Bearded Women Page 9
I become a tattoo parlour mascot on the day my roommate Lee moves out to live with her asshole fiancé. We live on the bottom floor of three-storey house—Lee and her daughter share a bedroom, and my son shares a bedroom with me. Lee’s fiancé has stayed the night at our place several times. Her daughter sleeps on the couch then, but usually ends up in bed cuddled next to me because Lee and the asshole fight so loudly. Even in my bedroom with the door closed you can hear the names he calls her. More than once I’ve told Lee that she and Prince Caustic have to keep it down. I don’t want my son or her daughter to be hearing such things. Lee says the kids are asleep, but I know that’s not true.
By the time Lee is packing her last few belongings I’ve known about the move for two weeks, but it’s still a shock.
“You can’t move in with that jerk,” I say for the twentieth time while Lee loads her collection of stuffed animals into a milk crate. “He’s abusive.”
“He’s small,” she says. Burke is an inch shorter than Lee and maybe ten pounds lighter, but Lee’s body is hunched in the morning after Burke’s been yelling at her. “He always feels like people are challenging his manhood or something. I can’t yell at Burke. It would hurt him too much.”
“The bastard’s not made of glass,” I say.
“We’re going to get counselling,” she says. “He agreed.”
My ex-boyfriend did, too, but I never managed to drag him within a mile of the counsellor’s office. It took me six damn years to figure out he was a loser. He’d yell at me one minute and say he loved me the next. He claimed it was stress from his job and from us having a little kid that made him moody. I thought I’d marry him. He was Jacob’s dad after all. Jake was three when we moved out. I had to do it while my ex was at work. We’ve been living with Lee ever since.
Lee is thirty-four and can barely read, convinces Jake or her daughter Izzy to help her understand her mail. I think she has some form of dyslexia and I’m not sure how she managed to graduate high school, but Lee is determined to a fault and won’t get tested for a learning disability. She says she gets along well enough, but I know she’s too embarrassed to admit to anything. That’s why she’s been working third shift at the auto parts factory for sixteen years. That’s why she hates dating. It involves someone else finding out she can’t read. Burke is Lee’s first boyfriend since Izzy’s dad left five years ago and moved to California. I’m pretty sure part of the reason they broke up was because she refused to get help and he refused to keep reading everything to her.
Burke is impossibly kind when it comes to helping Lee, reads her letters and books and magazines aloud, and follows under the print with his finger so she can pretend she’s reading along. I don’t understand these men we choose, how they can be so sweet about one thing, the thing that is most painful, but they’re bastards about everything else. Lee and me, we both want to hold on to that drop of sweetness, but it nearly kills us in the process.
Izzy is clinging to her bed, refusing to leave.
“I want to stay here,” she yells. “I won’t go live in his stupid apartment. It smells funny. I hate Burke.”
“Everything is going to be fine,” says Lee, putting her hand over her daughter’s fingers, probably in the hopes of easing them off the mattress. “You’ll have your own bedroom and a new daddy.”
“That jerk is not going to be my daddy,” yells Izzy.
I’m tempted to stay and see how Lee resolves this dilemma, but Jacob and I have to get to the tattoo parlour. I work Tuesday through Saturday, eleven to five, take a dinner break and go back with Jake at six-thirty. We stay ’til nine-thirty on school nights, eleven on weekends. Lee waves good-bye to us and promises Izzy the moon if she’d only sit up.
At the tattoo parlour I work the register, do bookkeeping, sterilize equipment, and draw tattoos. My boss Zip is great at tracing pictures on skin and getting the colours right, but says he can’t draw worth shit. Jacob climbs up on a red leather stool and sits still as a sphinx while Zip inks half a birch tree on some guy’s back. Zip doesn’t have a wife or kids and likes Jake, has already told me Jake can come to the tattoo parlour after school instead of going home to wait for me. I’d rather not let Jake be a latchkey kid, and I figure watching people get tattooed is just as educational as anything he could see on TV.
