Free Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt Page B

the accident and they send cards. Some bring casseroles and small potted plants to her apartment. I smile and try to thank them, but it’s difficult. The snakes and I are too depressed and dopey because of the painkillers. That haze quells some of our sadness, at least for now, but I have too much time to think. I have a responsibility to my snakes, these seventy-seven living things on my head. I have to make sure they are safe and healthy, but sometimes I don’t know how to best care for them. It makes me a little mad; I didn’t ask to be given these snakes, but now I have them and I have to negotiate that.
    My snakes are like little kids. Defenceless.
    The Garden Society ladies come to Violet’s apartment for a meeting, cluster around my bed and chat in quiet voices. We mourn with Olivia—she’s in a rental agreement she can’t break but her apartment is so full of dust it’s making her allergies worse. No amount of sweeping seems to help. So many of us Garden Society members are in that situation, a state of trapped. We have fixed lives—fixed incomes, fixed rental agreements, fixed expenses—and none of us can break out. We feel hopeless. Like there are no good options.
    My prof leaves messages on the answering machine at my apartment (how did he get my number?) wondering why I was absent from class and saying he missed me and he hopes he didn’t do anything to make me upset. It’s too creepy.
    After a week of recovery I go back to work, still grieving.
    Rick, one of the bouncers who’s always trying to hit on me, asks if I’d like to come back to his apartment for a nightcap and a backrub.
    “I know you lost one of . . .” he touches his head. “Maybe I could help you feel better.”
    I stare at him so hard he’s perfectly still for a moment. “You have no fucking clue,” I say.
    “You could tell me how you feel at my place,” he says.
    I slam an empty plastic pretzel bowl against the counter. It breaks in two. Rick steps back. “You have no fucking clue,” I say again.
    He doesn’t bother me for the rest of the evening.
    The snakes weigh my head down, literally and physically. Tonight they are heavy with confusion. Drunk people depress me further. I can’t wait to leave the bar. My snakes drink beer out of near-empty glasses when I’m not looking. I’m toasted by the time I get off work, barely have it in me to walk home and flop on the couch. I’m mad at my snakes, prefer to medicate with chocolate, but they want booze. I go to the bathroom but can’t throw up, peer at myself in the mirror, and freeze for a moment because I look like shit. The snakes loll around my head. My eyes are dark, sunken, drunk.
    That’s what makes me puke.
    It’s better that way. Gets all the toxins out of my system. I rinse my mouth with warm water. I have to get away from the bar. I can’t let my snakes fall to temptation and develop some chemical dependency. They don’t have my willpower. I need to give them a better life than bartending and book sorting, but that means quitting my jobs, going to school full-time.
    That will be heavy financially. I worry it will be hard on my snakes, give them more headaches, but I’m so tired of all those long nights and the turn-to-stone cracks from drunk people. When I call Violet and tell her about the decision, she is pleased and worried.
    “Just don’t take on too much, dear,” she says.
    Too much debt. Too much stress. Too many dreams of the millions of ways my life will improve after I get a degree. I know nothing is guaranteed.
    When I tell Katie about my decision, she says I’m crazy.
    “Stick with what you’ve got,” she says. “It’s better than debt. You can sleep at night. I’ve given up on anything more, just need a paycheque to feed myself and my kid. The hell you know is better than the hell you don't.”
    She makes sense, speaks to my worries. She was the first in her family to go to college, to try and lift herself out of a blue-collar