Calendar Girls

by April Hill

  And so, like The Little Engine That Could, I steamed ahead, overwhelmed but determined, puffing my idiot brains out, secretly anticipating my award as the Chamber of Commerce’s “Woman of the Year”—and ignoring pretty much everything else I needed to do.

  When the check for the water bill bounced, Jeb was a little annoyed. He had written the check in question, but I was the one who’d overdrawn the checking account—by dropping a hundred and twenty-eight bucks on beanbag makings and forgetting to write it down in the checkbook. Like the loving husband and PTA supporter he is, Jeb simply shook his head, grumbled a bit, and went to the bank to made the check good.

  Next, I gave up housekeeping entirely. Never a great sacrifice, in my opinion, but Jeb often works late, and when he couldn’t find a clean plate late at night because I forgot to turn on the dishwasher, and then poured himself a tall glass of ice-cold spoiled milk because we were living on pizza and Chinese takeout and I hadn’t set foot inside a grocery store in two weeks, he lost it. Jeb and I rarely shout at one another, but that night, we probably woke up the neighbors. Dressed in nothing but a fleece robe and slippers, I’d come downstairs to see what was wrong when I heard him banging around the kitchen and swearing a blue streak.

  “Just calm down and lower your voice!” I hissed. (Jeb had just swallowed—and gagged on—his first mouthful of sour milk.) “I’ll go grocery shopping tomorrow—if I have the time.” I’d already promised the same thing, by the way, twice. Whatever we had in the house besides leftover pizza and egg rolls, Jeb had brought home himself.

  “If you have the time?” he repeated. “I did five loads of laundry after work two days ago, and Eric says he couldn’t find a clean shirt to wear to school this morning. I warned you two months ago that the brakes on your car were growling, and you still haven’t gotten them fixed. What the hell’s going on, Libby?”

  “I’m getting the damned brakes fixed tomorrow,” I lied through gritted teeth. “And what’s going on, for your information, is I’ve been working my ass off making all those stupid beanbags. And the two-hundred fucking sock monkeys for my Brownies, of course, and…”

  And then, I lost it, as well. Weeks with not enough sleep and too many pricked fingers came together in a rush of temper. “Come to think of it, chief,” I shrieked, “why don’t you just try putting a fucking sock in it! Drink your damned milk! I’m going to bed.” With that, I threw one of the aforementioned sock monkeys at his head. “If you don’t like the way I handle things around here, you can go screw…”

  Jeb hates the word screw—almost as much as he dislikes the F word—when either word is directed at him, anyway. As it happened, screw was the last complete word out of my mouth for a while. The next sound I heard—after being hauled unceremoniously across Jeb’s hip—was the sound of him rummaging in a kitchen drawer for one of the only clean cooking utensils in the house. Which turned out to be a gigantic wooden spoon. You can probably guess what the very next sounds were.

  Over the years, I’ve been spanked with a fairly wide assortment of items—most of them opportunistic, so to speak. Whatever happens to be on hand when Jeb’s patience runs out. But of all the implements ever used on my behind, I’d have to say that my least favorite is a wooden spoon. They’re usually small and light, but I think their very smallness encourages Jeb to believe he needs to spank longer, and to use a lot more muscle to get the job done right. A belt can leave welts, and makes a lot of noise, and a hairbrush hurts like hell, but since they both seem so scary, neither one of those things gets used for very long at one time—by my husband, anyway. He’s always been an adherent of the fast, hard, and on the spot school of spanking, so for him, a wooden spoon is simply the ideal weapon—especially one the size of a saucer. And even more especially when the intended victim is already naked, without so much as a thin pair of cotton panties between her and the sort of blistering that—in hindsight—she so richly deserved.

  By stroke number ten (count approximate) I was howling for mercy, and beyond grateful that our innocent children were soundly asleep at dear old Granny’s for the evening. By stroke seventeen or thereabouts, my ass and the backs of my thighs felt like they were giving off smoke, and by the twenty-fifth blow, after Jeb landed a few well-placed swats to the inside of each thigh, I was absolutely sure I would never use another obscenity for the rest of my life. (That feeling passed, eventually.)

