Bearded Women Read online

  We moved into a new trailer two and a half blocks from the old one. Smoke-stained kitchen utensils, clothing, and photo album pages came back to us over a period of months. Every other day we’d get a pair of socks or a sweater, a couple of butter knives, and a few sooty pictures. We washed the clothes, scoured the dishes and silverware, and I spent evenings going over the pictures with a kneadable eraser from the art supply store, trying to get off more soot.

  Polaroid snapshot taken by my mother of my father sitting on the brown corduroy living room couch that we got from the Salvation Army (the cushions smelled faintly of sour apples). He wears a red sweatshirt and sweatpants, eats a powdered sugar donut, and has white flecks trailing down the front of his shirt.

  Three weeks after the first trailer blew up and two weeks after we’d moved into the new one, my father went crazy. He refused to eat anything but donuts and orange drink, stopped talking in the mornings, didn’t say much in the evenings, and refused to go to the paperclip and thumbtack factory with my mother. They’d met there, both worked in quality control.

  “Please,” said my mother to my father every morning while I ate cornflakes. “You have to get dressed.”

  My father smiled at my mother’s request like she’d complimented his hair, and turned back to the morning news programs. I don’t think he watched the shows as much as he stared at the moving mouths, the business suits, and the cheery expressions of the anchor people. Something about them, their orderly happiness, calmed him.

  At the factory my mother opened every hundred and fiftieth box of clips or tacks and counted the number to make sure the machines were accurate. Often she came home with band-aids on her thumbs. My father made sure the thumbtacks had points and the paperclips were bent correctly. He liked the exactness of his job, the scales he used to be certain the right amount of metal was being used in each paperclip and tack.

  My mother took the Polaroid picture hoping that if my father saw himself he’d come to his senses. He nodded at the photo and took another bite of his donut.

  I was eighteen and had already decided to save my family by getting holes in my hands.

  Grainy black-and-white novelty postcard of my grandfather, charred slightly in the lower left corner. He is young, maybe twenty-five, wears a short-sleeved white shirt and long black pants. He sits in a wooden chair, his hands tight against the chair arms, as blurry streams of water shoot up through the holes in his palms. White lettering under his picture: “The Fantastic Human Fountain.”

  There are two different stories about how my grandfather got the holes in his hands, but both of them involve him horsing around with a cousin while drinking bootleg whiskey and staking tomatoes in the garden. In one story the cousin pounded a metal stake through my grandfather’s hand on a dare. In the other they were fencing and my grandfather fell down, tried to use the stake to support himself. The stake went between two bones in his hand in just the right place, left a hole the surgeon kept open with a surgical stainless steel tube. Legend has it my grandfather was still kind of drunk when he told the surgeon to do this, but he was also remembering the carnival that had been through town two months earlier, and perhaps already dreaming up his act as The Human Fountain.

  My grandfather had a somewhat reputable surgeon make the matching hole in his right hand and insert another stainless steel tube. The wooden chair, his only prop, had hoses running up through the arms. Grandpa made good money on the circuit but left after ten years and returned to farming. He died in a combine accident when my dad was twenty-seven, five years before I was born.

  “Sideshow life was probably safer than life on a farm,” my dad often said when I was young. “I think he wished he would have stayed there.”

  “Craziness,” said my mother and shook her head. “It wouldn’t have been the place to raise a family.”

  My father shrugged. I think he would’ve preferred life in a sideshow to life working in a factory, but he was never one to say what was on his mind. This might account for the fact that, rather than say anything about the trailer exploding, he decided it would be easier to go crazy.

  Polaroid snapshot of used beige Ford station wagon with brown Naugahyde seats and pink plastic beads hanging from rearview mirror. Sleeping bag, tent, two grocery bags of snacks, one pot, a cooking spoon, two gallons of water, and camp stove are not entirely visible but all piled in back seat.

