Bearded Women Read online

  “I’m sorry I got mad at you,” I say.

  She stares at her right arm, the lifeless one.

  I sigh but notice Stuart doing the daily crossword and glancing at us from two benches over. We see often him at the park in the morning. He lives in the retirement complex nearby. He’s a kind man, sometimes brings us coffee or a pastry from the bakery. We have shared details. I know his wife had a stroke five years ago and died of a second stroke two years ago. He knows I operated my mother’s tattoo shop for decades but sold it seven years ago.

  “Sorry,” says Stuart when he sees me looking at him. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  I make room for Stuart on the bench and wave him over. At the moment I’d like the company of someone who isn’t my sister. Someone who isn’t terribly cross. Someone who, and I’m ashamed to admit this, can talk.

  My sister stiffens, grabs my arm with her good hand and tries to pull me away from Stuart like I’m three years old. Sometimes we fight over who gets to protect who.

  “You look nice today,” says Stuart to my sister.

  My sister tries to smile. She hates being singled out as much as she hates my flirting. I think she sees the same coquette in me that she saw in Mother, who tended to flirt with her unmarried male clients. I don’t pretend to know what happened in Mother’s bedroom after we were asleep, but I don’t doubt she had company from time to time. I see nothing wrong with that, since I’ve done likewise.

  My sister usually hated my mother in silences, but there was one time they argued at dinner and my sister yelled, “You don’t even know who our father is.”

  Mother set down her fork and blotted her lips with a napkin.

  “Do you want his address?” she said quietly.

  “You have it?” my sister squeaked.

  Mother nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” my sister said.

  “You never asked,” said Mother.

  “I want it,” said my sister. “Of course I want it.”

  I watched Mother copy words from a small leather-bound book onto a piece of paper. A name and a street address, I imagine. Possibly someone in town. Mother had impeccable handwriting. She could have been a calligrapher.

  My sister folded the paper and slipped it in her pocket. Mother asked if I wanted the address, too. I said I’d think about it, but knew my answer would be no. If this man was too embarrassed to visit us, why should I care about him? I imagined he might be watching Mother and my sister and me from street corners, monitoring our progress to the grocery store, but I assumed he had his own wife and children and was less ashamed of them.

  I never asked my sister if she spoke with the man, but she wanted the paper and the opportunity. I doubt her pride would have let her chat with our father and divulge what she knew. There are many questions I keep silent when I’m around her.

  I help Stuart with the crossword, correct a couple answers that don’t fit the grid. We chat about my mother’s tattoo shop. He says he’d like to see it someday, and perhaps take us out to lunch afterwards. I nod and say that would be fun. I don’t tell him that sometimes I find it difficult to visit the storefront, but that’s because I can’t work a needle like I used to.

  “You should see this,” says Stuart. He begins to unbutton his shirt, showing off his wrinkled chest. My sister puts her hand over her mouth, but Stuart keeps unbuttoning until he can slide the fabric off his shoulders and reveal the tattoo of a falcon on his arm and one of a raven on his back. Their wings droop, preparing to land on some invisible perch. I appreciate the pictures as well as the other marks on Stuart’s body, patches of light and dark and scarred skin. After a certain age everyone is a novel.

  Stuart buttons his shirt and we resume chatting about how it’s nearly lunchtime. He asks if we would like to join him for a sandwich. Our hands inch closer on the bench. When our fingers graze, I feel a little surge in my chest. Surprising, almost, how the sensation doesn’t change. Stuart cradles my hand in his and rubs his thumb over my fingers.

  My sister screams.

  Stuart and I stare at her.

  “What on earth is the matter?” I say. “Why can’t you have a pleasant morning at the park like a normal person?”

  “Is she right in the head?” Stuart whispers.

  “I don’t know,” I say, not caring that my sister can hear me. “Goodness knows what’s working in her mind and what isn’t.”

  That shuts my sister up. She gives me a good stare, stands up, and starts walking out of the park. Stuart and I watch her for a moment.

