“Who writes those things?” she asks. She’s tried something new with her ear: four rings, three studs. I’m not used to seeing the diamond out of the bottom hole. She twists it, in its second position, between thumb and forefinger.
“It’s fast,” I say.
“It’s a drug,” she says. “Hormone. Thingie. Don’t you need a doctor?”
“There’s a doctor who prescribes it.” His name is stamped in the blank space on the back of the brochure. “Then the person at the studio who applies it is a registered nurse. She does the branding and scarification, too. It’s all very clean.”
“Oh great,” says Lelana. “Why are you doing this?”
The nurse has me sit back in a big old vinyl dentist’s chair. Over its fake leather maroon it has been spray painted with gold and silver swirls.
She wears rubber gloves and holds a thin cloth patch. It has been traced already with the shape of my beard: larger than a goatee, but trim, with a moustache. When I told the receptionist I wanted a beard, not something abstract, she tried to talk me into leaving a blank design, my initials or a geometric space, in the middle. That’s what the few fashionable bearded women are wearing, but I don’t want that.
The nurse takes a scissors and cuts carefully on the thin red ink lines until it looks like a construction paper beard a child would put on with a string. Then she peels the adhesive from the patch. With her gloves, it takes her two false starts to peel it. I have washed my face thoroughly and wiped an astringent over it; my chin tingles. My breath feels tight in my chest as I wait for her to drape the patch over my face. Her movements are precise and careful. Where the patch clings to my skin I feel a heat, building slowly. I don’t know if is the treatment or the excitement.
I have to wear the patch for twenty-four hours and go back to have things checked out. I have taken off work. I look at it in the mirror. It looks like a cheap Halloween costume. The patch is a light pink-tan color that looks like no one’s skin ever did. It is darker than my own skin, so that, if I squint and blur my vision, it almost looks like a pale beard. Or like something is wrong with my skin.
It stings coming off. The nurse holds a moist strip of paper up against my twinging cheek. She looks at it. It is blue.
“Good,” she says.
I have little white pills I’m supposed to take. In some way they direct testosterone to the follicles marked by the Hirexiden. They are so small they look like pills for a cat.
I swallow one with some orange juice and look in the mirror. My face looks the same as ever, but flushed, irritated, where the beard is supposed to come in. Makeup could smooth the color out, but the brochure says to clean the area gently and put no other products on it.
No one seems to look at me when I walk to the grocery store. I brush my fingers along the lower slopes of my cheeks. Has the peach fuzz fallen out, crowded out by more virile hairs? I can’t tell. My fingertips seem too sensitive, they seem to have caught the tingling of my reddened cheeks. I pull at my chin, then stop, hoping I haven’t disrupted anything.
I buy frozen burritos, pretzels, chocolate bars, and more orange juice. I think the checkout clerk is staring at me, too polite to say anything. I smile at him.
I wake Tuesday with a definite stubble on my chin. Lelana narrows her eyes at me when we pass in the bathroom hall. I put on mascara and a little more eyeshadow than I normally use and go to work.
Everyone in the office is pretty conservative in their grooming. They have seen facial hair in the high-fashion magazines and on MTV, but fancy, not like mine. Gaze after gaze glances off my chin without a word spoken. I spend most of the day on the phone trying to track down a lost report. The receiver pushes against the stubble. The people on the other end of the line don’t know it. I eat lunch outside, in the courtyard by the downtown sidewalks, watching pedestrians watching me, men almost frowning, women looking carefully bored.
Between bites, I rub the stubble with the back of my hand. If I kissed a man now he would be the one scratched, his cheeks as reddened as the back of my hand is reddened. Which of these men passing by would I kiss? They lower their eyes toward the sidewalk as they pass. I finish the sandwich I brought, two bags of chips, an apple, a banana, and a bottle of beer, watching the men go by.
It’s growing in thick and fast. I’m proud of it; I can hardly keep my hands off my face. The treatment, the hormones, they started it, but it’s my follicles that have risen to the call, that are putting forth this rich growth, this life on my face.
Lelana’s boyfriend comes over to pick her up Friday night and looks startled when I answer the door, the first open look of surprise I’ve seen. She must not have told him. She hurries past me and ushers him out of the apartment building. I sit through the afternoon watching arena football on cable. It’s cute how they run around the small stadium wearing skintight uniforms bare up to the knee. After the game I watch two old black-and-white romance movies. I realize Lelana has come back in without my noticing, only when I hear a sullen rattle of pots and pans in the kitchen. Two commercial breaks later, the door to her room shuts firmly.
I wake with my fingers buried in the short thick growth of my beard, and, comfortable, sleep again.
It’s beautiful, all the colors I thought it might be, an autumn beard of brown and red and sparkles of blond. I experiment with the best eye makeup to complement it. The sink is crowded with pencils and trays of powder and tiny tubs of cream in every color of brown, russet, charcoal. It is a month since I started growing the beard, and it is better than I ever hoped it would be. As I start to work on my face, I wonder idly where Lelana is. Around.
When I finish with my eyes I take a small scissors and carefully trim my beard until it is perfect.
I wear tight black pants and a clinging dark blue top, open in a small keyhole at the chest but with a turtleneck against which the beard glows. I shopped for the outfit for days. I brush my beard, I fluff it, I look at it from all angles in the mirror. I run my fingers quickly through my hair and go out the door.
Everyone looks at me at the club. Everyone.
I dance alone on the floor for an hour. For two hours. Then the men, tentatively at first, then in growing numbers, begin to crowd around me. I pick and choose from them. Too weedy, too loud, hair too limp. Finally I let one dance with me, slow, his breath warm and moist in my beard.
Lelana is not in the apartment when I take him home. I kiss the man and feel my beard catch on the angles of his smooth, naked cheeks, his lips. We do not need to talk. One hand tangled in my beard, the other on my breast, he lets me press him down against the bed. As he gasps, he pulls at my beard, pulls at my real and living beard.
When I send him home, I have not asked his name. I sleep with sweat and kisses in my beard and dream nothing at all.
In the morning, I shave.
Sometimes you lie half-asleep and the first line of a story floats into your mind, like a dream that forgets you must be fully asleep before it can come into the room, and as enigmatic and self-evident as any dream.
It doesn’t happen often enough.
This is a story about dealing with the pain from the alien by playacting the alien, incorporating the alien. It isn’t a difficult concept. People have been doing it for as long as we’ve been human. Children do it when they put on their mothers’ shoes. Adults do it, sometimes with less awareness. We take in change and survive. I think this is probably an optimistic story.