  When he finally let go of me, I hopped around the kitchen for a few seconds, fanning my roasted fanny and trying not to cry. I almost never cry when I get spanked for real, mainly because I’m mad and don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I was mad now, too, but my will was weak, and seconds later, I began sobbing like a little kid. This was Jeb’s cue to take me in his arms, kiss me very tenderly, and try to calm me down—one of the things he does that makes me love him like crazy—even when my rear end is still on fire. We went upstairs to bed with me still blubbering, promising not to let myself get carried away again by things that aren’t really important—like silly Fourth of July booths. And I genuinely meant every single promise I made—when I made them, anyway.

  By the time the morning of July Fourth arrived, I was crawling the walls. With the help of my troop of sweetly giggling but untalented Brownies, I had managed to put together twenty cardboard boxes of peculiar-looking craft projects that only a mother would buy, and two hundred cross-eyed sock monkeys of my own inept manufacture. The three lopsided booths were finished and already on the pier, draped in crepe paper. The ladybug beanbags were finished (though losing beans at an alarming rate from every crookedly sewn seam) and all my faithful volunteers had shown up carrying gooey, mostly unappealing baked goods nestled on paper plates. I’d made all of my deadlines! Life was perfect, even if I was losing my mind. I had actually begun to envy my predecessor her four peeing, pooping infants. At least she didn’t have to fight a swarm of tourists for one lousy parking place within walking distance of the freaking pier. In ninety-degree heat, carrying four boxes of sock monkeys, two stacked trays of Smiley Face cupcakes, and four plastic jugs of Hawaiian Punch.

  I was about to throw in the towel and simply drive off somewhere— to a cool, shady spot where I could wolf down the Smiley Face cupcakes and drink the Hawaiian Punch in peace—but then, miraculously, I spotted an empty parking place. Well, sort of empty. And sort of a parking place. There was a large yellow cardboard sign on the curb, probably posted by my very own husband that read, “Temporary No Parking, Tow Away Zone.” The thing was, there was already a big, black motorcycle parked there, and my small car would fit nicely in the space that remained, so what the hell. Any not quite legal port in a storm, right?

  I don’t know how many times Jeb has tried patiently explaining to me the arcane and bewildering principles of parking on a hill. I listen, and promptly forget. My solution to the problem of parking on hills has always been to simply not park on hills. Until today, that is, when this steep, hilly, sort-of parking space was the only one for blocks in any direction. This was an emergency, after all. I was already late. I was in a shitty mood. I was hot. I was tired. I was sticky, not just with heat, but with yellow cupcake icing. Dozens of adorable gap-toothed Brownies and Little Leaguers were going to be disappointed if I was late delivering their goodies. And their heartbreak would be my fault. I could almost feel the coveted Woman of the Year Award slipping through my sticky fingers. Only one long block away, just down the hill from where I was standing, was the pier—festively decorated for July the Fourth.

  I suspect, dear reader, that by now, you think you can picture what happened next. But please believe me when I say that you can’t. Not really. No one, not even me— a person well versed in calamity, with a better than average familiarity with bizarre catastrophes and a vast and colorful history of lunacy and self-induced disaster—could have foretold the havoc my tiny mistakes in judgment were about to wreak. Not the sheer magnitude of the cataclysm that was to follow, nor the Kafkaesque proportions of the mayhem I was about to brin
g down on the innocent and unsuspecting citizenry of Sand Castle Beach as they went about celebrating the birth of our nation.

  Now, the simple fact is that any one of the tiny little errors in judgment I mention here (what Jeb would call colossal stupidities) could have and almost certainly would have resulted in a bare bottomed walloping of extended length and major severity—probably requiring a variety of implements and two days of sitting on foam rubber. I had been told repeatedly to have my brakes fixed. I had been warned about, and even ticketed in the past for parking illegally. I had been given careful, detailed instructions on how to park safely on a hill by an expert on such things. (Wheels in, wheels out, you know what I mean, It’s confusing!) Curiously, the one thing I did do properly that fateful, sun-drenched morning was to lock my car doors. It has always driven Jeb nuts that I never lock my car doors. That morning, though, maybe trying to compensate for parking in an illegal space, I locked all four doors.

