The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

If you did not read or did not enjoy the Old, then there is no need for you to read this story, which is its sequel.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you…

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look..

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

-Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

Volk

Christmas Eve

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

She woke up in horror.

After Marabeth Strauss had allowed her breathing to calm down and sat up in the bed, letting her heart settle, she reflected that this wasn’t such a bad thing. So often in the last year she had awaken in anger. And the anger was what terrified her. No one should be as angry as she was. No one should have such violent dreams. She was afraid to recount them, especially now. Afraid to think of the things she said to her mother and father in those dreams that, for Christ’s sake, a woman well past her first youth should be over by now.

The anger dreams that featured Caleb made her feel better. There was no ambiguity in her relationship to her ex husband, just pure hatred, and there was something comforting about that which was pure.

The sky was grey and this was Christmas Eve. This was the fourth day of a much needed winter break, the fourth day she woke up in delicious ten o’clock in the morning, movie people wake up time wonder. She climbed out of bed and was embarrassed to admit her feet hurt. She’d need better shoes. She was much too young for this shit. Her tits sweated and stuck to her, and she resented this bullshit, wondered about wearing a bra in bed, told herself fuck, and refused to go to the bathroom until she had half hobbled out of her bedroom and down the hall of the apartment on Birmingham Street to flick on the coffee pot, wait for it to make its first gurgles and prove it was still working.

On the pot, thinking that when she was done she would return to bed for a few more minutes of deserved sleep, and wiping her brown hair out of her face, Marabeth wondered about the dream.

“Fuck,” she murmured. “Get toilet paper.”

She felt the tirade coming again, saw her thoughts leaving behind the thing that had most troubled her for a new and more common thing. Women who were not feminist, what the fuck? She was so tired of them. In a world where every time you walked into the fucking bathroom you had to use toilet paper, a negligible expense for men, in a world where a box or two maybe of tampons were necessary every month to get you through your adulthood, how could so many women be so damn oblivious? How could…? Enough. More of that later. It was Christmas Eve, and soon she would be in her house full of good Catholic cousins and… but the dream.

To remember that man wiped out all of her feminist ranting, wiped out every issue she had with her kin. A man, tall and robust, fortyish or maybe fifty, with blond, almost icy blond hair, and flashing blue eyes, a square jaw. His hair was definitely short. He wore a vest or… maybe it was a jerkin. She drummed that word up from the days when her brother played D and D. On her back, back in bed while the coffee pot burbled, she pieced together the details of the dream and she could see the green tall pines, could see the thin clearness of the blue sky with no clouds, could see snow covered high hills, their slopes going down into blue crevasses which slid into endless blackness.

And had this frightened her? Because she had been frightened, and she did not know how. Had the man frightened her? How was it possible? She could not remember him doing anything. She could remember nothing happening.

Now she was blinking, and she turned over to look at the clock. What the...? But how could she have slept for another hour? How could she be finally, honestly, truly waking up so ridiculously close to 11:30, having slept the whole morning away?

“I am a child,” Marabeth said, getting up again and plodding to the kitchen and coffee pot in anger. She planned to sit on the little sofa under the great picture window, her back toward Birmingham Street, and her face to the door, and chain smoke her way to answering the question of why it seemed so impossible for her to make a success of her life, why she was nowhere near being a grown up.

“The thing I can’t quite master,” she stated, noting to herself that this coffee was too bitter, but not willing to get up and put anymore milk or sugar in it, “is to be realistic about where I am in life and how to not feel sorry for myself.”

She’d had a different vision for her life.

“Everyone does,” she realized.

“But no, that’s not true.”

Her brother Kris’s vision for his life was pretty much what it was supposed to be, better if you counted those rough moments. In her family, people did what they were supposed to. The whole thing had been Marabeth had not done what she was supposed to. Going to art school was not what you were supposed to do, but for the love of God stay in it once you get there! The years of boredom and depression that resulted in dropping out and spending all of her money to go to New York sounded better as an adventure, as a background to a colorful life than they really had been.

“And if you think about, no one in New York, no one who was born there would be impressed by my running off to it.”

Then again, the way those assholes were, they probably would be impressed. New York was the only place she’d been to that believed in its own myth.

