by Hill, April
"Is that it?" he asked.
"It?" I repeated, innocently.
"Yes. It. Meaning am I going to find more bad news in the mailbox tomorrow, and tomorrow, and ... am I?"
I gulped. "Not if I get there first?" I suggested, trying without much success to laugh.
"Let’s start again," David said, his voice a bit firmer now. "Are any more bills going to turn up that I don’t already know about?" The wording of the question didn’t leave me a lot of room to maneuver, so I made a spur-of-the-moment decision that I could probably lie with a certain degree of credibility, since even I couldn’t find the bills in question. With any luck, they might never turn up.
I made a great show of thinking about the question. "Not to my recollection," I said.
David smiled. "The Watergate conspirators couldn’t have said that better, or less believably," he remarked. "Okay, how many?" This man obviously knew me too well. I decided to throw myself on his mercy, and try honesty, or—failing all else—cuteness.
"Uh, gee, officer," I giggled, "I don’t remember, exactly."
For a moment, David didn’t say anything. Finally he stood up and began to roll up his shirtsleeves.
"Okay," he said, a bit too grimly for comfort. "We’ll try this another way." He reached for his belt buckle. "Close the door and lock it."
I gulped, but did as he asked. David folded his belt, and motioned toward his desk.
"Over the desk, pants down."
* * * *
The look in David’s eye had worried me, but the truth is that the New Year’s Eve spanking that ensued wasn’t the worst one I’d ever gotten. Maybe in the top ten, but not the worst, although it’s possible that my assessment was a little skewed because I knew that I had every single swat coming. I certainly can’t fault David. He gave it his best effort. Whenever he uses his belt, I know he’s trying to make a serious point. And it works. When a man rolls up his sleeves and unbuckles his belt, the implication is that something on a much grander scale is about to happen, don’t you think? Even though a well-applied hairbrush hurts just as much and even more, a belt just seems more ominous, somehow. Maybe it’s just me, but the sight of David unbuckling his belt, pulling it through the loops, and then folding it always makes my stomach do flip-flops.
I groaned when I saw the belt, but decided to go to my well-deserved fate as gracefully as possible. Like Anne Boleyn, or Mel Gibson, in Braveheart. Let’s face it; David was right. I had broken a promise, spent way too much money, and then lied about it. The broken promise and the money would have brought a disappointed look and a lecture from him. Okay, maybe a few well-chosen profanities, and on a bad day, a couple of swift smacks on the rump with whatever was at hand. But it was the lies and the "cover-up" that were about to bring a hail of fire and brimstone down upon my trembling rump. I pulled down my jeans and panties and bent over David’s desk with my elbows resting on the leather blotter. This, by the way, is not a comfortable position, and since I am short, my feet dangle in the air, leaving me totally helpless and unable to get up by myself—which is exactly the way David wants it. I’ve been known to attempt escape when things get too warm, and I knew that they were about to get very, very warm.
"I’m sorry," I said miserably, as I bent over. This remorse was genuine, by the way, not just a last ditch try for mercy. But David already knew I was sorry. He just wanted me to be a little bit sorrier. Okay, a lot sorrier.
David never starts slowly. David’s method is to get right to it. Which is exactly what he did that night. (Morning?) Anyway, we began the "après-party" festivities at exactly 12:36 a.m., when my pants came down around my ankles. By 12:37, my butt was radiating enough heat to melt the ice on the old skating pond, had there been one. I squirmed and kicked and grimaced my way through ninety seconds of that pure fire and brimstone I mentioned above, but after the first thirty seconds, I had given up all pretense of being either brave, like Mel, or ladylike, like Anne Boleyn. (If this doesn’t sound like a long time to be sprawled over a desk getting your naked butt strapped, by the way, try dropping your pants, supplying your own annoyed hubby with a leather belt, then get back to me. And if you have kiddies in the house, the way we usually do, I strongly advise biting on the edge of a throw pillow.)
