supplicium post mortem

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?

Where does the time go? Three-hundred sixty-five days ago, I came out from behind a sort of veil and started this blog. The reason, while not deliberate, was fairly obvious: I needed someone I could talk to about this whole part of my life, this whole part that I no longer had, in a sense.

Back in the dark ages (1990’s), I had a website. Quite my-first-html, it contained stories Mark and I had written and was a front for the conceit of Home School (a small domestic boarding school RP and TL started together in “Ireland” after M moved here to Gotham to live with me). After a while, I let the site lapse, and eventually took it down. M and I weren’t part of any public scene, and while we had a few online friends, we knew even fewer of them in real life. So, eventually, to me at least, the site felt like a kind of exhibitionism that I no longer wanted to maintain. So it went away. Now, when I think about some of the things on that site, I cringe so much I could poke out my own eyeballs.

Fast forward to 2008/9 when personal websites had been supplanted largely by blogs. I knew this and had visited the occasional tgi blog, but the blogosphere can be overwhelming. Just contemplating the extent of it made me feel I might hyperventilate. Also, people I knew who blogged (non-kinky) seemed to be entirely consumed by it. Since, in my regular life, I also write, I was protective of my creative energy. I had for several years been trying to pare back hobbies so that I could actually complete large creative projects. I didn’t have time for blogging. If I started up with that, when would I have time to do my real writing?

Eight months after becoming a widow, however, my real writing wasn’t happening. It, like so much in me, felt dead. So in that sense, I had nothing to lose starting a blog. It might, I reasoned, even serve as a kind of CPR. I was done being a taskmaster to myself. I was done with Should’s. I was done berating myself for not Accomplishing enough. If writing a few tgi blog posts distracted me briefly from the crushing desolation of a widowed January, then hallelujah. If it kept my creative heart from stopping, even barely, then Thanks be to God.

And this is what it did. Sometime last spring, the flash fiction began. Several months of that was the key factor, I think, in enabling me to return to my regular writing last November during NaNoWriMo. In that way, and in so many others, my resuscitation commenced. It is far from complete–far from it–but I think it is safe to say it is under way.

And besides regularly and sincerely thanking God for this (atheist friends, avert your eyes), I also feel a profound gratitude to all of you, and to the other friends I have made, online and off, over the course of this year. You have read my gushy outpourings. You have borne witness, sometimes silently, sometimes not, but always palpably, to the love and to the suffering. You have patiently offered hugs and encouragement, over and over. You have not criticized.

To all of you, to each of you: thanks.

You will have noticed by now that, in violation of convention, I do not have a blog-roll. Blog-rolls are great. They are how people find like-minded friends in the dizzying blogosphere. They help drive traffic to other sites you like. However, they have always stressed me out, and because of this, I have avoided adding one. The stress comes from two sides: when I see myself on someone else’s blog-roll I feel: Yay! They like me! and I feel part of an In crowd. When I am not on someone’s blog-roll I feel the opposite: they don’t like me! Or, they don’t know about me! I am a pariah. Neither of these attitudes is edifying. So, to try to detach from them, and to avoid the stress of worrying about whom to include on mine, and whom I would be offending by excluding, I have worked with a different rubric, which is to link to people within posts, when I’m responding to something they have written, or when they join in a writing game with me. Anyone who writes with me gets a link, and I always comment on the stories that come out of challenges I’ve posted (so long as I’m aware of them).

However, today is a day for celebration, not of me and my superhuman brilliance at having blogged for a year, lol, but of the friends who have made this year worth living. Therefore, in lieu of a blog-roll, here is a page written in partial appreciation for all of the wonderful bloggers I feel so lucky to know. You can also find it via the friends tab in the header.

Again–to friends known and unknown–thank you.

I wrote a little bit in the past about the first scene between Casey and RP, which was the first time I ever got whacked. It was during his first trip here in the summer of 1995, and we played it as a follow up to Mark’s first scene with TL (the first time she whacked him, or anyone). The scenario was that Mark and Casey had been seen sneaking out-of-bounds into the chapel balcony (at College, where TL and RP were co-housemasters and where Casey had just arrived as a new Fifth Former from America). A bit of wrought-iron gate had snapped off in the process. Mark had been caned. Casey was offered 4 strokes of the cane or 200 lines. I think her exact words were: “I don’t want to do the lines.”

M’s first visit lasted four days. On the last day we drove out of town and went on a hike in the woods. Afterwards, I remember being in my kitchen, him shaving at my kitchen sink, the smell of his shaving foam, and this overwhelming desire to be back in that relationship between Casey and Mr. Prior. I secretly got my hands on M’s pack of Marlboroughs, and as he was shaving, I went through to the study.