  When I decided to get the holes made I was thinking of the lost trailer, thinking of fountains, thinking of water, even though water wouldn’t have helped the trailer explosion. I bought the station wagon cheap, planned to travel and be the second human fountain in our family, have appearances at tattoo parlours and carnivals, and send money home to my folks in Ohio. This way they wouldn’t have to feed me, and I figured they could use the extra cash, what with my dad going crazy and all. I didn’t tell my mother about my plan to get the holes, just said that I would be on the road for the summer, working in a funnel cake booth at county fairs.

  “I don’t like the thought of you running all over like that,” she said. “It’s not safe.” She unloaded a bag of groceries, including boxes of donuts for my dad.

  “I want to save for college,” I said. A black lie, but one that would pacify her.

  “College,” she said, setting the sixth box of donuts on the table. She and my father had wanted me to take classes at the local community college in the fall, but when the trailer exploded, their extra money went with it.

  “Maybe graphic design or something,” I told her because she always said I was good at art. I hated drawing, even if I wasn’t bad at it. I felt worse for my parents than I did for myself about the college money. They loved me. I wanted to help them.

  “In September,” she said and nodded. Her words were blessing enough for me to leave, even though I planned to be travelling in the fall. I knew I was not a college sort of person, but my mother never believed this. I figured since she gave birth to me, it was her right to pretend I was who she wanted me to be, and my duty not to object too loudly while going my own way.

  Colour photograph from ten-year-old newspaper advertisement. Cream-coloured brick building with sign over the front door: Piercings and Tattoos. Heavy burgundy curtains frame the windows on either side of the door.

  I took pictures of my grandfather to the piercing salon, photos of him and my father when Dad was ten, holding a hose up to Grandpa’s hand and shooting a stream of water through. The fellow who owned the salon was Indian, claimed to be a fakir who had pierced the hands and feet of other fakirs. He didn’t have holes in his own hands, but there were black-and-white pictures all over the walls, photos of him with swords and nails sticking out of his arms. His face was wrinkled enough to make him about seventy-five, but his hands looked young, free of raised veins and knobbed knuckles usually associated with age. The fakir nodded at the pictures of my grandfather, said the operation would be free if I’d agree to be on display while I healed.

  “Been a long time since I performed one of these,” he told me. “They went out of style some years ago. If you were to sit in the window for a few days, be on display, I’d consider the bill paid in full.”

  I don’t remember the operation, just that when I came to my hands hurt and were swathed in bandages. The pain was less than I expected, but I spent three days in a haze, drinking some sort of black tea through a straw from a flowered china cup. The fakir was a pleasant gentleman and a good cook who fed me curried rice and lentils and told me not to move my hands too much or too quickly. In the end I had to believe that he was a real fakir, or a real something-or-other, because on the third day when the bandages came off so he could show me how to turn and clean the metal posts, there was almost no swelling or redness. He’d inserted quarter-inch stainless steel tubes between the bones of my ring and middle fingers. I had to turn them around once each day, a full turn, and clean them with alcohol. After
a week my hands were nearly healed. I don’t think the body does that normally. The fakir gave me pink plastic plugs to keep in the holes when I wanted them to be less noticeable.

  Polaroid of me and a seventy-year-old tattooed lady standing outside a tattoo parlour in Memphis, taken right after she told me I should have been born fifty years earlier. The rest of the pictures from this trip were lost when someone swiped my camera.

  I drove through Cleveland and worked a few days at a fair just outside of Akron, spent time in Philadelphia and Louisville at tattoo parlours, then went down to Orlando and New Orleans. At first I was the Human Fountain and shot water through the holes, usually with a hose, but that bored people quickly. I thought up other little tricks, like putting a straw through my hand and drinking out of a glass, or fitting a pen or pencil through and writing my name. A few times I smoked a cigarette through the hole, but quit that one after I got burned. I spent most of my time in small towns along the way, got gigs at county fairs and in tattoo parlours. The owners usually gave me food and a place to sleep as long as I’d hang out and answer questions asked by customers.

