Calendar Girls

by April Hill

I nodded gratefully. I’d already tossed my bouquet and kissed everyone in sight several times. After dancing with ten or twelve drunken cops, I’d finally shed my elegant, low-heeled ivory slippers and gone off to nurse the blisters that had developed on both heels. The idea of a long, quiet evening alone in a swanky hotel with Mike was all that was keeping me upright.

  “You look beat,” he said, kissing me very gently on the forehead. “I’ve done the obligatory farewells, so I’m going out to get the car and pull it around back. We can slip out without breaking up the party. Everyone here’s too hammered to notice we’re gone, anyway. By the way, where’d you park the car?”

  “Out in front of the church,” I murmured wearily. “I’ll go tell Mom and Kate we’re leaving, then wait for you by the back entrance.”

  After Mike disappeared through the front door of the church, I wandered around and offered my thanks to everyone, then limped to the back door to wait for him. There was something nagging at a tiny little corner of my mind, but I was too tired to give it much thought. When ten minutes had passed and Mike still hadn’t shown up with the car, I found a convenient post to lean against where I could still keep an eye on the back entrance. After a few more minutes, I closed my eyes, tried to ignore my aching feet, and began going over everything that had happened that day in my mind. And suddenly, it came to me, right out of the blue—what had been bothering me.

  I remembered where I’d parked Mike’s Corolla.

  When Kate and I got to the church, you see, we were running late, so we simply pulled up in front of the church, and dashed inside—leaving Mike’s car in a two-hour, tow-away zone.

  That had been more than six hours ago.

  Which meant that the Corolla was probably now sitting in a muddy police impound lot, getting hideously scratched while racking up hundreds of dollars in impound fees. And since most of our luggage was in the Corolla’s trunk, the odds of my getting a world-class spanking on my wedding night had just increased exponentially.

  Maybe five minutes later, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Mike striding my way, but by the time I realized what he had in mind, he was already standing behind me. I had just enough time to open my mouth to try to explain before he wrapped an arm around my waist, bent me deftly across his hip, and flung up the long tail of my wedding gown. I don’t think any of our wedding guests actually witnessed what happened next, but they would have had to be deaf as a stone to miss the shriek of pain I gave forth when Mike’s hand landed on my half-bare, satin-clad backside. People were still looking around for the source of the scream while Mike was pushing me not so gently toward the stairway to the church’s basement kitchen.

  What followed our arrival in the kitchen was the sort of epic spanking people write songs about— if anyone actually wrote songs about repulsive things like that. The event itself was almost classical in both form and substance, with the bride draped across the groom’s knee, and her ivory satin panties drooping around her shaking knees.

  With my bridal frock over my head and my deflated curls in my eyes, my visual take on what was happening was limited to an upside-down view of the worn linoleum floor, as seen through a dislodged fake eyelash, but I felt every one of the twenty or thirty blistering swats my handsome groom applied to my now totally bare buttocks. Despite his eagerness to set my behind on fire, Mike had apparently taken the time to rummage through the kitchen drawers for a gigantic, long handled wooden spoon the size of a damned saucer. He didn’t say a word, and didn’t miss a single inch. To say I was ablaze from mid-ass to mid-thigh would be a serious understatement. I swear you could have fried a couple of eggs on my rear end, with enough heat left over to make toast. Okay, so I’m exaggerating just a little, but not by much. No toast, maybe, but enough to melt butter. I was astonishingly brave, of course, and didn’t even make a lot of noise. Okay, so about halfway through, I did begin to howl like a banshee, but I muffled most of that by biting down on a red leather hymnal someone had left in the kitchen. I would like to believe that our wedding guests didn’t hear a thing.

  I rode most of the way to Boston sitting on a pew cushion I stole from the church, but it didn’t help a lot. We spent the night in a shabby Motel Six, two hours short of the very nice hotel Mike had booked. Not the most romantic choice for a wedding night honeymoon, maybe, but by the time we contacted the police about Mike’s impounded car, arranged for a rental car, and got out of city in heavy weekend traffic, the Motel Six looked like the Trump Plaza. I had suggested going back to our own apartment for the night, but Mike just growled at me and said we were going off on this damned honeymoon if it killed both of us.