For months Zip has been asking me if he can use my face to advertise the tattoo parlour. He’s a good guy and never pressured me about it, but he’s mentioned the possibility from time to time. I’ve never been desperate enough to sell my picture before, but now I’ve got to figure out how to cover twice the usual rent plus make car payments and add to Jake’s college fund. So with Lee and Izzy on the road to Burke’s, I agree to be the store’s mascot.
“You won’t be a mascot,” Zip says. He’s finished the tree and is sponging ink and blood off the guy’s back. The guy grits his teeth. Jake stares. “You’ll be more like an emblem or insignia.”
Of course this is just a nice way of saying mascot.
Zip says he’ll get an artist to do a black-and-white drawing of me and give me an extra hundred dollars every month in royalties, plus fifty percent of the profits from the sale of any merchandise with my face on it.
“I get to choose who draws the new logo and paints it on the front window,” I tell Zip, hoping that calling it a logo will make it seems less like it’s my face. “You can use it on T-shirts and business cards. That’s as far as I’ll go.” I have a certain pride in how I look, but don’t want to be on a bumper sticker or book of matches or inked on someone’s arm.
Zip snaps off his rubber gloves and scratches his nearly invisible blond goatee.
“What about bottle openers?” he says.
“No dice,” I say.
“Story in the paper?” he says.
I shrug. “If they care to do one.” I’m not figuring they will, but I’ve never been a good guesser.
Four weeks later Zip’s photo is on page seven of the local paper. He’s standing in front of the tattoo parlour beside my three-foot-high head, holding a T-shirt with the store logo on it. Me. I have to admit it came out rather nice—my black and white face looks cheerful, even attractive, and the four ears seem natural as wings on a butterfly.
Monday afternoon I’m standing in the driveway washing my car and not wearing a turtleneck or scarf, when the lady appears at my side. Or at least it seems like she appears. She probably just walks right up to me like any normal person but I don’t hear her because I’m thinking about Lee and Izzy and how they moved out a month ago and I haven’t heard from them in a couple weeks. The last time I spoke with Lee on the phone she said things were just fine and Izzy was getting used to the situation. I took that to mean she hadn’t yet tried to kill Burke.
“Are you a harlot?” The lady beside me is plump, has short brown hair permed in loose curls, is wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt, and carrying a lawn chair. She is vaguely familiar, like I might have seen her at the grocery.
“I haven’t had sex in six years,” I say. Not since I left the ex and swore off men. I think Zip may have a thing for me but he’s my boss and too nice a guy to try anything.
“You might be a sign of the apocalypse,” says the lady. “Perhaps you should have been killed at birth.”
I try to not take the last comment personally as she stands tiptoe and scrutinizes my forehead.
“Do you mind? I’m washing my car.” I swat at her with the damp sponge and she steps back but doesn’t leave.
“I’ve spoken with the angels,” she says. “They said you may be a sign of the end.”
“So?” I dip my sponge back in the bucket of suds. “They could have meant the end of jelly donuts or something.”
“But the end is near,” she says. “I knew it the moment I saw your picture in the paper.”
“I’m thirty-one for God’s sake,”
I say, “I have a kid. I’m not a harbinger of destruction.”
The lady nods but sets up her lawn chair beside the sidewalk, takes a small pad of paper from her purse, and watches me with her head tilted slightly. I give her fifteen minutes of polite silence before I say anything else.
“How long are you going to sit there?” I ask.
“Until I get a sign,” she says.
“I don’t appreciate being stared at,” I say.
The lady bites her lip. “This is nothing personal against you.”
“Pardon me for feeling so goddamned insulted,” I mutter and resume washing the dead bugs off my windshield. I remind myself I’m used to worse than this.
