Bearded Women Read online

I don’t work the register anymore, don’t even fill in when we’re short, just keep myself in the background except when I go on break and sit next to Mr. Chicken. Some customers smile at me. Others look horrified. Most of those are female. Women are scared of facial hair. We must bleach it or shave it or pull it out. I know that all too well.

  When I go to Mr. Yamoto’s apartment for my weekly restaurant report I can feel every heartbeat in my fingertips. He opens the door and smiles then frowns then cocks his head.

  “New look?” he says and steps to the side so I can walk in. I explain how I’ve always had facial hair but kept it shaved. Mr. Yamoto plops gracefully in a pea green overstuffed chair.

  “You don’t think it will make the restaurant lose business?” he says. “It might prove distracting to customers.”

  “Or it might bring them in,” I say with a hopeful smile even though it’s a dumb idea.

  Mr. Yamoto deepens his frown.

  “I’m staying in the background, really,” I say. “The employees aren’t bothered by the beard. I’ve never grown it out before. I want to try this.”

  “Can’t you try it when you have a week’s vacation?” he says.

  “It’s not a problem for anyone,” I lie. “Really.”

  Mr. Yamoto folds his thick hands together and looks down at them for a moment.

  “I’ll have to think about this,” he says. “It’s a restaurant and appearance is important.”

  “Okay,” I say, “okay.”

  Mr. Yamoto is a believer in consistency, you have to be if you own a restaurant, so I’m glad he’s giving me a chance. If I hadn’t been working for him for so long I know he’d make me shave it off without a second thought.

  The following day, Mr. Chicken and Mr. Yamoto arrive at almost the same time. They both order a box of chicken bits and sit with two tables between them.

  I go out to speak with Mr. Yamoto when I take my break.

  “I haven’t been down to the restaurant for a time,” he says. “I wanted to see how things were doing.” Meaning he wanted to see how people were reacting to me.

  Mr. Chicken is glaring at both of us, his angry eyes boring holes into our table. All attention in the restaurant is focused on us—the former sumo wrestler and the bearded lady—and away from him. After a few minutes Mr. Chicken stands and plods to the counter. He’s there an awfully long time. When he returns he’s carrying two trays, both towers of cardboard boxes. It’s more food than he usually eats—eight boxes of chicken bits, four fish sandwiches, three apple turnovers, three cherry turnovers, three sides of wasabi mushrooms, three cartons of spicy onion rings, six fried ice creams. Mr. Chicken unfolds a napkin with a snap of his wrist, lays it across his lap, and starts eating, really eating, cramming chicken bits and onions rings and mushrooms into his mouth with his fat hands at such a rate I wonder if he’s even chewing. Everyone is staring at him—me and Mr. Yamoto and all of the employees and all of the customers and it’s so disgusting and so fascinating no one can look away. He rips the turnovers and stuffs half in each cheek, eats the fried ice cream in three large bites, smearing food across his face. We’re all gaping, can smell the cloud of sweat and grease around his body.

  I don’t know how long it takes Mr. Chicken to finish everything. Maybe two minutes, maybe five or ten. It feels like a really long and really short period of time and there is complete silence in the restaurant. No one is placing any orders. No one else is even eating. We’re all just staring. When Mr. Chicken has finished everything and there is just a pile of boxes on his two trays, he wipes his mouth with a napkin, stands up, and promptly throws up everything on the golden tile floor.

  We’re still staring.

  Mr. Chicken plops back down and starts crying, his mouth gaping in soundless sobs.

  Half of my employees run for gallons of ammonia and bleach and mops.

  Mr. Yamoto stands up and walks around Mr. Chicken’s table, touches his shoulder, and it may be my imagination but I think Mr. Chicken leans toward him slightly. Mr. Yamoto daubs Mr. Chicken’s eyes very gently with a grease-stained paper napkin.

  I finger my beard. It is starting to become silkier as it gets longer, the hairs not so short and hard. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it, probably shave it off eventually, but for now it feels kind of nice.

