Bearded Women Read online

  “I could knit a scarf from both ends,” says one elderly woman.

  “I could play golf with myself,” says a middle-aged man.

  “I could hold twice as many ice cream cones,” says a pudgy kid.

  The cyclops woman tilts her head. No one ever had visions in her father’s coffee shop. Maybe they just weren’t attracting the right crowd. But her father never let anyone touch Drogo. Every night the cyclops woman runs a slim finger over Drogo and notices his wrinkles are a little less deep. Drogo is wearing away. The cyclops woman bites her lip and tells herself that she is imagining the change. But she thinks of her own bones, if they will exist like this after she is gone. Even now, what would people see if they touched her? What sorts of visions might erupt after they gazed into her single eye? She wants to know. She doesn’t want to know.

  The cyclops woman holds her breath as patrons whisper prayers to the finger, asking for the wart to be removed from their big toe, the bald patch on their scalp to fill in, their right arm to grow an inch so it’s the same length as their left, their lips to get a little fuller, their hair to be straightened. They peer in wall mirrors or tiny compacts dug from the bottom of purses, wrinkle their noses at their too-freckled, bushy-eyebrowed, eyes-too-close-together faces. The cyclops woman squints at them, those who decree themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.

  After four months, two weeks, and five days on the road, the cyclops woman drives home from Orlando, twenty hours straight, because she just wants to get back. She arrives at three in the morning, her body cramped and car-weary. Her father appears at the front door. He has always been a light sleeper, probably heard the car engine. His face glows red in the streetlamp light.

  “I’m home,” she calls from the driveway.

  “I’m sure you were discovered,” he yells. “I’m sure someone knows about you now and they’ll come pounding on our door tomorrow.”

  The cyclops woman walks closer and sees how her father grips the doorframe too tight, how his legs waver, how his eyes focus somewhere over her head.

  She takes off her shade.

  “It finally worked,” she says. “I have two eyes now. I don’t have to hide.”

  “Really?” he says. For a moment she sees a glow in his vacant stare. Then his eyes dull again.

  “Don’t lie to me,” he says.

  “How do you know I’m lying,” she says, “you can’t see.”

  “Of course I can see you,” says her father. “I’m fine.”

  “Fine,” says the cyclops woman.

  “I don’t want you working at the shop anymore,” he says. “It’s too much of a risk.”

  “Don’t be silly,” says the cyclops woman.

  “You shouldn’t have gone,” he yells, his hand shaking against the doorframe.

  “We have more business, don’t we?” says the cyclops woman.

  Her father marches back inside.

  The cyclops woman goes back to her car, grabs Drogo’s box from the passenger seat, stomps in after her father.

  “He wouldn’t let me tell you he was getting worse,” her mother whispers later. “And he kept telling me he was fine, but then he’d miss the door and bump into a wall.”

  “But I should have been home,” says the cyclops woman, smacking her hand against the kitchen table. “He should have been able to see me just a little longer.”

  “The tour was going so well,” says her mother. “I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want to upset you. There was nothing you could have done if you had come home. We needed those articles in the papers. We’re doing better now.”

  The cyclops woman grimaces as she watches her father walk down the hallway, his fingertips skimming the wall until they hit the doorframe and he turns into his bedroom.

  In her dream the cyclops woman is beside her father in the coffee shop, removes her shade and has sprouted another eye.

  “It worked,” she says. “Drogo worked.”

  “No, he didn’t,” says her father.

  The cyclops woman holds her shade and knows in the end this miracle didn’t matter. Her father can’t see both her eyes. And now that she has two of them, they are both going blind.