In elementary school at recess I stood by the chain link fence with three other outcasts. The smart girl insulted all the other kids in polysyllabic words. The fat boy had the best spitting range and accuracy of any kid in the fourth grade. The six-foot-tall girl was only teased from a distance because she had a great left hook. We moved after I finished eighth grade. When I started high school my mother bought me a lot of scarves and turtlenecks. She said there was nothing wrong with me but with the rest of the world. Around then I realised my parents probably just didn’t have the money for surgery to get the ears off.
Jake’s dad and I started going out during my senior year in high school. After three years of hiding the second ears under layers of cloth, I let him be the first person outside of my family to see them. He loved my ears, thought they were beautiful, said I should show them off in public. After a few beers he’d call me a lazy cunt and a good-for-nothing bitch, but even when drunk he never made any mean comments about my ears. I never understood how he managed to hold me up and destroy me at the same time.
The strange woman is still staking out our yard from her lawn chair when Jake gets home from school.
“Hello, Mrs. Simon,” he says to her. He gives me a hug, goes inside.
I glance at the woman scratching notes on her pad, drop my sponge in the bucket, follow my son.
“You know that lady?” I say.
“Her son is in my class,” says Jacob. “Isaiah.” He tells me all the kids tease Isaiah because his mother stands on a corner between the school and post office downtown and tells everyone the world is going to end. She’s been doing this since school started.
“Sometimes we sit across the street and watch,” he says. “People driving by yell at her, but she doesn’t shut up. Isaiah’s mad at her because his dad divorced her a year ago after she went crazy. Now she lives in a yucky apartment and his dad sends her money every month and she doesn’t do anything but yell at people. Isaiah has to stay with her every other week. He hates it.”
But Jacob tells me odd things have happened. Mrs. Simon said a light would fall from the sky and the next day a streetlight cable broke and one of the lamps almost landed on a car windshield. She said it would be a time of monsters the day before Isaiah’s dog had puppies, and the smallest one in the litter only had three legs. She said there would be an end to joy and a week later the bakery down the street from the school closed.
“The lady who worked there gave us free two-day-old cookies,” says Jacob. “Now we have to buy them from Shop Rite and they’re not as good.”
After listening to Jake I decide not to call the police about Mrs. Simon. At least not yet. You can’t go through life with four ears and not have compassion for people who get mocked or called crazy, even if you think they might really be crazy.
Tuesday when Jake and I get home from the tattoo parlour for dinner, Mrs. Simon is already stationed on our lawn in her chair.
Jacob waves and says hello. She smiles at both of us. I try to smile back but it probably looks more like a grimace. We eat macaroni and cheese in the kitchen, and from my place at the table I can see her out our living room window. She doesn’t do much other than take notes and look at her watch. There’s extra macaroni and cheese and since I don’t like it reheated I consider letting Jake take it out to her. In the end I put it down the garbage disposal. Mrs. Simon waves when we leave for the tattoo parlour. You could almost think she was a kindly neighbour sunning herself instead of a second-rate prophetess.
“Lady,” I say, “I don’t want to be mean, but you realise I could call the authorities and register a stalking complaint.”
Mrs. Simon cocks her head. “But I’m not hurting you. I’m just taking notes.”
“And I’m not calling the police,” I say, scratching the ear on the right side of my neck. “Not yet. I just wanted to let you know.”
Mrs. Simon looks down and scribbles more in her pad.
Jake crosses his arms once we’re in the car. “She’s really kind of nice,” he says. “Just crazy.”
I shake my head. I guess being stalked by nice crazy people is better than being stalked by mean crazy people, but stalking is stalking. It takes me a while to focus once I get back to the parlour. When I start playing around with a few tattoo sketches I feel a bit better.
Around eight in the evening two college-aged girls with multiple piercings in their ears bounce into the shop.
“You’re the woman on the window,” they bubble. “Can we get a picture?”
