Bearded Women (21 page)

“That was marvellous, dear,” she says, kissing Iris on the cheek with red painted lips.

Bulky Dutchmen shake Iris’s hand and gaze at her flat stomach, murmur congratulations while gripping half-eaten bankets like relay sticks. The judge, a slight toothpick woman in a white blouse and skirt, hands Iris a burlap bag of one hundred assorted tulip bulbs, a five hundred dollar cheque, and a first place plaque with two tiny white wooden shoes at the top, red tulips painted on the toes. Iris is crowded by contestants who want to touch her thin fingers. One man asks if he’d seen her picture in the Plain Dealer. A matronly woman drags her paunched husband across the stage to greet Iris.

“We remember you from the cheesecake contest,” they say. “That was something.”

Iris smiles, surprised how comfortable she feels among these complete strangers. They are fellow eaters, thick-fingered and amicable, realise the need to stick together because no one else understands them, or, even worse, thinks they are pigs. But it is about survival, something primal. Those who can eat the most live. Those who can’t die. Gluttons have staying power.

Three reporters at the bottom of the stage cluster at her feet, ask if she does any special training. Iris shakes her head, says it’s all in the mind, determination. She cradles her plaque, waves to the crowd, feels the tap on her shoe.

Flynn.

He is easily shoved aside by a cluster of photographers from the Grand Rapids Free Press, Holland Sentinel, Kalamazoo Gazette and Muskegon Chronicle who jostle for her picture. Iris poses with her plaque balanced on her hip. She tells them the correct spelling of her name twice, and explains Nature’s Suds and how Michiganders can find the soaps in fine gift shops. Iris feels Flynn grimace from twenty feet away, but her stomach and head are too full for it to make any difference. She descends the stage steps and toes to him light as a dancer, ignoring his bricklike stance, shoulders square, arms crossed.

“You lied.” He looks ready to snatch her plaque and smash it on the ground.

“How did you find out about this?” she says, her tone low and hard.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says.

“You looked though my desk.” Bastard. She thumps away from him, swinging her bag of bulbs, heading to the parking lot at the other end of the festival grounds.

“No worse than you.” He tugs her sleeve.

“I sold all the soap yesterday,” she says, still marching ahead. “Five more shops.”

“Congratu-fucking-lations,” he says.

Iris swirls so fast Flynn knocks into her, almost loses his balance. He steadies himself on her shoulders, but she shakes his hands off.

“What is your problem with this?” she says.

“It’s taking over,” he says. “It’s not what we planned.”

She turns back around, starts jogging to the parking lot. He pants to keep up.

“You have to fold your own laundry a couple times a month,” she says. “Big fucking deal.”

“It’s more than that,” he says. “A baby. We want to get pregnant.”

“Screw you,” she says and breaks into a run. He grabs for her hand but she pulls it away. Iris doesn’t stop until she reaches her car. She settles her winnings inside and leans against the open door to wait for Flynn and his insurance agent paunch. He arrives sweating.

“Follow me back,” she says. Iris slips inside the car and ignores the shapes his mouth makes in protest.

They stop for gas in Fowlerville.

“I don’t understand this,” Flynn says across the gas pump. “You’re different than before.”

“I’m happy,” Iris says and thinks of Denise, free and single, how she said many people married within the competitive eating circuit.

“Can’t you see that eating that much is disgusting?” says Flynn. “It’s harmful to your body. To us. I don’t want you to do it.”

Iris slides her hands down her own hips, feels the nice edges of bone. She has dropped one clothing size, mastered the banket, and feels healthier than she has in years. Of course she is different.

In ways it is nice he finally knows. She doesn’t have to hide the cabbage or her water-drinking and can hang the wooden shoe plaque on their bedroom wall and look at it each morning before getting up to make coffee and toast and sometimes eggs. She feels terribly alive. Flynn looks like he isn’t sleeping enough, has constant half moons under his eyes, shakes his head no when she asks if something is wrong. Iris makes three batches of soap every day to keep up with orders and goes to two eating events a month. Boston for baked beans, Louisville for moon pies, Mackinaw Island for fudge, and Oak Harbor for walleye (a charity event they ask her to do for a local food pantry; it doesn’t really count since they pit her against the mayor and police chief and fire chief, but they give her a cute little trophy with a golden walleye on top). Often she places, not first but enough to cover gas and hotel. Her only accident is in Memphis. Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Too thick and greasy. She can’t keep them down.

