The Beet Queen

“Already my mind was working on what revenge I would exact from her, and already I was way ahead where getting even was concerned, because Sita never saw me clearly until it was much too late.”

Mary believes that Sita is taunting her about the empty box that was supposed to contain Adelaide’s jewelry. In fact, while Sita does feel sorry for Mary in this instance, she is also jealous of Mary, so the empathy is complicated by feelings that Mary deserves some sort of comeuppance—especially given that Sita has had to sacrifice her clothes and some of her space for Mary. This ambivalence on Sita’s part reveals the seeds of a mutual resentment that will only grow over time.

“A few weeks later, when she knew her way around town, she got some jeweler to drill a hole through one end of the lucky piece. Then she hung the cow’s diamond around her neck on a piece of string, as if it were something valuable.”

Sita’s observation not only speaks to the rivalry between Mary and Sita but also foreshadows Sita’s later actions. Sita wanted the cow’s diamond for herself, but her father refused to give it to her, instead choosing to bestow it on Mary. Sita’s jealousy will later propel her to take Mary’s nearly empty box and use the pawn ticket to retrieve Adelaide’s garnet necklace, without ever telling Mary about it or passing it on to her. While she has her revenge, Sita will suffer under the burden of guilt for what she has done.

“The two of them stood by the window taking turns with the cow’s lens, ignoring me. I sat at the table eating cookies. I ate the feet. I nibbled up the legs. I took the arms off in two snaps and then bit off the head. What was left was a shapeless body. I ate that up too.”

Sita is watching Mary and Celestine slowly become best friends, and again, Sita feels that Mary has taken something that is rightfully hers. Thus, to get rid of Mary, Sita metaphorically devours her in the shape of the cookie.

“They would force me to worship them like an animal. I would fall. I would burn and burn until by grace I was consumed.”

Karl thinks about his illicit liaisons with homeless men while he is in the seminary. He employs a simile that serves to dehumanize himself, while also employing religious imagery that serves to redeem himself: He must fall before he can be saved, from sin to salvation. His profound rebellion against the Church’s teachings on sexuality comes in his realization that he need not renounce pleasure to be redeemed: His redemption is synonymous with pleasure and comes from the same source as his “fall.”

“Sometimes, even now, I look on the married girls that way a wild dog might look through the window at tame ones, envying the regularity of their lives but also despising the low pleasure they get from the master’s touch.”

Mary applies a fitting metaphor for her feelings about love and marriage. On the one hand, she craves security and comfort, feelings she did not experience as a child. On the other hand, she remains fiercely independent, always self-reliant and sure of herself, the other result of her traumatic childhood.

“I kept my looks up with more care than ever. I was ten years older than some of the girls I modeled with and I was no longer the one most sought after. I had to wonder how much time I had left.”

Sita’s comment about her fading modeling career is prescient in two ways. First, it comes shortly before she decides to return to Argus and marry rather than risk being rejected by the industry because of her age. Second, it foreshadows her decision to take her own life; as it turns out, Sita does not have much time.

“I shivered, knowing the letter had been in Mary’s own hands, the hands that glowed blue in the dark and yet picked up no unusual vibrations as to the envelope’s contents.”

The letter from Catherine Miller, Jude Miller’s “adoptive” mother, is addressed to the Kozkas, not to Mary; thus, when Mary receives it at the butcher shop, she sends it along to Sita. The contents contain Catherine’s confession about Jude’s actual origins. Sita never tells Mary—and despite Mary’s confidence in her psychic abilities, Mary never suspects—and also suffers under this guilt. The garnet necklace and the unanswered letter will haunt Sita.

“This came out of the blue, unexpected, and when he looked at me with his clear sad eyes, I suddenly had the feeling that had always frightened me, the blackness, the ground I’d stood on giving way, the falling no place. Maybe it was true about him, the awkwardness, no experience, the awful possibility that he wanted to get to know me.”