“Too many Marvel movies. Too many Ghostbusters. Too many superheroes,” she murmured.

And then, in the end, you had to finish college eventually, if not because there would be no good jobs, then at least because this is what people in her family did. It didn’t do to think too much about it. Those last two years in school, which had been enjoyable, but weird because she felt too old and she felt like it was a place that didn’t fit her, that she should have left years ago, also felt like it would never have fit her, no matter how young she’d been.

“It’s really the only think that explains Caleb.”

There he was in her senior sem class, all pale orange hair and long legs and faded jeans that fit his legs and outlined his thighs and led to what she estimated was a nice package. And she couldn’t believe she was thinking this way. At the time she had been so into her own head and into her own pursuit of happiness and truth and whatever the fuck had gotten her twenty-umph years old, heavily in debt and working as a receptionist in a candy factory. But now she gravitated to the only other person in that room her age who also seemed to feel like a fish out of water, and then they were together, and he had the most magnificent eyes.

Caleb’s family was Baptist. His father was a preacher. He sang hymns under his breath. She was surprised to learn he’d been with several girls before her. But he was her first. Looking back, Marabeth realized as she stubbed out her cigarette, this had been why she’d married him.

“We’ll go to Father O’Brien next week,” her grandmother had said.

“Grandma,” Marabeth had never thought this would be an issue, never thought she would be worried about it, never thought, to be honest, that she would be married, “Caleb’s not Catholic.”

“Well, maybe he can become one.”

“Or maybe,” Marabeth’s mother raised an eyebrow and looked at her mother-in-law skeptically, “it doesn’t matter, and we can work around that.”

“I think it will matter,” Marabeth said. “I think his family is Baptist. I think his dad’s a pastor.”

Kris laughed out loud and she frowned at her brother.

“What?” he said. “How are you going to go to a Baptist church every Sunday? How are you going to praise the Lord and wear a big ole hat?”

“Are you serious?” Marabeth demanded while Kris clapped his hands in rhythm and swayed, then said, “You can scarcely go to a forty-five minute mass once a week at Saint Ursula’s. Please, Mara! You’d better not have a Baptist wedding, or you’ll misrepresent yourself to that guy’s whole family.”

When the phone rang, she murmured, “Thank God,” and put down the cigarette and picked up the flat phone on the coffee table.

“Good morning, Joyce.”

“You sound happy.”

“Do I?” Marabeth said.

“You actually sound radiant.”

“That is such a surprise. I was feeling unradiant.”

“Do you need me to come around?’

“I always need you to come around,” Marabeth said. “But it’s not like that. I was just taking stock of my life.”

“That’s never a good idea,” Joyce said and Marabeth burst out laughing.

“Look, I called to see if you want to go Christmas shopping.”

“No, I do not.”

“Well, then I called to see if you would go Christmas shopping because I do not want to brave the mall alone.”

“When you put it that way,” Marabeth said, uncurling herself, “I can do that. Can we smoke in the mall? Have they finally made that legal?”

“Damnit, I wish.”

“So like,” Marabeth stretched and looked at her coffee longingly, “on a scale of one to ten, how much Christmas shopping have you gotten done?”

“I’d put it at a solid zero. You?”

“I’d put it at I’ve been looking around in my apartment at all the nice shit no one knew I had, and wrapping it up and boxing it. By the way, I’m glad you called and took me out of my head. You know, I was thinking about my wedding.”

“Yeah,” Joyce said, leaving it at that.

Marabeth respected the way Joyce refused to ever say anything negative about Caleb or her marriage. It was as if, with Marabeth having acknowledged its disaster, it was no need for Joyce to say a thing.

“When will you be here?” Marabeth asked. “I need to get ready?”

“Well, I need to get ready too, so I’m thinking I need to shower and brush my teeth and.. a half hour?’

“That doesn’t even make any sense. You mean an hour.”

“I think forty-five minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll be ready in forty-five minutes,” Mara said, silently mouthing, “I’ll be ready in an hour.”

“See you soon.”

“Bye.”

Mara hung up.

“This bitch is never on time.”

An hour and a half later, looking down from her third story window onto Birmingham, Marabeth murmured, “This bitch is never on time.”

