The Guardianship
Part Two
by Jack Lennox2
She heard two quick taps on her door. His voice was slightly muffled but the tone distinct from the hallway outside her bedroom.
"Time for bed, Nina. I'll see you in the morning."
She glanced at the clock. Damn! One A.M. "Okay," she responded with reluctance. She really wanted to finish the story displayed on her computer screen. The bedtime thing still made her feel like a teenager.
"Sleep good," she heard from down the hall. Nice thought, but I'm really not feeling too sleepy. "Thank you ...you too," she called to him sweetly, imagining him alone in his bed.
She wondered where the time had gone. After her conquering of the summit that afternoon, the day before dinner, and after, she had spent in front of her computer, mostly online. At dinner she had made the mistake of complaining about work again, leading to a subject she had been avoiding. Dan wanted her to find something she was interested in and pursue it; he would help, of course. The catch: it should be something she found fulfilling ...like chatting isn't a major accomplishment. The problem: she knew she could never be very good at anything.
She did like to draw, but it was really just a hobby. Dan told her he thought she had real talent so, with a blush on her cheek, she had reluctantly shown him a few of her erotic drawings. He said they were excellent. She would have preferred he had said they were hot. The ones she didn't show him... well, she figured they were probably a little too out there for him. Their arrangement had turned out to be so much more, and so much less, than she had anticipated.
After bookmarking the page, she obediently clicked to shut down her computer for the night. In contrast to her troubled adolescence, she now had rules to follow. Unless she could make a legitimate case for staying up later, it was lights out and under the covers by the time he set for her. She found the idea quite provocative. Her underwear covered little, but she decided the house was a little too warm for it. Laying in the dark, with only a thin sheet against her skin, she tried to take inventory of her confusing but intoxicating situation...her odd new life. Less than ninety days ago she had, to an extent, been reborn. As for so many restless searching souls, it had begun on the Internet, perhaps all by some grand design.
A memory surfaced - she hadn't thought of it since she was a child. Nina and her father - just the two of them in the family car - surrounded by white. They were headed home. She must have been ten. They had braved an ice storm in his big battered old car in order to make it to the statewide art contest in St. Paul that her teachers had pushed her to enter. Her drawings had won second prize. She sat small on the long front seat across from him, tall enough to watch the drifts of snow slide past in the still black night. He reached over, patted her knee and beamed. He was so proud of her. It was a small recollection, a brief flicker of the mind, yet nevertheless seemed to give her a sense of her own history, that her journey had, indeed, been a long and winding road.
Unbidden, her thoughts drifted further back in time. Memories had faded, but she saw a quiet and painfully shy child. She could not explain exactly how it happened, where things changed. She had seen the pictures of a bright, pretty blonde toddler, told how she was doted on by parents, relatives, and every adult enchanted by her big blue eyes and sweet demeanor. Her father, especially, adored her ...his princess, and she had a vision of sitting on his lap while he watched TV, warm and secure in her daddy's arms.
The change began sometime after she entered the Minneapolis public school system. The Anderssons lived on the edge of town; didn't quite fit in. Small and naturally passive, she was bullied by her schoolmates ...Neener, Neener, have you seen 'er...her mommy must forget to clean 'er. A sheltered only-child, she hadn't acquired many of the social skills and resiliency she might have developed through an interaction with siblings. Her teachers appreciated the polite and compliant girl who did well with her schoolwork but were unable to protect her from her tormentors. Awkward years surrounding the onset of puberty only made things worse as her body lurched towards adolescence and she dealt with acne, braces, assorted growing pains and their sundry nightmares ...but nothing stood out more glaringly in her memory than the spankings.
She was a third-generation American born in September of 1972. Her father's family came from Sweden; her grandparents on her mother's side were German immigrants. Both families settled in rural Minnesota before later migrating to the city. Throughout the seventies and into the eighties, Carl Andersson drove his family of three to church every Sunday in the big ol' Buick whose bumper stickers boostered "Nixon", then "Ford", then "Reagan" for president of the greatest nation on earth. Not ready yet to completely embrace the New World, the Andersson household still held to old world values and practices. On their multi-generation journey to urban America, they brought with them the idea of the old-fashioned woodshed. Her early memories of such things were fuzzy, but she knew her mother had dished out punishments when she was little. Her recollections became much clearer after that.
