It would not quite be true to say that Norm Sellings was vain about his beard, and so it would not quite be true to say that he was depressed when he realized that he had accidentally shaved it off. If he were to be honest with himself, he would have to say that it was almost inevitable that the thing would happen eventually. After all, he was often tired in the morning when he trimmed his beard, and the mistake of leaving the plastic guard off of the electric razor was one he could have expected anyone to make. Still, it did give him a small pang sadness when he touched the newly bare spot with his fingers and rubbed carefully over the sandpaper stubble that was all that was left of his beard. But there were more pressing things to worry about at the time, and so, Norm pushed the sadness away, and contented himself that at least his mustache remained intact. And, he told himself, maybe it was time for a new look. He’d worn the beard for years, more out of habit than anything else, and although he had become accustomed to its presence he told himself that perhaps its absence was for the better.
He left for work later that morning with a slight smile on his face as he absentmindedly rubbed at his clean-shaven face. This was going to be a good day. He could feel it.
And in many ways it was a good day. The weather was nice, and the time passed quickly enough at the hardware store where Norm worked. But around about lunchtime something began to bother him. No one had noticed the change. Or at least if they had, they hadn’t said anything. Norm found this to be rather odd. He had expected someone to at least comment on the change, but so far there was nothing. Still, he knew that everyone was fairly busy and maybe they were too distracted to notice. Probably that was it.
He went home that night, still smiling that faint smile. The smile broke into a grin when he found that Shirley had baked his favorite pizza in the oven. She greeted him with a kiss and told him to go and wash up.
She didn’t say anything about the missing beard.
They ate and talked about the day, and he waited and waited for her to say something. It was almost a surreal feeling that crept up in him. He found a strange smile tugging upward at the corners of his mouth and he realized that he was suppressing the urge to laugh.
She didn’t notice! How could she not notice?
He almost said something, almost pointed out the obvious and asked her for her opinion. But he didn’t. He kept quiet. He decided to make it into a game. How long could he go before she noticed? A day? Two days? A week on the outside. Now that would make a good story, he told himself.
But the days passed by, and still she said nothing. No one said anything.
Most every day he found himself sitting across from Vincent Forbs in the break room, a man who had known him for upwards of ten years. They talked about sports. They talked about the weather. Vincent asked how Shirley was, and Norm asked how Vincent’s bum knee was. But neither of them mentioned Norm’s missing beard.
Norm started to get confused. After a week had gone by he had convinced himself that he must had spoken about it to someone and then let it slip his mind. True, he was no geezer, but at age forty two he was no spring chicken either. Maybe he was just starting to lose his edge.
He tried to convince himself that this was true, even though he didn’t want to believe it, because the alternative was far worse. The alternative, he now realized, was that no one was really seeing him anymore.
After two weeks without the beard, Norm decided to try a little experiment. Novelty wasn’t in his nature, but he figured he had at least a small midlife crisis coming to him pretty soon, and since he couldn’t afford a sports car and didn’t have any need for a secretary half his age, he went for the next best thing. He shaved his head.
He had always wanted to. He used to feel so ridiculous as he was slowly going bald, thinking how pathetic it made him look. He might have done it before now, but he’d had an idea the Shirley wouldn’t like it.
When he was done, he looked in the mirror and ran his hand over the smooth skin of his scalp. It was a good look and he liked it. Made him look, well certainly not younger, but at least less dorky. He thought to himself that he should have done this years ago.
He went to work that day like always, sure that by this time the game would be up. Surely they couldn’t be so dense as to be able to ignore his newly shaved head. But again, nothing happened. No one said anything. Norm caught himself idly rubbing the top of his head with his hand while he spoke to Vincent, hoping that maybe this action would draw his friends attention to the change but with no luck.
It wasn’t until near the end of Norm’s shift that one of the newer cashiers, Norm thought her name was Felicia, spotted him as he was bringing a cart of fertilizer out the front door for a customer and said, “You look different Mr. Norm.”
“Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah. You been losing weight or something?”
“Yes,” Norm replied. “That’s it. I’ve been losing weight.”
“Thought so,” she said with a kind of self satisfied smile.
Norm thought he would scream.
He went home to his wife half hoping that she would be furious, but she just smiled and kissed him hello like she always did. She cooked egg plant casserole that night, and as they sat eating she said, “You know I think you might be losing weight Norm. You should weigh yourself tonight before you go to bed.”
“Yes,” Norm said. “I suppose I should.”
He wished he had said something sooner now. It had seemed like a fun experiment at first, to see how long it took her to notice, but now the fact that she seemed not to see him terrified him. If he spoke now…what would he say? Could he ask her why she hadn’t said anything about his beard for so long? What kind of answer could he possibly hope to get?
He didn’t know, and he didn’t think he really wanted to find out. So he waited. After three days of nothing, Norm snapped a little inside; he decided he had to take it to the next level. He thought long and hard about what his next step should be. He first thought about shaving off his eyebrows, but then he reasoned that if no one had noticed the other changes to his face, no one would notice the lack of a few eyebrows. For a very brief moment the idea of wandering out into public completely naked crossed his mind, and he shuddered it away. Even if no one did notice him…no. It was too shameful even to think about. Instead he decided to take the middle ground.