Picture my apartment as it was then: a four room railroad-style flat with no doors between the rooms, kitchen at the back, study at the front. It was August. Casey sat down in the “kid” chair, which was tucked out of the sightline from the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and pseudo-smoked it, ashing into a candle on the bookshelf. There was a box fan blowing a cross-breeze, and she took care to blow well into the fan so that the smoke would be visible, even if she wasn’t.

It seemed to go on a long time, this mouthing of cigarette smoke, the noise of the fan. And then suddenly, there he was: Mr. Prior.

“Morgan!”

She jumped six feet in the air, it seemed, having heard nothing, seen nothing. Stubbed out the cigarette. Stood up. He was gob-smacked by what he was seeing. How was it that this girl, this American girl, new to College just a few days hence, had decided to use his study, of all places, to smoke a cigarette? I don’t recall the dialogue, but it was brief. She was instructed to change into her uniform (she was wearing blue cotton shorts, sneakers, t-shirt) and report back in ten minutes.

In the dressing room, I put on her newly cobbled-together uniform. He had brought me a patch for my blazer. I’d found the blazer, grey flannel trousers, and Casey’s school shoes at the sadly now-defunct Domsey’s Warehouse. The patch had finally been stitched onto the blazer. I dressed, she dressed, trembling. We paced in the hallway. Scared. Frustrated. Confused.

On top of all this was another thread that had emerged in their earlier scene, and this was about Casey’s father. Carl Morgan was in military intelligence and was stationed somewhere dangerous, hence her being shipped off to College (parents divorced). But, she assured Mr. Prior, he was coming to visit her for half-term. He had told her so. In fact, she wasn’t going to be staying at College very long. She was pretty sure she’d be going home soon. Her dad had said so. This is what she thought about in the corridor waiting for the ten minutes to be up.

When she approached the study, RP was seated at the desk [my desk!]. He noted with grim approval her finally-arranged blazer, but got straight to his flabbergasted outrage.

“I just beat you yesterday!” he complained. What on earth could she possibly have been thinking?

“I wasn’t really smoking,” she said.

He almost did not know what to make of this. She explained that she’d only been stage smoking.

“Where did you get the cigarettes?” he asked.

Oops. Thou shalt not peach. “I’d rather not say, sir.”

RP was a Public School man and a gentleman and was prepared to accept this, for the moment. But he wanted to know why on earth she did it. It simply made no sense to him. “Were you trying to get yourself beaten?” he asked.

“No!” She struggled to explain, even to herself. “I just wanted… to be in here.” She dried up.

A silence full of so very much. And then somehow, through some genius of his, or grace, he seemed to get it, even though she didn’t. Even though I didn’t.

This time there was no choice of lines. It would be eight strokes. I can’t remember the technicalities of it, why eight, what they were apportioned for, but he told her to meet him in the Houseroom.

And so in the Houseroom [kitchen] she waited, sick and shaking before the Houseroom table. Pretty soon he came through, carrying the cane. Imagine, a man walking into my kitchen carrying a cane as if he knew what to do with it. He took off his jacket and instructed her to do the same. He took her jacket from her hands and told her to bend over the table. When she was in position, he pulled the tail of her shirt out of her gray school trousers [as previously discussed, purely for theatrical value!].

And it began.

She saw right away that he’d been going easy the first time. This hurt a good deal more, on top of the (first ever) four the day before. She was getting twice as many. He was hitting harder. I think she yelped.

Afterwards, when told to stand up, she gave the customary thank you. They shook hands. He met her eye and said, “Well stuck, Morgan.” It was sincere. There was that palpable but restrained love and care. My chest was melting like lava. I wanted more than anything to say there, with him, in that.

A little later there was a short scene in which he said good-bye to her. Mr. Prior had to take a short leave from College to sort out a personal situation. Miss Lincoln would be in charge. But, he told Casey, he would be keeping a particular eye on her. Again, the lava melting bones. Like heartburn in all your cells at once.

And one more thing, he told her. He had managed to reach her father on the telephone.

“When’s he going to get here?” she interupted, suddenly happy, hopeful, plunging entirely into that blind confidence in a rock-solid good thing.

“I’m afraid he isn’t able to come,” Mr. Prior said gently.

Imagine a tidal wave, searing, crushing, destroying.

“What do you mean?” said a small voice.

