She stopped crying. Her face relaxed. Her bones ceased to ache. Odessa rolled to her stomach and planted her hands on the floor, stood up. Something around her body had been lost, a sense of grounding, gravity. She felt a release in her legs, her hips, her spine, sweet and sudden. The smell of the sea was potent. New strength surged in her arms. Odessa knew that for at least a few minutes she could be powerful outside the shell. She pictured herself carrying the scallop to her car, driving home with the trunk cracked open slightly.
When she grasped the edge of the shell with her thin fingers, she saw her veins were growing brighter, nearly glowing through her skin. The shell slid more easily than she had expected, off of the cushions, onto the concrete garage floor. Martin gaped at her.
Odessa pulled it down the driveway, paused for a moment when she felt her arms ache, but a second wave of strength rolled through her body, and she kept going.
“I’ll send a cheque,” she called to Martin.
Martin could not move. He winced at the sound of the wooden shell grating against the concrete driveway, but shoving it off the table with Odessa inside had drained him. He could not chase her. As Odessa lugged the giant scallop to her car, her power was mythic. But when she was halfway there, Martin noticed her pace beginning to slow. Her body bowed over, closer to the ground, but she kept lumbering backwards, even as her fingers loosened incrementally. He knew what was coming. The slow motion tumbling forward as if into a pool of water. But not just yet. Odessa pulled the scallop along.
For a moment the driveway dissolved, the harsh cement went blue, the shell floated along and Martin envisioned the barest shimmer of a young woman’s gold hair, hands covering herself in modesty, then he saw the second figure, the silver grey of an old woman’s hair, her nakedness without apology as she tugged the shell through the waves.
I’m taking inventory in the walk-in freezer, have my hat and gloves on and am counting packages of sandwich buns, when one of my employees barrels through the door to tell me Mr. Chicken is back. She shivers in her green Golden Lotus blouse, grabs my elbow, drags me from the freezer.
“I can’t very well do much about him,” I say, taking off my hat.
“But he scares us,” she says. “You’re the manager. Manage him.”
By the time she and I reach the front counter, Mr. Chicken already has his first box of chicken bits in hand and is waddling back to a table to start eating. I don’t know who first started calling him Mr. Chicken. Probably one of the high school boys who works the fryers. Mr. Chicken is maybe fifty years old, balding, has salt and pepper hair, wears a white shirt and dark pants and a tie. He weighs about five hundred pounds and his stomach avalanches over his waistband like the extra is going to drop off at any moment.
Mr. Chicken’s gaze wanders around the room, staring hard at Golden Lotus customers and employees alike. We all watch his ritual from the corners of our eyes. He eats the first box of chicken bits then returns to the counter and orders a second twenty-piece box, lumbers back to his table and eats them all. He returns a third time, a fourth, a fifth, until he has eaten one hundred chicken bits. Then he orders a cherry turnover. An apple one. A vanilla fried ice cream. A chocolate. We watch him for twenty-five minutes. The way he keeps eating is scary, mechanical. Some of my employees think he must have four stomachs like a cow, that he’s not really human. In the past month, more than a few customer survey cards have come back with “Get rid of the weird fat guy” written in the comments section.
Mr. Chicken stares at two little kids sitting at the next table until they cry. There is no expression on his face. I know I have to say something to him. I scratch the stubble on my chin. I’m not a very big woman and I like to go by the traditional idea that the customer is always right, but upsetting children is going too far. I take a deep breath and plod into the dining room area toward his table, hear my employees hold their collective breath.
“Pardon me, sir,” I say. “I’m the manager at this restaurant.”
Mr. Chicken stares at me. “The food’s fine. Good food.”
I don’t know why I get mad at the staring. His eyes are a little sad, a little angry, a little like they’re daring me to do something.
“Some of our customers reported that you were looking at them intensely,” I say in my most polite manager voice. “They worried if you were okay.”
Mr. Chicken stuffs the end of a cherry turnover in his mouth. “This a restaurant or a shrink’s office?”
“Those kids you were staring at got upset,” I say.
“Not my fault.” Mr. Chicken wipes his mouth with a napkin. He smells of sweat and grease.
“I see,” I say. “Thank you for your time, sir. I hope you continue to enjoy your meal.”
