“The Winter Wonderland”
By Emily Mills
March-June 2006
There had been no anticipation of such a mild winter and, as a consequence, all of the street sweepers were dismantled and in for their yearly tune-ups. The gutters and storm drains, then, were cluttered with cigarette butts, bits of waded up paper and fast food cups. Melt water from the little snow that had fallen pooled up around the clogs, creating nicotine and soda lakes dammed by the trash barricaded grates of the sewers. It was not the type of scene Zoë had envisioned upon moving to Wisconsin.
Mary, her older sister, told her imaginative tales of shiny white snow banks, ice-covered lakes, green pine trees blanketed with powder, sleigh bells ringing and the whole goddamn nine yards. Either Mary was a dirty liar or global warming was really kicking ass this year.
Zoë glanced into the grimy picture window of the apartment she was passing. For a moment, she saw only the reflection of a young, sleepy-eyed woman, shoulder-length black hair half-tucked into a red knit cap, white cheeks splotchy with pink. Then a scene materialized behind and inside of the apparition: two boys sitting cross-legged in front of a gigantic TV screen playing a video game and drinking beer from red plastic cups.
A long, blue bus roared by and splashed more dirty slush up onto the curb in front of her. Zoë checked the clock on her cell phones’ display and slowed her steps. Reunions were meant to be relatively pleasant but she couldn’t help the ever-expanding knot of dread that grew in her stomach. Combined with the coffee she’d had as her only sustenance that day, her insides felt sour and angry. The bus depot loomed some thirty yards ahead. A few city busses were swapping out old riders for new but she was looking for one of the great silver, interstate vehicles to pull in. Darius was coming all the way from Oklahoma to see her. All the way from Oklahoma and a recent conversion to Christianity which, to be perfectly frank, made her really uneasy about the visit.
Zoë’s father, Josiah, had been a Baptist minister, an ardent disciple of the old hellfire-and-brimstone school of preaching and not a terribly light-hearted man. After forty-six years of sermonizing at every opportunity including dinners, beating Zoë with his belt, slapping her mother around and sometimes shaving all of Mary’s long, curly hair off in the middle of the night while she slept, Zoë couldn’t say she had been shocked when, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday, the man had died suddenly of a massive heart attack. There had been something akin to sadness, or maybe it was just her body adjusting to the lack of his overwhelming presence in her life. She even cried at the funeral. Her mother had been inconsolable for months afterwards. Zoë didn’t guess it had a lot to do with love so much as fear of being alone. But anyway, Darius had known her father and Zoë assumed it had been enough to scare him away from Christianity for life. She’d been motivated not just to leave the faith, but the state, too.
It had been five years since she’d last seen Darius. He’d been a scrawny punk rocker who wore too much eyeliner and masturbated to Morrissey records and loved to go on for hours about the newest philosopher he’d discovered: everyone from Kant to Foucault to Bob Dylan. She’d liked him instantly because of all that and the way he smiled like there was nothing in the world better than looking at you. They used to make out with each other for fun when life in Oklahoma got too boring to handle (which was often). The day after graduating from high school, they went to the manmade lake just outside of town and built a tree fort on the shore just to say they’d done it. For all she knew, it was still there, hanging rickety over the sluggish brown water and covered in their scribbled pseudo-philosophical quotes and curse words.
Zoë left that butt hole of a town one week after graduation and came to this city in the north hoping to escape the smoldering residue of her father’s presence and low-rider trucks and guys chewing tobacco in class. Darius coming to visit, though she did want to see him, only brought pieces of all that back to her. And now this bizarre revelation about him going Jesus freak. She had no idea what to expect when he stepped off of that bus.
A grizzled man wearing a straw hat with brightly colored ribbons hanging from it was jingling a coffee cup half-filled with nickels and dimes and singing a song about purple bananas on the sidewalk by the depot. She leaned against a lamppost and listened to his singing, playing idly with a quarter that had been collecting lint in her pocket for days. The big bus came huffing down the street and stopped just in front of where she stood. Zoë dropped the quarter into the cup and let a deep breath fill her chest with cool air.
