Bearded Women Read online

  The three-legged man’s granddaughter lived with her mother until she was eighteen, but she spent holidays and every other weekend with her father. She has always known her mother needed more care than her father, which the three-legged man finds admirable. The three-legged man knows his daughter is a kind and generous person twenty-eight days every month. He and his granddaughter do not speak about the wine. They sit quietly and wait for something to change. Understand the three-legged man has learned there isn’t anything else he can do.

  The three-legged man invites Odelle to dinner once or twice a week because it is better than eating alone, and because she has painted lovely pictures of him and not asked for a penny in return. Odelle has slim fingers and arthritic knees, which means she must sit when she paints. She is not squeamish about nakedness and neither is the three-legged man. He thinks the wrinkles of age have made him more interesting to look at, like a partially burned candle. Odelle is not his girlfriend, although sometimes the three-legged man is wishful.

  “Would you like to be a couple?” Odelle asks him the day before the gallery show while they eat beef stroganoff over noodles. Odelle is always straightforward.

  “A couple of what?” says the three-legged man. The thought of romantic relationships both excites him and causes him to make bad jokes. You understand that sort of nervousness.

  Odelle rolls her eyes. You understand that sort of exasperation.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m old.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “Are you offended?” he says.

  “Not by your age,” she says.

  The three-legged man would like to have a girlfriend. The three-legged man is terrified at the prospect of having a girlfriend. Embracing new things makes him worried. Not embracing new things makes him feel stodgy.

  “Can we just keep on like this?” he says.

  Odelle nods. He cannot tell if she expected this response or if she is disappointed.

  “Are you nervous about the show tomorrow?” she asks.

  “My body has never made me nervous,” he says.

  “But the same can’t be said for other people.”

  “Other people have never made me nervous,” he says, thinking of his daughter who makes him not so much nervous as wistful.

  The three-legged man has regrets. After his wife left, he told his daughter she would return. He was hopeful. He kept his daughter hopeful. She started to hate him for it, blamed her father for her mother’s departure. She wasn’t comfortable being the child of a three-legged man, but perhaps not many people could be.

  Once when the three-legged man’s daughter was drunk, she told him she’d been terrified her daughter would inherit a recessive gene, have three legs.

  “Three fucking legs,” she said.

  Because his daughter was drunk, the three-legged man did not take a great deal of offense. He was a bit relieved and a bit dismayed that his granddaughter had two legs.

  His granddaughter says, “I never thought having three legs would be a bad thing.”

  You may or may not agree, but remember that if you lived in the same town as the three-legged man, you would have grown up thinking three-legged men delivered the mail, so your thoughts on three-leggedness would have been closely related to your impressions of the postal service.

  The three-legged man often sits on a stool in the living room in front of a full-length wall mirror. He draws himself, practises foreshortening on his legs. There are five sketchbooks on the three-legged man’s coffee table. Drawings of him sitting and standing and walking, both front and side views. Drawings of Odelle as a fat lady, a sword swallower, and a tattooed woman. Drawings of his wife and daughter and granddaughter, always a three-quarters view. They have the same small nose and small ears and pronounced chin. The three-legged man last saw his wife when she was thirty-one, a year older than his granddaughter and twenty-one years younger than his daughter. In the drawings of his wife, she has aged to look more like his daughter.

  The three-legged man’s daughter stares at pictures of the insides of people all day—their bones and organs and muscles. She diagnoses images. Sees what makes people work. What has gone wrong. She is good at what she does. A very intelligent woman. All sorts of nurses and doctors have told him so. Understand the three-legged man is very proud of his daughter. She wants to help people.

  His granddaughter says that on some nights when she was growing up, her mother came home and had three glasses of wine. Not the whole bottle. Maybe half.

  “When I asked if something was wrong,” says his granddaughter, “she shook her head and said she had a rough day at work.”

  Your mother or father probably told you the same thing on many occasions.

  The three-legged man’s granddaughter says her mother reads the obituaries every morning. Sometimes she follows under the text with her finger, mouths the words. After three cups of coffee she nods to herself and drives to the hospital.

  At the gallery opening, Odelle wears a peach-coloured dress made of gauzy material that flows around her hips. The three-legged man wears a suit and tie. He has three suits and doesn’t wear them often because he has to get them specially made. If you saw him in one of his suits you would think he looked very dapper. The three-legged man would say that he should look dapper because three-legged suits are not cheap.

  The three-legged man’s dentist and barber compliment the pictures, as do several retired mail carriers who only have two legs. If you saw the paintings you would agree—his third leg looks so normal, so natural, so expected, you could think all humans were tripod people. The three-legged man says he’s glad he wasn’t born in a time when doctors would have tried to take the leg off. He was saved by poor technology.

  After the show, the three-legged man and his granddaughter and Odelle go out for coffee and cheesecake. Rich desserts are one of his weaknesses. He was pleased with the show but keeps glancing out the café window to see who is walking by.

