Upright Beasts Read online

  “They are different eyes when the sunglasses are off.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Sometimes Jimmy takes me out of the water to a dark place behind the bushes, and he takes off his sunglasses with one hand while the other hand approaches me.”

  “And these are the eyes you hate? The eyes that thin to the edge of a knife when he approaches?”

  “No, it’s as if his eyes are clouds that have emptied themselves of rain.”

  “Like a villain? Like some foreign villain in a cartoon? His left hand stroking his thin early pubescent mustache, his right held high in anger?”

  “No, it isn’t like that at all.”

  “The way his eyes grab hold of you at the same time his hands do? The way his fingers tear into your shoulder blades as his eyes move closer—”

  “No. Jimmy’s hands go other places.”

  “Those cold, dead eyes that sting you like a handful of snow sliding down the back of your neck?”

  “Not at all.”

  “The eyes that are lit with a flame you do not want to recognize?”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “The way his eyes dart back and forth, looking at every point around you but at no point where you are, even as he bears down on you?”

  “No! A thousand times no!”

  “. . .”

  “It’s the way he looks at me afterwards, in the light, with a great sadness . . . like a father.”

  THE ROOM INSIDE MY FATHER’S ROOM

  When I grew too big for my room, I forced the door open. My father was waiting for me in his favorite chair.

  “I guess you’re a man now,” my father said. “Technically.”

  I looked around my father’s room. It was at least three times as large as my room and wrapped itself around mine on two sides in the shape of an L.

  “I’ve always hated that room,” I said.

  My muscles ached, and I tried to stretch out the kinks.

  “I built that room for you, just like my father built this room for me.” My father held out his palms, showing me his callouses.

  “I notice your father made your room much bigger than you made mine!”

  “I still needed space for me,” my father said. He seemed embarrassed and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I was a grown man, and you were a child. Remember?”

  Seeing him lounging in his chair made me angry. “I don’t even have a place to sit in there!”

  My father’s lips curled up with his mustache. He got out of his chair and pointed a finger at my chest. “You know how ungrateful you are?” He spat on the floorboards. “Before you came along, my room was much larger! I even had a bed back then.” He was towering over me, growing with indignation. But I was out of my room now and would not back down.

  “I never asked to be born in that room,” I said. I glared at him with a son’s hate, and he seemed to shrink back down to my size, then smaller. Soon he collapsed into his chair.

  “I did the best I could,” he said to himself, barely above a whisper. “No one can say differently.”

  “Your best was shit,” I said without much force. He was already weeping into his plate of sausages.

  I couldn’t stand to see him like that, but I also couldn’t stand to go back into my tiny room inside my father’s room. There were only two doors in his room. I opened the other and stepped into a room even larger than my father’s. It was in the same shape, my father’s room filling the upper right fourth.

  This room was much messier though. The floor and walls were covered with old knickknacks and trinkets. Everything was coated in a film of dust.

  My grandfather lay in his cot in the corner. “What do you want?” he said when he saw me. “Did your father send you to complain to me about how small his room is?”

  “No, I’m looking for a bigger room for myself. I can barely fit in mine, plus the heat’s broken.”

  “Well you can’t stay here,” my grandfather said. “There’s barely enough space for me.”

  I was raised to respect my elders, but this made my blood bubble. His room was at least four times as large as my father’s! I wanted to wrap my hands around his wrinkled throat. When I stepped forward, something crunched under my feet.

  “This place is a mansion,” I said. “It only looks small because you’ve filled it with old junk.” I picked up the cracked baseball trophy and shook it for emphasis.

  “Put that down,” my grandfather screamed. “That’s my thing. One of the only things I have left!” He pulled his old quilt up to his neck as if to shield himself from me.

  “Look, I’ll just sleep in the corner,” I offered, “between those stacks of old magazines.”

  “Impossible!” he said, then he waved a finger in the air. “And if you think this is large, you should have seen my father’s room. They built real solid rooms back in those days.”

  I sighed. “Well, maybe he’s got a space for me then.”

  My grandfather merely laughed in response. He seemed lost in his old memories. He looked away from me and closed his eyes. As I left, I heard him beginning to snore.

  My great-grandfather’s room smelled thickly of mustard. His plates weren’t cleared, and he was curled up on a massive canopy bed.

  When I spoke, he looked up without recognition. Then he waved me toward his left ear.

  My great-grandfather seemed sympathetic as he listened to my tale. I told him about my tiny room and the way his son and grandson had treated me. But when I was done, he shook his head.

  “You can’t stay here. Everyone gets their own room just for them.”

  “You don’t understand how small my room is. It isn’t fit for a man.”

  “Ha! I remember saying the same thing to my father when I was your age.”

  He reached up and tickled the hair behind my ears.

  “Great-grandfather,” I said in a tender voice I thought might appeal to his generation. “How about the other door? Can I find a room for myself through there?”

  My great-grandfather slowly pointed at the door I had walked in from, which was still open.

  “That door goes to the room I built for my son.” He twisted his body in the other direction. “And that door leads to my father’s room.”