Her phone rang, and she didn’t trouble to answer it, but slipped it into the pocket of her red coat as she shoved her tamishanter on and then, strapping her purse over her shoulder and slipping her hands into her pockets, left the apartment, heading down the three flights of back stair in the almost modern brick building, and coming out the side onto O’Connor Street.

“So, I’m a little bit late,” Joyce began,

“You know what?” Marabeth said, “It doesn’t even matter.”

Joyce pulled out of her space and drove to the corner waiting for the traffic to pass on Birmingham before heading north for the river and onto Day Road.

Joyce three back her head and sang:

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”

Marabeth joined in:

“Everywhere you look!”

Take a look in the five and ten glistening once again
With candy canes and silver lanes aglow

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Toys in every store
But the prettiest sight to see, is the holly that will be
On your own front door!”

“See, that’s the thing I love about you,” Joyce said. “Who else would join in that song with me? People are so fucking gloomy but—”

Joyce rolled down her window and gave a loud scream that startled the driver in the old blue Taurus riding closest to her.

“It’s Christmas, Goddamnit!”

In Joyce’s presence, looking up and down Day Road as they traveled north, Marabeth felt an exhilaration in the black trees and white sky, in the snow crusted streets that she usually did not. She was momentarily and not unpleasantly reminded of the dream this morning, of snow upon snow, of snow glinting with white and silver and blue crystals, and the long shadows of great beautiful…

“Was your mind on Christmas?” Joyce asked.

“A little bit,” Marabeth said. And then she said, “Well, no, actually, it was on this dream I had this morning.”

“Share!” Joyce said so enthusiastically, suddenly looking at her so intently that Marabeth wondered if she would see the the red light as they met Alvington Street.

“Well, not like Christmas at all,” Marabeth said. “Except that it was snowing. Well, I correct that. I wasn’t snowing at all. The snow had happened. But who knows when? It was like being in the mountains. Like in Heidi or something. And so beautiful! Oh, much more beautiful than this.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Shut up. It was the whitest… No! The purest snow is better. You looked at it and you could see all the colors, all the sharp individual crystals under the sun. And the sky was so blue it was almost warm, but it was that color that you only see in winter.”

“Like your brother’s eyes?”

“Have you been checking out my brother?”

“He’s not bad.”

“I’m going to put that out of my head,” Marabeth said.

“But now that I think of it—”

“You think your brother’s hot too.”

“You really need to stop. Now, that I think of it, the man in the dream does remind me of Kris.”

“The man?”

“Yes, in the dream. Not so much that he looked like Kris, but he sort of… he was very tall and square foreheaded and sort of serious the way Kris—or Dad—could be. But he was blond. They’re dark. The men in my family are all pretty dark, but this man was blond and… there was this woman. She was blond too.”

“That’s a very Aryan dream.”

“With the bluest eyes.”

“Isn’t it strange that Hitler wasn’t blond, didn’t have blue eyes and might have been Jewish?”

“Sometimes I feel like we’re having two entirely different conversations.”

“Isn’t your mom Jewish?”

“Her mother is.”

“Which makes her, which makes you. Just saying.”

“Well, we’re still going to midnight Mass, and are you trying to call me Hitler because I had a dream about two blonds?”

“It did seem that way,” Joyce acknowledged. “But I think I was just saying shit. You know? The way I say shit.”

“Yeah, you do say a lot of shit.”

“See.”

“But the thing was, I woke from the dream afraid. And I don’t know why I was so afraid because the dream sounds wonderful. I mean, doesn’t it sound wonderful?”

They were heading up McCord Road to the northwest part of Lassador where the city spread thin and turned into suburbs and subdivisions, fields, barns and the occasional strip mall.

“It sounds beautiful,” Joyce said. “But it can’t be all of the dream because, you’re right. Why would you wake up scared? I could see waking up sad because you weren’t there, though personally I’d feel that way if I dreamed about being in Havana or St. Croix or someplace warm, but… Goddamn.”

The road was already getting crowded again as they entered the more developed area of Northdale, and though it was a ways off, even Marabeth could see the ant swarm of cars filling the parking lot of Northdale Mall, already anticipate the horror or shopping.

“This,” Joyce said, “will make your biggest nightmares seem like bliss.”

The beginning of The beasts