Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  “Don’t mock me, Phil.”

  “That’s not—I wouldn’t. Michael, tell me. We can’t do anything otherwise. Say what you need to say. Tell me what you need.” I held back; he did not respond well to psychologizing. I’d already decided I’d do whatever he asked. Ginny’s wedding and all it represented was too important. That Ginny Maakestad and Silas Yoder found each other on this godforsaken earth might be some sort of proof we’re not so forsaken as all that. But God or no God, forsaking, unforsaken, forsook, or forsooth, Michael and I were the only parents still alive to be part of this wedding, and we could not screw it up, not because of our own troubles, not for anything in the world. I’d told myself that whatever Michael thought would enable him to get through it, I’d do, and when he finally told me, it was not so bad as I’d imagined, not by a long shot.

  He said: “I think if I could spank you . . .”

  My head turtled toward him as I waited for more, but no more came. His eyes were shut like he couldn’t bear to see my reaction, which was probably for the best, since I can’t deny my disbelief: here we were at a dire moment in our lives, and Michael wanted to enact some kind of soft-porn domination fantasy? This was how we were to rise above our circumstance and behave like adults? This was his answer? But another part of me understood entirely. “You want to hurt me,” I said. “I get it. I hurt you, you want to hurt me.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t know why I want it. I’m ashamed to . . . but since I thought of it, I’ve imagined . . .” He broke off, and I appreciated how hard it was for him. I sympathized. I did. My feeling toward him wasn’t precisely maternal, but it was certainly patronizing. As I slithered my way up to that condescending perch, though, something else happened, and the man on the bed became, for a brief moment, the man I’d married years before. He became what he’d first been to me: my teacher. Not my equal, but my superior. When I first knew Michael I was captivated by his knowledge, his stature. Just nine years my senior, he was a professor and I a lowly grad student—his lowly grad student. The authority in his voice has faded—or my ears are so accustomed I can no longer hear it. But my affair with Lucius had changed us, changed who we were and who we might be to one another, and for a moment in the bedroom that day he was the distant and unreachable—and infinitely desirable—man he’d once been. His jaw was so rigid it looked like he had an underbite, or was holding something in his mouth as he spoke, something caustic. His skin quivered, veins throbbing, teeth clenched. His words came in vicious points, each a stress of its own, as if he wanted me to know he’d carefully chosen each. “I want to hit you,” he said. Then: “I want to whip you.”

  I was scared of the rage I’d seen in his muscles and bones, but in a moment the fear was gone and I felt what people apparently feel in times of horror or humiliation or pain. Part of my consciousness left my body and scuttled up on high to hover and observe. Part of me was still down there, sensate; I wasn’t numb, but I was registering sensation without specific qualities. I felt, but didn’t know how I felt, or what I felt. I experienced without processing. I sat above, recording it for later, when I could risk the scorn I might feel.

  Ginny used to be unable to watch certain sporting events on TV—ice skating, ski jumping, gymnastics. The tension was too much, and she’d be tied in knots, her anxiety causing physical pain. Finally, she’d cover her eyes. But afterward she always asked for a narration of the events she’d hidden from. When we got a VCR, she had Michael tape the competitions, so once we’d told her how they turned out, she could then watch for herself and see the drama unfold. That’s what I thought of as I removed myself from the situation in the bedroom. I thought I’d replay it later to experience it without the unbearable uncertainty of the outcome. And this is, I think, how a grown woman with no innate penchant for S&M submits herself to a spanking by her husband, who stands trembling before her in a brown velour bathrobe. I stepped outside myself. I said, “Okay.”

  Michael didn’t reply, but stood slowly and went to my dresser like he’d already thought everything out. He opened the drawer where I kept ruined pantyhose I hadn’t yet tossed.

  I pushed myself onto the bed. I lay down. I turned over.

  Michael moved like an automaton, physically forcing his every step. He came to the bedside and lifted my hands—one, then the other—to the headboard, holding squeamishly to my wrists as if I were diseased. He tied me to the headboard with knots he learned fifty years ago as a Cub Scout. Knots he demonstrated in 4-H county fair expos—oh, if the Scouts only knew how their lessons were being applied. Or maybe they know full well what their training’s good for.

