Home for the Holidays

by Hill, April

  I reacted with distaste, of course. "That’s not even sanitary!" I protested. "My mother’s going to be eating off this table two days from now!" This argument didn’t seem to impress him, and with no further conversation, he went to it. I gritted my teeth, determined not to make one single yelp or show my frustration. The New Year wasn’t even a week old, and I was already on Spanking Number Two.

  For those of you who have never been walloped with a rubber spatula, you will have to take my word for it—this unattractive and clumsy-looking utensil, while flexible and not especially heavy, is capable of delivering a very unpleasant spanking. The white rubber part is only about four inches wide, but it’s thick, and when used seriously, the thing leaves a powerful sting in its wake. And from the firm way he was holding me down, I had a feeling that David intended to make very serious use of it this morning. Closing my eyes tightly, I tried to brace myself for the first blow by tightening the muscles in my butt and biting my lip—which didn’t help in the least, by the way. When the rubber began to land hard and fast on the exact center of my bared buttocks, I yowled, forgetting instantly the promise I’d made to myself not to give him the satisfaction of yelling. He covered both cheeks of my squirming ass with bright pink splotches and finished with a couple of sound swats on that exquisitely tender under curve of the butt, where your ass joins your upper thighs. The spanking was hard, brief, and efficient.

  "You are a real son of a bitch!" I yelled.

  "And you just earned yourself another three swats," he said, affably. He applied the three, and then offered a truce. "Do you want to keep this up, or leave well-enough alone?"

  At that moment, we heard the kids pounding down the stairs. Five seconds earlier, and they would have witnessed everything. David and I exchanged glances, and I bore the sting in silence as I started the kids’ breakfast. While Mike dawdled and Amanda wolfed down her eggs, I sat down gingerly at the table and helped David come up with a workable plan. He would mow the yards, wash the car, do the shopping and take the kids off my hands for the rest of the day, so I could concentrate on cleaning the downstairs. The younger kids’ rooms were beyond help, anyway, and Mom—like everyone else—was persona non grata in the twins’ territory. All that was left upstairs was the guest room, our bedroom, and the bathrooms. He would solve the cupcake emergency, meet me at school for Parents’ Night with the kids, and we’d go to dinner afterward. Perfect.

  David finished the lawns, took Amanda with him to the hardware store and said he’d be back for in a few minutes for Michael, who was still eating breakfast.

  A half-hour later, Michael was still eating breakfast—or not eating breakfast, actually.

  "Eat, Michael," I said wearily—for the eighth time. "You’re going to be late, if you want to out go with Amanda and Daddy. Besides, sweetie, you’ve been playing with your food for twenty minutes and haven’t eaten a bite."

  He stuck his tongue out. "I can’t eat it," he whined. "It’s yucky. I hate it!" Whereas he hadn’t eaten a bite of his breakfast, a glance at my son’s plate showed that he had managed to construct a very lifelike volcano out of scrambled eggs and chunks of toast.

  I sighed. The ritual was familiar: 1.) Plan healthy, appealing meal. 2.) Prepare healthy meal and set it on table. 3.) Throw healthy, nutritious meal down garbage disposal. Since I stopped breast-feeding him four years ago, Mike has limited his voluntary food consumption to applesauce and red Twizzlers. Every meal since then has involved bribery, threat, or deception. (Linguini with applesauce is one of my recent successes.)

  David and I have four beautiful and remarkable children, but I’ve noticed that each of the foursome appear to be deranged in some bizarre and annoying way, apparently inherited from David’s side of the family. This eating thing, for example. Certainly, no member my family had ever turned down a meal, and we all had the hips to prove it.

  As I always did, I tried to reason with my child, who had now progressed to using a knife to pick warily through his pile of cold scrambled eggs, as if he were checking for vermin. Reason never worked, of course, but David had absolutely forbidden any more applesauce this week. (In my wifely revenge fantasies, I like to envision David being forced to spend one full month at home like I do—day in, day out, cooking for Michael.) David seemed to think that this motherhood thing was easy.

  I looked at the clock, and nudged Michael’s arm one last time, encouraging him to eat. "C’mon, sweetheart, how do you know you hate eggs if you haven’t tried them yet?"

