Bearded Women Page 2

  I get home at eight in the morning feeling tired but a bit better. Doug has been home for an hour at least, made us eggs and bacon and toast.

  “The station manager called,” he says, squinting at me across the table. “It was about doing a show on you. Some sort of special. He wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “I tell one person at work about the possibility of an operation and now it’s front page news.”I shake my head. “I’m still not sure about it.”

  “You’re not?” he says.

  “No. I don’t know. There’s the safety risk and . . . I don’t know.”

  But that afternoon I call the gynaecologist, figure I might as well start going through pre-surgery procedures, just in case. I don’t even know which organs are connected where, how they would have to untwist my genitals from Bianca’s. While I am on the phone to the gynaecologist’s office I wonder how long Bianca could live on her own apart from me. Would it be seconds? Minutes? Hours? Nothing?

  At dinner I tell Doug I decided to start preliminary testing but haven’t committed to anything. He’s mad anyway.

  “They’re going to hook you,” he says. “Once you start down that road, even if you’re not sure, they’ll force you into it one way or another. Those doctors will lie, tell you it will be easy even if it won’t.”

  “It’s still my decision,” I say, mad at him for thinking I can be forced into anything. “I can say no. It’s my body and I get to decide what to do with it.”

  It’s my body that may conceive a baby. It’s my body to detach from Bianca if I so choose. Sometimes I get tired of making allowances for her. But when I lie awake at night I wonder what is mine and what is Bianca’s. Are my breasts her breasts? Is my head her head? Our head? How much does she exist as me and how much is she her own being? I know chickens are supposed to run around for a few minutes after they have their heads cut off. They say it’s a muscle reaction, but I’ve always thought the chicken was still bent on trying to get away. And what is the head on the chopping block thinking once it is independent of the chicken, watching its body in a futile sprint? If the body is still moving, what of the mind?

  Doug and I barely talk for a week, just argue. He’s mad, says I’m going to needlessly put my life at risk, and he refuses to have sex with my walking half. He just wants Bianca.

  “Those parts won’t be with us much longer.” He slathers his toast with strawberry jam. “Might as well make use of them while they’re here.”

  “But it’s a waste of good sperm,” I say. “Until I get pregnant, it should all go into my walking half. The extra parts could stay if I conceived. And I’m still not sure if I’m going through with it.”

  My argument fails to sway my husband and he sleeps on the couch for four nights. When he comes back to bed he’s still mad, but mad in a sex-deprived way. We try to figure out a truce—he can have sex with Bianca one night and my walking half the other night. Doug seems okay with this compromise but grimaces when he’s under me.

  “You could at least look like you’re enjoying it,” I say.

  He smiles a big fake smile.

  I sigh because I’m not enjoying it, either.

  When he has sex with Bianca it’s rougher than before. He thrusts harder, slaps her rear. I wince, tell him to slow down and be gentle. He kind of blushes. We change our strategy. Doug starts out with Bianca, enough to get him excited, then he lies down on the bed and I clamber on top of him while he struggles to hold the juice in. This works a couple times but involves a lot of bumped knees and shins. In the end he’s still more turned on by Bianca than my walking half, and this is hurtful though I don’t want to admit it.

  When I go to have more tests, CAT scans and such, Doug shows his anger in other, smaller ways. He doesn’t always kiss me when we leave for work in the afternoon and get home in the morning. He starts doing overtime at the diner, working on weekends and ’til ten or eleven in the morning. He says if I want this surgery and we want a child, we need to save money. I bite my lip and nod.

  Bianca’s wrath is an even bigger problem. She knows what I am considering, and during the eight weeks of pre-surgery testing I have two of the most painful periods ever. Bianca bloats and it’s hard to zip up her pants.

  I try to reason with her.

