Calendar Girls

by April Hill

  I was still pondering the deep emotion in all this when the belt landed with a resounding crack across my bare behind. And while I had known that being spanked would hurt, I did not know, or even imagine, how much it would hurt. At the fourth swat, I began howling, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t try to get away, either. All that stuff came a few scalding thwacks later, when it began to feel like my ass was about to burst into flames. After that, I squirmed and twisted, wailed and kicked, prompting Jeff to warn me that if I didn’t stop kicking him, he was going to add a couple of minutes with an old wooden hairbrush he just happened to have lying around, and see how much I liked that. Since I didn’t think I’d like it very much, I stopped kicking and simply lay there, defeated, but still howling at the top of my lungs. But I still didn’t cry. I was far too stubborn for that.

  Next, I resorted to begging, and to playing the remorse and pity cards for all they were worth— swearing on every single thing I could think of that I’d never do anything dangerous and stupid again as long as I lived. When the thwacks just kept coming, though, I got the feeling my lies weren’t being all that persuasive.

  And finally, I began to cry, huge, sobbing tears— and he stopped.

  (News flash: Apparently, my tolerance for pain isn’t quite as high as Dr. Friedkin had told me. I would have happily sold my parents and both my beloved siblings down the river for one less thwack.)

  For a few minutes, I sniffled and hiccupped and moved around the room rubbing my fiery, very well-spanked behind. It didn’t help, but I was still hoping to elicit an apology from Jeff for spanking me, or at least some sympathy.

  No luck. He sat down on the arm of the couch I had just vacated, and simply watched—and waited. I knew what he was waiting for, but saying what he wanted was going to be hard for me, after what had just happened. Earlier in the evening, I couldn’t wait to tell him how sorry I was for everything, but now…

  Instead, I wiped my nose, pulled up my pajama bottoms—wincing when the scratchy fabric touched my roasted butt—and marched off to the bathroom to sulk, and to wash off the dripping mascara. The bedraggled creature looking back at me from the mirror wasn’t exactly a vision of loveliness. My hair was tangled, my forehead and cheeks were chafed and raw from the cold, my eyes were red, and my nose was running. The gorgeous Valentine’s Day ensemble I’d blown the budget on was lying in a sodden heap on the bathroom floor, and in my droopy, oversized flannel pajamas, I looked like a melting lumberjack coming off a three-day toot.

  I sat down—very carefully—on the toilet lid, and began to bawl like a baby.

  Which was apparently what Jeff had been waiting for.

  A knock on the bathroom door confirmed it. “May I come in,” he asked softly.

  “Go away,” I sniffled. “I’m trying to figure out how to drown myself in a stall shower.”

  “I was planning to add a tub in a few weeks,” he said helpfully, “after we were married.”

  I stopped sniffling. “Could you make it like a Jacuzzi? A really deep one, with those little water jets all around? And one of those rainfall showerheads?”

  A chuckle. “Not if you want a honeymoon. I never got around to telling you how much I get paid per month, did I?”

  “Are you really going to put poor Kevin in jail?”

  He laughed. “So, now, it’s poor Kevin?”

  “Well, you were both my victims, in a way,” I explained with a sigh, “and you never know when you’re going to need a good chiropractor. My left ankle feels twisted.”

  “A good night’s sleep in a warm, soft bed should help that.”

  I got up and opened the door.

  “Yes, but are we going to get a good night’s sleep?” I asked sweetly. “Or any sleep at all?”

  Jeff pulled me into his arms and kissed me. “I doubt it. But before we get to that, there’s still your Valentine’s present to open.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t really need a set of snow tires.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out the little box.

  “I’m sorry, Emma. What happened—with the dance, and all—was partly my fault. I wanted to surprise you, and all I managed to do was bungle…”

  When I opened the box, I saw a dainty diamond solitaire winking up at me from its bed of green velvet—and I started to cry again.

  Jeff wiped a few tears from my cheek, and kissed me—very gently. “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  After all these months of composing and recomposing an answer to this question, the simplest one was all I could think of. It must have been okay, though, because Jeff kissed me yet again, a lot more enthusiastically, this time, and then took me to bed.