“He was sorry not to be able to talk with you himself,” Mr. Prior told her. “And he is very sorry he can’t come visit you as he said. He will see you at Christmas, though.”

Her lip was trembling. She blinked back tears.

“Oh. Right.”

“So,” RP continued, “it looks as though you’ll have to put up with us for a while longer.” She nodded, trying not to let the tears show. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Casey,” he said calling her by her Christian name for the first time, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she whispered. “It’s no big deal.”

When the scene was over, she went away and sobbed.

Writing about this now, especially having read other people’s scene accounts, I can see how odd it must look. The tgi gives focus to the scenes, but it isn’t really the center, or even the most powerful force. The most powerful force, perhaps, is Casey’s heart. How it longs to be with Mr. Prior in his study, somehow. How lascerated it is by her real dad, who loves her very much but cannot help but let her down. How much of a cataclysm the whole visit turns out to be, how much she loves him (M, Mark, Mr. Prior) by any name, as she has never loved anyone or conceived of loving.

He had to get on a plane later that night. I collapsed in bed and passed out from the ordeal of his visit, from overstimulation, from a kind of grief. He promised to come again, soon, October. Ten thousand years away.

But then came, as so often with him, a lucky strike extra, a gift of grace. At eight AM, my phone rang. I dragged myself from unconsciousness to answer it. His flight had been teched. He was still here. He wasn’t leaving until that evening. We had a whole extra day.

I am so grateful I never knew—then or even the morning before he died—what was coming. I knew, then, that we needed the extra day. What I didn’t know was how much we needed it. How very much.

Today me and TL had a big fight, maybe the biggest one we’ve ever had. It was like this: I rode my bike to church, which I do most of the time as long as it isn’t snowing, raining, or snow/ice on the ground. I’m allowed to ride even when it’s really cold (like last weekend in 17° F temperatures) so long as the streets are dry. RP was fanatical about bike safety [concerned & attentive in the face of a hopeless cause, ed.]. He disapproved of i-pods while biking, got furious when I rode in the rain, and insisted I carry rain gear at all times in case I got caught out and had no other alternative but to ride in it. He also forbade me to ride in the dark without a lamp. He dished out some strong whackings over violations, I can tell you.

So, anyway, it was cloudy and damp, but not raining on the way to church. Then, just as I had changed and was wheeling my bike through the crowded lobby, it started chucking down. One of the Vestrymen said, “Casey Morgan, you had better put your bike away and come back for it another day.” I peered out and was intimidated by the downpour. I started to take my bike back down to the basement, but then decided to ride to the subway and take the bike back that way. TL gives me a warning look that says, Just because you look cute in your rolled up blue jeans & sneakers does not mean you will be allowed to ride home in this. Outside, though, the rain isn’t that hard, and I decide to risk it.

I plug in my earbuds, put on the Glee soundtrack, and take off the wrong way (only 2 blocks!) through midtown traffic. TL hits the roof and starts calling after me to come back and what do I think I’m doing, etc etc etc. But I do it anyway.
It takes 35 minutes to get home, it’s 36° F, and by the time I get back I am soaked through. TL is waiting for me at the door, ready for murder. After standing over me while I towel off my bike, strip, stand under a hot shower, dress and dry my hair, she hauls me into the study.

Showdown.

She has calmed down somewhat, but still she is incandescent. I trot out the standard responses to her lambasting: other people were doing it; Lance Armstrong rode in the rain; I rode extra carefully and didn’t have any accidents or close calls; I got warm and dry as soon as I got home. She wasn’t having it, though, and she was losing her temper. I knew full well, she said, that if RP were here he would crucify me. I deserved the cane, just to start, and probably That Thing too. I gave her a look that very clearly said, Sucko,TL, cuz he isn’t here, is he?

“Don’t you look at me in that tone of voice!” she thundered.

She was scaring me. I tried to calm her down. “Look,” I told her, “I know I shouldn’t have ridden home in the rain, and I’m sorry, but you’re worrying about something that didn’t happen.”

Did I not agree, she asked, that riding in the rain was dangerous?

I did, actually. Drivers get nuts, my breaks don’t work as well, the road surface turns more lethal than usual, and the soles of my sneakers slip against the pedals.

So what if I had got killed? she demanded.

“I would be happy to die,” I said in all truthfulness.

She stared at me. “Be that as it may, there are a lot of people who would be devastated and possibly have their lives ruined if you died, especially after…” I blushed, feeling suddenly ashamed. “And what if you weren’t killed but only injured,” she continued. “What if you could never ride your bike again, or walk the dogs, or write?” Damn. She had me there.

