Bearded Women (6 page)

Mr. Chicken is still averting his gaze from me and making customers uncomfortable. I worry that if my plan doesn’t work soon we’ll start losing a lot of business to the fast food restaurants on either side of us. We’re the only one with fried ice cream and fried wasabi mushrooms, but they aren’t worth braving the glare of a fat guy.

After I haven’t shaved for a week, my employees are so freaked out that they forget to be scared of Mr. Chicken. I have to call a meeting after the lunch rush and explain it, how the hair started growing when I hit puberty and I’ve just recently stopped shaving.

“I think it’s cool,” says one of my female employees.

“It’s kind of gross,” another mutters.

“I’d date a girl with a beard,” says one of the guys, but he’s the sort who always brown-noses so I don’t know if I can take him seriously.

When Mr. Chicken comes in for lunch I sit one table away and glare at him over my coffee. With the beard slight but apparent he keeps glancing at me, blinking, looking away, looking back. Other customers are looking at me, too, but I hope I’m not as off-putting as Mr. Chicken. No one seems to leave because of me.

After work I go to have a drink at the bar two blocks from my apartment. Part of me wants to try out the beard. The other part really needs a drink. I order a cosmopolitan and sit at the bar watching guys watch me. Because it’s a little dim they can’t see the beard at first. I know they’ve spied it when their eyes get wide.

The guy who sits next to me and orders a Guinness is wearing a polo shirt.

“So,” he says, “is that a beard or just really good makeup?”

“It’s a beard,” I say.

“Wow,” he says and pauses. “Wow.”

This is the extent of our conversation, but to his credit he sits beside me until he’s finished his beer. We’re both watching the soccer match on the television above the bar.

“Well,” he says, “have a good night.”

“You, too,” I say. I order another cosmopolitan and glance sideways at this group of three guys sitting in a booth at the far wall, whispering and looking over at me every once in a while. I start wondering what kind of guy is going to find a beard attractive on a woman. I could either find the really open-minded ones or the weirdos who think it would be cool to have a bunch of kids with beards.

After a couple more minutes one of the guys from the booth comes over and nods at me. “We really like your beard,” he says. “Very well trimmed.” He’s smiling.

“Thanks,” I say and nod. I have no idea whether he’s being serious or sarcastic but I’ve always been terrible at judging such things. The guy returns to his friends and they all look over to me and one of them gives a little wave. I wave back and then watch more soccer. I don’t leave the bar until after they’ve gone. They were probably sincere but I don’t feel like taking chances.

At home I wash my face and brush my teeth and wash my face a second time to get out the toothpaste that stuck in the beard. It’s an odd sensation to be growing it out. A weight has been lifted. I don’t have to hide it anymore. A weight has been added. The way most people look at me now, I might as well have hair growing all over my body.

On my day off I go to Hairyette’s for advice on beard maintenance. It’s still a little stubby and I have a sort of lumberjack look. My stylist tells me that in another week or two it will look much better, silkier. It just takes patience.

“You may never want to be clean shaven again,” she says.

Her clients say the beard suits me, but they are the sort of people who are used to bearded women and probably like the aesthetic.

When I look in the mirror I’m still not sure. I’m getting used to it the way people get used to a new haircut. It looks really strange at first, but somehow starting the beard, having it, makes it easier to keep growing.

Mr. Chicken grimaces the next day when I sit at the table next to him. Customers are now looking at him and me. I’m stealing his limelight. This wasn’t what I’d originally intended, but perhaps if Mr. Chicken gets pissed enough, he’ll leave my restaurant alone and find someone else to bother.

Even though many of my employees say they don’t mind the beard, a week after our chat in the break room, the girl who didn’t like the beard quits.

“It isn’t about the beard,” she says, but she doesn’t look at me while she’s saying it.

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.

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 pilgrimages 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.