Karl’s encounter with Wallace leaves him shaken. He is not seeking a connection or a relationship; the honesty and longing with which Wallace views him are palpable. While Karl rejects this immediately, as is his habit, it will remain with him for years—until he finally decides to return.

“This is Sita’s way of telling us she doesn’t really want us to come, her low-class former friends and relatives. She is sending us the invitation just to rub our faces in the subtle ambiance of her new and very prosperous life.”

When Sita opens her expensive French restaurant in Argus, she sends a fancy invitation to the butcher shop. Celestine is correct in her assessment, as expressed above, that what Sita really wants is to show off her success. However, Celestine takes up her bluff, and she, along with Mary and Russell, shows up to opening night. It is a disaster, and Sita needs their help in the kitchen, for which she is characteristically ungrateful. It is another blow to Sita’s fragile psyche; her gloating becomes their triumph.

“In the love magazines, when passion holds sway, men don’t fall down and roll on the floor and lay there like dead. But Karl does that. Right that very evening, in fact, not long after the dinner, when I tell him he must go, he suddenly hits the floor like a toppled statue.”

Celestine identifies one of Karl’s consistent traits, manifested by his childhood abandonment: He needs to be taken care of, even though he tries to consider himself an itinerant loner. She uses an apt simile to depict Karl’s paralyzing emotions.

“For many years Saint Catherine’s had been important in my life, and religion itself still had a strict hold. Among other things, the idea of relying only on Louis and myself for answers and assistance was new.”

Sita reflects on how losing the religion upon which she once relied presages her subsequent breakdown. She suffers from an excess of guilt over her unspoken acts of revenge against Mary, she has a failed career and a failed business in her past, and she is entangled in a rather unaffectionate marriage—with a scientist type, who has no pressing need for religion. Relying only on herself proves to be too much pressure.

“‘All flesh is grass,’ I said, hardly believing my own voice, and because of the strangeness hearing the phrase as entirely new. We stood uncomfortably, looking at the lawn, and I noticed that the whole yard was covered with the same kind of grass that grew in cemeteries—fine, short-cropped grass of a brilliant green color.”

Sita quotes from the Book of Isaiah here, recalling a distant memory of church. The full sentence from the King James Bible reads, “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field,” meaning that beauty—what Sita has spent her life pursuing—is evanescent and even the body itself is fragile and temporary. Sita is confronting her own mortality here. This moment foreshadows Sita’s eventual death in the yew bushes planted in her front lawn.

“I live in a flat, treeless valley where sugar beets grow. It is intemperate here, a climate of violent extremes. I do like storms, though, and bad weather of all types.”

Wallace describes the unpromising terrain of Argus, while also implicitly acknowledging the hardiness of the beets: They can survive the extreme weather, just as Wallace himself can. For all of his sensitivity, Wallace is a hardy character—self-sufficient, hardworking, and not wanting for much—again, like his sugar beets.

“But to me, the child would always be Wallacette. As her male sponsor, I was glad to give her full name for the church records, and her date of birth.”

Wallace rejects Mary’s nickname, Dot, which obscures Wallace’s role in Dot’s birth and life. He displays pride—and a sense of possessiveness—over the child named for him. He is not merely a “male sponsor,” he intends to become a father figure. His feelings for Dot are complicated by the fact that she is Karl’s daughter, for whom he still yearns. He can express his love for Karl through his relationship with Dot.

“Sleep, which she resisted, did not come upon her gently but felled her in odd positions. Draped over the side of a cart or packed in its corner, she seemed to have fallen in battle.”

Mary’s observations about Dot as an infant please her; she believes that Dot resembles her, with an innate impatience for weakness or neediness. Instead, in the metaphor above, Dot is a natural-born warrior child, yielding only in the final moments of a hard-fought battle.

“The years since the beet had come to town were hard on [Officer Lovchik]. Construction workers from the beet refinery roistered in the bars, and the asphalt haulers set up wild camps on the edge of town where the bypass was going in.”