  Cyclops

  Usually cyclops babies don’t live very long. This is why you never hear about them, why the cyclops woman is the only one to have reached thirty. Two people besides her parents know she has just one eye—the family ophthalmologist and the midwife who delivered her in her parents’ bedroom. Her mother wanted to keep the process as natural as possible, worried about strange things drugs were supposed to do to newborn babies.

  The cyclops woman’s father makes her wear a shade, a crescent-shaped sunglasses lens that fits around her head, so the world looks a little dark to her. Her father’s world is also getting darker. His glaucoma is worsening and the ophthalmologist says he’ll be blind in a matter of months. He won’t stop working, though. At the counter of Drogo’s, the family coffee shop, he explains to customers that his daughter wears the shade because she has a condition that makes her extremely sensitive to light.

  “I think it’s very becoming,” says Cynthia Liss, one of the regulars. She says the eyes are the most intimate part of the body and the shade lends an air of mystery like Japanese women with their fans.

  The cyclops woman thinks the shade makes her look like a washed-up Hollywood starlet that happens to be working at the family coffee shop.

  Her father boasts that Drogo’s is the only coffee shop in the world with a reliquary. Drogo is the patron saint of coffee house keepers and unattractive people. His finger and six eyelashes rest across from the counter in a tiny glass coffin etched with gold curlicues. The coffin is attached to the wall and surrounded by a big gilded frame. The finger looks like a piece of beef jerky, and the eyelashes could be anybody’s, but some of the regular customers make a habit of touching the coffin every time they enter. Cynthia Liss leaves small offerings—dime store rings, single fingers cut from gloves, and red nail polish because she says red is the most Catholic colour. On Drogo’s feast day, April 16th, the cyclops woman’s father has her festoon the frame with ribbon.

  He brought the finger and eyelashes back from a trip to Belgium three months before he opened the coffee shop. At least once a month he stands behind the counter and tells the story of how he found them in a little apothecary shop in Brussels. He says, “The apothecary whispered to me that Drogo’s finger had been taken from St. Martin’s in Sebourg, where Drogo died and where the rest of his relics are kept. That old man said Drogo’s finger had worked miracles for others who had come into his shop. It had made an old woman’s gnarled hands straight, a little boy’s deaf ear hear, a dog’s lame foot strong.”

  When her father finishes the story, he nods and smiles at the cyclops woman. She smiles back, knows he bought the finger hoping it would manifest a miracle, give her a second eye. When that didn’t work it became an attraction. Sometimes she wonders exactly how her father looked when he walked into the apothecary shop, if the way he squinted at objects suggested he had the loose wallet of a desperate man. Other times she figures that if she is a cyclops woman with brethren who taunted Odysseus, surely the finger could have belonged to a saint.

  There are little cards with Drogo’s picture and biography next to the gilded frame and customers can buy them for a dollar. The picture is a painting really, a man with a huge nose, uneven lips, and eyes looking in different directions, a man Dali would have loved. The cyclops woman reads Drogo’s biography every night even though she’s memorized it, how he was the son of a Flemish nobleman whose mother died when he was born. When he grew older he became obsessed with the idea that he’d killed her, so he sold everything he owned and became a shepherd and a hermit and made nine pilgri
mages to Rome. Later he contracted an odd disease that made him very ugly, and he spent the rest of his life living on barley bread and warm water. People said he was able to bilocate, be in two places at once, tending sheep and attending Mass. The Cyclops woman wonders if that is true with his remains as well, if he actually has twenty fingers, twenty toes, four eyes, and two noses roaming the world. She cleans the fingerprints off Drogo’s finger’s glass coffin every night. The cyclops woman knows the finger well, all its joints and creases, and likes it in the way that people like something because it is familiar.