Me: I know. I said sorry.

TL: Why didn’t you just take the train?

I told her how the train took longer, was boring, cost $2.25, and was a big fat pain with carrying my bike up and down all the stairs.

TL: So, all things considered, would you do it again today? Honestly.

I thought.

Me: Um, I guess I would.

TL: Why!?

Me: Because nothing bad did happen except it was a nasty ride and I got cold.

TL (standing and yelling at the ceiling): Dear God, send me someone to deal with this wretched child!

So, off she stomps. I hear her crying in the other room, and I feel bad because she’s right about the danger, but I hate her for not being able to do anything about it.  I decide to get my mind off it, but just then that other one shows up. You know her. She’s the one who writes most of these entries, STEALING MY NAME!

Her: Casey, you aren’t being very kind to Miss Lincoln.

Me: Sue me.

Her: I’m serious. The point here is less bike safety and more trust. Miss Lincoln has been trying harder than any human being could to take care of you, hampered as she is. And today you showed her how little you care for her efforts.

Me (quietly): I care.

Her: How caring is it to leave her feeling powerless to stop you risking your life, as she sees it? How caring is it to push the point and remind her she can’t really stop you doing anything?

Me (even more quietly): Not very?

Her: You knew you were upsetting her. You even agreed with her about the danger, but you did it anyway because you were willful, weren’t you?

Me: Yes?

Her: Do you think God would like you tramping all over Miss Lincoln when she does everything possible to look after you?

Me: (small voice): no.

Her: And I know that sometimes you just need to be bad because you’re so tired of being good all the time. And because you’re so angry about everything. Right?

Me: (nod)

Her: Just try not to be so callous towards Miss Lincoln while you’re getting on with that, all right?

I mean—Geez! How fair is that to be double teamed, especially when one of them almost never talks to you?! So now I feel super bad about how I acted to TL, and I know I should be in trouble for riding in the rain, especially on a horrible day like this, but as per usual, there is nothing to be done about it. So as a last-ditch attempt at some kind of penance, I decided to write the whole thing out so you can see what a mean and selfish kid I really am.

So now you know.

I was recently asked what I missed most about Mark. My first impulse was to dismiss such a question as unanswerable, unless Everything! counts as an answer. However, in this case it happens I brought the question on myself, so to dodge it would not be cricket. So I thought, I know. I’ll use a lifeline! I’ll ask the audience. And this isn’t cheating, kids, because 1) you get three lifelines and I haven’t used any yet; 2) other people can usually see you better than you can see yourself; 3) it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been blogging about for the last year; 4) It’s almost my one-year blogoversary, so, um… there!

Right, then. What do I miss most about him? We will accept entries in comments, email, or tweets @caseydamnmorgan. Best answer of any length can have a story written for them. (Yay?) To give everyone a fair chance to complete their research or cogitation, and to accommodate text-based masochists (thanks to Bitchy Jones via Caroline Grey for this apt term), the deadline will be next Sunday 1/24 at 6pm EST.

Ok, go forth and think about meeeeeee hahahaha.

When you live like a hermit as I do, you occasionally fall into correspondences. Since I met M via just such a correspondence, I’m always hopeful that one of them might prove interesting long term.  Today while slogging through the woods in the snow, dogs in tow, I recalled an autobiographical essay I sent to a correspondent earlier this year. It struck me, particularly in light of Emma Jane’s Christmas present, as suitable subject for a post. So, slightly adapted, here it is. I don’t think the correspondent in question actually read the whole thing in the first place, and who can blame them, it being rather long. Note to self not to overwhelm skittish correspondents with lengthy self-revelation.

In previous exegeses I have written about the growth of my tgi imagination from its unlikely beginnings in the Waspy, industrial Midwest. Besides sharing photos of my dolls, I haven’t written much about the girl I was before adolescence, a girl who bears slight relation to casey, but is far more anxious and goodie-goodie. This is her story, my story:

Despite  feeling very peculiar when reading or watching stories about tgi, I was terrified of and squicked by the reality. Part of this was a negative response to having received it in the way that I did (more on which another time). Part of it, though, has to be the gargantuan dependence on the idea of myself as a Good Girl (read: compliant, accommodating, approval-worthy, Nice). I’ve met several people into tgi who have said they didn’t misbehave while growing up. Neither did I. My parents employed a bit of light hand spanking with my brother and me for what I think of as “getting out of hand” moments. Never were there rules understood in advance, broken deliberately, and punished. The idea of deliberate punishment (whether physical or not) was enough to send me into a meltdown–because being punished would have meant that I was Bad, not Good, not me, and not lovable. I was anxious enough with my parents’ un-articulated boundaries. I was addicted at a young age to the crack of their approval. I lived in fear of losing it.