She sees many of the same people at eating events, semi-professional regurgitators with full-time jobs—cab driving, hairdressing, carpet installation, and a former pro football player. Most are rotund but exercise regularly, drag around caravans of cheerily plump wives and children. Iris has light dinners with other contestants and their family hordes. They exchange stories before she drives back to her hotel, calls Flynn and tells him when she’ll be back the next day. He never says much, just a quiet okay. She feels slight remorse, but his insurance business is going well, her soap business is going well, the house is well-kept, and she still brings him lunch.

Over Thai peanut noodles Flynn asks if Iris can make a fancy dinner on Friday. A prospective client is starting a screen printing venture, and needs business insurance, property insurance, and health insurance for ten employees.

“I want to have him and his wife over to meet you and discuss the policies,” says Flynn.

Iris winds a noodle around her fork.

“This weekend is bad,” she says. “I have the ice cream eating contest in Philly. Why not next week?”

“He has to make the decision by Monday,” says Flynn, noodles drooping from his fork. “It’s coming down to the wire, his business opens in a few days. I want him to see our home and my lovely wife and have a lovely meal cooked by my lovely wife.”

“Why couldn’t you eat out? Restaurants make better food than me.” Iris narrows her eyes. Flynn usually goes somewhere ritzy to wine and dine prospective clients, none of this “lovely wife” stuff. He knows about the ice cream contest, she scrawled it on the calendar at home.

“I need you here,” he says, putting down his fork and reaching for her hand. “I want your help.”

“I was going to leave Friday at four.” Iris lets him take her hand but leaves it limp.

“Can’t you just skip one?” Flynn rubs her fingers.

“First prize,” she says, “two plane tickets to anywhere in the United States and a thousand dollars.”

“There’s a lot of money at stake here,” Flynn says. “You have to help me.” He lets go of her hand, stabs fruitlessly at his noodles. Iris doesn’t say anything.

“You’ll make dinner?” Flynn says.

“Yes,” she says.

Flynn smiles. “Thank you.”

Iris makes lasagne on Friday morning, prepares garlic cheese bread, wraps both in foil and slides them in the fridge with heating instructions taped to the top. Flynn will have to romance the prospective clients in his lovely house without his lovely wife. She tells herself she is not a bad person, just has other agendas. Iris leaves for Philadelphia at three, following her afternoon cabbage. She is at her hotel by eight, drinks a pitcher of water, and does not call Flynn for fear he will disturb her concentration.

The competition is in a massive ice cream parlour built to look like the old-fashioned sort—waxed wooden floors, chrome fixtures, a counter with twirling stools, high school students standing sticky-handed and bored in the background. Round tables have been shoved into four long rows. Iris arrives an hour and a half early since sitting in the hotel makes her nervous. After she receives the red number five to pin to her T-shirt, she paces back and forth. She does not know what Flynn will say when she returns home. Iris tries not to think of his attempted sabotage; it makes her face hot. She smells the parlour odours of sugar and vanilla, gazes at the floor, comforting lines of honey-coloured wood. Glancing up, Iris sees contestants mobbing to pay the seven dollar entry fee, spectators gathering behind yellow caution tape, camera flash bulbs flickering prematurely. A man the size of a refrigerator who sports a goatee gives her a slight wave. She recognizes him, waves back. Bill, a cab driver in Tampa who holds the record for butter eating, seven sticks in five minutes. Iris respects his stamina, remembers him as a furnace of heat. He radiates it like a small dark sun.

Too soon the whistle blows, a signal for the contestants to arrange themselves behind the tables as half-gallon ice cream tubs are rolled out on large steel carts. Vanilla ice cream. The goal, to eat as much as they can in twelve minutes. Iris lifts her metal soup spoon, tests its weight as one would test a hammer. The whistle blows again and she plunges through her first tub. It is slightly melted, slides down smooth, but halfway through Iris senses the chill in her fingers, up her spine, the slight pain of cold trauma. Her mouth is freezing, her toes start to stiffen. She finishes the first tub, shoves it aside to grab the second, can barely feel herself swallow, thinks of ice cream hypothermia, her mouth too cold to melt it, but the ice cream keeps slipping down her throat as she shovels thick gobs. She cannot understand how or why her fingers keep moving though her brain is numb. This is worse than cheesecake or pizza or banket, worse than fried peanut butter and banana. Her thoughts slow, her stomach no longer able to tell how full it is, she thinks her body should be frozen, immobile, but somehow the spoon is moving, she empties the second gallon tub and goes to the third, tries to ignore the hoots and camera flashes. It is twelve minutes of trying to consume Antarctica.

