legged man is a teetotaller. His daughter drinks the whole bottle (except when his granddaughter comes and has one glass). You would not know when his daughter is drunk because she is so neat. Never slurs. Never swaggers. Just swears a lot. The three-legged man’s former wife also liked wine too much. Remember this for later.

  You’d like the three-legged man’s daughter. She smells slightly of honeysuckle, wears brightly coloured skirts, has a pleasant voice, and is good at explaining things to other people in a reassuring tone. If you happened to see her in the grocery store bread aisle and asked her advice on whole wheat versus seven-grain bread, she would explain to you reassuringly why one kind, probably the kind you wanted in the first place, was both healthier and tastier than the other. You can understand why it is good she went into the medical profession.

  The three-legged man’s friend Odelle is a good artist, but she is only known locally so you would not have heard of her. She is sixty-seven, nine years younger than the three-legged man, and accustomed to the idea of wrinkles, of the aging body. It was her idea to paint him in a series of different nude poses from classical art. Michelangelo’s David. Rodin’s pondering man from The Gates of Hell. She even painted him as an old man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, reaching out to touch the hand of God. The three-legged man particularly likes that painting. You would, too. His daughter does not. Odelle’s work is going to be shown in a local gallery. There will be hors d’oeuvres and an art critic from the local paper.

  “That woman is going to make you the talk of the town,” his daughter says at Sunday dinner after finishing the bottle of wine.

  “I hope so,” says the three-legged man.

  “I don’t even know why I’m so fucking worried,” says the three-legged man’s daughter. “You’ll be the embarrassed one. Not me.”

  “That’s what I keep telling you,” says the three-legged man. He tries not to grimace, shifts on his stool and taps his third leg on the floor like he does when he’s anxious. The leg grows out of his spine and it’s hard for him to sit in regular chairs.

  “She can’t paint worth shit,” says his daughter. “The show will flop. No one will come.”

  “Time for you to cool off,” says the three-legged man as he stands up.

  “The ones who do come will gawk and point. A fucking sideshow. That’s what you’ve always wanted. To be a goddamned freak.” She often says this when drunk.

  The three-legged man slides his hands under his daughter’s arms, lifts her up like a big doll, and walks her down the hall to the bathroom. His third leg swings behind him like a tail. You would smile to see him if you did not know that his daughter was drunk, and you would not know that she is drunk because she is so neat, doesn’t resist. The three-legged man sits his daughter on the closed toilet. She crosses her arms. Crosses her legs. Smirks because she knows she’s upset him. The three-legged man closes the bathroom door and brings his stool from the kitchen to wait outside.

  His daughter is too like her mother, holds the poison in, doesn’t throw up. She spends her days interpreting X-rays and CAT scans and other images of the possibly ill at the hospital. There she is quiet. Technical. To the point. When the three-legged man sees his daughter’s co-workers at the grocery store and bank, they comment on how intelligent his daughter is, how calm and focused. The three-legged man thanks them politely.

  He knows every family harbours its own spectacle. The private ones are the worst.

  You must understand that the three-legged man loved his wife, but had to send her out of the trailer when she was drunk. There wasn’t anywhere to put her inside. Eventually she ran off with a human pincushion. Many in the sideshow had a weakness for liquor. The three-legged man raised his daughter alone from the time she was seven. He thought he did well enough, but when she was a teenager she spent time with the children of other performers, kids who drank as much as their parents. The sideshow was failing. Nobody had much money. Everyone wanted to forget that.

  The three-legged man knows he was not strict enough with his daughter when they travelled with the sideshow, but he amended himself when they moved to town. He made sure his daughter obeyed curfew. He surreptitiously sniffed her words when she came home, searching for an odour of beer or mint meant to cover beer. He did not allow alcohol in the house. His daughter did well in college. He kept his fingers crossed.

  The three-legged man fetches his sketchpad from the kitchen counter and returns to sit outside the bathroom door. He took up drawing after he retired from the postal service. He does not show his drawings to many people, but if you saw them you would think they were reasonably good, though the proportions are a bit off. He’s been sketching Odelle from memory, drawing her like a tattooed woman, penciling mountains on her arms, rivers winding up her thighs, mesas across her abdomen, a waterfall to the side of her right breast. Her body becomes many landscapes. He draws for an hour that becomes two. Three. He listens for his daughter.

  Since the three-legged man was a mail carrier for so many years and did his route on foot, he got to know everyone in town and everyone got to know him. The daily walk kept him fit, and the profession kept him social. He became a fixture. When the three-legged man goes to the barber, conversation is the same as when any other man gets his hair cut, although the three-legged man needs to sit on a stool because the barber’s chair is not very comfortable. The three-legged man and the barber and any customers who happen to be waiting discuss the weather and how it is unseasonable, high school sports teams and how they are worse than average, the old days and how they were invariably better than now. The three-legged man knows these are normal things for crotchety old men to discuss, and he is pleased to do it. If you had grown up in town, when you saw the three-legged man on the street you would think of mail, not his third leg. The three-legged man feels conflicted about this. He likes that his third leg has become normal, part of who he is, but its oddness used to earn his living.

  The three-legged man opens the bathroom door after six hours. His daughter sits on the closed toilet, reading a magazine. He keeps his art journals and copies of National Geographic Magazine on the counter. For dinner they eat simply—turkey and cheese sandwiches. The three-legged man reminds his daughter that Odelle’s art show is Wednesday at seven.

  “You should stop by,” he says. “If only for a few hors d’oeuvres.”

  “All those people looking at you naked,” she says.

  “Most of the people in Renaissance paintings are naked,” he says.

  “They’re also dead, not standing beside the canvas.”

  The three-legged man shrugs. In his daughter’s mind he will always be embarrassing, with or without clothing. When they first moved to town, she made a point of walking three feet ahead of him wherever they went. You might say this is normal teenage behaviour, but even now the three-legged man’s daughter cringes when they are together at a restaurant. She never drinks wine in restaurants or around friends, only in the company of family.

  If you went to school with the three-legged man’s granddaughter, you would not remember her. She was quiet, not a wonderful or poor student, and she tended to stand in the middle row when class pictures were taken. If asked to describe her, you would say nice, which is what you say when you can’t think of anything else, because it doesn’t really say anything. Her most memorable feature was that she had a three-legged man for a grandfather, the three-legged man who delivered your mail, but this would not be remarkable to you because you would have grown up with a three-legged man delivering the mail and you would have assumed that’s what three-legged men did. The three-legged man’s granddaughter was notable because she was good at art—not drawing but clay and sculpture, anything three-dimensional—but this would not be something you would recall now, so many years later.

  The three-legged man’s granddaughter works in a costume shop, doe
s 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.