When I was six, just after joining children’s theater, I went to try outs for The Three Little Pigs. The deal at children’s theater was that our director, Mrs. R, would try a bunch of people in a bunch of roles, and you could say what your preferences were, but you had to accept whatever role you were ultimately given, with good grace. Be a Trouper. She had me try out for all the pigs and even the wolf. I was burning with shame and anxiety because I was terrified of being cast as the wolf. That would mean I was Bad. I knew I wasn’t my character, but I was young enough that I felt that their…moral state?…connected itself to me, that people would judge me as they judged the character. If I was forced to play the Big Bad Wolf, then I might not only be Bad, but it would mean I was the kind of girl who deserved to be punished, maybe even spanked! Even the first or second pigs caused me anxiety; they, too, were Bad because they lazily built their houses of inferior material. They deserved their tragedies, and worse. The third pig was the only role that would allow me to sleep at night. By massive luck, or by type casting, I got the third pig. You really cannot imagine my relief.

A little later, I was cast as a village girl in a play called The Little Juggler. It was only my third or fourth show, and I had only a few lines. We village children were mean and bratty and teased the vegetable sellers and little juggler boy. Mrs. R came up with a bit where the vegetable seller gave me a swat with a carrot after a snarky comment my character made. I froze with embarrassment, shame, confusion, horror. I almost cried during rehearsal. I was sick to my stomach for days over it and eventually was forced, through sheer desperation, to assert myself enough to talk another girl into trading lines with me. I couldn’t explain why, just that I really really really wanted to trade lines. She agreed. Later Mrs. R asked what had happened with the lines. I think I blushed beet red and near-tears blurted that we had just wanted to swap lines. She let it go, though I’d no idea why. As an adult, I now suspect she recognized one of those awkward and inexplicable childhood embarrassments, and had mercy on me.

So, spanking as a real life topic was not the slightest bit funny for me. Everyone I knew got it growing up. It was a standard punishment along with grounding and having your allowance taken away. At school there were playground games that included the “rickets” or the “spanking machine”, i.e. having to crawl through the legs of your playmates and be swatted by them as you passed. Other kids found this raucous fun. When in 3rd grade [age 8] we had “moving up day” and visited the big 4th grade classes, they played a ball game called SPUD at recess. When you lost a round, you got an S, then a P, etc. If you got up to SPUD, you had to go through the spanking machine. I felt sick to my stomach and insisted on watching only. It made me so very frightened of 4th grade.

When you misbehaved at my school, you got Sent To The Bench (which Mark hijacked in the first story he wrote for me, The Benefit of the Doubt). The Bench was a pew-like bench outside the Assistant Headmaster’s office, just inside the main entryway. Everyone could see you there. Astoundingly (or depressingly) I was never sent to the bench in all my time there, surely one of the few if only students for whom this was true. In reality, you got told off, or in middle school got a detention with the telling off. Before middle school, I had the idea that you might get spanked. Some other kids wound me up (or fanned the flames of rumor) by telling me they heard that was true. (Reality: not!)

Perhaps you are beginning to understand the little nervous wreck I was underneath that perky, A-student, nice girl in the Lilly Pultizer dresses and school uniform? She’s still here a little bit, but M (and RP) effected a lot of rehabilitation over the years (for instance, RP’s institution of Casey’s four rules).

I wore underpants at all times except when in bath or swimming costume, another habit that was whacked out of me (Casey) by RP, who forbade it under nightwear as unhygienic and perversely over-modest.

Once when I was 8 or 9, I asked my dad if French kissing was dirty. I asked it rather boldly, expecting him to 1) be impressed that I’d talk about French kissing and 2) say Right you are, it sure is. He looked at me for a second, probably surprised, and said: Of course not. It’s wonderful. I didn’t really believe him, and on some semi-conscious level thought he was giving me a party line.