  On Sunday the three-legged man’s daughter and granddaughter come for dinner. His daughter brings a bottle of wine. The three-legged man knows he should say something, but he doesn’t. Understand that saying something would not change anything. They eat grilled chicken breast and discuss the costumes his granddaughter is making for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  The three-legged man’s daughter sees his sketchbook lying on a corner of his desk, open to one of the pictures of Odelle. She is drawn like Eve, standing beside the tree of knowledge, ignoring the snake and the apple. The three-legged man thinks it is one of his best drawings. (You probably would, too, or you might prefer the one of Odelle as a tattooed woman.) His daughter picks up the sketchbook and stares at the picture. She takes a pen from the pocket of her jeans, uncaps it, and starts scribbling over the picture, a four-year-old’s scrawl.

  The three-legged man and his granddaughter gape. The three-legged man is not entirely sure what his daughter thinks of Odelle beyond normal dislike, but he has wondered if his daughter still thinks he should be married to her mother.

  His granddaughter stands up, grabs his daughter’s arms, wretches the sketchbook away, and holds his daughter’s hands behind her back.

  “Too tight,” says his daughter.

  “Good,” says his granddaughter who is not usually a violent person.

  The three-legged man stares for a moment, oddly pleased with his granddaughter’s reaction. His notebook is on the floor, opened like a moth. The three-legged man walks around the table, picks it up, closes the pages, and lays the notebook beside his plate. He pries his granddaughter’s hands from his daughter’s wrists, hugs his granddaughter so her arms are pinned to her sides.

  “Get out,” says the three-legged man to his daughter.

  She doesn’t scream expletives, hangs back for a moment, perhaps waiting to see if he will shove
her in the bathroom. He doesn’t. She leaves. The three-legged man watches her from the kitchen, through the living room window glass. Her head is high, her posture perfect.

  The night his wife left was a usual night. She was tipsy. He ordered her out of the trailer. You would have agreed it was reasonable that he do this. He figured she’d come back when she was sober. Instead she went and found the pincushion man. The three-legged man waited for a week for her to come back. Then he waited eight years. His wife was often a good and kind and generous woman. You would have liked her.

  The three-legged man and his granddaughter sit in his living room. The three-legged man wonders what he would do if his wife came back now. He wonders if he would recognize her. He wonders if she would be at all remorseful.

  Butterfly Women

  The skin flaps ran the length of my body from my wrists to my ankles so I looked something like a flying squirrel. The flaps were loose and full, but if I lifted my arms more than a foot above my head I felt a pull at my side.

  When I was little the doctors and my father wanted to cut the flaps off, but my mother didn’t let them. She wanted to wait until I was older, let me decide.

  My family went out to breakfast every Saturday at a diner three blocks from our house. Melba and Janice, the two waitresses, had brown puffs of hair, white aprons, too-red lipstick, doted on me and complimented the little pink caftans my mother made. When I was five years old I ordered a Belgian waffle for breakfast. My mother cut it and I reached for the maple syrup and knocked over a glass of orange juice with my flap. The juice flowed across the table onto my father’s lap.

  “Dammit,” he yelled, standing up and letting the juice drip further down his pants. I cringed. I can’t remember exactly what he said, something about my flaps getting in the way, making me clumsy. I couldn’t finish the waffle.

  My father divorced my mother a month later, left while I was asleep. Later my mother said my father would have left whether or not I had flaps. She explained that she and my father were the sort of people who could be together for a little while but not a long while. I have hazy memories of my parents yelling in the kitchen, my father saying he didn’t want to have a bat for a daughter, my mother yelling back that she did not give birth to a bat but a butterfly. I liked thinking of myself as a butterfly. It made my flaps hurt less.

  I started gliding when I was five years old. Jumping off the slide in my backyard was more exciting than sliding down it, and my fall was slowed if I spread out my arms, let the wind catch under my flaps. It took a few tries to figure out how to land, but once I got the hang of it, kept my legs flexible and bent my knees, it was pretty simple. I jumped off the slide ten times before my mother saw me from the kitchen window, ran out yelling that I had to stop or I’d break a bone. I pouted on the swing set for a while, then looked back at the kitchen window. No mother. I climbed up the slide and made six more jumps before she ran out screaming again.

  My mother was the school principal, one of the first women in the area to have that job, though I didn’t appreciate it until I was older. When kids at school teased me, called me flying squirrel girl, my mother said they were just jealous. I didn’t feel any better. When I was in second grade, workmen were making repairs to the roof of the school and left a ladder leaning against the brick wall. I climbed up. The building wasn’t high, just one storey, but some tattletale sprinted to the office to get my mother. She was standing on the ground surrounded by second graders when I spread my arms and jumped. I sailed down, landed without a bruise, but my mother kept me in the office for the afternoon and grounded me at home for a month.

  Mom was there when I fell off my bike and bruised my flaps. She was there when I got chicken pox, made me lie still while she coated the flaps with calamine lotion. For a week I was miserable and itchy because there were as many bumps on my flaps as the rest of my body. Oatmeal baths didn’t help. My mother put mittens on my hands so I couldn’t scratch the flaps.