  “Should she leave on her own?” he says.

  “No,” I sigh. “I need to go after her.”

  “It was pleasant chatting with you,” he says, squeezing my hand. His touch makes my fingers hurt, but I don’t care. I catch up with my sister at the stoplight.

  “You are perfectly awful,” I yell.

  She grins at me, malicious, then begins to cross when the light changes. I almost don’t go after her, but Mother would never forgive me. As I trail my sister, I remember how, when we were little and played games of pretend, she was good fairy and made me be the evil one. She got to decide because she was older, but I liked my role more than she wanted me to.

  In the middle of the street I grab my sister’s fingers and try to pull her back, but she yanks her hand from my grasp. We reach the sidewalk and I take her hand again. She screams like I was trying to kidnap her. Passers-by stare. She keeps screaming. I know they are not looking at me or the pictures on my body. They’re thinking, Batty old woman. I ache for my sister and her wordlessness. Family should care for family. That’s what Mother said. That’s why I cared for Mother until she was on so many medications that neither of us could keep them straight and she needed to go into a home.

  I let go of my sister’s hand, turn around, and walk back to the curb. Stuart should still be at the park. I’ll explain everything to him. He’ll understand. We can go for lunch together. My sister can unlock the apartment door with her good hand. She could live alone, in her own small place, if there were nurses close by to assist her. I have known this for a while. I almost peer over my shoulder to see if she changed her mind and is following me back to the park, but I don’t care to look.

  To Fill

  Iris is folding clothes and watching television when she finds the donut-eating competition and the petite Asian woman eating donut after sugar-glazed donut. She tears them to pieces, crams them in her cheeks, chews with ferocity. Her name flashes in small white letters across the bottom of the screen. Denise Yin. The announcers whisper as if at a golf tournament. Denise is ahead by eight donuts. The men beside her are gargantuan, shovel donuts in their mouths with singular focus, but Denise beats them all. Forty-five donuts in seven minutes and she doesn’t even look ill.

  On the couch Iris clutches the unfolded socks, holds them close to her mouth. She can almost taste the sweet crumbs.

  The burly men on television, fingers and mouths shiny with donut glaze, gaze at Denise with worshipful eyes. She might as well be a goddess, standing with arms raised above her head, the crowd cheering as if she has indeed proven herself immortal. The commentator announces Denise has broken the world record for donut eating, and that she also holds the record for eating hardboiled eggs and burritos.

  Iris glares at the socks as if wishing them to be donuts. Denise can’t weigh more than a hundred twenty pounds. How can she eat so much? Iris ponders this while making soap in the afternoon, cinnamon-scented bars, recalling how the tiny woman smiled so wide it looked like she could eat the world.

  Iris runs the soap-making business out of her kitchen, has her own little embossed label and business cards, Nature’s Suds. She makes a batch of soap every day, has five bookshelves in the laundry room and living room where the bars cure for a month. Before wrapping the soaps she tests the
m with pH paper, has to make sure they aren’t too caustic, won’t burn skin. She sells to boutiques and gift shops as far as Toledo, an hour away.

  In college Iris majored in art, spent her days with oil pastels, dry pastels, and conté crayons, rubbed her fingers raw against flat expanses of paper. It was where she met Flynn who was brown-haired and practical and thin as a paintbrush. He studied statistics, wanted to sell insurance. By the time they graduated everything was planned—the wedding, the house, the eventual children. Iris would stay at home, sell her drawings. Flynn would open his office in a space next to a Chinese restaurant and Iris would bring him lunch each day so they could eat together. Iris thought it was perfect until a year and ten art fairs had passed with few sales, not even enough to buy more pastels and pencils and paper. Flynn said it was fine, he was making enough for them both. Iris moped for two months, wanted to pull her own financial weight, so she started making soap to sell. She had learned from her grandmother, a woman of thrift who made her own wrapping paper, bought everything in bulk, and distrusted chemicals meant to cleanse her skin. Iris found soaps were easier to sell than abstract drawings, and in six months she’d earned enough to cover soap supplies and art supplies and then some.