It may not have been one of the worst, but that night’s spanking did go a little further than David generally does, and by the time he helped me up, I was sniffling and blubbering and hopping around to fan myself and cool the burn. (Which never works in the slightest, by the way.) And then, David did something he’s only done once before in all our years of practicing this discipline thing of ours. He pointed to the corner, and then sat down at the desk to work. "Half an hour," he said firmly. "No argument, no stalling, and no talking. Leave your pants down around your ankles and stand there, thinking about your sins. If I catch you moving one inch, I’ll come over there and set your ass on fire again—twice as hard and twice as long. Got it?"
So, while David worked at something or other at the desk, I stood there with my ass aglow and tried to think about my sins, as ordered. The problem with thinking about my sins, though, is there are often so many of them that my brain tends to get muddled. Since Michael’s birth, it seemed like everything in my life was going to hell. My weight had climbed; my house was a continual mess and you already know about my organizational skills. The laundry hampers usually bulged; I had missed three appointments in the last few months, almost had the phone turned off because I forgot to send the check, and ran out of gas twice. The gas thing was a real big no-no, but fortunately, David didn’t find out about any of these incidents. Why, you ask? Because I lied, of course. No question about it. This Christmas debacle was simply the tip of an enormous iceberg. I was on a downward spiral. Okay, that’s mixing metaphors, but you get what I mean.
Anyway, I stood in the corner, spanked and humiliated, while the color of my butt returned slowly to normal. Finally, the half-hour was up, proving the old adage that time flies, even when you’re not having fun. Miserably, I pulled my pants up, and we went upstairs to feel sorry for myself. As we left the den, David picked up the pile of bills and a pad of paper from the desk. Upstairs, I showered and changed into a loose nightgown before coming back to the bedroom. Even the lightweight fabric felt like sandpaper on my scorched butt, and when he pointed to the armchair, I groaned audibly.
"Do I have to sit?" I asked dolefully.
"You can stand or lie down or hang from the light fixture if you want to, for all I care," he growled. "Just light somewhere. We’re about to have a serious budget discussion." I chose the lying-down option and lay flat on my stomach across the bed. David sat down in the big armchair, pulling it closer to the bed so he could spread the papers out on the bedside table.
He opened the discussion with a restatement of the obvious—and a threat. "You went more than fourteen hundred bucks over budget, roughly, which I why your butt is on fire and why it will be again, if this ever happens again," he said grimly. Then he looked at me, as if expecting a reply.
"It won’t happen again," I said, solemnly. "I promise you."
"You promised me this year, and the year before that," he said wearily. "Everything we have is yours, Meg, as much as it is mine. You know that. Spend what you want, and I’ll tear my hair out and deal with it. But I won’t have you lying to me, trying to cover up your mess and getting in deeper. I’m not going to sit here and pretend it’s not the money, because it is, partly. But it’s the principle of the thing, too. We’re supposed to be a team, and you’re not playing by the rules we both agreed to. You said you wanted that new house this year, and I told you I thought we could swing it, if we were careful. In three months, you’ve undone everything we worked for all year."
"Oh, come on," I protested. "I didn’t spend that much!" (Dumb, huh?)
For a moment, David just looked at me with disbelief.
"You bounced thirteen checks—six of them twice," he said slowly, like he was explaining the rules of chess
to Murphy, our feeble-minded Miniature Schnauzer." You went over the credit limit on three credit cards, which resulted in extra charges, and you made the mortgage payment late twice in three months. We had perfect credit, and now we don’t. It’s that simple."
"Does it matter all that much?" I whined, and before I saw it coming, David leaned over, flipped up the tail of my gown, and dealt my already-throbbing backside an agonizing smack.
"O-W-W-W-W," I wailed, massaging the offended spot. "I’m sorry! I know it’s important. I just don’t understand why one or two little blips on our record is so fucking …"
Almost instantly, David had me on my back with my legs up in the air, and began swatting my naked butt and the backs of my thighs with his bare hand and the ubiquitous hairbrush, which appeared as if by magic from the bedside table. Then, grabbing my ankle in one hand, he applied the damned brush to the insides of both my thighs until I pleaded for mercy as loudly as I could without waking the neighbors. And while I chewed on the bedspread to muffle my howls, the clever boy found the only un-spanked areas left, and finished the job he had begun earlier.
