Bearded Women (23 page)

I snatch the scissors up off the floor, walk to Em’s dresser with my daughter still in tow, yank open a drawer and grab a long-sleeved lavender shirt. One of her favourites. I sit down on the floor near the still-crying Jenna, make Em sit beside me, and hand her the scissors and shirt.

“Okay,” I say, “cut it up.”

Em stares at me, then down to the shirt.

“I’m not going to do it,” I say. “We’re going to sit here until you do.”

When she makes the first cut it’s fast, on the bottom hem. She snips up to the neckline like she doesn’t even care. She takes off the sleeves, cuts them at the shoulder, then lengthwise into two pieces. When Em cuts down the back of the shirt, from the neck to the bottom hem, she’s not going as rapidly.

“Twelve pieces of fabric,” I say. “At least.” I want something that can’t be stitched back together.

Em cuts at a slower and slower pace as the shirt is reduced to dustrags. It was a gift from me for her ninth birthday, a shirt she wore to school almost every week. It looked nice on her. I tell myself Em’s growing, would have been too big to wear it in another half year. By the time Em has cut the shirt into eleven pieces, she’s like Jenna, near tears.

“One more,” I say, laying a larger fabric piece in her lap.

“I’m sorry,” she wails, but I know it’s not because of remorse.

“Keep going,” I say.

It takes her five minutes to make the cut. Em’s hands move like the scissors weigh ten pounds. She stands. The shirt pieces fall from her lap. Em flops on her bed and curls her body tight while I gather her sister’s shirts and sleeves, pad out of the room.

“You should have made her cut up more than one,” Jenna says when I find her in the living room. “Or let me cut up one of her shirts.”

“One is enough,” I say. “Especially since she had to do it.”

“But she cut up fourteen of mine,” says Jenna.

“And I’ll sew them back together,” I say, “or buy you new ones. Probably both.”

“It still isn’t fair,” says Jenna, peering down at her arms then at mine.

“No.” I sit beside her, go slack against the back of the couch.

“Can I have some ice cream?” she says.

“Sure,” I say because I can’t lift my hands to stop her, or to do much of anything else. Unfairness is the way of the world. But how do you tell that to a twelve-year-old? Maybe you don’t. You just give them ice cream.

That night I sleep deeply, get up at ten in the morning and am greeted by a silent house. The girls have gotten themselves cereal for breakfast and are in different rooms—Em in the living room and Jenna in their bedroom, both reading. Jenna says good morning, tells me that the lotion we put on last night helped and her skin is feeling better. Em doesn’t say anything. I figure it’s best to let her pout.

On Saturdays I work a short day, noon until four, and trust the girls to care for themselves for a few hours. They know the number for the jewellery store and the neighbours are around if they need anything. Today I am wary to leave them, but I tell myself that after a night of rest we’re all feeling better. Or at least less hostile.

At work I don’t do much, just sit in my lab, brush the few skin flakes from my worktable, and stare at the tiny diamonds I use to grade colour. So small and even and perfectly cut.

When I arrive home, Em runs up to the car and hugs my legs as soon as I get out.

“Jenna locked me out of house,” she wails. Em says it happened when she went outside to get the mail, and she’s spent the past hour on the swing set. Jenna knows Em is terrified to speak with the neighbours, even though they’ve known her since she was born. I sit down with Em on the front step, pat her back before telling her to wait a moment longer while I go talk to Jenna.

“She left me alone,” Em says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Is she gonna get punished?”

“Yes,” I say quietly.

My older daughter is sitting on the couch wearing shorts and a T-shirt, her arms and legs flecked with white. She’s watching television.

“How angry are you?” Jenna says.

“I don’t know yet,” I say.

Jenna says Em got mad at her because she wouldn’t let Em watch TV. “I said she couldn’t since she was grounded, then she went into the kitchen and got a pie plate and started burning skin flakes in it. It smelled awful. I yelled at her and told her to stop. She didn’t. So I grabbed the matches from her. When she went outside I locked the door. I didn’t want to put up with her shit.”

“Jenna,” I sigh.