  Michael pushed the plate as far across the table from him as he could reach, then clapped both hands over his eyes, as though I had served him a steaming dish of rotting sheep brains. Suddenly, he began to make gagging noises and grabbed his throat. "I can’t eat it!" he bawled. "It looks pukey!"

  Wondering whether "pukey" was better or worse than "yucky," I simply admitted defeat, took one last look at the mess he had made on the plate, and dumped it in the sink. He was right. It looked pukey.

  "But you see, Michael," I explained, cheerfully. "Just because something looks pukey isn’t a very good reason to not like it. If that were true, rich people wouldn’t be eating lobster, now, would they?" (Okay, so it sounded logical at the time.)

  Michael thought for a moment. "What’s lobster?" (Michael is not my brightest child. We’ve probably eaten dinner at Red Lobster every other Friday night since the kid was born.)

  "Where’s your blue jacket?" I asked, rummaging in the stuffed closet. "Didn’t you wear it to school yesterday?"

  Michael shook his head. "I went there naked," he said. He meant without a coat, (I hoped.) Michael has a rather imprecise way with language that often requires a bit of translation. His kindergarten teacher had informed us that Michael was "a tad behind the others," but I preferred to think he was simply a poet who marched to a different drummer.

  When David arrived home and collected Mike, I kissed them all goodbye for the day, then collapsed on the couch to assess what I had to do. And then, lulled by the blessed quiet, I fell asleep. For four hours.

  * * * *

  I was thirty minutes late to the fundraiser, and by the time I got to school, I had missed much of the evening’s planned entertainment—an original musical written and performed by Mrs. Goudy’s second grade class. When I couldn’t locate David in the crowd, I found a seat at the back, and sat down to watch the play. The plot had something to do with the "Kingdom of Unhappy Teeth," where the "Bad Tooth Fairy" puts cavities in children’s teeth, rather than dollar bills under their pillows. (Dollar bills! I thought. What is wrong with these people? David and I are still giving quarters!) The play’s musical score was orchestrated for fourteen kazoos, and three dozen drums made out of oatmeal boxes. It and was very, very loud, if nothing else. The drama concluded with the Bad Tooth Fairy being vanquished by "Proper Dental Hygiene" and her little friends, the "Happy Toothbrushes"—who danced. The villainous bringer of cavities melted screaming onstage in a transparent rip-off of "The Wizard of Oz." Plagiarism, second-grade style.

  As the eager audience thundered out to look for the bake sale, I finally spotted David waving to me from across the auditorium, and I waved back to him. He had two grotesquely dirty children with him, who appeared to have been dressed by some feeble-minded person with no color vision. I was afraid they might be related to me by blood, and as David came closer, dragging the filthy urchins behind him, my worst fears were realized. Amanda and Michael, second-tier heirs to the McCann family fortune.

  David kissed me on the cheek, and I looked down at the squabbling ragamuffins, the fruit of my loins, who had now fallen to the floor and begun rolling around, punching one another. After David separated them, they sat in their chairs on either side of dear old Dad, and glared back and forth.

  "I told you to exchange these for something else," I complained, wiping a mysterious substance from Mike’s pant leg. "Something clean. What in the name of all that’s holy have you done to them?"

  He grinned. "After we finished shopp
ing, we went to the park for a while."

  "Was it Jurassic Park, by any chance?" I snarled. "They look like they’ve been wallowing in primordial slime."

  "You’re in a great mood," David remarked, finally getting annoyed. "What’s the problem?"

  "My life is the problem," I groaned. "I know that I never quite got the hang of the birth control pill, but you should have been more careful."

  David grinned again and patted my thigh. "C’mon, Meg, own up to it. These two were intentional, and you know it."

  "Well, it’s still your fault," I said, miserably. "You could have volunteered to be castrated. I heard that it’s a very simple operation, almost painless, and afterward, you can sing like an angel. Maybe you should have put me in a chastity belt, or a convent. "I grabbed Mike’s hand as he reached over to belt his sister, who was spitting at him. "Why do our children hate one another, David?"

  "They don’t. It’s just sibling rivalry. Perfectly normal. Remember how the twins were?"