"Are you going to take this seriously or not?" he demanded, dropping my legs.
It had been a long day, and a longer night, and every square inch of me longed for bed, so I agreed. I would take it seriously. Actually, I had already taken it seriously, depending on how you look at it.
"I’m going to ask you just one more time," he said. "Are there any more bills I don’t know about? Tell me now, and you’re off the hook. Lie to me, and we’ll do this every night for a month if we have to."
I had a feeling he meant it. David had apparently decided this was to be a year of change, so I confessed everything. Well, most of it, anyway.
* * * *
CHAPTER THREE
The Day After New Year’s isn’t a holiday for most people. Most people—normal people, anyway—have had all the festivities they can handle, and if they don’t have to go back to work, they sprawl around their living rooms, recovering from all that booze, food, and football.
That’s what normal people do. Then there’s David’s family.
I had thrown away this year’s invitation to the annual family food-fight, which would have been the end of it if Murphy hadn’t gone looking for his lunch in the garbage. Murphy is a Schnauzer, not especially picky about where or what he eats, and today there must have been some rotting morsel he found particularly enticing, because when David went in the back yard on the afternoon after New Year’s Eve, he found the lawn strewn with garbage. Murphy was sitting in the middle of the mess, finishing a package of moldy cheese, and apparently reading the invitation from David’s sister—the invitation I had discarded, inviting us to the family’s post New Year’s soiree, to be held at the home of my mother-in-law, a woman I usually refer to as the antichrist.
"I take it you don’t want to go," David said, holding the invitation under the faucet to remove the coffee grounds and dog slobber.
"You’re very quick," I replied, sullenly. "What was your first clue?" I was not in an especially good mood—as you might understand—after the events of the previous evening. Neither of us had had a lot of sleep, and my hindquarters were still feeling the effects of my End of 2012, Beginning of 2013 walloping.
David only sighed. "Are we going to do this again?"
"Probably," I grumbled. The question could have meant anything, of course, but whatever he meant, I probably was going to do it again. I do everything stupid at least twice. "Do what?"
"Have our usual little ‘if you make me go to your mother’s, I’ll drink Drano’ conversation."
"If you make me go to your Mother’s, I’ll drink Drano," I replied sullenly, just so there’d be no question about where I stood on the issue.
David sighed again. I’ve noticed that David sighs a lot around this time of the year. "All right," he said, "the kids and I will go to Mom’s by ourselves, and you can stay here and pout all day, how’s that?"
"How’s this," I countered wittily, "why don’t you go fuck dear old Mom, instead of me, since you like her so much?" Oops! The nasty old "F" word just sort of slipped out, and in a nasty context, as well. In our home, we take the First Amendment very seriously, and I am allowed to say anything I want, so long as I can prove that such language is in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. I am quite sure that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin sat around at night turning the air red, white and blue with Anglo-Saxon epithets, but David hates it. Yep, the day after New Year’s was going downhill, fast. Even for me, this was a record. I usually don’t get myself spanked until at least the sun is over the yardarm.
I know what you’re thinking: you’re asking yourselves why, after last night, for God’s sake, is this idiot trying to get her ass blistered again? Because David is a gentleman, who has never spanked me two days in a row. I felt absolutely safe in being obnoxious and unreasonable.
It wasn’t really a spanking, actually. He simply spun me around, lifted my robe, and whacked my butt four times with a big wooden spoon I had carelessly left on the counter. Make no mistake, the spoon is a formidable tool when used properly, and even these four swats elicited four yelps of pain, and left a memorable sting. But I knew perfectly well that David wasn’t serious. Not yet, anyway. The four smacks were like a shot across the bow, before the heavy cannons rolled out.