  I spent much of my first night as a married woman sulking. That and tending to the egg-shaped red welts that had begun to blossom all over my soundly spanked behind. I refilled the plastic ice bucket four times, used up every towel in the place, and then called the office for more. When I started to the bathroom with the last of the large bath towels, Mike flashed me a menacing look.

  “I’m sure I can find something in this lousy room to wallop you with,” he warned. “Try using that last clean towel and see what happens.”

  I’d been waiting for an apology from my new husband, but it didn’t appear to be forthcoming. I could understand his point, of course. I was lucky enough to have a small suitcase full of niceties with me—like a change of underwear and a toothbrush. Mike had the clothes he got married in, and a whole lot less cash in the bank than he had the day before. I guess he had a right to be grumpy—and to the last dry towel, as well.

  He softened later that night, after I’d apologized, sworn on a Gideon Bible that I would never get another parking ticket, and volunteered my little pink electric razor so he could shave the next morning. I volunteered a lot of other things, too, which he graciously accepted before coming up with a few pleasantly lewd suggestions of his own. We slept until two o’clock the next afternoon, committing ourselves to a second night at the Motel Six, then went out and squandered the remainder of the day and way too much money at the first shopping mall we passed.

  Mike and I never made it to Cape Cod. With only two days remaining of our ill-starred wedding trip, we stayed on at the Motel Six, experimenting with the least painful positions in which a bride with a sore backside could fully enjoy her cut-rate honeymoon.

  By the time we got home, my fifteen minutes of fame had passed, but Kate had thoughtfully saved the local papers and taped the segments on the evening news following my downfall. The pictures weren’t as nice as our professional wedding photos, but Mike says they’ll make for an interesting scrapbook.

  The End

  July—Libby in: Under The Boardwalk

  A show of hands, please. How many of you remember that great old song from the mid-1960s, sung by The Drifters—Under the Boardwalk? Well, this is my own version of that classic—with quite a lot of variations.

  * * *

  My name is Libby, and my husband Jeb and I live with our kids in New England, in a small, purposely quaint seaside community called Sand Castle Beach. Jeb is the chief of police in our little town, and I am a harried stay-at-home mom to our four sometimes adorable kids. Back in 1889, when the town was founded by a portly gentleman by the name of Gustave Ulysses Gatzburg, it was home to the Gatzburg Porcelain Works, which manufactured toilets. Indoor plumbing was becoming common at the time, and Gustave, who knew nothing whatever about making toilets when he purchased the business, made himself a quick and substantial fortune. Before long, however, retailers began shipping Gustave’s toilets back to him by the boxcar load. They had discovered that the Gatzburg commodes—having been made of poor quality clay and fired improperly—tended to crack at extremely inopportune moments, flooding customers’ bathrooms and causing not only inconvenience and expense, but a large number of minor but extremely humiliating injuries.

  With substandard toilets piling up to the roof in his abandoned warehouse, Gustave helped himself to next month’s payroll, every penny of his in
vestors’ funds, and disappeared into the fog of history. Most of the defective commodes in storage were hauled into the street, where they were pulverized by a crowd of Gustave’s disgruntled former employees wielding sledgehammers. The few fixtures that escaped this wholesale potty slaughter can be still seen around the village of Sand Castle Beach today, planted with geraniums or mums or other hardy perennials. Two of the cracked survivors even flank the entranceway to our old wooden pier, where they serve as receptacles for cigarette butts. (Smoking isn’t permitted on the pier, due to its age.) With the passage of time, Gustave’s toilets have become treasured antiquities and backyard conversation pieces. May it never be said that New Englanders are without an appreciation of history—or a sense of humor.

  During his lifetime, both Gustave and his company town were frequently called (behind his back, of course) Gasbag. After Gustave’s departure, not wishing their community to go through time with such an unfortunate association, the town fathers put their heads together and agreed upon a new name for the town—one that might possibly attract tourists to what was, and still is, a lovely little seaside village.