  I called my mom every week from a pay phone, told her where I was, and that the funnel cake booth was doing well. She sounded tired but pleased to hear from me, never mentioned my dad unless I asked.

  “He’s doing well enough,” she said, which I figured to mean that he was still alive and watching television and eating donuts.

  I liked travelling, but there were snags. The station wagon’s front windshield began leaking during a rainstorm in Texas and the back windshield was quick to follow. The back seat smelled musty for the rest of the trip, no matter how much baking soda I poured on it. I ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and spent too much time sleeping in my car or on the couches of people who seemed nice. I know it was a miracle I wasn’t raped. I made enough money to get by, but nothing to send home. There wasn’t enough work for a young woman who wanted to sell the sight of her body as opposed to her body itself.

  Christmas card photograph taken by me of my mother and father sitting side by side on the couch. Dad and Mom wear red sweat suits and Santa hats. Dad eats a donut and looks off to one side while Mom sits on his lap and smiles too broadly.

  By the time I came home in the beginning of October, I had my health, my leaking car, two shoeboxes full of pencils and postcards and pins I’d picked up along the way, and two nice clean holes in my hands. With the plugs in, the holes weren’t that noticeable. If I’d only been worried about myself I wouldn’t have felt bad about returning with no money, but I was ashamed I hadn’t managed to save anything for my parents. I’d prepared a lie for my mother about the holes being the result of some horrific funnel cake grease accident, how I’d needed the money I saved to pay for the medical bills, but when she saw the holes she just sighed.

  “At least you’re home safe,” she said. I guess she didn’t have the energy to fret too much as there were other things to worry about. Dad was still living on the couch in the new trailer. Mom was working twelve hours a day to pay for the trailer and Dad’s medical bills.

  I got a waitressing job at a diner and moved in with a friend who was studying to be a dental hygienist.

  “I should have a place of my own since I’m an adult,” I told my mother.

  “You could still stay with us,” she said with a slight smile.

  “It’s kind of small,” I said. She nodded. I think we both knew I didn’t want to see my dad every day. Or smell him. Sunday dinner was difficult enough, with Mom trying to coax Dad to the table for twenty minutes before she gave up and ate cold pot roast with me.

  “I think he’s getting better,” she told me every Sunday. There was nothing else to say.

  I got a job at a doll factory when I got tired of the diner, of being on my feet, of truckers eyeing my ass, and of freaking them out when I took the pink plastic plug out of my left hand and poured their coffee refills through the hole in a careful, thin stream.

  Polaroid of funeral flowers sent by my father’s sister in Akron. Arrangement consists of white roses and white lilies and white daisies, looks washed-out and spooky. My aunt wanted me to take a picture of the arrangement to send back to her so she could be sure the florist had done a good job, sent what she ordered, and not gone cheap on her.

  Eighteen months after I ended my career as a human fountain and six months after I started working in the factory, my dad passed away. I don’t know if there is a medical name for what happened to him, but somehow he moved backwards, lost coordination and bowel control and speaking skills, started drooling and had to wear diapers. He was fifty-three years old and helpless as an infant. The coroner said it was heart failure. It just stopped beating.

  I took a week off work to help Mom out. She spent most of the time sitting at the kitchen table and unbending paperclips, making the wires into straight lines. I cooked for her, tidied the trailer, washed the floors, and sponged the couch with vinegar and baking soda to rid it of the smell of my father (more exactly, the smell of his waste products). Mom didn’t want me to clean the sofa, came and sat on it when she realised what I was doing. After that I cleaned around her. It seemed like the best way I could help.

  I didn’t know what to say to my mother, sometimes just sat beside her on the vinegar-and-baking-soda couch and slipped unbent paperclips through the metal tubes in my hands.

  “Do you think you might want to move closer to me?” I asked her. Since I’d started working at the doll factory I’d gotten an apartment of my own. It was a bit noisy at times, but I liked it better than my parents’ trailer. The brick building felt sturdy.