  Before the shop opens in the morning, the cyclops woman rests Drogo’s finger back in its glass case, the creases worn smooth. Cynthia Liss and a few other regulars are standing at the front door, anxious for the shop to open. There will be more customers for a while, but the cyclops woman wonders how long it will last. Will people keep coming when her father is blind? When she is blind? Four months on the road was not enough. But maybe there isn’t anything that would be enough. She thinks of her father at home trying violently to see and knocking into the kitchen table. There is more money in the family bank account and her mother bought her father a new white cane he is refusing to touch. The cyclops woman knows he will use it in time, just as in time he will be less angry with her. She locks Drogo’s glass case and imagines how Cynthia would beam if she knew the cyclops woman was a cyclops woman. She imagines the gifts Cynthia would bring—single contacts, bottles of mascara, eyeshadow in every colour of the rainbow.

  Outside the customers press their fingers against the glass, leave temporary smears the cyclops woman will have to wash off in the evening. Her eye hurts as she squints at them through her shade. The world is blurrier than it was before she left. She will have to remove the black lens eventually. It will not be a choice. Now she is simply prolonging that moment, that revelation. Maybe she will wait until she can no longer see faces.

  Snakes

  They are slim and brown and look like dreadlocks. The longest ones trail halfway down my back. I wrap a scarf around the snakes and tie a loose knot to keep them in a ponytail and out of the way, especially when I’m bartending. They can’t be close to the half-empty beer glasses because they’ll get drunk if I let them. When I’m not paying attention they try to sip beer on the sly. The snakes and their tiny primal brains are connected to my instincts, my subconscious, so I can’t always control what they do. They’re like seventy-eight little siblings. I love them, but they’re annoying.

  “Am I going to turn to stone?” slurs one guy at the bar after polishing off his fourth gin and tonic in an hour.

  I give him a granite stare, say that he’s reached his limit and I’m cutting off his booze. If someone hadn’t come up with that turn-to-stone bullshit, I would have been able to get a better job, maybe in a high-end retail store, and not have to work two part-time gigs. Understand that I’m bitter.

  Tips have been bad tonight, which doesn’t improve my mood. I’m hoping to make enough this week to finish paying down my credit card bill. Between tending bar and shelving books at the library I can get by, but the tips give me a little room to breathe and buy a couple chocolate bars at the grocery.

  It’s April, a rainy night, and I have to walk home. The snakes don’t like getting wet, and when they’re too cold or warm I get a headache. My car gave out six months ago and it wasn’t worth repairing, but winter was hell. I had to walk around with a big fleece head wrap that kept the snakes warm enough for the ten-minute walks from my apartment to the bar and the library.

  I budget as I walk, figure this month I’ll have just enough. So much for the credit card bill. Last year I was optimistic about the future, bought a new couch, then I had to get the brakes and heater on my car replaced. A waste of money since it died a few months later.

  I’m also paying for one class a semester at the college, which means no new car soon, just books and tuition. I want to get a degree in biology and a job doing plant research. I like studying cells and reproduction, started taking classes four years ago, but I’m only a sophomore. I remind myself I don’t have to be in a hurry to finish, but it feels like I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to quit my jobs and get student
loans and end up paralyzed by debt I might not be able to pay off. A couple friends of mine who work at the bar tell me every night how they’re never going to be in the black.

  “Just because you go to college doesn’t mean you’ll have a great career,” Katie says. She has a degree in history and fifty thousand dollars in loans. Before I got the job at the library and just worked at the bar, I was really scrimping. Ran up two credit cards in the process. Every night my snakes got headaches as I thought about the bills I couldn’t pay off. I don’t want to be in that position again.

  But night after night I collapse in my apartment, too tired to study because I’ve been working all day, but if I don’t study I won’t be able to pass my classes and get a degree that might win me a better job (though Katie is quick to remind me it’s not guaranteed). Tonight I have reading homework for my Greek mythology class. (It’s one of my electives. I took it because I hoped I could dispel a couple myths, mostly ones about me.)

  My upstairs neighbours have decided to throw one of their parties. I have to be up at eight, and it sounds like my ceiling is about to give because of the boozy thumping. I stomp to the second floor and feel like a crotchety old woman, but dammit, I need to get work done. Intoxicated people loll out the apartment door. One of my upstairs neighbours (there are two guys and a girl) wavers towards me, stepping over a couple of bodies.