“The pie plate’s still there.”

I take three steps to the kitchen door and see it on the table, an aluminum tin with neat piles of small white flecks and tiny charred bits inside. Tweezers and a magnifying glass are on the table beside the pie plate. I imagine Em burning the skin with scientific care. The scent of char is thick in the house. Amazing how such tiny pieces can create such a stench.

Jenna is watching some cartoon with little purple space aliens trying to take over a city. They keep getting run over by busses and shaken by dogs. It’s kind of dumb. Jenna giggles.

“Finish the show,” I say. “But after that, grounded like your sister. Same rules apply.”

Jenna nods like she hadn’t expected anything different. Sometimes you do what you have to do to get a moment of control. It’s not hard to notice how the house is quieter with Em outside. Occasionally, very occasionally, I wonder if she wishes she had ichthyosis, too. I need to collect my younger daughter, but for a moment I stand in the kitchen doorway, looking at the burned skin bits, savouring silence.

Photo #1 (from personal archives):
Most of my face. All of my nose but only my right eye. Too much of my hair. The new perm makes me look like a poodle.

Photo #2 (from personal archives):
My right hand with the quarter-inch hole in the center, between the bones of my ring and middle fingers.

Photo #3 (from personal archives):
My left hand, a mirror image of the right.

It’s my first new camera in years. I have to test it out so I’m taking pictures of myself, the stuff in my apartment, and my hands. I had the holes made in them ten years ago. I was sure I’d earn more than two hundred a week travelling as The Fountain Woman.

Newspaper photograph dated 15 March:
The place where our trailer stood. Blackened cement block foundation, some of the charred metal shell, a few spindly trees in the background. Caption: “Local family meets with devastation.”

I decided to get the holes made the year after my folk’s trailer caught fire, or rather exploded, because of a leak in the propane tank. Least that’s what the propane company said. They claimed it was a hardware problem, but I think it was because someone forgot to seal the tank properly when they’d delivered propane earlier in the afternoon. After the explosion there was little we could do to prove that, because there was nothing left. The trailer was gone. Or, more precisely, in little pieces scattered over a quarter-mile radius.

We moved into a new trailer two and a half blocks from the old one. Smoke-stained kitchen utensils, clothing, and photo album pages came back to us over a period of months. Every other day we’d get a pair of socks or a sweater, a couple of butter knives, and a few sooty pictures. We washed the clothes, scoured the dishes and silverware, and I spent evenings going over the pictures with a kneadable eraser from the art supply store, trying to get off more soot.

Polaroid snapshot taken by my mother of my father sitting on the brown corduroy living room couch that we got from the Salvation Army (the cushions smelled faintly of sour apples). He wears a red sweatshirt and sweatpants, eats a powdered sugar donut, and has white flecks trailing down the front of his shirt.

Three weeks after the first trailer blew up and two weeks after we’d moved into the new one, my father went crazy. He refused to eat anything but donuts and orange drink, stopped talking in the mornings, didn’t say much in the evenings, and refused to go to the paperclip and thumbtack factory with my mother. They’d met there, both worked in quality control.

“Please,” said my mother to my father every morning while I ate cornflakes. “You have to get dressed.”

My father smiled at my mother’s request like she’d complimented his hair, and turned back to the morning news programs. I don’t think he watched the shows as much as he stared at the moving mouths, the business suits, and the cheery expressions of the anchor people. Something about them, their orderly happiness, calmed him.

At the factory my mother opened every hundred and fiftieth box of clips or tacks and counted the number to make sure the machines were accurate. Often she came home with band-aids on her thumbs. My father made sure the thumbtacks had points and the paperclips were bent correctly. He liked the exactness of his job, the scales he used to be certain the right amount of metal was being used in each paperclip and tack.

My mother took the Polaroid picture hoping that if my father saw himself he’d come to his senses. He nodded at the photo and took another bite of his donut.

I was eighteen and had already decided to save my family by getting holes in my hands.