  “This house was my dad’s,” he told me later. (A lot later. Around daylight, actually.) “I’ve spent the last few months fixing it up, but if you don’t like what I’ve done, we can look around for another place, closer to town.”

  I shook my head sleepily. “It’s perfect, and beautiful. Positively the best Valentine’s present I’ve ever had. You’re going to have a hard time beating it next year, though. You might want to start planning something, now. Not that I don’t trust you to get it right, darling, but chocolate’s always a good place to start.”

  THE END

  March and St. Patrick’s Day—Cathy, in The End of the Rainbow

  Most of this story takes place on a very small island off the coast of Ireland, a rocky, mist-wrapped parcel of earth and sand that seems to have been dropped by God into the middle of the otherwise endless, deeply green sea. To visitors, it’s a place that often seems enchanted, especially in the early morning, when the low fog lifts slowly, revealing the island’s ruined castle, perched, as all ruined castles should be, on a rugged cliff. Avalon, perhaps? It’s the kind of place where fishermen still go out in very small boats, to fish for herring and mackerel, and lobsters, using little more than their bare hands and antiquated gear.

  The hero of the story is Irish, and even though I am not even remotely Irish, I wrote the story, so I get to be the heroine. Despite the name of this story, there are no leprechauns in it, and no pots of gold. Just the rainbow, and what I found at the end of it.

  The story is about many things, including but not limited to, love, lobster fishing, and being spanked, all of which were new experiences to me when they first happened. It’s also about how I went in search of a giant lobster and a great headline, and ended up leaving behind everything I had always thought I wanted. But mostly, it’s about how I found someone who made leaving it all behind seem like the most natural thing in the world, and how I finally came to understand what’s important in life, and what isn’t.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, in what now seems like a galaxy far, far away, I was an aspiring, not-especially-young journalist, known at my place of employment by my byline–AlleyCat.

  AlleyCat was both my byline and the title of the short column I labored to turn out once a week for a glitzy gossip rag called Seek. The magazine was sold most often in subway stations, and it was frequently remarked by real journalists that Seek was the sort of publication that gave gutter filth a bad name. Although almost nobody admitted to actually reading Seek, it was very popular, and highly profitable. (For a variety of excellent reasons, the magazine has now gone belly-up, an outcome for which I like to believe I was at least partly responsible.)

  At the time my story began, I was living with my boyfriend, Todd, in a faded but once elegant twelfth-story apartment that overlooked a teeny-tiny sliver of one treeless wedge of Central Park. You could see it if you leaned three feet out the window, craned your neck at a forty-five degree angle, then clung to the windowsill to keep from falling to your death on the cracked pavement below. I am originally from Omaha, and before I moved to the city and sold my soul to the devil, I had earned a degree in English literature from a well-respected midwestern university. I had even written a novel. Well, more like almost finished writing a novel. (I have always been good at almost finis
hing things.) My writing skills were above average without being dazzling, and once I began working at Seek, I learned to augment these skills with an acerbic style that made me and my column sound more sophisticated and knowledgeable than we really were.

  Had I remained in Nebraska, a frog in a small pond, I might very well have risen to the position of editor at a small-town newspaper, but in the very big pond of New York City, I was living my life like someone out of a chick-lit novel, or an endless episode of Sex and The City. In order to make myself into Sarah Jessica Parker, as Carrie, I bought a lot of shoes I couldn’t afford that hurt my feet, and for a while, the masquerade worked. But before long, with my thirty-fourth birthday approaching, it hit me. I wasn’t Carrie. I was an approaching middle age flash in the pan.