  She has been married to Flynn for five years and hardly ever draws, feels a certain futility in picking up a pastel if no one appreciates and buys her work. But people buy soap. Iris tries to be satisfied with that, even if her profits are a few bare dollars compared to what Flynn earns.

  At dinner she tells Flynn about the donut-eating contest.

  “Denise ate donut after donut,” Iris says. “She could have eaten ten more in two minutes flat. All these big guys were just staring at her. It was amazing.”

  “That’s repulsive.” Flynn scrunches his nose and twirls pasta around his fork. “Why would anyone want to do that? It sounds like contestants would be dropping left and right from heart attacks.”

  “She seemed to be okay,” Iris says.

  “That’s the sort of person who needs her head examined,” says Flynn. “And good health insurance.”

  Iris wants him to be impressed, but he starts talking about his latest clients, their insurance policies.

  “How are soap sales?” he asks.

  “Not bad,” she sighs because she is never sure how to read him when it comes to her business. Sometimes he seems sincere, encourages her to expand, other times his tone is so light she doesn’t think he takes her seriously.

  “One shop ordered twenty lavender soaps today,” Iris says. “But you should have been home to see the contest, those big men. None of them had even cleared thirty donuts while Denise had eaten forty-five.”

  “Good spaghetti,” says Flynn.

  “Thanks,” Iris says because sometimes he is like this, impenetrable.

  That night Iris dreams of Denise, of standing beside her at the end of a long table. They cram chocolate donuts into their mouths, laughing between bites, while Flynn and four big men stand at the opposite end of the table, nibbling and gawking. Such beauty in this forbidden gluttony. When Iris wakes she is refreshed, drooling on her pillow. Something in their stunned expressions invigorated her. Iris imagines her breath still smells of chocolate.

  They had been married three years when Iris missed her period. She waited five weeks to tell Flynn, just to be sure. He was so happy, hugged her tight around her hips. She could already feel her body expanding, was a little surprised because babies were still something of theory, something that happened to other people. Iris was okay with the idea of pregnancy, walked around the house for a couple of days cradling a ten-pound bag of potatoes because she believed in practice. They called her parents, told a few friends, were hugged and taken to brunch.

  During the sixth week, a Sunday morning, she found a red stain in her underwear. Flynn called her parents, called the friends, spoke in a soft voice while Iris sat on the edge of the toilet and looked at her underwear soaking in the sink, cold water to remove the blood.

  “At least we didn’t tell more people,” he said, holding her shoulders tight and sniffling into her sleeve. Iris nodded, felt more empty than she expected, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a mother yet. It was harder six months later. She skipped another period, made a quiet announcement to Flynn, found a spot of blood in her underwear the following week. They cried for a night and he asked if she wanted to try again soon or wait a while. Iris shook her head, not sure how to explain what she felt. He was mourning the lost babies, but she was mourning something else, the idea of babies, the lack of control, how she should have been able to keep it, that small gathering of cells, hold it inside her body for nine months.

  Several weeks after watching the donut competition, Iris sees the flier at the grocery store. Five of the world’s top eaters are challenging novices in a benefit tour to raise money for the hungry. Denise is pictured among them. The tour is stopping in Columbus, two hours away. It costs a dollar and two cans of food to get in, and five dollars to match stomachs with the eaters.

  Iris wears a skirt and short-sleeved blouse, her good black flats, and leaves a note for Flynn saying she is going to Columbus for business. On the front seat of her car are two cans of soup and a box of Nature’s Suds soaps. She is nervous, has not tried to sell her soap this far away or in cities as large as Columbus. Iris wants to expand her business but fears store owners will tell her no. Yet going to see Denise makes Iris excited, somehow bolder. She straightens her blouse and skirt before walking into the first store with the box of soap and a pile of business cards.

