supplicium post mortem

First, please know that I love my family very much and would be lost without them. They are good to me and stand by me and are nice to me and believe in me and would stick up for me any moment.

But here’s the thing: no matter how much you love them, at a certain point it’s healthy and right that you grow up and start your own life. You don’t leave them behind, but to some extent you escape that first family. I had done this. It took a long time for M to get me to see that we had a new family now. The parts of the old that weren’t so great—these we didn’t have to have. We could make our own traditions. Yes, we’d still put my childhood ornaments on the Christmas tree, but now on Christmas eve, he’d make mince pies and we’d listen to his Britpop Christmas CD. And yes, my parents will always be my parents and I love them, but in a way, I didn’t have to be that child anymore. RP was looking after Casey, so the old life was past, and the new, better, realer life was here. And I could love my sister and mother and all the rest, but with his help, I could take them with the right amount of salt, and when it was time to leave, we went home to our house that we had our way, to our dogs, to our bed, and to all the secret love we had together. At our wedding, we’d given ourselves to each other in Christ, and now this was my strongest bond. This was the new family, the new life. I wasn’t living in my childhood house any more.

Today I had Christmas brunch at my apartment for my mother, my sister, and my sister’s childhood friend. My mom had unexpectedly been staying with me since Thursday due to a minor medical emergency. Her difficult dogs had been in my way, frazzling my nerves, keeping me awake, and increasing my workload. I am coming down with a cold due to lack of sleep. We all had a fine time, I guess, but by evening, I really wanted everyone to go home. I had had visitors for 3 weeks and needed to spend some quality time with my dogs and do the zillion things I had to do to get ready for my UK trip tomorrow.

Except no one was going home. My sister and her friend were lying on my bed watching agitating videos on their phones. My mom was feeling weak and had gone upstairs to nap. It had become clear that she and her dogs were staying another night. I took my dogs around the block.

On a quiet, dark side-street, I leaned over someone’s wall, buried my head in my arms, and started to cry. I felt trapped by this family—a family I love but want to escape. I wanted my own family, with M, the one I thought I had, and I wanted the kids we were trying to have, the twins. I wanted it to be Christmas in the new life, with him and our children, and our dogs, and Casey and Mark and all the others. I wanted us to be able to come home from being with my mother and sister, but instead, my house was invaded by this old family. And no matter how much I love them, it just feels wrong in a way for them to be so much in my house and life—the house and life I should have with M.  My mom and sister think it would be fine, in the absence of a husband, to have a turkey-baster baby and bring it up all together in kibbutz. I feel physically nauseated by this idea. It is simply incestuous. But lacking a family of my own, now, I can’t seem to get them out of my hair.

It would be one thing to be a life-long single woman. But to have got used to the new family, and now be back with the old… I know it’s colossally ungrateful to say this, but it feels like getting rescued from the orphanage and then having to go back.  But I’m emotional, and I don’t really feel well.

There’s a blizzard headed into town when my flight to Englandland is due to leave tomorrow. My house sitting and dog sitting arrangements have grown inordinately complicated and unsatisfactory. My mom isn’t well and who knows when she’ll be better, or how much help she’ll need, especially with her horrible dogs. I am thinking this trip was a terrible idea. I should stay home, quit trying to make it happen, just take care of my mom and my dogs, and get some work done over the school break. It was selfish and stupid to try to make it happen. And kids in orphanages don’t get to go to parties.

I know I’m not being very rational. Things usually look better in the morning. I’m not a cynic about Christmas. I love Christ. And I’m so grateful for everything I have, and all the friends and family who love me. Still, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed today, except the part about turning out the light at the end.

When I write the phrase little chat, it is usually in upper case, Little Chat. I think you already know what that means. It is probably time I attribute the phrase to its originator. Mark first used, upper case, early in our correspondence, but I incorrectly remember hearing it first in a vignette he wrote for me.

Our email correspondence (until he moved to Gotham) stretches to almost a thousand emails each, almost all of them saved individually in txt files with names like “fmark232.txt” [the 232nd email from Mark to me] or “tomark33″ [my 33rd email to Mark]. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a reference amongst all that, especially 15 years after the fact.

Tonight I was searching for the text of this Little Chat vignette, which I did using the Search function on my PC. It turned up many emails, and the first one I opened turned out to be the one in which he confessed that he loved me. I barely remember this email, but encountering it again absolutely slayed me. I won’t quote it. My eyes are still swollen.

I did eventually find Mark’s vignette and have posted it below as well as under the Stories tab. The scenario was Mark and Casey at the Lewises. This was an alternate reality to Home School, one we only played a few times. The idea was that Mark and Casey had run away from the Orphanage and had been found and adopted by the Perfect People (Dr. & Mrs. Lewis). I later (or was it earlier?) wrote a companion piece to his vignette, which I also posted under the Stories tab. After reading them both, I feel his is much better: more direct, less fussy and complicated, more spontaneous and full of heart. Looking at both scenarios from far away, I would say that we never lived or much played the letter of them, but the mood and heart of them were a constant feature of our life together, especially Mr. Prior’s life with Casey.