One terrible afternoon when she was seven, Nina learned that the man who gave her candy when her mother wasn't looking, the one who read her all her favorite stories, the one who tucked her into bed each night with a kiss, could also hurt her. From that day forward, she would live in fear of the little paddle her father had fashioned from a strip of plywood at his workbench in the basement. A devotedly well-behaved child, spankings for her were rare events. She just had to be careful of his unpredictable anger. Still, each time her daddy had put her across his knee with her pants off and created that instant fire on her bare bottom that made her scream at the top of her lungs, it had been a trauma that left her in a state of numbing shock. He had always held and comforted her at some point afterwards, told her he was sorry, but in her confused mind was only a dull hatred. It was even more than just a betrayal perceived. She was certain that none of her peers in the fairly progressive area she lived in had to suffer such a terrible indignity, and it only left her feeling more alienated and with a secret shame to keep carefully hidden.
In her mind it was 1986. Everything changed when she was thirteen. Her parents divorced - a first for the Andersson clan as they, perhaps, finally succumbed to the pressures of modern American life. Passed back and forth, she would stay with her father for awhile, then with her mother. Often, neither knew exactly where she was or what she was up to and, like many separated parents, both spent much of their energy battling each other while trying to win their daughter's favor. There would be plenty of strife, but no more spankings.
Coincident with her new found freedom was her discovery of boys, or more accurately, their discovery of her. By the age of fifteen her body had settled on a modest and pleasing shape, and she was receiving notice as that cute blonde girl who seemed appreciative of, and well-disposed towards, any kindly attention shown her. She found an attraction to the guys who had the most contempt for authority and soon began years of acting out against all the injustices ever perpetrated on her.
Though she would not receive corporal punishment as a teenager, it still played a large role in her mind. She was almost sixteen and regularly sneaking out of the house at night to be with her friends. One summer night after her father had gone to bed, she was quietly out the door and off to the local mini-mart parking lot where the gang often hung out until someone of legal age would show up to buy the beer. Once they had achieved that goal, they would usually drive to the edge of town where their favorite off-road hideaways served as grounds to hold a good party. In just such a spot, in the back of a van, Nina had lost her virginity the year before.
She remembered on that night at the mini-mart -- they were drinking gin, and getting progressively more rowdy. Instead of heading out to lover's lane, several of the gang wound up at the local high school where after breaking in, lockers were vandalized, bathroom walls spray-painted, and trashcans were thrown through windows. Four squad cars showed up as if they were responding to an armed bank job. Nina did not directly cause any damage, but that fact was completely lost on the arresting officers. A complaint was filed with the probation department alleging her participation in a criminal act. Because she was under 16, she was able to appear with her father, plead guilty, and accept fifty hours of community service as her sentence. Through all the stress of being arrested, however, the only real fear she felt was the uncertainty about what her father would do to her. He had become somewhat of a pushover by then, but the highly unlikely idea of a girl of almost sixteen getting her bottom blistered was still her worst nightmare. He was plenty angry; on top of her hours of highway trash pickup, she was grounded for a month. Grounding never stopped her from sneaking out to drink with her friends, so the punishment turned out to be even more than just a relief.
She was still both timid and good-hearted by nature, so by her late teens, she had managed to come out the other side of her rebellion without permanent damage. Her schoolwork, however, had suffered as academics took a backseat to her newfound social life -- she never really thought she was very smart, anyway. Somehow she made it through high school, but she knew that many less ambitious had pulled off that achievement. Somewhere along the way she had picked up a taste for menthol cigarettes and a boy named Johnny. Both were very cool, and at seventeen, Nina was sure she had found the guy she wanted to hold onto forever. Her father didn't like Johnny, which made the relationship just a little more satisfying.
It was just past midnight, a few minutes after she turned eighteen, that Nina and Johnny left Minnesota and headed southwest, all their belongings crammed into the camper on the back of his pickup. Pulling away from her mother's house, the streets she had known all her life had seemed like a brand new path leading out of purgatory and towards her exciting and wonderful new future. She was finally free - and with Johnny, all odds could be overcome. She remembered they made a wrong turn off the highway in Wisconsin and accidentally backed the truck into a ditch trying to turn around. He blamed her for it: she was the one who couldn't wait to go to the bathroom. With the sun just coming up, they were forced to walk several miles on a dirt farm road to get help. Johnny refused to speak to her; Nina was trying to keep up with his longer stride with tears in her eyes and swarms of mosquitoes the size of horseflies thirsting for her blood.