  The owner agrees to a consignment deal in minutes.

  “Very pretty,” she says, nodding at the lavender and orange-cinnamon soaps.

  Iris manages to arrive at the competition a half-hour early. It is in a dim bar that smells faintly of beer and pine cleanser, has wooden floors. Iris sits in the first row and taps her shoes.

  When the eaters emerge from a back room, the audience cheers. Iris spies Denise beside a slim Asian fellow and three large white men. There is a call for contestants to participate in the cupcake-eating challenge. Nine men ante up, take their places at the long table before platefuls of cupcakes. Iris is intent on Denise, must be staring because Denise returns her gaze, winks. Iris blushes. She wants to sit beside that woman, that power, but hadn’t considered competing. Still she is hungry, didn’t eat breakfast or lunch, too nervous. The smell of chocolate cupcakes makes her feel emptier, a hole that flows down to her feet. Iris is opening her purse and paying five dollars before she can stop herself, sitting down in the last chair between two men with doughy elbows.

  She breathes deeply while a judge explains the rules, how regurgitators will be disqualified. Iris feels her hands sparking with the drive to consume, to fill herself. She can’t count the number of cupcakes on her plate before the whistle blows, the contest begins. Iris finds if she opens her mouth wide enough she can cram a whole cupcake inside. She chews with an unknown fervour, not even tasting the chocolate, just focusing on the next cupcake in her hand. The contestants each have a glass of milk, and the men beside Iris take delicate sips, but she can’t waste time even though her throat feels thick and sticky. She forces cupcake after cupcake, barely counting because the number is less important than the next mouthful. The first few are easy, then the smell of chocolate becomes tiring, her cheeks full, her tongue gummy. The man beside her spits cupcake into his hand and is disqualified. Iris keeps going, tearing, chewing. The timer rings and Iris rests her wrists against the table, hands coated with chocolate crumbs, mouth stuffed with a final sweetness before she swallows. She expects to be sick, but is filled with an odd sense of accomplishment like she has just run a marathon, a satisfaction in her stomach and head.

  The tally is announced—she ate eighteen cupcakes, came in sixth overall but first among the novice eaters. Iris wipes her fingers on a damp cloth, looks up to find Denise stan
ding in front of her, hand extended. When Denise speaks she has a soft southern twang.

  “I’m Denise,” she says.

  “I want to learn to do what you do,” Iris says, then blushes because she sounds pathetic.

  Denise grins.

  “Keep at it,” she says. “There aren’t too many people who think this is a serious sport, and certainly not a sport for women. The best way to get better is to go to competitions on a regular basis.”

  “That’s it?” says Iris. “What if I can’t get to many competitions? I don’t know how my husband will feel.”

  “That’s why I’m single.” Denise rolls her eyes. “It’s hard to find people who understand this sort of thing. A lot of us marry within the circuit. Easier that way.”

  “Oh.” Iris feels herself emptying again. She had hoped for a whiff of support.

  Denise tilts her head.

  “I don’t coach too many people,” she says, “but you seem to have talent.”

  Denise says the secret is to expand the stomach slowly, that thin people can expand it more, to the skin, since it isn’t ringed by fat. She says to start water training, drink six cups at a time and increase it by a cup per day until she can drink a gallon at one sitting. Some people train with cabbage, eat ten pounds twice a week, but perhaps she could start with four.

  “Be careful to take it slow,” says Denise. “It’s dangerous if you go too fast. You can cause internal bleeding. Go on a diet before competitions to lose a few pounds so you can gain it back. And exercise, build up muscle.”

  Denise shakes Iris’s hand, wishes her luck. When Iris goes to the ladies’ room she is almost giddy, but in the stall she feels a hot rise in her throat, turns quickly, and all eighteen cupcakes go neatly into the toilet. She glares at them, angry at her body. Her cheeks flush. How could she not exercise this small control over herself? Iris kicks the toilet until her feet hurt, and still she keeps kicking.