  My mother watched me playing with her paperclips and shook her head. We’d both tried to help my father, to save him, and we’d failed. She kept working at her factory. I kept working at mine.

  That’s the way it’s been for the past eight years.

  Black-and-white photocopy picture of me tying a doll’s hair back with a big grey bow. Picture is on the front of a booklet given to new factory employees about company policies and safety hazards. (The grey bow would be pink if they spent more for colour copies.) I am smiling because my co-worker Gerry who took the photo just told a raunchy joke.

  The plastic dolls arrive in boxes, one hundred sixteen to the box. The pink dresses and green dresses and lavender dresses come in bags, fifty to a bag, assorted colours. The bows we tie ourselves out of quarter-inch ribbon. The paint for the dolls’ eyes comes in two-ounce jars with a label that says the paint fumes have been shown to cause cancer in California. Apparently they don’t cause cancer anywhere else.

  Sometimes I work at the station where we dress the dolls and tie back their hair. Sometimes I work at the station where we tie little bows and glue them on the dresses, one on each puffy sleeve and one at the waist. There is nothing on the glue bottle about glue fumes causing cancer in any of the fifty states, but it smells like it does. Sometimes I work at the station where we paint the dolls’ eyes blue and nails pink so the box can say Hand-Crafted and Assembled in the U.S.A.

  No matter what station I’m at, sometimes in the middle of my shift I sit for a moment with a partially finished doll in my hands and see that her fingers are curled in the same way my fingers want to curl at the end of a workday. The plastic that forms their bodies is not unlike the plastic plugs I use in my hands. After ten seconds of reflection, Judith the supervisor yells at me that this is not a tea party and I should get back to work.

  By slowly increasing the size of the metal tubes in my hands over the past ten years, I’ve been able to enlarge the holes from a quarter-inch to three-quarters of an inch. The larger diameter means more water could shoot through the holes.

  “I don’t understand why you want to make the holes bigger,” my mother says.

  “Because I can,” I say. “Why have quarter-inch holes in your hands when you can have three-
quarter inch holes in your hands? It sounds more impressive.” I don’t tell her I’d still like to go on the road.

  Photo #4 (from personal archives): My living room/kitchen area. Posters of San Francisco and Chicago and New Orleans on the walls, blue secondhand couch under posters, twelve-inch television between couch and kitchen table. Two dolls, awards from work, sit on the television. They have blonde hair and pink dresses with merit patches sewn on them. My boss is a cheapskate.

  Mom drives over to my apartment for dinner once a week, brings bread and a vegetable, and I make some sort of main course. She still lives an hour away, alone in the same trailer she bought after the first one exploded.

  “How is work?” she says right after she steps inside.

  “Fine,” I say, hugging her. “Did you go to that recipe swap meeting?”

  “Didn’t have anything worth taking,” she says. “Not in the mood for cooking, anyway. Gwen who lives next door to me, her daughter works at the auto plant, but she’s going to school at night. Becoming an accountant.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “You really should try that recipe club again. Or maybe a garden club.” She never seems sad when I see her, but she never seemed sad when my dad was going crazy. It’s hard to know what I can believe.

  “No space for flowers,” she says. “You’ve got a head for numbers. Night school isn’t that expensive. You could afford some classes.”

  “I’ll think about it. I worry about you getting lonely. You’re not involved in anything social. When’s the last time you went out for coffee with someone? Or on a date?”

  “I’m fine,” she sighs.

  We spend the first few minutes of every conversation trying to convert each other. I worry that my mother is lonely and depressed and turning into a hermit. My mother is upset because she hoped I wouldn’t end up working in a factory like her and my father. She thinks I could have done something better than tying bows. Maybe designed the dolls or the dresses for the dolls or the boxes that the dolls are sold in or drawn an ad to market the dolls. She thinks what I’m doing is insignificant. Maybe she also thinks what she does is insignificant, but that doesn’t seem to matter as much.