  Bad example. The twins were still that way. I began to visualize eight more years of split lips and attempted murder.

  When I looked unconvinced, David put his arm around me. "Could be I’m wrong, but you seem kind of down," he observed. "How’s the cleaning going? Any word from your Mom, by the way?"

  I avoided answering the first question. He’d find out soon enough—the moment he walked through the front door at home. I did chat a bit about Mom, to show what a good sport I was. "I haven’t heard anything, which I guess means she’s still coming," I said. "If I ask you nicely and go down on you every night for the next month, will you have her killed?"

  David grinned." Sorry, Babe. Not my area of expertise. I appreciate the offer, though."

  "Well, then," I groaned. "I’m doomed. I already called Havana. No luck. It takes at least a month to arrange a hijacking."

  As we rose to leave the auditorium, tomboy Amanda, who has been voted by family and friends as, "Most Likely to Spend Time in a Correction Facility," smashed her younger brother on the head with what at first appeared to be a dead animal, but was actually her muddy baseball mitt. The fight resumed, full force. Mike began to wail, his nose bubbling attractively, and David tried to grab him before he could get in his first bite. (When cornered, Mike often bites someone—usually his sister, but sometimes innocent bystanders, if they make the mistake of coming between her and his mouth. The biting habit is sort of Michael’s trademark, an early suggestion, perhaps of a forthcoming career in professional wrestling. I theorize that since Mike wasn’t breast-fed as long as the other three (for obvious reasons), it was my failure to be a properly nurturing mother that accounted for his oral-aggressive tendencies. Tonight, I was ready to make a blanket concession that everything was my fault. It would be so much easier that way.

  With his sister still smacking him on the head with a baseball mitt, Michael suddenly crawled under my chair, pursuing a bunch of discarded and thoroughly-stepped-on M&M’s. I got down on my knees and tried to pry the squashed candies from his mouth, but Michael gobbled them down greedily, as if he had just discovered a delicious new food group. I sighed. It was nice to see Michael finally eat something with enthusiasm. When Amanda whacked him again, he bit her on the calf and Amanda went berserk.

  At that precise moment, with my grimy offspring clawing at one another’s throats, a tall, lovely, perfectly groomed young woman named Mindy Something-or-Other (from the PTA) interrupted the pandemonium to say a polite "hello." Mindy had baby-sat for us as a teenager and was now married to a successful stockbroker. Hugely pregnant now with her first child, Mindy still looked not so much like an expectant mother, but like a fashion model trying to shoplift a basket-ball under her haute-couture maternity smock. She was adorable—and flawlessly made-up.

  "Well, hi there, Mr. and Mrs. McCann!" Mindy exclaimed brightly, and then backed up a step. Just as Mindy opened her mouth to speak, Michael had let out an enormous belch and vomited the M&M’s onto my lap.

  "How are you?" Mindy finished weakly, trying to avert her eyes.

  I looked up at the lovely young woman standing before me and wanted to scream something like, "Run, fool! NOW! While there’s still time!" But I didn’t. Instead, I wiped Michael’s small face with my sleeve and picked him up.

  "You know, Mindy," I said wanly, "this isn’t as much fun as it probably looks like."

  We took the kids home, although I would have preferred to believe that the place belonged to someone else—a family of third world refugees, perhaps, with no money, no prospects, and no cleaning lady. From the street, the house seemed normal enough, thanks to David’s efforts this morning at mowing and edging the yard, but to a stranger walking through the front door, the first impression was that the place had been plundered by a satanic cult.

  As I looked around our disordered living room, at the unsorted laundry on the couch and the empty MacDonald’s cartons from two days ago that littered the coffee table, my spirits dropped even further, and when I saw the look on David’s face, I knew there was probably a fairly important argument on the evening’s agenda. I had sworn that morning to "do something" about the house. But then, I said that every morning. I was nothing, if not consistent.

  David didn’t comment on the condition of the house but took the two disgusting children upstairs and attempted to scrape them clean. I wandered aimlessly through the kitchen and laundry room, picking up stray toys and items of dirty clothing, unsure of where to begin. Finally, I took the coupon box down from its place on the windowsill and began to alphabetize the contents. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step." I had read that somewhere—maybe in a fortune cookie.