“Thankee missus,” the man sang and doffed his hat.
Darius came off the bus looking like a cross between a Mormon missionary and the antichrist which, she mused, was a pretty impressive feat. He was still wearing eyeliner but seemed to have gotten the ratio of makeup-to-skin just right in the intervening years. His brown hair was cut short but careful application of mousse had rendered it fashionably tousled. There was new weight on his face and torso, functional and necessary since he’d been such a beanpole before, and he was wearing the same, natty old black trench coat he’d had since junior high. But then he had on neatly pressed khaki pants, a dark red polo shirt with the little alligator emblem and, in general, looked much cleaner than she ever remembered him being. First impressions were shaping up to be confusing and unhelpful.
“Darling, you look marvelous,” he drawled easily once his gray eyes had settled on and recognized her face. “But you haven’t slept in a while, I can tell.” He folded her into a warm embrace and quickly let go.
“Thanks for noticing,” she said dryly. Darius took a step back and looked her up and down. “Everything up to par?”
“Just been awhile, wanted to make sure you were still you.”
“I should say the same thing,” Zoë answered lightly, trying not to make it super obvious what she was getting at. But she’d never been particularly good at subtlety.
“Can we eat? I’m starving,” he asked, perhaps sidestepping the issue for the moment. Zoë suggested a nearby coffee shop that also served sandwiches and, with his concurrence, they were off.
~*~
“Why did you convert?”
Darius swallowed a bite of ham and cheese and smiled. “You don’t dick around, do you?”
Maybe the music had inspired her. Bad Religion always made her think of the nights she had spent smoking clove cigarettes and fooling around on the playground equipment in the park behind his house. Darius always brought a little, beat up boom box with only one working tape deck and played Bad Religion albums all night long. Now some stupid barista had popped in “Generator” and she’d been all but forced to ask the question straight away.
“I don’t get it, Darius, that’s all,” she said.
“I wish I had a quick answer for you, darling, but I just don’t,” he answered softly. His gray eyes seemed slate dark now that he’d come north, as though the further distance from the sun was sad enough to make them do that.
“You were an atheist. You were the one proclaiming that God was dead loudly and drunkenly from the top of the high school gym that night we crawled up there to throw liquor bottles at the football team.”
Darius chuckled and took another bite out of his sandwich. He made a little, pleased humming sound and shook his head a little but didn’t make to say anything.
“OK, so I’m biased,” she went on after the silence got annoying. “But you’ll forgive me for being a little shocked.”
“You lost your accent,” he said simply. Zoë choked on her planned next sentence and sucked in some coffee scented air.
“What?”
“You’ve gone Yankee on me,” Darius laughed. “C’mon, say see-ment.”
“Shut up, I’ve lived here for five years, what did you expect? At least I haven’t gone and joined up with the Witnesses,” she shot back irritably. He actually looked cross for a moment but quickly regained his easy countenance.
“You know I ain’t a Witness. I don’t even have a denomination, Zoë; I’m just a Christian, plain and simple.” He explained this while wiping the palms of his hands on a napkin. He then crumpled it up and threw it into a nearby garbage bin. Zoë picked absently at her croissant, not hungry even when she’d ordered it.
“So who are you then?”
“A stupid little shit who finally found the ultimate philosopher.”
“Don’t tell me…it’s Jesus!” she proclaimed sarcastically. But it didn’t have the desired effect, which was irritation, and Darius only grinned.
“Strip away much of what other people said after him, get to the core of the man’s teachings and it’s all you ever need to live your life as a decent human being. That’s why I converted, Zoë,” and here he reached out and took her left hand in his right, “but I’m not here to convert you. Just to visit, OK?”
She swallowed a bit of dry air and nodded.
