Beatrice Gets A Christmas Card

Beatrice walked down the driveway in six inches of snow, off to the post office to pick up the holiday mail at her mother’s insistence. She was the first brave citizen to step outside the boundaries of their front yard and go ‘downtown’. Not only was snow falling at a rapid rate, but the wind made big and tall pine trees sway in the wind like feathers.

It was horrible outside. Beatrice had never seen such a fierce winter storm in her life. She wondered if her mother really loved her for sending her out in such treacherous conditions.

There wasn’t much to downtown; a post office, a grocery store, and two gas stations with adjacent pool halls, filled with video games and a pool table. Even the half foot of snow couldn’t keep Beatrice out of that pool hall. She loved her guy friends there: Bobbie Baumberbauch, Chris Smith, Jason North, Stephen Smith, Brian Hoffman and Mike Nead. She knew they would be there today, during the blizzard.

They all treated Beatrice with respect and as one of their own and the group of boys and Beatrice had lots of fun at Spencer’s gas station, on the outskirts of town.

Beatrice hated being the only girl in the gang.

She ruled the pool hall and she ran there every chance that life gave her! The boys bowed to her there and that’s how she liked it. She tossed her cue stick like a cock and she was a stud at Spencer’s arcade.

She really didn’t understand the Christmas card drama that members of her family participated in ritualistically each December and why her mother sent her out into a blizzard to fetch the mail one cold December day.

Some of the Hallmark cards that were addressed to the Miller household were really well written and Beatrice loved the glitter covered poetry in some of the keepsake literature.

She always compared signatures inside cards between different members of the family and pondered why some family members wrote personalized greetings while others depended on bad writers at Hallmark.

But it all seemed so silly to her. "Why waste eleven cents on mailing out popularity contests via the United States Postal Service?" she said to herself while heading down the lesser of two streets, (the back alley), in six inches of icing like snow, to the post office.

Beatrice’s mom could tell one in August every last person who sent her a card last Christmas and who was going to get one next year. It all seemed very selfish to Beatrice, but she didn’t mind going to the post office, sticking a key in a little metal door with a window, and pulling out tons and tons of 1st class Christmas mail. Beatrice and her family were well loved and it showed in the mass mailings each December.

Walking to the post office for her mom meant having the opportunity to smoke a cigarette. Smoking a paper stick filled with tobacco made Beatrice feel just how she wanted to feel– like James Dean.

The town where she lived was very small and quiet. Only two streets ran through the little village and there was only one intersection with a blinking light, one side yellow and one side red, which was enough in the early eighties to keep traffic flowing smoothly through the little retirement community.

When Beatrice walked down the unplowed, snow covered alley, ladies of the town peeked out their kitchen windows to see the tom boy puffing away on a Luck Strike.

Barb Benson lived down the back alley. She was a married woman with three tiny children and it seemed to Beatrice, that she waited by her kitchen window not to judge her for smoking cigarettes, but for another reason.

There was a pile of embers from a wood burning fire stove dumped upon the fresh six inches of December snow outside of Barb’s house.

Barb wasn’t at the window this evening and Beatrice wondered why.

She stood next to those smoldering embers for two hours, keeping warm in temperatures hovering in the teens, waiting for her friend, the beautiful blonde lady, to show up in her kitchen window, washing dishes and flirting with Beatrice upon her snow covered lawn.

But something was wrong with Barb and Beatrice knew it.

Beatrice cried and shivered while thinking of Barb getting another black eye from her husband that cold December Eve when she went to get Christmas mail for her mom.

There wasn’t any mail that day, at least that’s what Beatrice told her mom with frost bitten toes.