I trudge behind the counter feeling rather like an idiot. All of my employees are biting their lips. I was unable to save them from the stares of Mr. Chicken. But I don’t feel right kicking someone out of the restaurant and I’m too stressed to be assertive. I had an awful date last night. James. We’d been out three times before and after dinner I figured I had to tell him that I was a closeted bearded lady. Because I’m blonde and shave every morning it’s really not noticeable, but relationships are always a problem. I explained the beard to James as we sat side by side on the couch in my apartment. He stared at me, then said he had to leave. When I asked about another date, he said that if he wanted to date someone who shaved his face he’d date a guy. Of course it hurt. Of course I cried after he left. But I’ve heard worse. Women with beards are scary. We cross that line between masculine and feminine. Maybe the men I date figure I’m going to run around hammering nails and fixing toilets and lifting weights and doing all of those stereotypical guy things and make them feel like pussies. Or at least less like guys.
Mr. Chicken lumbers out of Golden Lotus at two-thirty and my employees breathe a collective sigh of relief.
“Can’t you call the police on him or something?” says one of the guys who works the drive-through.
I try because I’m not sure what else to do. The dispatcher’s “hello” sounds bored and unhelpful but I tell her the story anyway, how there’s a man staring at the customers in my restaurant and I’m not sure what to do.
“I’d like to take legal action,” I say.
“Is he disturbing the peace?” she says.
“Not really,” I say. “He’s quiet, but he’s making little kids cry.”
“We can’t do much about that, ma’am,” says the dispatcher, “not unless your fat man is trying to eat somebody.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I say.
“If he’s really fat,” she says, “you could sell tickets.”
I relay the call to my employees who are not amused. My afternoon is only mildly redeemed because I get to take off work a little early at four so I can make it to my haircut at Hairyette’s by six. Even though Hairyette’s is two hours away it’s worth the drive. My stylist, the only other bearded lady I know, has a beautiful silky brown beard that she keeps neatly trimmed.
“I keep hoping you’ll come back with a lovely blonde beard,” she says while she shampoos my hair.
“It looks good on you,” I say. “It would look silly on me.”
“You need to try it,” she says, wrapping a towel around my head. “Get used to it.”
I tell her about James so she can give me sympathy.
“You have to grow out the beard and then start looking,” she says. “Some men love beards. My ex-husband for instance. Now there was a man who always said, ‘If I can have a beard, my wife might as well have one, too.’”
“But he’s your ex,” I say.
“Honey,” she says, “there’s a lot more to a marriage than facial hair issues.”
I nod, but in the end it’s too easy to shave every morning and keep myself looking normal. One of my ex-boyfriends suggested electrolysis, but it’s too expensive, too painful, and I’m afraid of scarring. I might end up in a worse place than I am already.
I feel better after the haircut at least, good enough to visit Mr. Yamoto and give him the weekly report on the restaurant. Mr. Yamoto owns Golden Lotus, cooked there for a number of years before his joint pain got too bad. He doesn’t get out of the apartment much now, weighs about three hundred and fifty pounds, but says he used to be two hundred pounds heavier. He was a sumo wrestler back in Japan, a celebrity, but after he injured his ankle and retired his fan club dissolved, the letters slowed to a trickle. He wallowed in a thick depression for a few months before deciding to come to America. Once he whispered to me that the restaurant saved him.
“Cooking,” he says. “That was the answer.” He designed the menu to be based around tempura fried foods. Everything is lightly battered and then bathed in hot oil, which explains why many of our regular customers aren’t that much smaller than Mr. Chicken, although they are quite a bit nicer.
When I get to Mr. Yamoto’s apartment he nods at me, a tiny bow, and invites me in for really strong Japanese coffee. As we sip I tell him I’m not going out with James anymore. Mr. Yamoto turns his coffee cup around in his large hands and shakes his head, tells me I’ll find the right person soon enough. He doesn’t know about the beard.
I open my mouth to tell him of Mr. Chicken, but I can’t. I don’t want to whine. I want to show Mr. Yamoto that I can be in control of the restaurant. And getting special attention makes me queasy. So I tell him that the new tempura wasabi mushrooms are selling really well.