This aside reflects how the city of Argus has changed in the 28 years since Mary’s arrival. Wallace’s vision of how the sugar beet fields would change the town has come to fruition, but it has brought not just prosperity and modernity but also corruption and chaos. To echo the religious language often used within the novel, it is as if Argus was once an Eden that has now fallen into iniquity.

“Saint Joseph should carry a construction tool, I think, not an instrument of death. Perhaps because of the maul, Dot looks grimmer than the mild church statues, and more powerful. I believe in her as Saint Joseph, even though she is my daughter.”

Celestine observes, with a measure of alarm, that Dot has been armed with an instrument of destruction, a mallet-like tool that can inflict harm—and will, with Dot wielding it against the front half of the donkey in the play. This image of Dot, forbidding and formidable, is an exaggerated version of her actual personality. Dot is surely no saint, but there is something awesome about her strength and certitude.

“They loved Dot too much, and for that sin she made them miserable. Sometimes it was if all her family’s worst qualities were crowded into her—Mary’s stubborn, abrupt ways, Sita’s vanity, Celestine’s occasional cruelties, Karl’s lack of responsibility.”

Wallace observes the dysfunctional family in which Dot is being raised (though he himself is also a part of this). Dot’s generational inheritance is a mixed bag, as Wallace sees it; the worst of the previous generations have been passed down to her, alongside some of the best. Wallace himself adores her, despite the above assessment. He is drawn to her self-possession and fearlessness.

“We had never been friends. She had wounded me whenever possible, beginning with the first day she gave my namesake, Wallacette, the unremarkable nickname Dot. She had resented me, taken jealous potshots at my friendship with Celestine, been perpetually cunning where she could have been kind, and tried her best to spoil this party. There was no warmth in her, no generous heart. She was a tough case.”

Wallace and Mary have long nursed a rivalry over Dot, beginning with Mary’s robbing Wallacette of her name and Wallace of his namesake. However, Wallace underestimates Mary here: He has overserved her alcohol in an attempt to keep her quiet; this has backfired, which disrupts Dot’s luau-themed birthday party. Part of the blame surely goes to him. In addition, shortly thereafter, Mary reads his palm, pronouncing him lonely and encouraging him to marry Celestine. She wants the best for all of them, even if she does not always show it in appropriate ways.

“We are talking about the afterlife, her pet subject, and she is kneading Polish sausage meat with her bare hands that have thickened and calloused through the years so they look like tough paws. We’re getting old.”

Celestine notes the passing of years via the personage of Mary. She employs a simile to describe Mary’s work-hardened hands, coarsened by the years of work in the butcher shop. She also notices that Mary’s quirky obsessions have grown stronger over the years.

“At one time I used to have the pills stashed everywhere. But I kept forgetting where I hid them. They’d turn up unexpectedly, and that was undependable. I couldn’t’ stand to lose a one after Louis died because there is no doctor in town anymore who will write out a ticket.”

Sita has been burdened not only by guilt and loss (of her career, her business, and now her husband) but also by what appears to be an addiction. In her desperation, she decides to take all the pills that are left, thus ending her life. It is a tragic end for a once-ambitious woman whose dreams went unrealized.

“Most important of all, the thing I never lost sight of, was the crowning of the queen. It had to be more than perfect: it had to be regal. All of Dot’s fantasies rolled up in one and come to life.”

Wallace has visions of grandeur for the coronation of his Beet Queen. However, as with most yearnings for perfection, the reality falls short. It is also notable that these are not necessarily Dot’s fantasies, but rather Wallace’s fantasies for Dot.

“He’d do anything to please me, but didn’t have the nerve to please himself. I like a person to be selfish so I can stop thinking that they’re thinking something that I can’t understand. He drove me out of my mind with attention, and even though I did feel sorry for him there was no question, ever, of staying. And yet I was coming back.”

Karl thinks about Wallace’s affection in contrast to his own selfishness; the two function as foils for the other. Karl has grown humbler through the years, and he yearns for a family, for comfort and love. Thus, he returns to Argus, not only for Wallace but also for Dot.