  When I cried that my flaps hurt because I raised my arm too high, stretched the skin, my mother pulled me beside her on the couch, gave me a tissue and a cookie.

  “You’re beautiful,” she said. “I’ve never created anything quite as lovely as you.”

  I chewed my cookie and stopped crying for a little bit, stopped asking my mother if I could get the flaps taken off. I liked that I could soar off the back of the slide, even though my mother threatened to take away my allowance if I kept doing it.

  My father sent gifts at my birthday and Christmas until I was eleven years old. Then the presents stopped. He had moved across the country to Oregon, had another family, another wife, another set of kids. Kids without flaps.

  “Boring,” said my mother. She let me draw on my flaps with nontoxic markers so I could look even more like a butterfly. “See how pretty they can be?” my mother said.

  I nodded but wished I could wear normal jeans and shorts like other kids, not just the caftans my mother sewed.

  I started sitting on the roof when I was twelve years old, in junior high. I got home before my mother, who was usually at school until five. Our house was two storeys high. The roof sloped gently so I had to be cautious, but it was easy to go out through my bedroom window and hang my legs over the edge of the roof, over the gutter. I faced the backyard and a field of clover and Queen Anne’s lace, often lost track of time and was still sitting there when my mother got home.

  “No desserts for a week if you don’t go back through the window,” she yelled. Or no allowance. Or no TV. I jumped anyway. My mother gasped. I knew she was afraid I’d fall by accident, not be able to spread out my arms. I didn’t understand why she wanted me to keep the flaps, told me to have pride in them, but never let me do fun things.

  When I began having periods, I had to start wearing underwear. My mother bought extra-extra-extra-large satin panties, helped me put them on and pull my extra skin over the waistband. Skin bunched against my body, drooped like angel wings or dead flower petals.

  “I want to get the flaps cut off,” I said to my mother while standing naked in the bathroom, save a pair of pink panties designed for old women who weighed three hundred pounds.

  “Honey,” my mother said and hugged me tight, “just try this for a while. Soon I‘ll show you how to wear tampons.”

  I gritted my teeth. I had to wait until my period was over before I could resume flying, before the flaps were worth the hurt.

  When I was in tenth grade my mother was diagnosed with diabetes. She had always been a large woman, rounded and imposing, but she shuddered in the doctor’s office when the nurse explained how she’d need to give herself finger sticks every morning to test her blood sugar level. My mother and I sipped diet soda in the hospital cafeteria. I patted her arm and felt the pull on my flap.

  “It will be okay,” I said, “you just have to be more careful now.”

  “Careful not to lose toes,” said my mother, glancing down at her feet. “Careful not to have a heart attack.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said. “You’ll stay healthy.”

  “I thought I was,” said my mother. “I want a sweet roll.”

  “You can’t have one. You know that.”

  “This isn’t going to be a good life,” she said.

  “They make sugar free everything now,” I said. “All kinds of sweets.”

  “Not a good life,” said my mother, shaking her head.

  In high school I dated boys who read sci-fi and fantasy novels and were entranced by my flaps. When we went to my house after school I showed them how I could fly. A couple of them wanted to jump off the roof with me. I told them they were crazy, but the boys were insistent. Two of them broke their ankles and I had to call an ambulance.

  “You always have to show off,” my mother muttered as she sat beside me in the emergency room. “Boys will date land-bound girls, too.”
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  “I tell them not to jump,” I said. “Boys never listen.”

  My mother sighed. “Stress like this makes me want chocolate.”

  I gave her a couple of the sugar-free chocolate buttons I kept in my purse.

  “Not as good as the real thing,” she said.

  “What was your blood sugar this morning?” I said.

  “I’m still alive and kicking,” she said.

  I knew she cheated sometimes, ate sweets and took extra insulin.

  “I worry about you,” I muttered.

  My mother put her hand on my knee and grimaced.

  “You can’t keep injuring your boyfriends,” she said. “The guy you marry will be in a full body cast by the wedding.”

  No boys liked me enough to date me more than a month, but I didn’t tell my mom that. I had a reputation as being hazardous. Sometimes I kind of liked it. Other times it was annoying. Not much different than the flaps.

  I went to college to get a degree in education and become a first grade teacher. Much of children’s literature was based on fantasy, things that were special and out of the ordinary, so when I explained to my students that I was a butterfly woman, the kids smiled and nodded. They liked the big colourful caftans I wore, the way that fabric flowed around my body.

  I got the first tattoo on my flap when I was twenty-three. A Renaissance angel with a sword under my left elbow. My mother cheerfully paid for half of the cost. I think she hoped I’d quit flying once I’d found another use for my flaps.

  I bought a house in the country, only one storey high so it wasn’t as good for flying, but on breezy days I could jump from the roof and float several feet before touching the ground. I added more small tattoos—hummingbirds, cardinals, a griffon, a phoenix, and a gargoyle with tiny wings.

  I was by myself a lot in the evenings, but I didn’t mind the quiet after being around little kids all day. I dated a few guys, mostly teachers and librarians, but no one who I wanted to marry. My mother kept asking if I had a special friend.