I blink at them a couple times, then glance over to Jake. He’ll probably want to take swimming lessons at the Y once school lets out, and he’s going to need new summer clothes. I look back at the girls and tell them it will cost two dollars. The girls whip out a little camera and Jake takes the photo since Zip is inking an apple onto some lady’s ankle. The girls both hug me and tell me my ears are really cool. Then they buy shirts. It feels nice to be appreciated and yet rather disturbing, like I’m some sort of pop star.
Thirty shirts have sold in the past few days and Zip says he’ll have to order more from the supplier. At least my slight celebrity is profitable. Zip is good to his word on my extra cash, gives me a hundred dollars plus another two hundred from the T-shirt sales. I treat Jacob to ice cream on the way home.
“I want a shirt with your picture on it, too,” says Jake.
“No,” I tell him.
“But a couple kids at school have them,” he says. “And you’re my mom. If anyone gets a shirt it should be me.”
“You need to be wearing shirts with sports team names or something,” I say. “Not me.”
“But you’re better than any stupid sports team,” he says. “I want a shirt with you on it.”
“We’ll see,” I say, which is what my mother said when she meant no.
Jake knows this and kicks lightly at the dashboard as he licks his ice cream.
Mrs. Simon reappears in her lawn chair on Wednesday afternoon, has her pad, a can of cola, and a sandwich in a plastic bag. She watches while Jake and I play Frisbee in the yard. Jake asks if she’d like to join us. She smiles and shakes her head no and scribbles more notes.
When we go inside to eat dinner, Jake says, “She made good cookies for Isaiah’s birthday treat last month. We should ask her to bring some next time she comes.” I decide it’s not a bad idea, send Jake outside with his request. It’s the least she can do since she keeps staring at me.
Wednesday night Izzy calls the tattoo parlour and asks if she can come back and live with me. She says things at Burke’s are awful.
“Has he yelled at you?” I say.
“He yells at Mom and she defends him,” says Izzy. “She says he’s the only really understanding guy she’s ever met. It’s a load of shit.”
“Is your mom home?” I say.
“She just left for work,” says Izzy. “That’s why I called you now.”
“I need to talk to her about this,” I say.
“You know she won’t listen to you,” says Izzy.
I bite my lip and say I’ll call Lee tomorrow.
On Thursday I phone Lee on my lunch brea
k, maybe not the best idea because I think I woke her up.
I say Izzy called me. “She’s not happy.”
“She’s adjusting,” says Lee.
“She says Burke still yells at you,” I say. “I thought you guys were going to start counselling.”
“We will when he can work it into his schedule,” says Lee. “Everyone is adjusting now. Izzy is learning what it’s like to have a dad again, and Burke is figuring out how he needs to act around kids. They’ll be good for each other. He’s helped me so much, you know. No other guy has ever done that. Izzy just needs to give him a chance. She’ll be fine.”
Lee hangs up the phone.
I think about calling her back but I don’t. I know she’s a stubborn woman, won’t listen. And I hate telling others how to parent.
Thursday afternoon Jake and I find Mrs. Simon in her chair on our lawn with a paper plate on her lap filled with chocolate chip and sugar cookies. She hands me the plate cheerfully while telling me that my second set of ears look slightly pointed at the ends and that’s probably a bad sign. I thank her for the cookies.
At work we have sold almost one hundred shirts. People are popping in and out of the store, wanting to get photos with me and paying five dollars for the privilege. The fuss is strange because I’ve been working at the parlour for a few years and nothing like this has happened. Zip says I was just keeping too low a profile and not to doubt the power of merchandizing.
The annoying part is when people take pictures of me without permission. Tonight I’m near the back of the shop sterilizing equipment and all of the sudden there’s a flash like lightning and some college guy is hightailing it out of the store.
“Asshole,” I yell and glance over to Zip who winces and looks at the floor. I glare at my black and white image on the tattoo parlour window. Before Jake and I leave, Zip gives me a large check for shirt royalties. It’s money Jake and I need, so I don’t press the issue further. I tell myself things will get better, that all the stupid publicity will die down and I’ll still get my extra hundred a month.