  “Would you keep it down,” I say. “I have to work in the morning.”

  “Sure thing,” she says. She’s wasted. I hear someone vomit.

  Back in my apartment I still can’t concentrate, decide I might as well sleep, but I have to lie in bed with a pillow over my head. I want to break the damn lease and move because all the other people in the building are twenty-something college students whose parents are paying for their degrees. They could care less about studying. But this is the cheapest apartment I could find that’s within walking distance of both my jobs. I don’t have extra money, can only hold the pillow more tightly over my head. The snakes lean against the wall, feel the vibrations from the partygoers upstairs.

  My snakes are cranky in the morning, nip at each other as I dress and wash my face. I give them bits of toast and grape jelly. They nibble pieces out of my fingers but are still in a sour mood, so I buy a double mocha for us on the way to work. Whatever they eat goes into the rest of me, whether it’s toast or coffee or mosquitoes, but I only taste what I put into my own mouth. By the time I get to the library my snakes are so hyped up on caffeine they bump into the big glass door at the entrance, reminding me why I don’t give them coffee too often. When my snakes get nicked or squeezed it hurts like hell.

  In the afternoon I go to City Park to help the Garden Society with our annual weeding and planting. Being outside cheers me a bit, and it cheers my snakes because they get to eat the little bugs that circle my head. I love plants but can’t have many in my apartment because there’s too little light and not enough room.

  I scare new Garden Society members, older ladies who are nice enough when they get to know me, but sometimes it takes a while for them to be cordial. It helps if I keep the snakes mostly covered by a big kerchief. The ladies and I have plenty to chat about since we all love plants and have to budget carefully. We all have low incomes so we’re the same sort of almost-desperate, get exactly enough money to survive each month, our hands clenched around every dollar. We all pray nothing will go wrong and force us to pay more money that we don’t have.

  On Wednesdays my Garden Society friend Violet takes me grocery shopping. She knows I don’t have a car, and she’s happy to give me rides. Wednesday is senior day so she gets fifteen percent off everything.

  “My oldest girl wants me to move into one of those assisted living places,” she says, “but they’re so expensive. I want to stay in my apartment. It’s pricey enough.”

  I sigh. “My rent just went up. I don’t know how I’m going to balance that and my class fees and books. I can’t take time off work and just go to school.”

  Last night my friend Katie was complaining about her debt again, saying that if she’d known she wouldn’t be able to do much with a bachelor’s degree in history she wouldn’t have gotten it in the first place.

  “Now I have to worry about car payments and house payments and kid payments,” she says. Katie and her boyfriend just had a son, and children don’t come cheap.

  Too many people who frequent the bar have student loans they’ve been supporting for ten years, which is part of the reason they want to drown their worries in beer. I can’t end up like that. I have to think about the stress I’d be causing myself and the snakes. I have to keep plugging away at my coursework. At both jobs. At my lingering credit card debt. But every time I push the stone up the hill, it rolls back down.

  My Greek mythology class meets on Thursday nights. The prof is an older guy. At first I thought he was nice, but when I stopped by his office to discuss my paper on how Odysseus was a total jerk, my prof asked if I wanted to chat about our course readings over drinks.

  “I didn’t think they let students and professors do that,” I said.

  “It would be strictly academic,” he said, “just in a more relaxed environment.”

  I told him I’d think about it.

  Tonight in class he asks my opinion on the story of Orpheus and the Greek concept of the afterlife. I hate how he acts like I’m an authority on everything Greek, mumble something about the River Styx and Charon and how I picture him as a surly New York cabdriver. My prof nods and smiles and says that’s a very interesting idea. The other students roll their eyes.

  “Are you fucking him or something?” mutters the guy who sits beside me.