  Whatever.

  When David called down to me, I joined him upstairs to tuck the giggling Heirs Apparent into bed. My heart swelled with love and pride as I kissed them and read Amanda another chapter of "Harry Potter," which she probably doesn’t understand at her age, but still loves, because her older sisters do. Michael was asleep already, in one of David’s clean undershirts. (No clean pajamas, as usual.) His cheek was unbelievably soft when I touched it, and his bright copper hair was shiny and still damp on the pillow. In one of his adorable, chubby fists he clutched a "G.I. Joe" figure with one leg and a missing head, and in the other, a plastic hand grenade.

  "Our child is a war-monger," I said wearily, as David came over. "He told me yesterday that he wants to be a Green Beret and go to Vietnam."

  "Too many old TV shows," David said. I caught the reprimand, but decided not to respond. It was true. Michael spent most of his free time glued to the TV, and too tired to stop him, I usually just handed him the remote and hoped he wouldn’t accidentally buy a lot on QVC.

  "He traded an old Beanie Baby for the grenade at school a couple of weeks ago," I explained, "and I have a feeling he shoplifted G.I. Joe from the thrift store. We were there looking for dress-up stuff, and the decapitated guy showed up like magic an hour later. You owe Goodwill a check for 25 cents or they’ll probably sic the law on him."

  "We need to call the doctor about Amanda," David said, as we went back downstairs. "She’s got another nosebleed."

  I sighed. "No she doesn’t."

  "Yeah, Meg, I just saw it. She …"

  "She faked it, David. Trust me. It’s a candy the kids call Vampire Blood. Someone in the neighborhood handed it out on Halloween. Very hot with the six-and-under crowd. You have to keep up with the times, Dad."

  "That’s ridiculous. What kind of kid would fake a nosebleed?"

  "Your daughter, that’s who," I moaned. "I tried taking it away, but that taking candy from a baby thing is harder than it sounds. Why do you think I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown? I’m about to be the first member of my family to go insane for real! Dear God, what a day!"

  Downstairs, David went into the den. I started a load of towels and sneaked two shots of gin before I went out to face him. Tonight, I was almost hoping he’d spank me. I felt so damned guilty about everything, I figured mayb
e spanking me would help him blow off some steam. The plain fact was, our lives were a mess, and it was all my fault.

  He was sitting at the desk when I came into the family room and sat down silently on the couch. He swiveled the desk chair around and looked at me.

  "What happened today, Meg? I thought we had a deal. I’d get the kids out of your hair all day today, and you’d do something about the house."

  "I did do something," I said glumly. "I dropped a glass down the garbage disposal and broke it—the garbage disposal, that is. I’m sorry, David. The day kind of got away from me. Before I knew it …"

  "That leaves from nine this morning until the thing at school. The dishes are still in the sink from last night."

  I tried being cute, which is what I always do when I’m cornered. "I’ve got an idea. We could move before Mom gets here," I suggested cheerily, "and just not leave a forwarding address."

  He nodded. "Maybe, but I’ve got another idea. Do you want to hear it?"

  Actually, I had a very strong feeling that I didn’t want to hear it.

  David tapped his fingers on the desk, looking thoughtful. "I’ve decided that you and I need to make a New Year’s Resolution. Better yet, let’s call it a promise. A joint promise."

  "You know I gave up making New Year’s resolutions," I grumbled. "By the second week, I’ve blown it, and spend the rest of the year feeling like an even worse failure. Whoever came up with the whole stupid idea is a sadist. Besides, in my case, I’ve got too much crap wrong to get into one little resolution."

  "Are you sure?" David asked.

  "You of all people should know," I said. "You want a list?"

  "Maybe everything you’re complaining about is really just one part of a bigger problem," he suggested quietly.

  "Of course it is, and the problem is that I’m nothing but a big, fat failure who can’t get anything right."

  "That stops tonight," he said.

  "What stops?"

  "Putting yourself down. In the first place, it’s not true, and in the second, you only do it to get me to tell you that it’s okay—so you can keep doing it."