  Like many beach communities on the eastern seaboard, Sand Castle has a boardwalk along the oceanfront—a vintage affair actually made entirely of wood—wide wooden planks and cedar pilings set deep in the sand. Halfway down the boardwalk, the attached pier juts out into the water, forming a big letter T. In the summer, a charming turn-of-the-century carousel provides twenty-five cent rides for the kids and a nostalgic ambience for everyone else, but aside from the carousel and a hot dog concession operated by the Kiwanis, there are no other rides or attractions along the pier. Its underpinnings aren’t considered sturdy enough to house additional structures, or to bear the weight of modern vehicles. Strolling along the pier is still the thing to do in the summer months, though. Old guys and little kids fish for nonexistent fish off the end of it, and teenagers hang out underneath doing what teenagers do—until my husband or one of the other three officers that make up Sand Castle’s police department go down and roust them out.

  The boardwalk serves the same function, and is considered by the local kids the better place to make out, since they’re not as likely to have their amorous activities interrupted by an unexpectedly large incoming wave. It’s been estimated that perhaps twenty percent of Sand Castle’s babies were given their start in life under the old boardwalk. A possible urban legend, but according to hospital records, an uncommonly large proportion of local babies are conceived between Memorial Day, when the beach opens and Labor Day, when it officially closes. The same records seem to indicate that the peak day for having unprotected sex in Sand Castle Beach is July Fourth—the day of the city’s annual Fourth of July Pier Festival and Fireworks.

  The Fourth of July Picnic and accompanying fireworks is the premier event of the season here, and just about everyone in town shows up. The Chamber of Commerce offers a six dollars and ninety-nine cents a plate barbecued rib dinner with homemade coleslaw and baked beans, and the ladies of the First Methodist Church, the Sixth Street Congregational, and St. Joseph’s Catholic Church all build booths to sell handcrafts, baked goods, etc. The pier is lined from end to end with colorful stands, and fun is had by all, including whatever tourists happen to wander into town—too many tourists, actually, since adequate parking has always been a problem here, even on normal days. The streets were laid out over a century ago, and many of them are narrow and relatively steep. The town itself is built on a low, sandy bluff, a good deal higher than the seafront—a good thing during winter storms, when the water comes up all the way to the base of the bluff, but annoying when you’re lugging armloads of beach toys, folding chairs and umbrellas, and dragging a plastic cooler heavy with soft drinks, sandwiches, and forbidden cans of ice-cold beer.

  Being married to a small town police chief is not an easy thing. Everyone knows you on sight, and is quick to tattle to everyone else in town when you jaywalk or forget to put a damned quarter in a downtown parking meter. My attitude, you see, is that my husband—a devoted and tireless public servant—is vastly underpaid, and that I, as his vastly underpaid helpmate and life partner, should be cut just a little slack, here and there. Big-city cops get their loved one’s tickets waived all the time, right? What harm can a tiny little bit of small-town corruption do?

  Unfortunately for me, the chief of police himself has always come down on the side of the town’s only meter maid—a two hundred and eighty pound lady, named not Lovely Rita, but Not-So-Lovely Irma. Over the last three years, Irma has given me at least fifteen unjust citations. Most of the tickets have been for silly things, like parking overtime for maybe twelve and a half seconds. Still, there were a few infractions of the more serious nature on the list—like driving too fast on Main Street, parking in a no parking zone, etc., and for some mysterious reason, my infractions almost always come immediately to the chief’s attention.

  Most peoples’ tickets, of course, are dealt with in regular traffic court. Mine are generally resolved with me bent over the end of the bed with my underwear at half-mast and the chief’s doubled leather belt finding its way into some of my most tender and sensitive nooks and crannies. Once, in a fit of temper, I told Jeb that if our village meter maid were a tad less plump, and a few years younger (The woman’s sixty-seven if she’s a day.) I’d suspect her of being his roly-poly love cookie, and not just his tubby spy. Jeb, who can be fiercely protective of his staff, has always frowned on petty cruelty, and he was obviously disappointed in my unkind remarks. When he pointed out that I was being insensitive, sexist, and just plain mean-spirited, I took offense, and when I spitefully refused to take back my comments about Irma, he pushed me facedown over the back of the couch, hauled down my panties, and used the TV remote to deliver a dozen or so highly disagreeable swats to a part of my own person that some unkind and insensitive persons might describe as overly plump.