  “I’m just checking out options,” I say while driving to the hospital for another scan. “This is no done deal.” Her hips, her ovaries, her vagina are searing pain. I grit my teeth. All of Bianca hurts, even her knees and feet. I don’t know what to do. Part of me worries that even after she is removed the pain will still be there. I have heard stories of war veterans who lost hands and feet but could still feel pain in the absence. A phantom limb seems paltry compared to a phantom lower half.

  Protestors are massed every day outside of the television station. They picket carrying signs with black outlines of people with four arms and three legs, say I shouldn’t be allowed to procreate at all, regardless of surgery. They believe the abnormalities are hereditary and I’ll only birth monsters. Of course I know it’s not true, but it hurts to know they think my body isn’t fit to produce another. Word also gets out to the local papers, and editorial page letters are devoted to me for three weeks. Some people say I should get the surgery. Some people say I shouldn’t get the surgery. The really whacked ones say I should have been killed at birth.

  The station manger is mad is because I told him I wouldn’t do a television special, whether or not I get the surgery done. He thinks I should jump at the chance for local and national and even international press.

  “Think of the fame you’d gain if the surgery were successful and you could conceive,” he says.

  “If my husband will still have me,” I mutter.

  The station manager ignores me, says it would be a great career move.

  After three months of hassles and tests, I’m more resolute about having the operation than I was before. The gynaecologist says even though it will take me a long time to recover, the procedure itself will be easier than expected—Bianca’s liver and kidneys and intestines function separately from mine, and won’t be as difficult to detach as they thought.

  Of course Doug and Bianca don’t want me to have surgery. Even the station manager has changed his mind since I refused to do the television special, says it would be best if I’d just deliberate forever to keep it in the news.

  Then Bianca doesn’t have her period when my walking half does. I wait a week. Two. At the beginning of the third week I feel a little sick in the evening after I wake up.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” I whisper to Doug at dinner. Both of us are wide-eyed, as if saying it any louder will make it not true. He hugs me tight and we both hold our breath. I squeeze Bianca’s legs tight to keep the baby inside, keep it growing. I don’t talk about surgery for days and Doug seems cheery even though he has to have sex with my walking half because we don’t want to disturb Bianca.

  The foetus miscarries after six weeks.

  I sit on the edge of the bathtub, naked from the waist down, my nightgown hitched up over Bianca. I grip her bloody underwear in both hands and cry. This is how Doug finds me. He sits beside me, wraps his arms around my shoulders, rocks Bianca and me back and forth.

  “We could always adopt,” he whispers.

  I cry harder. I want a baby from my body, yet I’m afraid that even without Bianca I won’t be able to carry a child to term. What if this pregnancy is Bianca trying to stay with me, trying to conceive to pacify me? I want to keep Bianca. I want to have a baby. I can’t have both.

  The accountant in the parking lot is still asking for toenail clippings. I see him once a week. Everywhere I go people are watching me. I can feel their prying eyes. Before my possible surgery made news, it seemed like people had almost gotten used to Bianca. Or at least everyone everywhere didn’t gape. Now at the gym I think a f
ew dozen people have bought memberships just to watch me work out. They walk on treadmills going one and a half miles an hour and stare as Bianca does her deep knee bends against the wall.

  The television ratings are up, haven’t been this high since I joined the station.

  Doug convinces me to let him have sex with Bianca two days after the miscarriage. He says the pregnancy is a sign that we should keep trying and prove the gynaecologists wrong. Bianca shudders pleasure when he touches her, as if she’d been worried Doug would no longer find her attractive after the miscarriage. He caresses her with a gentleness that is somehow unlike the way he touches my walking legs. I sear with jealously. I know he sees her as a part of me, but how can he understand that she is and she isn’t? I feel the hot waves of her orgasm that is mine and not mine. When I start crying Doug hugs me and all I can do is shake my head.