  This rankles my snakes. They start hissing, which turns the heads of everyone who wasn’t already staring at me. Shit. I slide down in my seat and leave right after class, before my prof can ask my opinion on anything else. I paid hard-earned money to take this course, and I’d drop it if I could afford to take the loss, but I’m financially committed to a creep for the rest of the semester.

  I complain about him to Violet when we tend the City Park gardens on Monday.

  “He sounds like my ex-husband,” she says. “He was a bastard and a flirt besides. Do you know if this professor of yours is married?”

  “Don’t think so,” I say because I haven’t seen him wearing a wedding band, but sometimes people take those off if they want to give the appearance of singlehood. I work in a bar so I know all the tricks.

  “Just keep away from him,” she says. “No private meetings in his office.”

  I nod. I’m careful not to let him catch me alone, though it won’t do anything to relieve my in-class embarrassment.

  After our gardening session Violet drives me to the store so I can buy bread and milk, then she drops me off at my apartment. I grab my sacks from the back seat and Violet closes the car door for me, but she doesn’t notice that one of my snakes is in the way.

  The pain in my head is excruciating. I’m glad I can’t see the blood.

  “My sweet Lord,” Violet says, grabbing a hankie from her purse and wrapping it around the end of the decapitated snake. “Doctor or vet?” she yells, shaking my shoulder.

  “Vet,” I say, almost woozy from the pain.

  The next half hour blurs. I wish someone would cut off my head along with the snake’s. The vet only has to use a local anaesthetic, but it knocks me out.

  I wake up sitting in a padded chair in the vet’s office, listening to dogs barking in the next room. Violet sits beside me, twisting a clean hankie in her fingers.

  “Oh goodness,” she says. “How do you feel? I’m so sorry.”

  My head doesn’t hurt, feels like it’s full of lead marbles. The vet called my doctor and explained the situation. My doctor called a prescription for Valium in to the pharmacy.

  The vet had to remove the sna
ke at its base and put in a few stitches. She says I’ll have to be off work for a few days to give the wound time to heal. I want to protest, say I can’t afford to be away from my jobs that long, but the anaesthetic makes my tongue thick.

  A nurse gives me a small cardboard box containing what’s left of my snake. It’s wrapped in a little baggie, the kind they use for pets that have been put to sleep. I stare down at the box and get weepy again. Violet pats my shoulder until I’ve exhausted my tears, then she drives me to her apartment and has me lie down on her bed. She says she’ll pay for my medical bills.

  “But it was just an accident,” I say. I think of that little cardboard box, my lost snake, and start weeping again. Violet hugs me. I don’t have names for all my snakes, but there were seventy-eight of them and now there are only seventy-seven. The remaining ones will be traumatized.

  Lying on Violet’s bed with a glass of ginger ale on the table beside me, I ask woozy questions. If a snake got cut off at the base, near my skull, would it die or just grow a new tail? Could the snakes exist independently of me? My snakes have been injured, my snakes have received small cuts, but none of them have died before. Maybe I’m a burden to them. Maybe they don’t want to be attached to my head, forced to breathe smoke every evening at the bar. Maybe they’d be happier writhing around in the City Park gardens, eating bugs on their own accord, not subject to my whims and part-time jobs.

  I take more pills when the pain rises in my head. Violet brings me toast and eggs and sandwiches and meatloaf. The snakes and I don’t feel like eating. I can feel their sorrow, their confusion. They nip at each other, upset because they don’t know what to make of the floaty feeling we all have from the Valium.

  Violet tells the Garden Society ladies about the accident and they send cards. Some bring casseroles and small potted plants to her apartment. I smile and try to thank them, but it’s difficult. The snakes and I are too depressed and dopey because of the painkillers. That haze quells some of our sadness, at least for now, but I have too much time to think. I have a responsibility to my snakes, these seventy-seven living things on my head. I have to make sure they are safe and healthy, but sometimes I don’t know how to best care for them. It makes me a little mad; I didn’t ask to be given these snakes, but now I have them and I have to negotiate that.