  So, having learned from trial and error that trying to make positive things happen in my life was both exhausting and usually futile, I began to follow a different path—the path sometimes referred to as the path of least resistance. I chose to see my life as a river, with me floating down it, on my back. The river was a whole lot bigger and stronger than I was, and it was going where it wanted to go, with or without my consent or cooperation, right? I was just along for the ride, really. I amused myself by looking for familiar objects in the clouds, enjoying what I could see of the passing scenery, while trying to avoid the stronger currents, where I might be sucked under to a polluted and watery grave. It wasn’t quite as restful or tranquil as I’ve made it sound, though, and on most days, it was pretty much all I could do to dodge the submerged tree trunks, castoff jogging shoes, and balding truck tires that were rushing by me. What I could never figure out, though, was whether this meant that I was becoming content and well adjusted to my fake chick-lit life, or suffering from suicidal depression. The symptoms are pretty much the same, when you think about it.

  I might have continued this way if I hadn’t seen the article about the gigantic lobster, which happened, not coincidentally, on the same day I decided to leave my boyfriend. Todd was technically my fiancé, but I never like using a French word when a real one will do just as well, so let’s just go with boyfriend, even if Todd was as much a boy as I was a chick, and by that point, we weren’t even all that friendly. Eight months earlier, he had proposed and I had accepted, but I wasn’t wearing an engagement ring yet, because Todd was still deliberating want he was looking for in a diamond purchase. What I wanted didn’t appear to be an issue, since the ring was more like a calculated financial move than a lushly romantic DeBeers commercial. No swell of violin music, just the possibility of a good return on his investment when the diamond market went back up, as Todd assured me it would, making the diamond I didn’t actually own and probably would never wear worth three times what I didn’t pay for it.

  I didn’t care that much about the ring, since I’ve never especially liked diamonds. They’re artificially priced, have sharp edges, get a lot of stuff on them, and you can’t wear them on the subways late at night unless you have a death wish or an unconscious desire to lose a finger. Whatever Todd selected would probably live most of its life in a safe deposit box anyway, so what the hell. Besides, I’ve never really liked the idea of being marked in that way—like you belong to whoever gave you the ring in the first place. Call it a symbol of love and commitment if you like, but to me, a diamond engagement ring says something entirely different. It announces to everyone who sees it what a cultural anthropologist studying primitive courting practices would call your bride price. You might just as well walk around with a rope in your hand, leading a bunch of cows or goats.

  If you’re getting the feeling from all this that I wasn’t the most enthusiastic bride-to-be in the Big Apple, give yourself a quick pat on the back.

  * * *

  I had gone to work that pivotal morning with nothing more in mind than to get through the day without throwing myself from my grimy ninth story window, get started on my column for the week, and then go home and fall asleep on the couch until Todd got home at around eight. That specific evening had already been scheduled as our monthly budget conference night, a grueling two-hour exercise in sadomasochism during which Todd liked to explain at tedious length why he was my economic superior. I never argued the point, mainly because it was true. Not only did Todd make nine or ten times more than I did, he also understood that a fool and his money are soon parted, whereas I have always harbored the hope that money does grow on trees.

  But then, just before lunchtime, while I was trying to come up with a column idea for the magazine’s Saint Patrick’s Day issue, my friend and colleague Angie Peterson came into my cubby hole with a smirk on her face, thrust a newspaper article in front of me, and splashed a cup of perfectly good two-day old Starbuck’s coffee all over the stack of accumulated crap on my desk. I should probably explain, here that Seek had the dubious distinction of printing a higher percentage of dishonest and/or fabricated material than any other trashy magazine in the country—maybe the world. Leland Wiley, the magazine’s owner and de facto editor-in-chief, prided himself on the number of libelous articles he’d managed to get away with, and rewarded his employees’ most outrageous fabrications with enormous boxes of Godiva chocolates. He especially enjoyed sullying the reputations of what he called exhibitionistic do-gooders. Angie had once been given orders to dig up some dirt on Habitat for Humanity, and for a while, she was sure she had the goods on Mother Theresa, but the story eventually fell through when it became clear, even to Leland, that Mother Theresa was not actually a transgender, formerly male math teacher from San Bernardino, California. A month after that, she was hot on the trail of a story about a trio of adorable dolphins that had enjoyed carnal knowledge of their keeper, and tried to eat a third grader. When it turned out the entire story was bogus, planted by a vengeful tuna fisherman on his anti-EPA website, poor Leland was inconsolable.