~*~
“Do you believe in God?”
Inside the brown glass there was amber liquid, bitter and sweet, a little bubbly and definitely delicious. Zoë swished the bottle back and forth and watched the beer foam up and lap at the lip of the container. Yeast. Hops. Fermentation. Something gone bad becomes delicious. How did that happen?
“Do you think the Apostles got drunk?” she asked and the words were a little slurred. “Hell, do you think Jesus got drunk?”
Darius smirked and snatched the bottle away from her. “I think you’re drunk.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she said and lurched forward, trying to catch what had been taken from her. Darius held the beer behind his back and did a little two-step to keep it away from her lunging body.
“I don’t know the answer to that, Zoë,” Darius said while the dance continued and he tried not to laugh.
“Why not, Jesus boy? Aren’t you supposed to study his every last word and move?” Zoë grabbed out for the bottle but Darius feinted right before skipping backwards and away from her drunken efforts. She stumbled and met the floor, arms out, in a slow, almost deliberate fall.
“Because it’s not important,” he answered and took a sip of the beer. She rolled over onto her back and looked up at him, trying to keep objects in the background from spinning or moving.
“Tell me,” she began. “What is important?”
Darius lowered himself so that he was sitting next to her, legs crossed. He finished the beer and set the bottle down next to a small pile of its siblings.
“The message. That’s what I’d say.”
“And what’s that?”
“Be groovy to each other,” he said with a smile.
“And you plan to teach this to the Baptists…how exactly?” she demanded, throwing her fore and middle fingers up in a “v” to emphasize the point.
“I’ll put it in different words,” he conceded. “Same message, though.”
Zoë wobbled to her feet again and tried to affect a rigidly upright pose, right hand on heart, chin held high. The end result, however, more closely resembled a seasick man on the deck of a storm-addled ship. She belched.
“’I’ve come here before the FCA to deliver a important message to y’all,” she began, doing her best impression of Darius’ baritone public speaker voice. “’Be…groovy…to each other.’ And that’s when the football players in the front pew tackle yer ass, and not in a good way.”
Darius rolled his eyes. “I doubt the Fellowship of Christian Athletes would ever even have me to one of their meetings.”
Zoë made her way over to her bed and flopped down on top of the rumpled sheets. She knew she’d had too much to drink. It had been a long while since she’d gotten drunk, though. It was owed. Darius’ presence had stirred up torrents of memory like a dredge in a muddy lake. Bits of the bad old days drifted around her head and settled heavily onto her skin. Drinking helped wash it away.
“What do you believe in?” Darius asked.
Love. Pain. The wind in Oklahoma. The Dead Kennedys. “I don’t know,” she said quietly, beginning the slow but inevitable slip into alcohol-induced unconsciousness. “I don’t believe in going home. Also…no heaven, no hell.”
Darius could sense that he was about to lose her to some serious sleeping. He shuffled over to her and pulled a blanket up off the floor and around her shoulders. Zoë closed her eyes and tried to snuggle deeper into the mattress. Darius sat down on the floor beside the bed.
“What do you believe in?” he asked again, this time his voice barely audible.
“Sleep.”
~*~
In this dream, she’s Joan of Arc and her father is All of England. There are a lot of accusations of cross-dressing and quite a bit of swordplay, but other than that none of it would be out of place at one of their family dinners.
God tells her to burn and pillage All of England, go ahead and mutilate some corpses while she’s at it, and then leaves to go play backgammon with all of the Popes who’ve died so far.
A little boy with big, gray eyes tries to hand her a burned teddy bear (wait, did they even have teddy bears back then?) but the hooves of her white horse trample the thing and the boy just stares at her with those intense eyes and she wants him to close them so she reaches for her sword but it has turned into a long, slimy gar fish and that’s the end of that idea.
“Zoë.”