When the whistle blows again Iris sags, can feel sharp points of cold in her throat. The four judges amble around the parlour, tallying buckets. She ate almost one and a half gallons, left a few gobs at the bottom. In a sparse five minutes the judges declare she has won second place, behind Bill who finished one and one half gallons exactly. Iris smiles a cold smile to herself. Not bad. One of the judges is shaking Bill’s hand when his cheeks bloat. He makes a sound like panic. Everything erupts. The crowd gasps repulsion and takes pictures.

Iris swallows deeply, averts her eyes, covers her ears to the cheers and gags of the audience. She tries not to listen while pale Bill contests the ruling, argues he is the rightful winner since he kept the ice cream down for seven minutes. The judges say no, it had to stay down for the awards ceremony and pictures and hour of official clamour following the contest to be legitimate. Iris sits in a corner, sips sugar free hot chocolate provided by the ice cream parlour and concentrates on warming herself from the inside out. She ignores the chemical cleansing ammonia that ice cream shop workers are using on the floor. Bill loses his battle but Iris thinks he looks too ill to fight. She feels rather like a fraud when the judge grasps her sticky fingers, presents the certificate with the gold embossed lettering, but she accepts the prize. Various strangers come to shake her hand. Bill huddles against a far wall with a Styrofoam cup. Eventually she toes over to him.

“I’m sorry,” Iris says. Her stomach churns; she has to think stay down, stay down.

“It’s not your fault,” Bill says, gazing at his knees without extending a hand. “We’ve all seen very experienced, professional people lose like this. No shame in it. Part of the sport.”

Iris nods, unsure what else to say, so she leaves him, drifts back to the crowd of congratulations.

When Iris arrives home at eight Saturday night, Flynn is watching television, a Chinese cooking show. He hates to cook.

“He wondered where my wife was.” Flynn changes the channel to another cooking show. “I said you were away on business. I burned the damn lasagne.”

“I won the contest,” Iris says. “We’re going to Charleston.” She pictures the sidewalks, the Spanish moss hanging from trees. It is where they honeymooned.

“You are,” he says. “I’m staying here.”

“You’re coming,” she says.

“You’re out to ruin my business.”

She says, “You didn’t get a contract from the screen printing business?”

Flynn grimaces. “Whether I did or not isn’t the point.”

“You’re going,” Iris says. “A week away, just a week. You got the damn customer.”

“I didn’t think you cared about that,” Flynn says. “You don’t care about us. You don’t care about having a baby.”

“I made your fucking lasagne and garlic bread,” she says.

He says, “But you didn’t stay, I wanted you to stay.”

“I was away on business,” Iris says.

The hotel is painted the colour of salt, has palm-green accents around the windows, a long Southern porch with rocking chairs. Her room is decorated pink as the inside of a cotton candy cone and faces the beach. Iris walks Rainbow Row and buys a woven basket at the indoor market. Through a telescope on the docks she gazes at Fort Sumner as it sits stoically in the water.

The morning of her third day, Iris is recognized by a family as she walks on the beach.

“Hey,” says a man the size of a loveseat, “you’re the ice cream woman. I saw you on TV. You’re even tinier in person. How do you do it?”

The loveseat man is married to a woman slim as two chopsticks. Their three children—a toddler, a middle-schooler, a teenager—are rounded with comfortable fat. The father hands the oldest his camera.

“Can we get a picture?” he says, scooting his family into position. Iris settles herself in the centre. The flash nearly blinds her. The father and mother and the two younger kids hug her in a mob like she is a long-lost cousin.

“Terrific,” says the father. Iris watches the five happily waddle across the sand, up the path to the hotel. She is the ice cream woman. Iris tilts her head and thinks how much the loveseat man resembles those on the eating circuit, amicable fellows with paunches soft as cream cheese. She tries to imagine herself marrying a man like that, tries to find something attractive in his girth. Softness, perhaps. Acceptance. Sand pulls gently at her feet as she continues down the beach. When Iris squints she thinks the dunes could be piles of brown sugar. Cinnamon ice cream. Oatmeal. Mounds and mounds with no end. The breeze across her shoulders is slight and free, bears the lonely breakfast smell of cold coffee and toast.