  Bound to the headboard with my own Hanes-Her-Way “Barely There” Sandalfoot pantyhose, I lay facedown, waiting to be lashed by this zombie version of my husband. He retrieved his belt from the waist loops of khakis he’d slung over an armchair the night before, and approached, looking so whipped himself that I sympathized with him again. But sympathy turns so quickly to pity, and pity led me right to disdain, for Michael and the pathetic idea that his little S&M fantasy might clear the air between us. Back in Ohio with Lucius, I’d felt nothing but guilt with regard to Michael. Now, at home, with him hovering over me as if awaiting direction, I just wanted to get it over with so I could stop pretending to be bound to the bed and get on with my day. But then I’d gone again and lost sight of the larger picture, which wasn’t about me and Michael and our marriage, but about Ginny and her marriage. We couldn’t afford for this remedial measure to fail. In order to broker the peace we needed, I had to let the spanking serve its purpose. I could not float above, fly-on-the-wall-like. If it was to work, I had to be inside myself. Michael was not an idiot; he needed my submission, and so I needed to find a way to make myself feel demeaned, and to make him feel responsible for it.

  As if he understood, Michael’s voice grew authoritative. He said, “Take off your pants.”

  “Michael.” There was too much reprimand in my voice, I knew. I flapped my elbows.

  “Oh.” He lay the belt on the bed, reached his arms under me, found and undid the button of my jeans. The way he held the fabric I thought he might yank and split my pants, rip them open the way he wanted to rip me open, but in a moment his fingers found the zipper pull and he dragged it haltingly down. Then he brought his hands gently up to my abdomen, palms flat against me, and slid them down into my underwear, pushing everything down in one clean motion until it all turned inside out at my ankles. Michael switched his position and pulled; I heard my clothes slump to the floor. My husband reclaimed his belt.

  He stood a long while by the side of the bed, one hand in the crook between my thighs as if trying to warm it. Almost despondent, leather belt trailing from his hand, he seemed like a little boy who’d returned from walking the family dog with only a leash and empty collar. I felt a surge of tenderness, and would have reached for him with a palm of reassurance had I not (a) been tied to the headboard, and (b) thought my support just then was probably the last thing he needed. So much evidence of our trouble is right there: I didn’t trust Michael to take care of his own needs.

  I closed my eyes. I was so tired I thought I might actually sleep. My consciousness wavered. I fluttered to when I felt Michael sink to his knees, his hand coming to rest under one side of my ass, which he cupped with an excruciating tenderness. I was slipping away. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so profoundly exhausted in my life, a quivering exhaustion, spasmodic, my limbs and muscles like separate entities with twitching wills of their own. I fell asleep.

  The first slap of the belt came from inside a dream, with a logic and a context of its own. I awoke with the second slap, which did not hurt so much as confuse me. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t hurt. It was, I thought, supposed to be painful, but maybe it wasn’t painful because my body wasn’t my body—it seemed to be the body of a horse, a big chestnut mare. The lash of leather was not a riding crop’s switch, but more like a saddle girth or stirrup strap
thwacking against me, thick and dull. When Michael let the belt fall to the floor and started in with the flat of his hand, I thought of a kind old horse groom laying down his currycomb to buffet the great beast with a few affectionate smacks to the flank. He brought his hand down with some force, then left it there, where it had struck, for a long moment. Then he began to rub the spot in circles as if to spread the pain around and prepare my flesh for the next onslaught. His skin against my skin was dry and warm. Above me, his breathing quickened, and he paused for a long time over the rubbing before he raised his hand again to strike. When he did, his hand retracted quickly, then came down again with a new quality of force, a speed and an astringency. I remember thinking of Fourth of July fireworks displays—those long minutes between singular blasts, as you wait, neck craned expectantly to the sky until the grand finale when everything comes together in an extended bombardment of relentless glory, bloom upon boom upon splash. The tiniest pause in dramatics and you think the show’s over. And then it’s not! It keeps coming, encore after encore after encore, until you think maybe you don’t want another encore. Maybe you’d rather stand up, go home, feel the quiet . . . Only the encores won’t stop, they just keep coming, slap after slap after slap, until you can’t understand how he has the strength and energy to keep lifting his hand, to keep the blows coming. You start to question your own perception of time; has this really been going on as long as you feel it’s been going on? Have you lost your hold on temporal relativity? Are you stuck in a glitch of time, a record caught in one groove? It’s impossible to say, impossible to say anything, impossible that his hand is still rising and falling. Your flesh stings, prickly with electrostatic fuzz, and things start to go numb, like frostbite setting in. And still the smacking comes. You think maybe he’ll beat you until your peripheral vision goes starry and blackness clouds in like carbon monoxide. You wonder if he’ll simply pass out himself, from the exertion, although it almost seems rote now, mechanical, like he could go on forever, and this may truly never, ever end. The illogic’s taking over, presenting itself through the scrim of your exhaustion as the sort of immutable truth you encounter in nightmares, a no-way-out, no-exit truth: all there is and will ever be is the rise and fall of this man’s arm until the numbness has spread through your body and you’re nothing. There’s nothing left.