I felt enormously conflicted and peculiar when my mom would read me a book called The Lonely Doll [discussed by EJ and earlier by Adele] which featured a father teddy bear taking his son across his knee, as well as  his quasi-ward, the lonely doll. It’s a terrifically twisted book–I mean, teddy bears spanking dolls?–but then a good deal of my tgi play involved my dolls spanking each other. See, I never spanked them because that would be Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice! However, they were not all nice, and some of them were quite strict school teachers or even orphanage matrons/masters, so I was able to identify with some of my poor Holly Hobbie dolls who suffered under such wonderfully mean grown-ups. The Lonely Doll might actually be a bit of a metaphor for meeting M (if you overlook the nauseating layers of twee). Whatever her name was, this doll lived alone. Then Mr. Bear and his son came along, and she had friends. But then she and bear jr. let their hair down and played a little wild and made a mess; and Mr. Bear spanked them! She was so upset because she was sure they would leave her (because she was Bad! Not lovable!), but actually they stayed. And she wasn’t lonely, and Mr. Bear presumably dealt matter-of-factly with her and bear jr. when they misbehaved as they should like little animals exploring a wide world.

I say there is not much of this girl left in me. I say she bears only slight resemblance to casey. Is it true, though? Casey might be more willing to be naughty. She might not shatter under the shame of being punished. But she is still a recovering good girl. She is, I am. There is still work, we think, for someone to do.

As regular readers probably know, I have gone to a few tgi-oriented parties here in Gotham during the last six months. Those who have encountered me at those parties will know that I have not played at them. I haven’t really written about these non-play experiences. I love to read other people’s reports of play dates and parties, but I’m reluctant to write about my own experiences. I guess I don’t want to be the object of anyone’s blogging, so I shy away from talking about other people. I don’t mind people reporting that they had tea with me and that I am brilliant and charming, but I wouldn’t want an intimate play session shared with the internet. I’ve only written about some of my past scenes because my partner is dead. I don’t want to come off as censorious–to repeat, I love reading other people’s reports and do not disapprove in the slightest. Why, then, can’t I imagine writing about my own encounters? I can’t argue that I’m too shy to reveal myself. Heaven knows I’ve revealed the most essential parts of myself, repeatedly, right here. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I actually have an encounter to report.

Because here is how these parties go: I turn up, people are standing or sitting around in a central area, other people are off playing (behind screens or in playrooms). I get a glass of water. I eat a pretzel. I chat. I tend to be more relaxed talking with girls, probably because I don’t imagine any subtext to those conversations. Rightly or wrongly, on some level I trust women because I don’t think they’re trying to play with me. I don’t mistrust men per se, but there’s always the specter of possible play, no matter how respectful or even uninterested in me they are. So, I chat easily with girls (unless they’re acting frosty due to seeing me as some kind of competition–what a laugh), and easily enough with men. What do I chat about? Well, recently, I heard all about winter carnival arrangements in the midwest; I discussed scuba diving; I heard about motorcycle culture; I heard about the extent of the Scene in various other locales. All this serves, ultimately, to establish an ordinary human connection with my interlocutor, to remind us both that we are regular people who happen to have this hobby in common. Sometimes people show me their toys. I appreciate toys, as I would appreciate someone’s fountain pen collection. But do they turn me on and make me want to play? No.

I tell everyone that I am not playing. I explain I am bereaved and not ready to play. Everyone is respectful. I should take whatever time I need, they say; I will know when it’s right, and I must do only what I want to do, they say. We are all agreed on this point. I think I must confuse people, nevertheless, because here I am chipper and friendly (I hope), yet not playing. It isn’t as though I’ve gone with a partner or even with a group of friends. Given my solo status, why am I there, again, if I really really don’t want to play?

Sometimes people think I need reassurance, as if I’m a novice trying to take the plunge. They suggest that—when I am ready—I should think about finding a friendly person and just doing a little friendly scene to get my feet wet. Perhaps I do need to get my feet wet. Perhaps I don’t. But the more time I spend at parties, the more I begin to feel that it isn’t going to happen in that kind of environment. And, whatever you might say about my situation, I am about as far from an anxious novice as you can get.

Let me try to explain why—and before anyone feels hurt, it’s nothing to do with the parties themselves or the people at them. The parties and party goers are all welcoming, respectful, and just fine. The truth is that when I turn up at a party, I am actually about a million miles away from casey, even though I borrow her name. The person attending these parties is my ordinary, workaday self, under an alias. This person chatting away about spanking, scuba diving, history, whatever—this person could just as easily be on the telephone with some vogonic city department sorting out a business problem; or having a conference about some kid’s learning issues; or chatting with college or theater friends at their parties. This person is rational, confident, witty, empathic, together. This person is not casey.