Grainy black-and-white novelty postcard of my grandfather, charred slightly in the lower left corner. He is young, maybe twenty-five, wears a short-sleeved white shirt and long black pants. He sits in a wooden chair, his hands tight against the chair arms, as blurry streams of water shoot up through the holes in his palms. White lettering under his picture: “The Fantastic Human Fountain.”

There are two different stories about how my grandfather got the holes in his hands, but both of them involve him horsing around with a cousin while drinking bootleg whiskey and staking tomatoes in the garden. In one story the cousin pounded a metal stake through my grandfather’s hand on a dare. In the other they were fencing and my grandfather fell down, tried to use the stake to support himself. The stake went between two bones in his hand in just the right place, left a hole the surgeon kept open with a surgical stainless steel tube. Legend has it my grandfather was still kind of drunk when he told the surgeon to do this, but he was also remembering the carnival that had been through town two months earlier, and perhaps already dreaming up his act as The Human Fountain.

My grandfather had a somewhat reputable surgeon make the matching hole in his right hand and insert another stainless steel tube. The wooden chair, his only prop, had hoses running up through the arms. Grandpa made good money on the circuit but left after ten years and returned to farming. He died in a combine accident when my dad was twenty-seven, five years before I was born.

“Sideshow life was probably safer than life on a farm,” my dad often said when I was young. “I think he wished he would have stayed there.”

“Craziness,” said my mother and shook her head. “It wouldn’t have been the place to raise a family.”

My father shrugged. I think he would’ve preferred life in a sideshow to life working in a factory, but he was never one to say what was on his mind. This might account for the fact that, rather than say anything about the trailer exploding, he decided it would be easier to go crazy.

Polaroid snapshot of used beige Ford station wagon with brown Naugahyde seats and pink plastic beads hanging from rearview mirror. Sleeping bag, tent, two grocery bags of snacks, one pot, a cooking spoon, two gallons of water, and camp stove are not entirely visible but all piled in back seat.

When I decided to get the holes made I was thinking of the lost trailer, thinking of fountains, thinking of water, even though water wouldn’t have helped the trailer explosion. I bought the station wagon cheap, planned to travel and be the second human fountain in our family, have appearances at tattoo parlours and carnivals, and send money home to my folks in Ohio. This way they wouldn’t have to feed me, and I figured they could use the extra cash, what with my dad going crazy and all. I didn’t tell my mother about my plan to get the holes, just said that I would be on the road for the summer, working in a funnel cake booth at county fairs.

“I don’t like the thought of you running all over like that,” she said. “It’s not safe.” She unloaded a bag of groceries, including boxes of donuts for my dad.

“I want to save for college,” I said. A black lie, but one that would pacify her.

“College,” she said, setting the sixth box of donuts on the table. She and my father had wanted me to take classes at the local community college in the fall, but when the trailer exploded, their extra money went with it.

“Maybe graphic design or something,” I told her because she always said I was good at art. I hated drawing, even if I wasn’t bad at it. I felt worse for my parents than I did for myself about the college money. They loved me. I wanted to help them.

“In September,” she said and nodded. Her words were blessing enough for me to leave, even though I planned to be travelling in the fall. I knew I was not a college sort of person, but my mother never believed this. I figured since she gave birth to me, it was her right to pretend I was who she wanted me to be, and my duty not to object too loudly while going my own way.

Colour photograph from ten-year-old newspaper advertisement. Cream-coloured brick building with sign over the front door: Piercings and Tattoos. Heavy burgundy curtains frame the windows on either side of the door.

I took pictures of my grandfather to the piercing salon, photos of him and my father when Dad was ten, holding a hose up to Grandpa’s hand and shooting a stream of water through. The fellow who owned the salon was Indian, claimed to be a fakir who had pierced the hands and feet of other fakirs. He didn’t have holes in his own hands, but there were black-and-white pictures all over the walls, photos of him with swords and nails sticking out of his arms. His face was wrinkled enough to make him about seventy-five, but his hands looked young, free of raised veins and knobbed knuckles usually associated with age. The fakir nodded at the pictures of my grandfather, said the operation would be free if I’d agree to be on display while I healed.