  At night the cyclops woman’s mother frets over the books, how the small shop is barely keeping afloat even with the reliquary. Her father claims Drogo is why they’re still in business. The cyclops woman has been watching his latest ritual, how he stands in front of the finger before the shop opens and after it closes. She wonders how fast the glaucoma is progressing. The family ophthalmologist says she has the same disease, but he doesn’t know how long it will be before she is blind. It could be a year, five years, ten. She worries what will happen to her family when neither she nor her father can see. The shop isn’t making enough to hire extra help. Her father wants to keep working in the store, despite his impairment.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” he says. “Not blind yet. I can tell how much coffee is in the cup.”

  “You’re getting steam burns from the espresso machine,” says the cyclops woman.

  “I am not,” says her father, but she watches him run his hands under cold water for a few minutes in-between customers, wincing. She knows he is moving slow, trying not to bump into things. He misses the counter when giving a customer her coffee. The cup shatters on the floor, sloshes hot liquid behind the register.

  “It slipped out of my hand,” he hisses to his daughter while she gets another cup of coffee and helps her mother pick up the ceramic shards.

  At dinner he reaches for the salt and pepper shakers and knocks both over.

  The cyclops woman’s mother bites her lip.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do about the finances,” she whispers.

  “What we’ve always done,” says the cyclops woman’s father. “We’re going to sell coffee and get a business loan to tide us over.”

  “I want to go on the road,” says the cyclops woman.

  Both her parents stare.

  “Talk shows,” she says, “book deals, maybe a movie. People will pay to see me.”

  “You will do no such thing,” her father says, stabbing his meatloaf. “That is what we’ve worked to help you avoid. Nothing good comes of that sort of fame.”

  “But it would be easy,” says the cyclops woman. “We’d be set forever.”

  “I will not have my daughter prostituting herself,” says her father. “I’d rather go on welfare.”

  “I’m not stripping in front of people,” says the cyclops woman.

  “You’re not taking off your shade,” says her father. “You can’t know what would happen after that.”

  “You can’t either,” says the cyclops woman.

  “What if doctors got hold of you,” says her father, “and you spent the rest of your life with needles in your arms and a tube up your rear?”

  The cyclops woman’s mother doesn’t say anything, just puts her hand over her mouth.

  The cyclops woman decides to let her father think he’s won for the time being. They all keep chewing. She knows she won’t let her family go on the public dole.

  That night she lies in bed and dreams her usual dream about serving coffee at the counter when a customer snatches her shade away. She stands there blinking her one eye. Sometimes nobody notices and sometimes everyone does, but it is pleasant to feel the cool air on her eye, not to have it closed behind the stuffy sunglasses lens.

  In the morning the cyclops woman’s mother has a headache. She has been complaining of headaches more often lately and the cyclops woman knows it is because of stress. The cyclops woman’s head hurts sometimes, too, and she finds herself squinting more, getting eyestrain. She knows the vision loss, the blurriness, will only progress until the day there is nothing. No black. No white. As if she’d never had an eye to begin with. When she cleans the glass on Drogo’s coffin that night she reads the information card for the five thousandth time and feels sorry for Drogo for the five thousandth time. He endured so much pain, so much misery, so much sacrifice, and his mother was still dead.

  The cyclops woman finds the key to the locked glass cabinet. Her father thinks no one but him knows it is hidden behind the counter in a five-year-old box of Earl Grey tea. She opens the glass case and touches the finger with her small hand. It feels hard and leathery, like it sat in the sun for centuries. She thinks she feels a slight warmth and a slight pain in her own fingers, stands there for a moment with that warm ache before locking the case again. The cyclops woman sits against the wall and slips the shade off her head, stares at her hand. It seems to be glowing slightly.

  Because she knows her father would never agree to it, the cyclops woman and Drogo’s finger leave at three-thirty in the morning after she makes a few phone calls, packs a bag, and tells her mother her plan. Her mother nods and takes a couple aspirin.

  “Everything will be fine after your father stops having a tantrum,” she says.

