Three Tales of Female Submission

Chapter One The Giving & The Taking I had left the conservative Christian college to which I had been sent, one state over, after two years, returning to the family farm to spend the decade that followed keeping watch over my parents as they died. This was tedious and exhausting work. My only regret is that it took so long. My brothers—fourteen and sixteen years older—had left for college and never returned; they sent money, but that was all. At the time that I was forced to abandon my education my father was seventy-six years old, my mother seventy-two. My parents always reminded me of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, sober to the point of desiccation. While my birth had been improbable, given their ages, I’d never found the birth of my brothers any more explicable. I’ve come to understand that people being unable—or unwilling—to picture their parents having s*x is rather common; I believe my “claim” in this direction is stronger than most. When I married, at thirty, I was, in the ways important to my parents and to The Reverend, untouched. Which is not to say that no one had ever laid a hand on me. From the time that I was eight, when my younger brother left home, until near the time of their deaths—with semester-long hiatuses for the two years I was away at college—my parents punished me on a weekly basis: both “for cause” and “for maintenance.” “Maintenance” was a Friday evening ritual: the two of them would lead me solemnly into the bathroom, at bedtime. Father would have me kneel on the cold tiles, head bowed, forehead and hands on the edge of the old claw-footed tub. He would lace my nightgown up onto my lower back, pull my panties down around my thighs, and strap my buttocks and my hips, making little grunting sounds of either displeasure or satisfaction—perhaps both. Then he would spread me open with his huge, work-calloused hands, thrust a thumb into me, greasing my bottom with petroleum jelly, and leave Mother to administer my enema, which she did with a quiet, angry, efficiency. The pulsing of the nozzle into me, on introduction and removal—longer but thinner and smoother than Father’s thumb—was both balm and irritant, soothing and disquieting me as a sort of warmth spread from what I could only think of as my lower belly. When hair began to grow between my legs, this seemed to somehow enrage my mother even more; she took it to be a personal affront, something that I had done specifically in defiance of her. Sometimes, straining to hold the enema until given permission to release, I would clench my buttocks and rub my thighs together which, on more than one occasion, caused her to fly off the handle. She would pull Father’s razor strop off the shelf over the sink, yank my legs as far apart as the panties that bound my thighs would permit, and lash underneath me, curling the length of leather upward, striking the offending hair and the lips of my cunny. I think back on this now with something approaching nostalgia: I have come to love, I have come to crave, the multiple ways in which The Reverend—and the special members of his congregation to whom he gives this authorization—lashes every part of my body, reserving for particular attention my n*****s, my cunny, and my anus. This is not how my marriage started; but perhaps I should have expected it. Father stopped talking a year or two after I moved back home, not something that was immediately obvious to me: he had always been the implacable Head-of-the-Household, but Mother had always done a great deal of his talking for him. “Your Father is greatly disappointed by your behavior,” she would say sharply, over dinner. Father would nod darkly. Off to the bathroom we would troop. Later, I would be told that he had probably been having small strokes for quite some time. My greatest upset on hearing this was that he hadn’t simply had, what the doctors referred to as, “a massive stroke,” sooner than the one that killed him when I was twenty-seven. The Reverend had preached Father’s funeral, in his storefront Church of The Message, in a strip mall on the edge of town. I had never really met him before. I knew of him, but little about him, save that he was seventeen years my senior, that there were rumors of a rough past, and that he had crosses crudely tattooed on the webbing between thumb and index finger, on both hands. His was not the church we attended; the choice of both minister and location was odd. Moreover, this was a matter which, apparently, had been pre-arranged. As had my betrothal, The Reverend informed me, graveside. “It was your Father’s wish that you be given to me,” he said quietly. And so I was.