  I saw at once that getting all my crap down to the pier was going to take two trips, but figured I could simply draft Jeb to come up and get the rest. After a moment’s pause, it came to me that doing that would entail Jeb finding out I’d parked illegally. And if there was one thing I didn’t need this morning, it was a husbandly lecture, or—more likely— a few quick, husbandly swats to my illegally parked behind. Okay, next plan. I restacked everything, then started down the hill carrying all my crap heaped into one teetering pile, and dragging the jugs of Hawaiian Punch along behind me in a canvas tote bag. I couldn’t see anything, of course, and the bag was scraping along the pavement, masking the more ominous scraping sound that had begun right behind me.

  The first sound wasn’t especially loud, but a second later, there was a crash of metal-on-metal loud enough to make me jump, followed by a horrendous grinding, growling noise that sounded a lot like a small blue Hyundai running into and then rolling over a big, black motorcycle. Which, oddly enough, is exactly what it was.

  I screeched, abandoned the boxes of sock monkeys and the trays of cupcakes and the four jugs of Hawaiian Punch to their fate, and ran for my life as my Hyundai rolled slowly by and kept going—right over the Smiley Face cupcakes, the sock monkeys, and the Hawaiian Punch. (Except for the tray of cupcakes that landed on the hood, splattering the windshield with yellow icing.) One of the flying sock-monkeys had become impaled on a windshield wiper, giving my Hyundai the curious appearance of being driven by a poorly sewn stuffed animal. Only scant yards away, innocent children with balloons, and sweating adults in crepe-papered booths had no inkling of the decimation that was coming their way. Waving my arms frantically and screaming for all I was worth, I tried to warn them, but the Sand Castle VFW band had just begun massacring Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, and amid the patriotic din, my screams went unnoticed.

  I was actually praying for my car to ram one or more of the other cars on the street—the ones parked legally, with their wheels properly positioned. Anything to stop it before it reached the bottom of the hill—and the pier. No such luck. I couldn’t have backed the damned thing down the street any straighter—except for the one brief swerve it made to the left, taking out three parking meters, a mail box, and a fire hydrant, which promptly erupted like Old Faithful, creating an instant flood. The little Hyundai was picking up speed, now, but when I looked again, I could see that someone had sounded the alarm. People on the pier were beginning to scatter—some of them jumping off the pier and into the water, and others hanging over the side, clinging to the railing. I saw Jeb running toward me, with one of his deputies close behind, and I realized with a sinking heart that my husband the hero was hoping to leap inside the car and hit the brakes. Which he might well have been able to do, on any other day. The car wasn’t moving very fast. If only it hadn’t been locked up tight as a drum, and if only the brakes hadn’t failed, and if only…

  Here’s the best part. A mere three feet in either direction, and the Hyundai would have missed the pier entirely, and rolled down the sandy embankment onto the beach, stopping well short of the water. A few ruts in the sand, a few dents in my car, the kind of spanking (possibly public) that I’d remember ‘til I was really, really old, but nothing else of dire consequence. Even if the car had reached the boardwalk, it could have just as well smashed into one of the solid concrete posts placed there for precisely that reason—to keep vehicles off the pier. It could have even collided with one of old Gustave’s stupid toilets. But none of that good stuff happened. With the doomed sock-money still flopping on the windshield, my little blue car rolled right by the toilets and slipped between the two posts without incurring a single scratch—and if only the same could be said of the pier, I would be a much happier woman today.

  The Hyundai was moving faster now, dripping water and yellow cupcake ooze and wobbling from side to side a bit after its encounter with the fire hydrant. The people still on the pier, between the car and the end of the pier were making a last minute scramble to get out of its way, having given up hope of seeing it stopped.

  I can’t really describe the carnage on the pier, other than to say that if I’d had a video camera, I could have won the grand prize on that TV show where they reward people for feats of astonishing stupidity. Booths were collapsing on both sides of the pier, a couple of beer kegs had exploded, spewing foam and quantities of beer over what was left standing, and dozens of balloons were floating away into the summer sky. Carnage. And I use that word in its truest sense, because while it turned out that there was no actual human damage, short of some bruises and scrapes, untold multitudes of hot dogs, hamburgers, and Polish sausage had been mashed to mush beneath the balding tires of my vehicle that afternoon. Even plates of steaming falafel from the new Islamic Center’s booth. I am nothing if not an ecumenical bringer of catastrophe.