Weak, arctic light from the window poked at her eyelids and at the sound of Darius’ voice, she woke up. Zoë sat up in her bed and looked around. He had backed up a few paces and was just gazing at her patiently. They were in her bedroom cum living room. There were beer bottles stacked up in a neat pyramid in one corner and the days’ newspaper was sprawled out on the floor in front of her radio, which had been turned on quietly and tuned to NPR while she slept.
“I need….”
“….water. Here,” Darius said and handed her an old mason jar full of clear liquid. She took a long, satisfying drink and closed her eyes as the cold water slipped through her body like little snakes.
“I’m not an atheist,” she said abruptly, suddenly remembering the vague outline of their previous nights’ conversation. “I think that’s egotistical.”
“So, agnostic then,” he guessed and took the glass from her shaky hands. A woman’s voice wafted out of the radio and began talking about civil war in Africa. Or maybe it was the Middle East. Zoë wasn’t sure.
“Maybe, maybe agnostic.”
“I think that’s the best answer I’ve ever heard,” Darius said and smiled that smile she always loved. This time, though, it only made her belly do a chin-up and think about rejecting all the water it had so generously taken in. She concentrated hard on a tiny dark stain on the carpet below her bed, willing everything to stay put.
“It’s not just ‘cos of my father, neither,” she went on, feeling a little more settled into her skin. Darius sat down at the foot of the bed and listened. He’d gotten good at predicting when she was about to speechify. The slow but steady return of her native accent was also a good indicator of this. “He was a fucking asshole, yes, but every damn religion in the world is full of fucking assholes.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” he interjected and then was silent again. Zoë barreled onwards.
“But I paid enough attention in church and Sunday school to know the Bible and know that it’s mostly full of crap. Those hypocrites should call ‘emselves Paul-ists or somethin’ ‘cos Lord knows they ain’t following Jesus.” She pronounced it with two syllables and felt something pop in her brain. Then she fell back onto the bed and watched the patterns on the ceiling change as her eyes adjusted. “The Bible never got me nothing but ass-whoopings and guilt. Who wants that?”
“Sadomasochists?” Darius quipped. It had the intended effect. Zoë guffawed and lost her angry train of thought.
“How long are you staying?” she asked and reached for the glass of water again.
“A few days. I’m going to Minneapolis from here to visit my aunt in the hospital. Lung cancer and all that.”
“Shit.”
“Lifelong smoker. She seems calm about it, like she always sorta suspected it’d end like this. So she called me and asked me to come out and say hi before she kicked the proverbial bucket. I ain’t seen her in a good long while so of course I said I would. Getting to stop and see you along the way was good incentive, too.”
“You sure do know how to flatter a girl,” Zoë drawled.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Darius stood and walked over to the pile of beer bottles. He poked at it with a booted foot and the structure dissolved in a tinkling, clattering mess of rolling glass. Zoë slapped her hands over her ears and winced.
“You really got to it last night, darling” he said and attempted to wrangle a few errant bottles that were making their way toward the corner of the apartment. The floor there was warped and sunken under the weight of an old, claw foot bathtub. Every loose bit of trash or dust gravitated toward that spot.
“I guess you bring it out in me,” she answered. Then she slowly brought her feet over the edge of her bed and planted them on the cool wood floorboards.
~*~
They spent all day walking around downtown, looking into shop windows and watching their breath dance up around their heads and into the cold, crisp air. Darius paid for their lunch at a vegetarian restaurant because he was amazed that there was such a thing and they ate their black bean burgers and salads in companionable silence. The waitress hit on Zoë, gave her a soda for free and invited them both to a concert she was giving later that night at a club underneath a church.
“Is this Christian rock?” Zoë asked, dubious. The waitress giggled and shook her head no, it wasn’t, that’s just where the place was but the music was anything but religious.
“I’m beginning to see why you really moved here,” Darius quipped as they left the restaurant and headed for a nearby park.