Without further ado, then, here is Mark’s piece, Wednesdays.

Wednesdays

by Mark Hastings

Sundays are for Regulars, for weekly cleaning.  Sundays are always spent together, at the Lewises.  Casey and Mark go to bed sore and peaceful and clean and warm.  Whole.  Sundays are a deep rich blue, the smell of dark polished wood, a full stomach and a feeling of belonging.

By Wednesday, that’s worn off a little.  Mr. Lewis is fond of saying, as he shaves on Wednesday morning, that Wednesday is the worst day of the week. Equidistant from the comfort of weekend.  Neither the residual freshness of Tuesday, or the slight anticipation of Thursday.  Nothing but acres of dullness.  Mrs. Lewis has Commitments on Wednesdays, so supper is usually something cold.  Mark and Casey both have School things that they hate. For Mark, it’s morning gym, ninety minutes of effort with the school Sergeant’s swagger stick flailing its response to slackness, and the inevitability of at least one vault-horse caning, ‘poer incurriger les otters’.   For Casey, double Latin in the afternoon with the psychotically sarcastic Mr. Whitworth, whose greatest pleasure is to decline irregular verbs in time with his strap-strokes, and who makes a virtue of leathering girls just as hard as boys.  Out in front of the class, but facing towards your peers so they are spared the worst witness of unprotected strapping, and can better concentrate on construe.

Mark has learned to avoid the Wednesday vault-horse, and Casey the mid-week strap, because on Wednesday evenings they have their “Little Chat”.

The children do the dishes after supper, while Mr. Lewis goes to his study, and Mrs. Lewis rests up.  There is a sense of anticipation, although it isn’t the edginess of Sunday, before the Regulars, because often a Little Chat is just that.  Even so, the dishes get done well, and quietly, on the whole, on Wednesdays.  Mark and Casey smarten themselves up, and jaunt carefully along the downstairs corridor to the study.  Sometimes Mrs. Lewis joins them, sometimes not.

Little Chats are lucky-dippy.  In the months since Casey’s arrival they have ranged from a particularly uncomfortable interview over a broken ornament (Casey), cleverly replaced on its shelf (Mark) and not discovered broken for some time afterwards (Mrs. Lewis), to a riotous game of Racing Demon in which Mr. Lewis was heard to swear when Casey stole his Ace of Spades, was sent to the corner by his family and threatened with a very hard whacking by Mark if he ever did it again.  On average, one or both of the Lewises feel that one or both of the children would benefit from a little additional discipline perhaps one week in two.

Little Chat discipline is always the same – slipper, paddle or hand, administered in traditional manner, across the knee of the parent in the clock-ticky quiet of Mr. Lewis’s study.  It’s very different from Regulars. Canes, birches, crops and straps are banned.  Punishments are measured in minutes, rather than strokes.  Usually either a Quin, being–as Casey might explain–five minutes, or a Dix, being ten.  Mark hates Dixes, with a passion, especially when they’re paddle, and administered by Mrs. Lewis. Casey has mixed feelings about the whacking, but she loves the closeness and warmth of Little Chats, the fire glowing orange while the wind blows white outside on winter Wednesdays.

So, Wednesdays are made red, a smell of incense, a little adventure, and fun.

Think you?

My childhood tgi fantasies tended to revolve around hostile authorities, which is why I liked The Orphanage so much. The orphanage in my mind evolved out of my infatuations with Annie (as experienced in the Broadway musical), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, Oliver Twist, Daddy Long Legs, A Little Princess, plus any other orphanage I could find in the pages of literature.

A notable exception was Mandy, by Julie Edwards (Julie Andrews). Mandy imprisoned my imagination and my heart, but on some level made me uneasy, perhaps because it was in fact closer to me than the hostile authority orphanage. Mandy is about an orphan (named Mandy!) who has lived her whole life in a small, kind, homey orphanage. She’s allowed freedoms, has friends, and is beloved by the orphanage matron. But, she longs irrationally for something else. She climbs over the orphanage wall, finds a cottage in the woods, and secretly begins fixing it up. Long story short, in a moment of crisis, she is rescued by the landowner on whose property the cottage stands (a man on a horse, no less) and taken to recover at his big house. The man and his wife (?) fall for her. Then she gets better and goes back to the orphanage. Except now, even though she’s back with her friends and people who love her, she misses the man and his wife. It’s enormously conflicted and sad. Eventually, they adopt her. Mandy pressed somehow on a loneliness I felt as a child, even though I was growing up within a loving, caring family. In many ways, I was unable to deal with this feeling. The hostile orphanage was easier.

My orphanage (which I imagined most nights while falling asleep, which I attempted to draw in my notebooks) was called St. Peter’s. It was a special admissions type place. I (my character, whose name varied) was brought there one dark, rainy night by a priest of slight acquaintance. My mother had been an actress (the real kind, not an “actress”) but had died and left me alone, à la Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. This priest had presided over the funeral and out of pity brought me to St. Peter’s, knowing of its sterling reputation. I was about nine.