  At first the cyclops woman figures she’ll be gone for a couple of weeks, travelling to a few coffee shops several hours away, displaying Drogo and charging a small fee to touch him and buy an information card. The coffee shops she called were a bit sceptical, but agreed when she said she wouldn’t charge them for the display and she’d work the counters if things got busy.

  In Indianapolis the cyclops woman stands beside Drogo, her shade in place, reciting the story of his life until she is hoarse. She is tired and her hands ache from the long drive, but Drogo’s finger looks content in its temporary new home, a clear glass jewellery box she bought for five dollars and lined with red velvet. Coffee shop patrons gladly ante their dollars to touch the finger for ten seconds, pay an extra buck for a Polaroid snapshot beside the relic. Some people mutter that it looks like a piece of beef jerky and they’re certain they can smell pickling spices. Others say they feel a slight heat or ache or calmness after rubbing the first digit. The cyclops woman smiles and adjusts her shade. A young acne-stricken reporter from the local paper comes to do a story for the religion page.

  “There aren’t very many touring relics,” she says.

  “I guess not,” says the cyclops woman.

  The reporter says, “His mother died?”

  “He never got over it,” says the cyclops woman. She thinks of her own mother at the cash register trying to ring up customers and keep her father calm as he rants about the missing finger and mistakenly pours scalding coffee over his hands instead of into a mug.

  “Those are neat sunglasses,” says the reporter.

  The Indiana coffee shop owners are an elderly couple who let the cyclops woman spend a few nights on their uncomfortable couch. She wants to take the shade off when she goes to sleep but thinks the better of it.

  “I have a disease that makes me sensitive to light,” she tells them at breakfast, her back still aching from the flat couch cushions.

  “That’s some finger,” says the old man, spreading marmalade on his toast.

  “Once I thought I saw a vision of the Virgin in some sugar I spilled on the floor,” says the old woman.

  The cyclops woman does not like the endless black cord of road. She does not like peeing in gas station bathrooms, eating peanut butter sandwiches two meals a day because she wants to live on the cheap, sleeping in her car when she can’t find anyone to loan her their couch for a night. In the morning she neatens herself best she can in fast food restaurant restrooms, wets her comb and ties her hair back into a neat bun before driving to the next venue. Many o
f them are tiny places like the ones her father owns, coffee shops where the owners are struggling and sympathetic, eager to try any new scheme as long as it’s free. She stays three or four days at each, long enough for word of mouth to get out and for the crowd of sceptical and curious visitors to be exhausted. Many people compliment her on her shade. Half of them ask where they can get one before asking her to snap a photo of them standing beside Drogo.

  The cyclops woman keeps her arm tense and ready at her side, wondering and worrying and almost hoping that someone will try to snatch off the shade. Sometimes she puts her hand on the black half-moon lens, her fingers tugging gently, wanting both to greet and prevent revelation. In the end she keeps it on because worrying over the consequences, the might-bes, gives her a headache. She could be invited on all the talk shows, or doctors could cut her up and put parts of her in test tubes.

  She calls home twice a week to tell her parents of her travels.

  Her mother says the touring finger has made the local news and business has increased in the shop. More people are visiting the six eyelashes still safe in the glass case across from the counter. The cyclops woman’s travel-weary body aches less to hear of her successes. Then her father gets on the phone.

  “You need to come home,” he yells so loudly that she has to hold the receiver away from her ear. “How is Drogo? Have you taken off your shade?”

  “No,” she says. “Dad, don’t worry. This is going to save us. I’m keeping the shade on and keeping close track of Drogo.”

  “I just know someone is going to steal him,” says her father.

  “We’ll both be home soon,” she says, “and things will get better. Business will pick up. This is just the sort of attention the shop needs.”

  “People are wondering when the finger will be back,” her father mutters. “Six eyelashes just don’t cut it.”

  In San Francisco people start claiming to have visions after touching Drogo’s finger. They imagine themselves in multiple, having divided like a cell.