  After Doug has fallen asleep I talk to Bianca. I tell her that part of her essence would still be with me even after she was removed. The blood in my body would have run through both of our bodies. She would be a mother along with me. In the back of my mind I wonder wispily if Doug would leave me if I had the surgery. How to explain to him that she would still be there, a phantom pull at my side? In sleep Doug slides his arm over my stomach and across to Bianca, his fingers grazing both of our hips. I wiggle Bianca’s toes and wonder what it will be like without her, how long it will take to forget the feel of her legs against bedsheets, Doug’s hand on her knee. I grit my teeth, close my eyes, concentrate on wiggling the toes on my walking legs, the ones I know are mine.

  The Shell

  Martin Wyss had not planned to carve for the dead. He wanted to carve horses and bears and ducks—hooves so hard they could run, fur so soft the chest could rise and fall, wings so strong they could fly. Martin knew he was meant to uncover what was hidden in wood, wanted to pull life from it just as Michelangelo had grabbed David’s marble hands and tugged. Michelangelo loved David because he found him in stone, and for the same reason Martin loved the ducks he discovered preening their oaken feathers.

  Sometimes, late at night in his garage workshop, Martin was sure he could hear sleepy quacks from the wooden beaks and tired pawing from the hooves of deer. But in spite of his attainment of the near-perfect duck, Martin had to work part time at a hardware store because his art barely sold. Perhaps a dog here or there at craft shows, a fawn from time to time, but most people smiled and nodded and walked by.

  His aunt requested the first casket. She was seventy and a chain smoker, knew he was hard up for money, so she asked him to carve a four-foot-high hollow teacup with a hinged lid. It was like she knew in six more months she would need to curl inside. His teary uncle paid Martin handsomely. A librarian aunt asked for a casket shaped like a row of books. A mechanic uncle wanted a toolbox coffin. It did not take long for word of Martin’s artistry to spread like a plague. Calls came from eight states, orders for a windmill, a race car, a violin case, all big and with hinged tops. It was too popular, Martin thought, the idea that in death one could lie in what one had loved. He quit the hardware store to carve full-time, but each coffin was labour-intensive, made just enough to pay for his food, mortgage, car loan, and buy materials for the next casket.

  “You must be so happy now,” his friends said, “able to carve for a living.”

  Martin shrugged. He still saw deer and bears sitting in the wood, still wanted to carve life but had to serve those who sat nervously at its edge, people who were wilting. Usually he had clients to his workshop twice—once to view his work and place an order, and again for a casket fitting since it was only proper to make sure he had sized them correctly. Martin kept these appointments to a polite fifteen minutes, averted his eyes when his clients rested their wizened legs inside the coffin and either pronounced it comfortable or a little too tight. By the time they left, Martin’s fingers had started aching and his knuckles appeared slightly knobbed.

  He had the earthy build of a carver, short thick arms and legs and a sturdy torso, but Martin knew even the healthiest of bodies only allowed for so much time, so much completed work. Around the perimeter of his garage, wooden ducks watched him in sympathy.

  Odessa Crouch wanted to be buried in a big purple scallop shell. She was sixty-seven and on disability, a recently retired legal secretary at Hummer, Hummer, and Huller. The law firm was downtown, next to the pink marble art museum. Odessa wandered the museum’s halls during her lunch hour, strolling past Egyptian mummies and Roman sarcophagi, browsing the gift shop and flipping through poster-sized prints. Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” was her favourite, the goddess rising from the sea in her oversized shell. A lovely way to be born. A lovely way to die. It had been fifteen years since Odessa’s body had started hurting, really hurting, and now it always tried to curl in on itself. Her hands, her feet, her arms, her legs, wanted to wind in tight spirals close to her torso, condense into a ball.

  Odessa had felt useful at work before pain cut her off. She’d organized legal papers and made phone calls about divorces, custody battles, alimony, and DUI. She was someone who helped sort things out. When Odessa’s husband left her for an older woman ten years ago, she got free legal services. Her two daughters were grown, had demanding babies of their own, and Odessa managed to get fifty-five percent of everything because her lawyers were vultures and her husband a wimp. Half of her possessions were willed to her two daughters and three grandchildren, the other half were supposed to be sold upon her death and the proceeds given to the museum. Odessa believed in art and free admission.