  “Does your father’s room have an exit?”

  “As far as I can remember, it’s laid out the same way as mine. This is, mathematically, the most efficient way. I would advise you to lay out your own son’s room in the same way, when that time comes.” He smiled at me and shook his head knowingly. “Every young’un thinks they’re a rebel. But we can only build what we know, and from the space we have.”

  I was so angry my nostrils were flaring. Then my anger turned to pity. My great-grandfather was even more small-minded than my grandfather and father! The whole lot of them were rotting away in their narrow rooms, never thinking of anything larger.

  It was my turn to shake my head as I left his room.

  Still, despite my distaste at that time, what my great-grandfather had said stuck with me, and many years later I repeated his words to my own son when he tried to start trouble.

  ALMOST RECESS

  The children erect a gallows out of desks, cardboard, and ribbon. A child is hung and then buried in the locker room under a pile of backpacks. The child is made to remain there, held down by two of the larger boys if necessary, for at least thirty seconds.

  “Act properly!” I say.

  They laugh, normally.

  The children do not understand anything about death. When the time is up, the hanged classmate leaps from the locker room with a candy bar in his mouth. The other children cheer and clap.

  Don’t they realize that nothing returns from the dirt? Not ever? Death might as well be a lollipop to them.

  Today’s lesson is on sections of the house. I draw on the board with differently colored chalk.

  “This is the hallway,” I say. “This is the attic.”

  “My grandm
other lives in the attic,” says Norm.

  “You lie!” says Sophie. “You don’t have a grandmother.”

  “I do, I do! She lives in the attic in the sky.”

  Norm yanks her hair, and Sophie kicks his shin. They go on like this until I shout that there is no attic in the sky.

  Carlos asks me where Norm’s grandmother lives.

  “The dirt,” I say, pressing my hands to my face.

  “Ew,” Sophie says. “There are bugs down there.”

  I start telling them about my husband. The way they soaked his body with chemicals and then lowered him into the ground. But the children hold their hands to their throats and make gagging noises.

  The next day, Carlos comes to school with one of his shoelaces tied around his neck. He is one of the most popular boys, and by naptime the entire class is wearing shoelace nooses.

  They trip around the jungle gym at recess. I retrieve their laceless shoes from the yard and toss them in the cubbies.

  After lunch, Sophie asks me if she can eat a chocolate bar. I tell her I only hand them out after pop quizzes.

  “But I need chocolate to live!” she screams. Sophie starts shaking, rolling her eyes back until I can see only white.

  “That is not funny!” I shout. “Not funny at all.”

  She is already beginning to giggle.

  I get to class late on Friday. My eyes are red and sore from the night before.

  When I walk into the room, the students are constructing a new gallows out of real wood and rope.

  “It’s for the science fair,” Carlos says.

  “What does this have to do with science?” I say.

  “I dunno,” says Norm.

  “You’re the teacher,” says Sophie. “You tell us.”

  It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I sit at my desk and sip my burnt coffee.

  When Sophie volunteers for a test run, I lift her body carefully to the loop. I’m supposed to hold her there while she pretends to die, then lower her safely to the ground.

  The children count down their thirty seconds, but I keep holding. I want them to get a little taste of fear. To realize death doesn’t stop when you want it to.

  Instead they just laugh as Sophie wiggles her body. The children fall to the floor and kick their legs in the air. Norm tumbles around on the ground like a hyena until he sweeps my legs out from under me.

  I’m lying on the carpet, looking up at Sophie. Her face is as blue as a naptime mat.

  The other children are standing or sitting around me. Some of them are beginning to cry. Carlos tugs on my skirt. It is almost recess.

  Sophie’s body is ticking back and forth, marking the seconds, minutes, hours left to fill before the day is done.

  OUR NEW NEIGHBORHOOD

  When the incidents start, my husband decides that what our neighborhood needs is a neighborhood watch. “We need to watch our assets as closely as we’re going to watch the twins,” he says, tapping the baby monitor screen. The screen is dark and blue. It shows two pale teddy bears in an otherwise empty crib.

  The next morning, I come downstairs and see Donald slinking in the corner with a black trench coat and fedora. “What do you think?” he asks. We’re low on disposable income, and, as usual, he bought a size too large.

  “It looks a little conspicuous,” I say.

  “That’s the idea, Margot. I want them to know someone is watching.”

  My husband buttons the top button of the coat, puts on a pair of sunglasses, and leaves. As I slide the toast into the toaster, I see him out the window. He’s sneaking through the bushes in the neighbor’s backyard.

  The reason we’re low on cash is that we poured our savings into buying House 32 in a neighborhood called Middle Pond. Middle Pond is located between West Pond on the west and East Pond on the east. All three are part of North Lake, which is itself a subset of the Ocean Shore suburb.

  It looks perfect on paper. It has a stellar school system and all the amenities.

  “Normally, I’d say we should wait and see,” the real estate agent had said, “but if you don’t snatch this now, you’ll watch it go bye-bye.”