The party shop down the road had a full supply of all kinds of costumes, but Norm stormed right past them all until he found himself looking at a display of clown makeup. He felt a little foolish as he paid for the stuff, trying to prepare himself mentally for whatever questions the clerk might ask, but it seemed the young man a the counter had no interest in his motive for purchasing such a thing.
But then was that so surprising? Maybe no one could notice him now.
The thought intrigued him. He wondered if he could walk into a bank and take all the money without anyone saying anything, but he decided that that was probably too much to hope for. It wasn’t so much that people had stopped seeing him. They had just stopped caring.
He went home with the clown makeup in a bag in the passenger’s seat. He kept looking over at it to check it was still there, as if he might have dreamed buying it. Maybe he had dreamed it all. It did seem like something that could happen in a dream, but the experience itself felt so real. Maybe there was no way to tell.
The next day was Sunday, and like always Norm and Shirley got dressed for church, but when Norm was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, he pulled the clown makeup out of the drawer where he had hidden in in the box of q-tips and and put it on. He wasn’t much good with the stuff and he managed to botch it pretty well, so that when he looked at himself in the mirror he thought his face reminded him more of some impressionist painting than the face of a clown, but it was good enough and anyway if he was right no one would see it either way.
Shirley poked her head in the door and asked if he was ready and if he knew what time it was and Norm told her that he did know and that they would make it in time just fine, and Shirley said okay.
She didn’t say anything about the makeup.
They went to church and sang the hymns and Norm felt like an idiot in the clown makeup at first, but by the time the preaching had started he had almost managed to forget he had it on. After all, no one had given him the slightest bit of trouble about it, or had even thought to bring it up.
The sermon was on the text “Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart,” a coincidence that almost had Norm in fits of laughter when he heard it.
Man looked on the outward appearance did he? Well Norm was walking proof that wasn’t true all the time. But then he didn’t feel like laughing anymore, and instead he started to feel sad because it occurred to him that he might live out the rest of his life like this with no one really seeing him, and he didn’t think he could bear it.
After the service ended, Norm went and shook hands with the preacher, and the preacher asked Norm if he had lost some weight, and Norm smiled a thin little smile and said, that yes he had and he thanked the preacher for noticing.
On the way home he thought of a thousand crazy things he could do: he could get a tattoo, he could get a piercing, or better yet one of those weird rings that made your earlobes look huge. He could dress up like a lady, or possibly wear shorts to work some days in the summer. But he didn’t want to do all those things. He wanted to be right. He wanted to be normal.
That night he told Shirley he was going to the store to pick up some things and he drove and drove for a long time until he found a dark stretch of country road with a wide shoulder. Off in the distance he could see the lights from some houses, but the stars were brighter than he’d seen them in a long time, so he pulled over and shut the engine off and thought for a while. He could hear the sound of bullfrogs croaking somewhere in the distance, and there must have been a house somewhere in the woods, because he could hear a man and woman fighting, screaming at each other and making a horrible racket.
He sat and he thought for a long time. After a while the screaming stopped, and he was able to really think and he thought that maybe he was making too big a deal about this whole thing. After all, it wasn’t as if his wife had stopped loving him. She was the same as she always was, patient and kind, and always encouraging. And Vincent hadn’t stopped talking to him, or changed how he acted toward him, so maybe it didn’t matter whether they noticed that he looked like. At his age it wasn’t like what he looked like mattered much anyway. When he had finished thinking this he felt better, so he put his truck into gear and turned around. He was almost run off the road by some idiot in a van going way too fast, but he managed to get out of the way in time and headed toward home.
He told Shirley the store didn’t have what he was looking for, and she accepted his explanation without the slightest hint of suspicion. He felt a little guilty about lying to her, but he didn’t know what else to say, so he went on with his life.
The next morning he skipped shaving. He thought that even if no one could really see the beard he liked having it all the same, and he went into work that day, and went on with his life as if nothing had happened. It was amazing how much better he felt after that. The day went by just fine, and as long as he didn’t think about things too much he felt pretty okay.
Vincent ate lunch with him in the break room just like always, and they talked and Vincent complained about how the new cashier hadn’t shown up for work that day, and they talked about how good help was just to hard to find these days.
And on it went. Norm resolved never to think of the thing again, and for the most part he succeeded. In fact, he succeeded so well that he managed to convince himself that the whole thing had been some kind of crazy dream or imagination of his. After all, that kind of thing could never happen in real life.
One morning a few weeks later he picked up his paper and read a story that told of how the police had found the rotting remains of a young woman in the woods off of an old abandoned stretch of highway. It was murder, according to the paper, and the victim had been tentatively identified as one, Felicia Sommers. The paper said she had been killed within a few hundred yards of a small subdivision, but that no one had reported any disturbance.
And Norm thought, Isn’t that just the way? No one pays attention to anything anymore.
But after a while he forgot about that too, and he went on as he always had. And when he looked at himself in the mirror later that night he noticed something that made him smile. It wasn’t anything big or obvious, but if he turned himself the right way, he thought it looked like he just might be losing weight.