  She’d heard of Martin Wyss’s caskets from a friend of a friend whose aunt had been buried in one shaped like a giant candy bar. The box was white pine but everyone at the funeral swore they smelled chocolate. Odessa wondered if, when she was buried in her scallop shell, people would smell the sea.

  When Odessa called Martin to inquire about coffin prices she thought his voice was too high, too weary. Odessa bit her lip. She wanted someone who carved caskets to sound like God.

  “I’m thinking of dying sometime soon,” said Odessa. “I want a casket shaped like a shell.”

  “What kind of shell?” said Martin. “Abalone? Conch? Clam?”

  “Scallop,” said Odessa. “Like Venus.”

  She wanted to be laid out in the foetal position. Now her wretched spine ached and made her hobble through the grocery store hunchbacked, but she thought that in death the curve would be beautiful, even graceful, once it did not mean pain. She wanted Martin to react to her saying she was thinking of dying soon. Instead he asked where she lived.

  “You should probably come to my workshop,” he said. “It’s not too far, maybe an hour’s drive, and you could see a few of my works, decide if it’s what you really want.”

  Odessa agreed even though she didn’t drive much anymore, didn’t do much of anything anymore without a lot of ibuprofen and sometimes Vicodin on top of her monthly cortisone shots. The pain flowed through her like blood, up her fingers to her arms, down her back to her legs and knees and toes. She’d worked as long as she could at the law firm, longer than her aching body wanted to allow, until the afternoon Mr. Huller brought her a cup of coffee and said quietly that perhaps it was time to take a rest. She was a hard worker, he said, and she’d earned a break after thirty-seven years with the firm. Odessa was certain her arms never hurt more than when she had to clean out her desk. The heat of that pain never left. Odessa hated the way her fingers arched into claws when she didn’t take her medication. She hated the way her legs ached in the morning, the way her veins popped out blue against the peach of her skin. She hated the way her feet felt like she was walking on popcorn kernels. Her insides had been replaced, muscle by muscle and bone by bone, with someone else’s aching interior, and deceitfully covered with her own skin.

  Odessa took a triple dose of ibuprofen on the day she drove to meet Martin. Her doctor said it would harm her stomac
h eventually. Odessa didn’t care, just wanted to keep her body at bay. She focused on the shell, imagined it was just a pen flick away, the writing of one small cheque and she’d figure out the rest from there.

  Martin Wyss was one of the most disappointing men she had ever met. Despite his too-weary voice, Odessa had still hoped for a man who looked like he’d been peeled off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Martin was five feet tall if that, had a bit of a paunch, was balding slightly, had arms thick as tree trunks, and not enough wrinkles to be over forty. He was the sort of man she’d expect to come and repair her sink. Martin showed her his garage workroom. It smelled not of wood but dead forests, burned things. One casket was in progress on the wooden bench, a seven-foot-long ice cream cone wide enough for a human body.

  “You realise that in a shell they couldn’t lay you out to your full height,” said Martin.

  “Of course,” said Odessa. She was five foot nine, taller than he was. Odessa explained her idea for the foetal position.

  “When do you plan on dying?” said Martin.

  Odessa wrinkled her nose. “One month.”

  “If you could hold off for one more,” he said, “make it two, I would be finished by then. Have to get this one done, you know.” He nodded at the cone.

  “Of course,” Odessa said. She wrote him a cheque, a down payment on her shell.

  “I guess that’s about it,” said Martin, folding the check in half and slipping it in his pocket.

  “You don’t need to ask me anything else?” said Odessa. “Measure me?”

  “I have a good eye for size,” said Martin, tapping his head with a sad finger. “I’ll remember.”