  The good news is that the antique toilets and the charming turn of the century carousel escaped damage, and that our beloved old pier didn’t collapse under the weight of a vehicle, as predicted. The bad news—for me—is that the vehicle in question rolled the entire length of the beloved old pier, crashed through the wooden railings, dropped like a rock into the ocean, and sank from sight—drowning a perfectly innocent sock-monkey.

  When I turned around to take another look at the wreckage, I saw Jeb standing at the end of the pier, in uniform. He looked stunned, so I decided it might be a wise move to make a quick getaway, and return to the scene of the crime when he wasn’t armed. At that point, I don’t think anyone but Jeb and maybe some of our friends realized whose car had been responsible for the chaos and I wasn’t about to wait for the word to spread. Tar and feathering is an old and cherished New England custom, and at this point, I couldn’t be absolutely sure that the chief of police would intervene to prevent a little vigilante justice. So, after asking around to see that no one had been injured, I gathered up our kids and walked back to the house—and stayed there until it was time for the fireworks to begin.

  * * *

  The fireworks for the town’s Fourth of July display were always stored in a metal shed farther down the beach, so that part of the celebration went forward, more or less as planned. No one could watch from the pier, of course, since Jeb still wasn’t sure it was safe. He’d ordered it closed until the city engineer could inspect the damage.

  It was almost dark when I got back down to the beach. Our next door neighbor, Ellen, was kind enough to add our kids to her own brood to watch the fireworks, while I went looking for Jeb—and the fireworks I knew were in my very near future.

  I found him under the boardwalk near the pier, checking with a flashlight for weakened planks.

  We walked a long way down the beach together, away from where the fireworks crowd had gathered. In the distance, we could hear the VFW band playing Under the Boardwalk.

  Neither one of us said much. I didn’t know how to begin, and Jeb seemed to be waiting for me, so I finally just told him—as simply as I knew how—how sorry I was.

  He stopped walking and nodded toward t
he deserted boardwalk. “I wasn’t going to do anything about this ‘til tomorrow, but this may actually be better—more appropriate, anyway.” It was dark, so I couldn’t be sure, but I think I detected a very slight grin on Jeb’s face when he pointed back down the beach toward the pier. “It’s dark, private, and the guys at the VFW are even providing a soundtrack.”

  And so, after a long, roundabout tale of woe, we arrive back where we started— with the charming old ditty by The Drifters:

  Under the boardwalk down by the sea

  On a blanket with my baby…is where I’ll be.

  OR

  Under the boardwalk, down by the sea,

  My scalded butt on fire, and o’er my hubby’s knee.

  Personally, I like the original lyrics better.

  The spanking I got that night under the darkened boardwalk was by no means the worst one I’d ever had, even though it probably should have been. I think Jeb was too tired, and too busy trying to figure out who was going to have to pay for what to give me his undivided attention—or his best effort. And he was generous enough to tell me that he understood that what happened had been an accident, and that I hadn’t actually set out to wreck everyone’s holiday and a lot of kids’ hard work on purpose. The way he put it made me start bawling, of course.

  He let me cry for a while, without saying anything, but when the fireworks reached peak volume, he quietly ordered me to take my jeans and panties down and bend over an old piling. When he rolled up his shirtsleeves and unbuckled his broad black police belt, I felt my knees weaken. Something about those two things being done together always makes my stomach churn.

  Jeb pulled the belt from its loops and doubled it, and a few seconds later, landed an opening swat that took my breath away.

  The spanking wasn’t a long one, as these things go, but Jeb can pack a lot of discomfort into a pretty short space when he wants to. It was a whole lot less than I had coming, but more than enough to have me stuffing my fist in my mouth to keep from howling at the top of my lungs each time the thick leather strap cracked across my scorched butt. Not that anyone could have heard me. We were too far down the beach from the crowd, and for that, at least, I was very grateful.