  Yeah, I know. Spanking one’s wife is probably the height of political incorrectness, but it’s something I consented to some years back. It was sort of a spur of the moment thing, actually. Jeb had caught me smoking behind his back after I swore on our children’s lives that I’d finally quit for good. The bare-bottomed and over-hubby’s-knee walloping that followed was impromptu, painful, and spectacularly embarrassing, and to lighten an awkward moment, I made this really lame joke, suggesting that being paddled might be just the thing I needed to break my pack-a-day habit. Jeb took me at my word, and three equally unpleasant spankings later, I did quit smoking. But one bad habit seemed to lead to another, and first thing you know, spanking became an accepted, if infrequent, part of my life. Besides—and please don’t spread this around—I had discovered by then that with just the right amount of sting applied in just the right locale, and under certain limited conditions, being spanked by a tall, handsome fellow like my husband could be very pleasant indeed. Done properly, it can lead to the sort of sex that truly brightens a lady’s day—and after a lot of practice, Jeb has become very good at doing it properly.

  The problem is that Jeb has also gotten good at knowing the difference between these two very different kinds of spankings, and equally good at not mixing them up. He’s also devised a couple of surefire ways of making sure that I don’t get them mixed up, either. There’s spanking as foreplay, and there’s…well, the kind of thing that’s not in any sense playful. If asked, I would have to say that the nice spankings outnumber the not-so-nice spankings by maybe fifty-to-one. In light of this numerical imbalance, Jeb has always done his level best to make those infrequent, not-so-nice events long, hard, and miserable—and very, very memorable.

  And now, after that possibly titillating interlude—back to the Fourth of July.

  Because I’m the wife of a highly respected chief of police, I’m asked to join a lot of committees—a civic duty I usually try to evade by being as rude, uncooperative, and incompetent as possible, without actually making my lack of enthusiasm too obvious.

  “Just say no,
if you don’t want to do it,” Jeb advised when I told him how much I detested being on committees. Jeb is a down-to-earth, honest, logical sort of fellow, and like many men, he doesn’t understand that while some of us don’t want to do crap like this, we also don’t want anyone to think that we’re the kind of people who don’t want to do crap like this. Men can sometimes be very obtuse about things.

  Which is how I ended up as: A) The recently drafted events coordinator for the PTA; B) A reluctant Brownie leader; and C) The chairwoman (when I bother to show up) of the bake sale committee for the Sand Castle Little League—all of whom normally set up booths on the pier each Fourth of July.

  To Jeb’s credit, he did warn me about the dangers of biting off more than I could proverbially chew. “You’re already swamped,” he observed, just after I had been snookered into taking over the Little League committee. (The real bake sale diva had just been safely delivered of quadruplets, proving yet again how low some women will go to shirk their civic responsibilities.) “Let some of the other team mothers handle the Fourth of July stuff this year. If you keep letting yourself get talked into things like this, you’re heading for a major meltdown. And as much as I hate to mention this, babe, organizing a bake sale doesn’t exactly sound like your thing.”

  This last remark, by the way, was a backhanded way of reminding me that just about everything I bake is rarely edible. Normally, I just burn it, taste it, and throw it away. My family’s health is important to me.

  He was right about the organizing, too. I’m lucky when I can remember the jelly on the kids’ peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the morning. The chances of my having the time or the energy to plan, build, and arrange contributions for a baked goods booth were slim to zero—especially on short notice. I was already committed to run the Brownie craft booth and act as a part-time volunteer at the PTA beanbag toss. But what else was a respected public figure to do? Let her clay feet show?