"Now," he asked amiably." Where are we going later this afternoon?"
"Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house?" I asked, sweetly.
He grinned. "Very good. See how easy that was? I’ll go up and tell the kids."
"I can just see their bright little faces, now, all aglow with anticipation," I cackled. "After last year’s fiasco, you’ll have to tie the twins to the hood of the car like a couple of dead deer to get them there."
David and I do not have pleasant teenagers. Oh, I don’t mean they’re really bad. They don’t jockey around town in hotrods and run down old ladies and nuns. Not on purpose, anyway. And, thankfully, they’re not into drugs—unless you count vitamins. (The twins once confessed to me that when they were little, they got into the Flintstone chewable vitamins every time I left the house and ate one of every color and flavor—for fun. I don’t know whether that shows an inclination to crime or that my elder offspring are simply dim-witted.)
Emily and Jemma are at "that" age, you see. If you have teenaged daughters, you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t have daughters of that age, I don’t want to be the one to frighten you, so just ignore me. (And if you don’t have children at all, there may still be time to get your tubes tied.)
On the average day, the twins are rude, sullen, and uncooperative. On a good day—maybe two days a month—they’re bright, funny, and charming. The same adorable children I remember having around before they turned thirteen. That was the year they were apparently abducted by aliens and subjected to a battery of experiments that left them with the bodies and faces of normal young women, and the personalities and social graces of flesh-eating piranha. One of the first manifestations of their transformation into new life forms was a total withdrawal from all family activities. They will occasionally submit to eating one meal a day with their parents and siblings, but other than that, they restrict contact with us to a minimum, evidently worried about being infected with normality.
On this bright day After New Year’s Day morning, I had not seen the inside of the twins’ shared bedroom for six months or longer, and David, who had seen it, had suggested that I should count myself lucky. The twins will sometimes even open the door when David orders them to do so. He attributes this small concession authority to his firm, well-balanced parenting skills. I think it’s because (to paraphrase the old proverb) the hand that opens the wallet, rules the world. Since today was—coincidentally—allowance day, his chances of being admitted to their lair were better than usual.
I waited until I heard David go upstairs and then started the countdown. He was on the landing
now, walking down the hall to the girls’ bedroom. A quick knock on the door, unheard over an ear-splitting CD by a rock group calling itself—if I heard the name correctly—"Stinking Slime Pit." A second knock, accompanied by a Daddy-like shout of, "Turn that damned thing down, for God’s sake! The walls are shaking!"
No response. "Stinking Slime Pit" prevails. Another Daddy shout, louder this time, and more forceful. Next, he uses his "Dad is Mad" voice. "Stinking Slime Pit" goes silent for a moment. Door opens, warily. Dad is apparently being welcomed into the sanctuary with a certain amount of respect. It is, after all, allowance day. A full minute passes. I visualize David taking out his wallet and forking over the dough. Another thirty seconds. Polite conversation with good old Dad, in deference to his forking over the dough. I look at my watch again. Another thirty seconds—the glad news about the trip to Grandma’s is being delivered.
I cover my ears.
"Are you out of your mind?" The shriek of outrage would be from Emily, the younger twin, by eight minutes.
"I’d rather drink goddamned Drano!" That would be Jemma, the older twin, and too much like her mother for comfort. Then, in unison; "No freaking way!" (Only they didn’t say 'freaking'. Unlike their mother, they’re too old to spank. They get to say anything they want, with almost total immunity. All that’s really in danger is their allowances, and the use of the car, which doesn’t bother them a lot, since they probably already have more cash hoarded away than an indicted Enron executive, and more friends with wheels than a NASCAR driver.
For several minutes, the screaming continues. I can’t actually hear David over the shouting, but I know he’s pulling out all the stops, trying everything—threats, begging, cajoling, open bribery. Ten seconds later the door slams, and David stomps back down the stairs, swearing. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, and smile. "All set, honey?" Wise girl that I am, I have hidden the wooden spoon.