  I didn’t realize he’d stopped until I felt my wrist come free of the headboard from which I was apparently being untied. My hand dropped like dead weight and hit the night table, bouncing the clock and pencil jar, my knuckles cracking against wood. A tweaked and awkward pain shot up my arm like a blow to the funny bone. I still had bones! Michael was done, though the spanking seemed to continue, like a bell’s toll still sounds in the eardrums long after the clapper has ceased to strike. When my bonds were loosed, Michael sank to the floor and laid his face against the side of my pummeled bottom. I winced, though I’m not sure I actually felt pain. A sob racked Michael’s throat. If I’d had any sensation left in my hindquarters, I’d’ve felt his tears. I think he’d been crying all along.

  The clock read ten past four when I rose from the bed that afternoon. I don’t know how long we stayed there after my spanking, Michael crumpled in the spot on the floor where I’d spent much of the previous night. I stood and walked to the bathroom. Reaching behind the curtain to turn on the shower, I realized my shampoo would not be sitting in its place on the wall shelf; I hadn’t been home in months. I turned to look in the medicine cabinet for something to wash my hair with—I wasn’t about to go to the car for my toiletries, but if there was no conditioner—Michael never used it—my hair would be unmanageable. I wore a shirt, but that was all, and as I turned to the cabinet I caught sight of myself in the mirror over the sink. Rather, I caught sight of someone in the bathroom mirror and started at the recognition of my own ratted hair and shadowy face. I looked like a prisoner emerging from confinement. My top was loose, black cotton. My eyes went down to my hips, the dark nest of pubic hair. I thought, How long has it been since I made love with my husband? Christmastime?, but could locate no more precise memory than that. How long since I’d made love with Lucius? Less than twenty-four hours. In his mudroom. Against the washer/dryer—not to enact some sexy idea of fucking against the appliances, but because we could not be together without needing to merge, because anything less was unbearable. Looking in the bathroom mirror of my Iowa home at the reflection of my thighs, I was trying to see myself in the eyes of a man who wanted to make love to me. I tried to see myself through the eyes of a man who wanted to spank me. Then I turned my backside to the mirror and craned to take stock of my ass. The redness wasn’t as shocking as the bruised imprints of his hand.

  That sight propelled me into the shower like another blow. I stood under the water for what felt like a long time, though I don’t know if it actually was. Then Michael came into the bathroom. He poked his head in at the edge of the shower curtain, and in a voice that was benign and sweet and just normal, he said, “Is there anything you need, Phil?” A rush of gratitude flooded through me. I looked at my husband and said, “I left my toiletries in the car,” and he bowed away from the shower, disappeared, and then reappeared minutes later with my satiny, plastic-lined satchel. He laid it open on the toilet seat beside the shower for me to take what I needed, then slipped off his bathrobe and the houseclothes beneath it, let them fall to the floor, and stepped naked into the shower, where he held my wet body to his own.

  MICHAEL OFFERED TO FETCH Bernadette at East Prairie Elder Living and come back for me once he’d dropped her at the Sundry Heifer, but it was ridiculous to do all that driving, too obvious an indication of Something’s the Matter with the Maakestads . . . We had to get through the night and the whole next day; we might as well start with a twenty-minute car ride.