  I, on the other hand, spent most of my time trying to get the goods on various male movie stars and rock idols, and wherever feasible, to publicly “out” some luckless male celebrity as gay. Gay women never got me as many points with Leland as gay men, because the boss insisted that the sleaze-buying public was more intrigued by anal sex than what he called “all that other crap,” which I thought was a fairly interesting way of putting it. I usually picked my victims by leafing through back issues of People or Us, and throwing a dart. Once I’d chosen the sacrificial lamb of the week, I searched through stacks of old publicity photos until I located a shot of the targeted guy posing with another man, and then photo shopped the picture. Did I have a great job, or what?

  “Check this out, Ace,” Angie cried exultantly. Angie operated under the delusion that we both worked for the Metropolis Daily Planet and that she was Lois Lane, closing in on a world-class scoop. “What do you see?”

  When I checked out the newspaper clipping she’d handed me, what I saw was a grainy photograph of a humongous lobster. Easily the biggest lobster I’d ever seen, but still a lobster, and from my experience, crustaceans are rarely newsworthy.

  “A lobster,” I said wearily. I tossed the paper down and made a pass at the mess on my desk with a couple of used napkins. “So what?”

  At that point in my life, you see, I regarded lobsters as nothing more than expensive items on a restaurant menu— creatures so unappealing in their natural state that they were better ordered and consumed without prolonged observation. Long before I understood how truly unpleasant lobsters can be in person, I used to wonder how in the name of God early man had first come to regard the lobster as food. Imagine, if you will, a giant lobster crawling up from the primordial slime, its beady eyes and roach-like appendages waving in the air, and one of our dimwitted caveman ancestors leaping to his hairy feet and exclaiming, “Man, is that thing gonna taste awesome with just a little lemon and drawn butter!” Since then, I’ve learned that there was even a time in history when it was illegal for prisons to serve lobster too frequently to inmates, on the theory that such a loathsome diet was both unhealthy and inhuman
e.

  Annoyed by my lack of enthusiasm, Angie punched me in the arm. “In the first place, dummy, that slimy sucker in the picture is not just a lobster. Look again. The damned thing’s the size of a VW—a freaking record holder, or something like that.”

  I slapped my forehead and whooped. “Egads, Lois, you’re right! Quick! Tell them to hold the front page!” I tossed the picture back to her. “That’s your big story? Some jerk fisherman halfway around the world hauls up a plug-ugly big lobster, and I’m supposed to be all over the story like a duck on a June bug? It’s a freaking lobster, Angie. I don’t do lobsters. I do Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, not a stupid fish that looks like a cockroach.”

  “Lobsters aren’t fish,” she corrected me. “They’re…well, they’re something else. Besides, who gives a shit about the crummy lobster? Look again, sweetie,” she insisted, shoving the photo at me for a second time. “And this time, try focusing on the guy in the picture, not the damned fish, or whatever.”

  So, I looked. And then, I looked again. A guy holding up a lobster, and neither of them looked especially happy about having their pictures taken. But in that brief, electrifying moment, I heard the sound of opportunity knocking.

  But I wasn’t about to blow my chance at fame and fortune by letting Angie know she was actually on to something. In my business, friendship and professional ethics can be like a couple of dead albatrosses around your neck.

  So, I tried playing it cool. “Yeah, so, what about him. Okay, he’s kind of cute. I see that, but guys like this one walk around smelling like fish guts, and get their coffee at 7-Eleven, not Starbucks. Take my word for it, Ang, he’s not your type. If he were smiling, I’ll bet you’d see a lot of missing teeth.”

  Angie smirked again, something she’s really good at, by the way. I can never get a smirk quite right, and that can be a serious liability in my chosen profession. “Don’t try that innocent crap with me,” she cooed. “I wrote the book on lying through your teeth. You’re just lucky I’m too busy to follow up on this one. I’m still working on my final draft about that congressman with the porn-star girlfriend. Just tell me one thing. Is that, or is that not, Devlin O’Connell?”