“I knew it,” says Mr. Yamoto who is always trying to develop odd new menu items.
He pats my hand when I leave and tells me to keep up the good work.
When I open the door to my apartment the air smells heavy and greasy even though I just had a ham sandwich for dinner. I rub my slight chin stubble, the prickly bits that are apparent around this time in the evening. Sometimes I shave twice a day, once in the morning and once after dinner, even if I’m just going to stay home and watch television. It’s reassuring to stand in the bathroom with my electric razor and run my hand over my smooth chin, know that a moment before it had been rough.
Mr. Chicken is back at Golden Lotus the next day, staring at people with a renewed sort of meanness. After he buys his third box of chicken bits I approach his table again.
“Sir,” I say, “we value you as a customer but ask you stop staring at people.”
Mr. Chicken squints up at me. “If I want to look at other people and have them look at me, what’s wrong with that?”
“We do not tolerate hostility toward other customers in this restaurant,” I say.
Mr. Chicken harrumphs.
Ten minutes later, when Mr. Chicken is on his second apple turnover, a woman comes up to report that he’s been looking at her so intensely that she lost her appetite.
I march back to his table.
“Sir,” I say, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“No.” He glares at me.
“Sir,” I say again, “if you don’t leave we may have to resort to more drastic measures.”
“Go ahead,” he says.
We stare at each other. His eyes are hard and the colour of cocoa. After a few moments I nod at him curtly.
“Very well,” I say and troop back behind the counter. Half of my employees are cowering in the break room and worrying over what he is thinking, what he might do, if he looks like the sort of guy who’d drive his car into a fast food restaurant. I tell them that they watch too much television and give myself one more day to think of something before calling Mr. Yamoto.
In the morning I’m running late and don’t shave, go through the day with a bit of blonde stubble. I’m a little nervous about it, but the beard is pretty much invisible even to me, the roughness only apparent when I touch my face. During my lunch break I decide to start staring at Mr. Chicken. He wants people to look at him so I do, sit at a table across from his and fold my hands and focus my gaze on his flushed face. He glances at me and then looks away, stares at others who are more willing to become uncomfortable. I rub my stubble as I stare and for once it feels kind of neat, rough and scratchy, mirrors my mood.
The next day I hit the snooze button three too many times, can’t do anything but throw on clothes and run out the door, so the stubble stays. It itches a little and is visible if someone is standing really close to me. Mr. Chicken doesn’t look at me but seems angrier than usual. I swear he’s the reason why five customers get out of line and go to the restaurant next door. While I watch them walk out without buying anything, I decide to grow out my beard. I will make Mr. Chicken stare at me so he won’t look at anyone else. I’ll shock him, scare him, show him I don’t look like everybody else, either, but that doesn’t mean I go around and make little kids cry.
This plan seems perfectly brilliant for four hours until I leave work and am standing in line at the grocery and realise that the rest of the world will see my beard, too. I glance from side to side to see who is watching, but the cashier doesn’t even give me a second glance.
I have been shaving every day since I was fourteen years old, since the beard started growing and my mother found me in the bathroom rubbing my chin. She screamed and dragged my father in. He showed me how to use an electric razor. My mother bought me one of my own the next day.
“You’re already shaving your legs,” she sighed. “We’ll try not to think of this as being that different.”
Mom was always the optimist.
I had friends in high school but never dated. Easier that way. I never wanted anyone looking at me, knew the girls who didn’t shave their legs and arms were teased something awful. They didn’t care, but I did, fretted constantly about what people would say if they knew I had a beard. When you look like everyone else, you don’t really think about how you can stand in a group of people and have no one pay much attention to you. Maybe some days you want to dye your hair pink or wear weird clothing but it’s easy to take off, easy to fit in again when you want to. When you need to. It’s when you don’t look like everyone else that you realise how important it is.
By day four I’m getting used to not shaving even though the beard still isn’t that apparent. Every time I reach for my razor I bite my lip, tell myself just one day longer. I’ve always had a certain pride in being able to conceal my beard, in knowing that nobody’s the wiser unless I go out of my way to tell them about it. But it’s rarely good when I do. I repeat to myself that maybe my stylist is right and I just need to get used to it.