by Grace Brackenridge
I sit on my bed, waiting for Father.
My room seems small somehow. A relic.
I stare at it, feeling strangely apprehensive.
Just as I always have.
Ever since Aunt Leona brought it over.
About a month after Mom died.
"With Ana gone, you've a responsibility, Robert," I vividly recall Aunt Leona telling her younger brother. "Ana had her beliefs, but those are as cold as the black earth over her. And now the child needs discipline. The age of 15 isn't too old. Any more than it was for you and me."
Father took it and swung it through the air. Spring had come weeks before, prompting me to wear a snug pair of terrycloth baby-blue shorts with wide white hems. But the motion of that disciplinary weapon caused goose bumps all down my long, bare legs.
I was a tall and gangly 15-year-old, just like Mom when she was 15. Father always told Mom she had a "great caboose" then swatted her buns in a playful way. Sometimes she would stick out her fanny and wiggle it at him, tempting him to swat her. Then she would giggle.
They loved each other in a gentle way, always saying kind things to each other. They had been boyfriend and girlfriend all through high school, marrying at the tender age of 18.
In the final months, as her long, elegant figure wasted away - as her mind wandered - Mom told me that my derriere was her gift to me. An asset, she would joke with a weak smile.
At 15 my breasts were relatively small but I did have a nice round butt that stuck out in back. And long legs with good muscles from soccer practice.
"You'll grow up and have a nice bosom," she would say, her words fevered. "That comes later, Gracie. Later when you're older."
"But when you're a woman, yours will be full - like mine," she would add, forgetting hers were gone now.
Father had a temper, Mom knew. I knew it too. Sometimes, Father needed long walks around the block, to "cool off and not do something hurtful." That's how Mom put it. Father seemed to agree.
Father had to extricate himself whenever his "demon" turned him "inside out." That's how Dad described it sometimes, after the passion had passed and he could talk about his own condition.
Mom always reacted to his anger with a soft, soothing voice that seemed to calm him. He didn't want to be angry, Mom explained to me each time afterwards. He had been "wounded," she said. These wounds left him a victim of his own anger, a volcano inside him that erupted at odd and inconsistent times.
Not that he ever hit Mom or me. Just play swats for Mom. And, for a short while, spankings for me.
Before Mom died, Father spanked me 3 times and even Mom spanked me once. All 4 were administered with great formality.
Mom said spankings were "dangerous" for Dad - and he seemed to agree. I didn't know for sure what that meant. But when Dad spanked me those times, Mom and Father sat in straight-back armless chairs in the kitchen, facing each other. Mom gave the lecture, mercifully brief since I was beginning to sob in anticipation.
Over Father's lap, my panties exposed and my fanny twitching in scared anticipation, Father would bring his palm down with what always seemed like an explosive slap. My body jerked, my legs kicked, and I would begin to sob in earnest.
Smack!
"Easy!" Mom would say softly to him over my wails. "She's feeling it just fine. Steady, even strokes. Just let it sink in..."
Five seconds. Then...
Smack!
Father would deliver maybe a dozen spanks in all. Indeed, I could always see the clear red imprint of his palm on my cheeks afterwards in the bathroom mirror, as the tub filled and Mom hummed a sweet song. I always got a bubble bath afterwards and a long loving session on Mom's lap, her arms around me like a cocoon, embracing and protecting.
The one time Mom had to do it was because Father became so angry, so inside-out from his demon, that he confessed that he "couldn't spank straight."
So after the lecture, over Mom's lap I went for the first time for my only maternal spanking.
She spanked only slightly less firmly than Father, but administered about 2 dozen strokes to more than make up for it. Then Mom scooped me in her arms and sobbed longer than I.
After her one spanking, Mom convinced Father that our household could do without spankings altogether. Father agreed.
"Spankings frighten me," he had said at the time.
Me too!
So when Aunt Leona gave Father that bright red paddle, I think Father and I were both scared of what might happen with it.
"I'll hang it on a hook in her bedroom," Father declared. "She will see it and know what it's meant for."
But when he looked away from his sister's approving nod, I could see fear in his eyes. Some 18 inches long, counting its classic gooseneck handle, and 7 inches wide, the board must have been less than a quarter inch thick.
But Father handled it gingerly, as if that thin sheet of hardwood had its own demon inside.
Father put a large brass hook in the wall, between my bedroom door and chest of drawers, up high so I would have to go up on tiptoes if ever he called upon me to fetch it.
There it hung, a symbol of the new order in our home - now that Mom was gone.
But Father never used it.
Whenever my minor mischief went over the line, Father ordered me to my room to wait until he was ready to come up and punish me.