This orphanage was run by a grossly exaggerated and fictionalized version of Mrs. R, my children’s theater director, with the other children as avatars of my children’s theater friends. And in fact the children at this orphanage were chosen for their talents, and Matron made money taking us around and having us perform for people. So, even though we lived a horrible, hard life and had to scrub floors and do every kind of difficult chore and were subject to the meanest discipline, after dinner every night we were sent to the dining room and told to get on with our rehearsals. We kids organized our own shows and practiced them together. Sure, there might be rivalries amongst us, but we were absolutely united against the orphanage authorities: Matron; her scary (and retarded) brother, Jack; and the other people in her employ, who could also punish us as they chose.

There was of course a Bench at the orphanage, but you could be whacked at any time for any reason. We comforted each other in our misery and always—always—had our minds on the future when we would Run Away. Of course we would fail many times, and be severely punished for our efforts, but one day, my cadre and I would make it. We would escape, and after a period of thrilling, Faginesque adventures in The City (which would naturally include theatricals), I would happen upon the Perfect People, who would adopt me.

The promise of the Perfect People was essential, but my fantasies rarely left the orphanage. Something about the harshness and despair, coupled with the camaraderie and resistance comforted me. The dynamic with authority was important. You couldn’t win against Matron, not openly, so your only option was to resist her internally, to obey her, but not in your heart, to pretend compliance while secretly plotting your escape. The hostile authority was intoxicating for a Good Girl like me, naturally. As a Good Girl, I depended slavishly on the good opinion of the authority, unless of course the authority was a Bad Authority. Then, I could resist it, disobey it, undermine it, hate it. No wonder the orphanage was like crack to me. There I could transgress, break bounds, get into trouble and still be heroic and good. There, punishment was a badge of nobility. The heroine always suffered punishment, and yet she was always good. Win, win and win!

Perhaps you are feeling like you might be sick now. I am, too. But the interesting point is what happened once I actually began to play at age 26.

When I first started to play, APD, I wanted to be in the English school world. It was a nice blend of hostile, but not fully hostile authority. I would call it detached authority. Ideally, they were fair and not abusive, but stoicism was certainly called for. I enjoyed exploring the extent of my stoicism, and I felt a particular buzz because I had, for so much of my life, been so very fearful, particularly of physical challenges.

But—but. M’s instinct with Casey tended towards the domestic, and towards the firm and compassionate end of semi-con play. We imagined the orphanage together, but we never played it, at least not with me as the bottom. Actually, we played Casey at the Perfect People once or twice, and that “Casey” turned out not to be much fun; she was so traumatized, she scarcely spoke. She wasn’t very robust. So, whether through observation or instinct, M realized, I think, that although I had come out of the orphanage, it would not be a good place for me to visit, now.

We did one scene early in our relationship with him as a hostile top. It taught us a lot, not least because it was such a disaster. But that is another story…

Most of my childhood tgi play involved my dolls. As previously discussed (but where? on Twitter?), I never spanked my dolls (that would have made me Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice!), but they certainly spanked each other. It’s a cold, rainy day here in Gotham, so it seems like a good time to dig some pictures out from wherever old pictures lurk.

These were taken by my own fair hand with one of those cameras the size of a milk-duds box, where you advanced the film with your thumb. Sort of like this:

Except I didn’t get mine off the back of a Minute Maid can. Anyway, remember the pink bedroom in that story The Visit? Here it is, gray dollhouse to the right just off camera:

Here we have Mother Goose looking the formidable schoolmistress. Her pupils (front to back) are Daisy (who has seen better days, and actually looks like she needs a visit from mental health services), Heather (Holly Hobby doll), Annie, and Holly (Holly Hobby doll). I did not actually name any of them. I always like the Holly Hobbies because they dressed very Little House on the Prairie. Anyhow, Mother Goose had better keep her eye on Holly and Annie, if you ask me. If they could be played by real girls, I would cast… oh, how could I choose with candidates like Jessica, Emma Jane, Eliane, Haron, Caroline, Mija, just to name a few internationally renowned schoolgirls?? Vote in comments, kids.

Next up, the orphanage dolls. The photo is blurred to hide their real identities, ha ha, but here they are, all lined up for inspection:

Cute costumes, right? These orphan girls slept in bunk beds, sang “It’s a Hard Knock Life” and suffered constant, mean whacking from the orphanage master and matron, played by Mr. and Mrs. Sunshine, who, when they weren’t impersonating orphanage wardens, drove around with their cute little baby in a camper van spreading peace and love.

It was constant drama in the pink bedroom. How I found time for homework and play practice, I’ll never know.

Mom & Dad: if you’ve been lurking and now, after seeing these pix, have to acknowledge that this is indeed me – Ohai!!

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?