“What, because the devil worshippers and ho-mo-sexuals are free to camp out in the basements of churches?” she drawled in return. Darius laughed and clapped his arm around her shoulder.
They found a bench in a circle of light underneath an orange streetlamp in the park and sat down. The sun was down but it was still early. A few teenaged boys and one girl were busy working a nearby cement flowerbox with a cube of wax, getting ready to skateboard on it. A few determined shoppers were still hurrying in and out of stores, seemingly impervious to the deepening cold.
Darius sipped at a steaming cup of green tea he’d ordered to go and watched the skateboarders attempting, and mostly failing, to grind along the now waxy edge of the flowerbox. Zoë rubbed her hands together and blew on them.
“Why don’t you move up here? Or at least away from there?” she asked. It was the question she’d really wanted to ask, more than why he’d converted, because all they’d ever talked about back in school was getting out of Oklahoma. But there he was, so many years later and seemingly capable of making such a move, still living in the place he’d once professed to hate so much. She missed having him around. But she’d be damned if she’d ever go back.
Darius thought for awhile before answering and then said, “We can’t all leave. Then what would be left? Everyone would think the same things as everyone else. It’s too easy. It’d be cheating me and everyone there.”
“You’re saying I took the easy way out by coming here?” Zoë asked. She felt stung.
“No,” he countered. “I’m saying it would be the easy way out for me. You make your own decisions, darling, and know what the right is thing for you. For me, it’s sticking around down there, doing what I can to show people other lifestyles, other options, other ways of being a Christian.”
Zoë shot him a sideways glance. “Seems a little egotistical to me, Darius. No offense.”
“I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m gonna make a huge difference. But one changed mind is better than nothing. Everyone here,” and he gestured to the skateboarders, the anti-war graffiti on a nearby wall, the vegetarian restaurant they’d eaten at, “seems to have pretty much the same ideas about things. And hell, they’re damn fine ideas and right on, but we can’t all stay where it’s easy and everyone agrees with us.”
“You little shit,” she said, annoyed, and stood up to face him head on. “When did you get to be so high and mighty, huh? You keep talking like you’re some holy messenger to the backwards folks back home, but have you even told your family that you’re gay?”
Darius stared up at her and said nothing. She let out a violent sigh and paced away from him.
“I will,” he finally said. “When the time is right.”
“There’s never gonna be a right time, Darius. They’re gonna be pissed and depressed no matter if you tell them now or on Judgment Day. Hell I’m surprised they didn’t figure it out years ago when you had that big ol’ crush on Billy Idol!”
Darius’ cheeks turned a little red and he lowered his eyes to the slowly cooling tea.
“I’m turning the other cheek.” He turned his face so that she could see it in profile. A fine shadow of stubble like a mask across his chin became visible. “Now hit me fair and square, not with some lame pot-shot.”
Zoë stopped breathing and just stared, unblinking, at the proffered flesh.
“I’m sorry. You just hit a nerve I guess.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he whispered. A boy on a bicycle glided past them on the sidewalk. Then, raising his voice back to a normal level, Darius lifted the cup into the air and said, “Here’s to denial. And running away.”
Zoë stopped pacing and couldn’t help but smile crookedly. She nodded and sat back down beside him.
Darius offered the tea and she gratefully accepted a sip. A single white flake drifted down out of the black sky and landed on his shoulder. They both stared at it for a moment and then another flake came down and landed at their feet. Zoë looked up into the air over their heads and saw a whole flurry of snowflakes wafting lazily on the currents of cold air.
“So it does exist!” Darius said in mock wonderment. They both giggled and leaned back against the bench; heads arced up toward the white speckled sky and stuck their tongues out.
“I missed you, Zoë,” he said after awhile. The skateboarders were gone and most of the shoppers had disappeared from the street. “But I’m glad you got out, like you wanted to.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go home?” he said and got to his feet, offering his hand to help her stand up. They linked arms and headed back toward her apartment, watching the snow come down along the way.