  Donald downloaded an app called HausFlippr that estimates property values in exclusive neighborhoods. Each time the Middle Pond score went up a full point, Donald cooked rib eyes on our new five-burner grill.

  He hasn’t cooked rib eyes in months.

  Our neighbors aren’t as worried about the declining rating. “My father used to say, ‘markets fluctuate like fishes swim,’” John Jameson says at the neighborhood improvement meeting. It’s our week to host, and I’m placing triangles of cheese beside rectangle crackers. Several of the other wives are insisting on helping me.

  “We’ll make sure this is the last time you host until after the miracles pop out,” Janice Jameson says.

  “Can I see?” Alice Johansson asks while lifting up the hem of my blouse.

  “There’s nothing to see. I’m not even showing.”

  In the other room, Donald is raising his voice. “Well my father always said you can never be too careful when it comes to property and prosperity. Plus, I already bought the trench coat.”

  The three of us walk back in holding the one tray.

  “If it will make you feel better, we’ll take a vote.”

  Donald is a tall, muscular man. He knows how to use his body, how to loom. The vote is tight, but Donald stares down enough neighbors to get his budget approved.

  “Let’s move on to the question of acceptable dye colors for next month’s Easter egg hunt.”

  “I refuse to participate if metallics are allowed again,” Claudia Stetson says. “They hurt my eyes.”

  The double-wide crib is temporarily in my office. This means that the baby monitor camera is temporarily in there too. It’s shaped like a purple flower and situated between the plants on the windowsill. The monitor is downstairs in the living room. I’ve adjusted the angle of the camera so that it can see the crib but not my computer screen.

  I can never allow Donald to see what I look at online.

  The property values in Middle Pond are based on the reputation of the neighborhood, which is determined, in large part, by the official score assigned by the North Lake Committee on Proper Property Standards.

  We are never told the qualifying factors. From the way the inspectors inspect, the list is long and varied. They inspect the level of seed in the bird feeders, observe the height of the grass in each lawn, and mark down rule infractions during games of sidewalk hopscotch.

  Our neighbors probably thought Donald would get bored after a week or give up when the score increased. But the score keeps declining, and by midmonth Donald has an entire operation set up in our basement.

  “Look at those paint stains in the Johanssons’ driveway. And see how the Stetsons keep every curtain drawn?”

  I’m maneuvering the laundry basket between his monitors and stacks of notes. He calls me over, makes me watch a time-lapse progression of black cars entering and leaving the Jacobsons’ garage. “I’m going to see if the neighborhood board will increase the watch’s budget. I need at least a dozen cameras. What do you think?”

  I want to tell him my bladder hurts, my back aches, and I don’t care about the neighbors’ driveways. I want to tell him he was supposed to be helping me during the pregnancy, not getting in my way. Mostly, I want to tell him he should be looking at me, not the neighbors.

  Or that’s what I know I’m supposed to feel. In fact, I don’t mind that Donald isn’t looking at me.

  I know every marriage goes through these phases, where you look at the other person and can’t remember what you ever saw in them. I know it will pass, and that the babies will give us something new to look at together. But they aren’t born yet.

  When Donald starts pinning evidence to his corkboard, I creep upstairs and open my SingleMingle account. I gaze at the pixelated men. Some are smiling, with salt and wind in their hair. Others are introspective, reading a nove
l in a leather wingback chair. When I click next, a new one materializes. I click next again and again and again. There is an endless number of these men. My favorites are the ones who don’t have shirts on. Some even crop their heads off, leaving disembodied torsos moving across my screen.

  Donald’s operation starts out small and consists mostly of warning signs he posts around the neighborhood. These signs show a dark figure with glowing eyes and the words “You Are Seen.”

  Nevertheless, during the inspector’s next visit, while he is measuring the dampness of the cul-de-sac gutter, somebody keys his car. The next day, HausFlippr changes our safety rating from A to A- and drops our overall score five points.

  Donald’s budget is quickly tripled.

  He buys a dozen cameras from Discountsleuth.com and hides them around our property. One is slinked through the hose, looking out at the street. Two face our immediate neighbors’ houses through holes in the fence that Donald drills with an old dentist drill. One is hooked to the weathervane at the top of the house, providing a rotating view of the neighborhood as the wind blows.

  The cameras snake down into the basement, where they are monitored by Donald and his two interns, Chet and Chad.

  I use a fake zip code on my SingleMingle account. My user information is a lie. My height is shrunk an inch, my status marked “seductively single,” my eyes labeled hazel instead of green. I use photos that obscure my features, angles that make my nose look bigger or my hair a different shade of brown. If anyone who knew me saw my profile, they wouldn’t recognize me. Still, I make sure to browse strangers in other neighborhoods like North Forest and South Beach.

  A man with the username OceanShoreStud27 catches my eye. His profile doesn’t have much information, but I want to know more. I plug his user photos into reverse image searches, find his other profiles on other sites. His name is Derek Carrington. He’s thirty-seven, a Libra, works in finance, has a blog devoted to his fishing catches. I check out his most played songs on WalkmanFM and a list of every movie he’s rated on Filmglutton.com.