As I was leaving a party recently, I was trying to imagine what would happen if I were to go off in one of the playrooms with some man I knew a little, a man I trusted to be moderate and not creepy. Off we would go, away from the party, and it would be just the two of us. And then, well, I’d have to dredge up casey. Why? Because casey is the channel through which I play (as a bottom). “Casey” is the label for that part of me, that vulnerable part of my personality, that young, gently cheeky, highly emotional side of me. The ordinary me has no interest in going across someone’s knee. The ordinary me is a completely together woman. So, here I would be with a man I knew only slightly, and suddenly casey would have to appear, or there would be no point to our encounter.

This, friends, is the sticking point. Because casey is something that was between me and M. And now casey is orphaned, scared, and bereaved, more bereaved than even I am. *

Is grief an activity or an emotion? Certainly, over the last year and a half I have allowed grief to work on me, as I try at church to let the liturgy and the music work on me. I don’t know how much it all penetrates to the part that is casey. Probably that is very protected and cloistered. It hurts a lot—a lot—even just now thinking of her and feeling her in my heart. I try to love her and take care of her and not bully her and do what I heard M say that awful day when we were interring his ashes.

God: casey wants to die. She doesn’t think there is any hope for life without Marky and RP. She hates people. She refuses to trust anyone, now or ever. She says I can quit going to these parties and quit blogging and quit tweeting and give all her clothes away to the poor.

So… of course I am not going to these parties to play. I am going simply to meet people and with luck make a few friends. And the thing with casey is that before she can be whacked or even spoken to in a toppy way, she needs simply to be seen. I mean that literally. No one has seen her face, no one has called her name—to her—in over 18 months. Just turning up in a room, wearing her clothes, and having someone speak to her, not a grown-up pre-match conversation, but as casey, as little casey. Someone would have to address her as a real person, not in some costume-shop top mode—young-lady-this-&-that, you’ve-been-very-naughty, etc. She might not even be able to speak the first time. She might sit there like some mute, traumatized orphan. So someone would have to talk to her, gently, not in a cotton-wool way, but like a strong adult with good boundaries and plenty of compassion. Like a real person would speak to someone in her circumstances. Just having someone speak to her like this might make her cry in about five seconds. It might be a long time, many such encounters, before it was anything like a good idea to introduce the idea of discipline into the relationship. Because—guess what?—whacking isn’t what it’s all about for casey, or for me. At least not now.

This, then, is why I am a dud at parties. I’m grateful to people for continuing to invite me. I guess no one ever claimed that the grief-stricken were any fun. I guess putting up with us is a kind of mitzvah. So…thanks.

* apparently a kind of theme/variation on this rant re. casey & play

gotta love Kate Maberly as Mary Lennox

I’ve been giving some thought to the subject of blog comments. We all like getting them. They make us feel heard and appreciated. Conversely, it’s easy to feel, when a post receives few or no comments, that people don’t love you.

I try not to go down this path, and I try not to beg for comments. It rubs against my wasp upbringing. Nevertheless, I can see that my posts don’t get as many comments as many of the blogs I read. What is it about my writing that discourages comments, I wonder? Is it my wasp reserve? Is it that apparent self-sufficiency that made people in college like and respect me, but never fancy me? Or perhaps I don’t give readers a place to enter? Perhaps I overwhelm them with too much reading.

Blogging isn’t a popularity contest for me, even if it sometimes feels like one. My goal is not to build a readership so I can sell books or feed a pay-site, both legitimate motivations, if not mine. Nevertheless, I can feel despondent when there aren’t many comments. This is inappropriate—or, since I despise that PC word, misplaced—because people who comment on my blog are not there to provide me with mass love. Even online friends, while they might express great support and affection, cannot genuinely love me, or vice versa.

But do I really believe this last statement? As a writer and reader, I know sometimes deep connection and in fact love can occur through the written word. For instance, I have first known and loved many of my students through their writing. Reading someone’s writing can be far more intimate than spending an evening with them down the pub or at dinner. And I would say I feel love (philia) towards blogging and twittering friends whom I have never met in the flesh. How does this compare to the love of in-person friendship tested over time? I am not yet in a position to say.