  And so, not an hour after rising from our bondage bed, Michael and I were in the car on our way to the nursing home. What a strange, strange time. I don’t know how to do it justice. My ass must have been numb; I don’t recall pain. I remember a sense of displacement, the feeling that this person in Michael’s passenger seat was not me. I was still in Ohio, with Lucius. Or maybe I’d crashed my car driving back to Iowa and this was purgatory, my coma-brain concocting the spanking to make sense of my body’s numbness when, really, my legs had been severed from my torso when I sliced through the I-80 median somewhere in Indiana. This was limbo: a buzzing, static state, more radio wave than human, in which I would drift eternally through the life I’d be living if I weren’t dead. If this was purgatory, though, it could be a hell of a lot worse than Iowa springtime: tulips, daffodils, blooming redbuds and dogwoods, students all getting the hell out of town, hauling their futon frames to the curb. The year before, Silas borrowed a trailer, hitched it to his Festiva, and drove around collecting futon frames. He painted them all white and used them to build us a garden fence. You could furnish whole houses just driving around River City before June 1. There was a glorious feeling in the air. Everything blossoming! Everything free for the taking! My daughter about to be married! Lucius and I in love! As little sleep and as much upheaval as I’d had in the past couple of days, it was hard to keep things straight. Driving through this lovely town in the thrumming spring, I had to remember who was beside me in the car, and where we were headed, and that I’d just been thrashed with a leather belt from the J. Crew catalog. Driving through River City, out into the farmland toward East Prairie, I felt a rush of goodwill toward Michael; I felt grateful. The yearning in my flickering womb was for Lucius, but the throb in my heart was for Michael, who may well have been right after all about the efficacy of a spanking to render us peaceable, coupled, and companionable. We slowed just inside East Prairie’s downtown, such as it is, and Michael downshifted at the stoplight. As he idled, hand on the gearshift, I couldn’t refrain from placing my hand on his, squeezing it there on the console between us. He looked to me as I touched him, confusion twitching in his eyes. Then the light turned green, he tensed to push the car i
nto first, and my hand came away. He took a deep breath, sighing as he let up the clutch, and we rolled forward. I worried perhaps the spanking had done me more good than him.

  Michael pulled into the East Prairie drive and, without words, left the car running and went in to get his mother. When they emerged, he carried her things in one hand and lent her his other arm for support, though this seemed largely symbolic. Yes, Bernadette took a number of medications and was nearly eighty, if not older, but she was as hale as a goddamn Clydesdale. In a pinkish summer suit with matching purse, she looked, as usual, oddly butch. Her hair was not old-lady-short-and-fluffed, but waved, parted on the side, styled à la Betty White, just over her ears, though the effect was less Golden Girls and more Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire. Bernadette was a brick of a lady. It’s amazing that someone with a bosom like hers could be so decidedly unfeminine, but there you have it. Michael’s father must have been a tall and slender man; Michael inherited very little from Bernadette save her wavy hair, possibly her brute strength. How often I have wondered what the hypothetical Grandpa Maakestad looked like—I’ve gone so far as to search the U of I databases for information or images of a David Maakestad, but never come up with anything of note. There was a couple, now long deceased, husband and wife, both doctors—Dr. and Dr. Maakestad—up in northern Iowa, but as far as I can tell they had no children.

  Michael got Bernadette and her bags in the car. I craned around, my face a frozen smile, but she settled in and buckled up before lifting her eyes to me, then nodded curtly. “Phillipa.” No hello, just acknowledgment of my occupancy in the vehicle.

  “Hi, Bernadette. Don’t you look lovely.” She brought the sarcasm out in me.

  Michael shut Bernadette’s door and climbed back into the driver’s seat. “All set, Ma?”

  She nodded and turned to the window, saying, “A little air might be nice,” so Michael began to roll down her window from his control panel, but then she was saying, “You didn’t tell me I’d need a kerchief,” so Michael reversed the window’s direction, and rolled ours up too. He reached for the AC knob. “Just a touch,” Bernadette cautioned, and he obliged. I have always found it painful to watch her emasculation of him, so I turned away, looked out my own window, dying to roll it down. This was purgatory: Bernadette in the back seat, eternally.