So there I would sit at the foot of my bed, waiting in my nightgown, nervously kicking my legs back and forth, wondering as I looked up at that fire-engine red paddle if this would be it. The First Time.
But Father never did open my door to dispense the discipline Aunt Leona felt so convinced I needed. I would eventually crawl under the covers and fall asleep. Next morning, at breakfast, my misdeed and my punishment were never discussed. The incident and the retribution had both disappeared into thin air - never to be mentioned again.
With each episode, I became more and more certain that Father's resolve to use the red paddle on my bottom had all but disappeared. At the same time, each minor transgression of the household rules seemed to build up a higher barrier between Father and me.
I know he grieved for Mom - so did I. But in addition, I could feel him withdrawing into a shell, less connected and less involved with me and my life with each passing day.
Over a year had passed since Mom's death when Rusty Graham kissed me. Just a peck, really. It was mid-summer and Rusty's team had just won a baseball game, down at the city park.
I'd had a "crush" on Rusty since the 6th grade, but I understood he could not possibly have an interest in me. After all, Rusty was 16 and older than me. He could hardly acknowledge I was alive.
But I ran up to him after the game, all flush from his 2-run homer at the bottom of the 9th, and just sort of hugged him.
Rusty was really excited too, because he kissed me right on the lips. Not long like a real kiss, but still it was right on the lips.
I thought I would faint.
Then I saw Aunt Leona not 25 feet away, looking at me with her large, disapproving eyes, with her arms folded across her chest, judging me bad in no uncertain term.
So when I got home, instead of agonizing over the inevitable call from Aunt Leona, I told Father.
"Just a peck," I stammered, looking down, afraid of the fire in his eyes. "Not like a real boyfriend-girlfriend kiss. But I wanted to tell you so you would hear it from me first."
"Go to your room!" he thundered. "I'll be up to deal with you as soon as I can control myself."
I sat for over an hour, staring at the red paddle hanging from its hook, making myself shiver even though the slight breeze that made the curtains flutter would have felt warm on any other night.
Crickets chirped loudly, legs vibrating impatiently. Waiting for something. Wanting something.
The scent of jasmine blossoms filtered in. My stomach twisted in a knot and I kept having this sinking feeling, like the roller-coaster had crested and I was locked in a perpetual downward fall. Zero gravity.
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.
I stood up on tiptoes and retrieved the dreaded red implement of correction. Funny, in the whole year that the red paddle had hung there, I had dusted it many times, as part of my Saturday room-cleaning chores. But I had never held it in my hand.
Father was in the living room, in his old stuffed chair with the low arms, the TV on but the sound turned down. His chin rested on his thumb and finger and he stared straight ahead, oblivious to the fleeting images on the tube.
"Father?"
He almost jumped when he heard my timid voice. His expression quickly turned to anger, flushing red, the way I'd seen it so many times before, right before he stormed out the door.
"Back to your room!" he bellowed.
"Daddy, I think you need to use this."
I held out the bright red paddle, gooseneck first, my arm trembling. He saw what I had brought him, then looked into my eyes.
He's scared too! I realized.
"I'm still too angry..." he said, shifting uncomfortably.
"Maybe you have to be," I said, walking over to close the distance between us. "Maybe if you wait too long, you won't want to."
"I don't trust myself."
"But I do, Daddy," I said, handing him the paddle and placing myself over his lap, just like I'd done when I was younger. "I didn't mean to be bad. But I'd rather be spanked than have you mad at me."
My yellow summer nightie pulled up off my fanny of its own accord as soon as I assumed the classical spanking position. The panties were part of the set, a soft yellow with tiny ruffles around the elastic at the waist and legs.
How odd to be back here! I thought, realizing I'd grown up a lot since last I had assumed this submissive position.
I rested my palms flat on the carpet and nervously ground my toes into the pile on the other side. But my bottom twitched, just like when I was small.
Father softly patted my bottom a couple times with the paddle. Testing the target, I suppose. After each patting, the pause was excruciating, for I expected the paddle to come down with punishing velocity any second now.
'I wish he'd start! I wish he'd get this OVER!'
But Father needed 4 or 5 of these little patting exercises before...
WHACK!
Well, if you've been paddled on your panties before, I don't have to tell you all about the electrical charge of pain that rockets up your spine, the instant and intense heat that explodes right under the skin, or the dull, aching throb that immediately follows that hot flash of searing pain.
Since you probably already know that, I'll spare you the details.
But I'd never been under a paddle before. So I had nothing to prepare me for the heat and throbbing pain.
Like when Mom used to supervise, Father delivered a dozen strokes, timed about five seconds apart.
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