And the blogs I read that get several comments per post–these writers know many of their commentators well and have played with them (or more) in a most intimate, real-life fashion. So they are “real-life” friends, certainly more tightly bound to each other than I am to them. Thus, perhaps my aloneness in life is partly reflected in the comment traffic on this blog.

www.kate-maberly.com

This morning I was trying to get up at quarter to five, but my mind was absorbed by thoughts of casey. Jessica’s post last week about getting teary in scene stimulated my imagination about how I anticipate casey might feel playing again. Sometimes I imagine her going to a Lowewood day, or some other group scene of a not-too-adult nature, perhaps with England people. But, I don’t imagine her having fun as they do. I see her pretending to have fun but actually feeling terrifically alone and small and orphaned and abnormal; wanting RP and feeling that she must have been very wicked for him to go away; hearing a voice in her head telling her she can’t ever be like these people, telling her they will never understand or love her like he could, that she is just a bore to them–”You OK, Casey?” “Oh, yes!” smile-smile–And if she ever got seriously told off or pink-slipped (or whatever it is they call it when you get sent for to be whacked), she’d be sitting there thinking: See, you are bad, and no one can love you, and these people will never invite you back, and RP won’t be there to love you later, and neither will Marky, and if you hadn’t been so selfish and bad they’d still be here. And the tears would be streaming down her face, like they are now, and these people who were just wanting to have a fun day together wouldn’t know what to think, and would find me way too much work and un-fun, and no one would take me aside and sit me on their knee like they did Jessica, and let casey sob her heart out on their shoulder without them feeling used, and then, when she’d recovered, get her over the hump by telling her that she wasn’t bad at all, but she had been slightly naughty and really ought to take the penalty for that, and then give her a firm but sensitive punishment otk, and then look after her with a kind of housemaster’s-daughter benevolence and firmness all the rest of the day, encouraging her gamely in any cheekiness that might incur penalty because they recognize it as a sign of health, not something that needs true scolding.

www.kate-maberly.com

Except then these people would have to not go away, because if they did (for instance by living in another country, or by being busy and/or married), it would just make her feel more alone and orphaned and wicked.

And so this is why I have not let casey play RL even though I go to parties and meet people who would put me over their knee if I wanted. Because in the realest sense, tgi isn’t play for casey, or for me. At least not in the way most practitioners mean it.

The coal burned brightly in the grate, but the room was cold, leaking the gale which blew down Wester-Ross. Mr. Prior had summoned her for a Little Chat, which Casey found unfair on holiday. Worse, he had announced uniform inspection. She hadn’t worn her uniform in forever. The iron at the cottage was temperamental. The whole proposition irked her.

“Come here,” he said, beckoning with crooked finger, his voice friendly, mock-stern. She shuffled towards him, rolling her eyes. “A bit less of that, thank you!” he snapped. She sighed, pointedly.

He switched on the extra light and began to take issue with her clothing. Did she call those shoes polished? What did she think she was doing with the knot on her tie? (This as he retied it for her.) And what, pray heaven, did she call those? He pointed to her shorts.

“The iron was stupid!”

He crossed his arms and stared at her. “I think you had better rethink your approach, young Casey. Your uniform is a disgrace—disgrace, and we’re already due a chat about several matters.”

“What?” she protested.

“You know perfectly well what,” he replied dryly. She sulked. “Turn out your pockets.”

“What!”

“Now.”

She sulked mightily as she emptied her blazer’s long-unexamined pockets of whatever they might contain.

“Chewing gum…detritus…cigarettes, Casey? And matches for the win, is it?”

“I—I didn’t know—”

He took her by the ear. “Let’s take all that as read, shall we? It’s clearly long past time for our little chat.”

• Rafi
• Graham
• Dominoxx
• PapaTomLA

Sometimes Casey wanted to break things, punch people, kick. Not in response to anything particular, but when the pressure built, fury like shaken soda against all reasonableness and courtesy.

School had reconvened for Michaelmas, James boarding, Casey at the local parish school. Days were busy, and boring. She procrastinated.

James came for an exeat that Saturday. Having looked forward to it, Casey found the afternoon deflated, like so many nice things in the having. James beat her twice at Scrabble. He spoke of rugby.

She went into the kitchen, leaned against the sink, and gazed out gray window at the rain. “I’d like Mr. Prior back now, please,” she whispered. “And Marky. They’ve been gone long enough.”

The window did not answer. She bit the edge of her tongue and returned to the drawing room via the letter table, where she used a blood-red pencil to insert an H in the crest adorning the Rector’s correspondence box. in God we tHrust

“Where’s the lemonade?” James demanded. She said nothing, but set on him with fists and feet. He took the blows, not turning, not fighting back, permitting the struggle to do with them what it would, until Casey felt herself torn from him by the Rector’s hands.

“What on earth!” the Rector exclaimed.

James squinted where she had punched him, issuing an excuse, rote and haiku-like. The Rector constrained her in his arms until she quieted. James looked at her as if he could apply first aid with his eyes.

Read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• PapaTomLA
• Dominoxxz - welcome!