They eventually settled in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he found a job as a mechanic and she a waitress at a Denny's off Interstate 25, the main highway cutting north and south along the east side of the Rockies. Their relationship lasted about a year. As it turned out, Johnny did have a bit of a temper, and the result was usually a bruise or two for his girlfriend, who was then drinking too much, had gained weight but lost much of her enthusiasm in the bedroom. She discovered that she had chosen the wrong life. She saw that injustice was all around her, and each hard day it touched her with its bluntness. She wished that her boyfriend could somehow share her pain rather than embrace the ugliness she detested. They quickly grew apart, and by the end of 1991, Johnny had found a livelier 16-year-old partner who was thinner and willing to inherit Nina's bruises.
As she lay in darkness, she tried hard to remember the years following; the sense of loneliness and despair she had lived with was still tangible, but the details were blurred. There were meaningless relationships, for sure; deadly boring jobs, you bet. She marked time along a path of aimlessness. Cigarettes and alcohol were her two passions, her time off work most often spent as long hours of late-night television before falling into a restless sleep on the couch. She discovered one afternoon at the age of twenty that she was pregnant; she never discovered who the father was, but lost the baby to a miscarriage during her first trimester. Maybe there really was a God. She did not visit her parents back home. Her mother had remarried and Nina couldn't stand to be in the same room with her mom's new husband. Her father ...well, what was the point?
A terrible memory surfaced. Her twenty-first birthday, the legal drinking age, had acted as the starting line to a race towards alcoholism. Within six months she had lost her job and was stretching her unemployment checks beyond their limit. One early evening in May, she dug out some old jeans and, with a pair of scissors, turned them into a very small pair of shorts. She made a cropped T-shirt to match. Since Johnny had left, she had gone through several quick and often abusive relationships. Why not have something to show for it for a change? She stood in front of her mirror lamenting the fact that a steady diet of junk food, and an exercise routine that didn't require her to get off the couch, had done wonders for her figure. The slender girl had finally put some meat on her bones, more in her middle. She had decided that maybe her face was her best feature, had applied red lipstick, plenty of eye makeup, and framed it with a new frizzy creation she coifed with a more-than-generous amount of hairspray. She didn't recognize the girl in the mirror, only that her mascara was running in small rivers down her wet cheeks. She washed her face.
Early the next evening she was sitting in a bar wearing her new outfit. She didn't remember much about the place -- just a smoky little cave with very loud country music coming out its hole. Nursing a beer -- she couldn't afford much more -- she was trying to make eye contact with people she would normally avoid. She noticed one rumpled cowboy who met her gaze more than once. After finishing her beer, she spent some time in the restroom, then made the next round of her little routine: walk slowly back to her car, stand near it for awhile, then make the slow walk back to the bar for another beer. It was on the way back that a pickup truck pulled to the curb next to her and stopped. It was her wrinkled wrangler. She knew that this was a way for a girl to get herself killed, but then Nina was already dead inside. She climbed up into the cab and he drove fast. They were in the alley in back. Fifty bucks? He looked a little dangerous ...he smelled a little dangerous. The bills in her hand felt greasy. Suck it, bitch! Feeling as if she were going to faint, she threw the money in his lap and made a lunge for the door. She felt a pain in her arm. He had her... she screamed at the top of her lungs. He must have panicked. She was almost thrown out of the cab, then only vaguely aware of the truck speeding away. Crumpled over on the ground, and next to an oil stain and broken beer bottle, she left her own sick.
In her mind it was 1994, two weeks past her twenty-second birthday. The phone rang in the middle of the night. Her mother had news she wasn't prepared for; her father had suffered a heart attack. At first she didn't understand, then stood with the phone in her hand, unable to make a sound, her world in the final stages of its complete collapse. Nina had hardly seen him in four years. The one in whose lap she had laughed, in whose arms she had cried, in whose eyes she had soared, was gone. The enormity of it washed over her in a wave as black as any night and literally knocked her to the floor. She shed a million more tears that night than from all the spankings he had ever given her. She couldn't leave her apartment for days, her pillow wet with her tears every night for a week. Somehow, she had been blinded but now could see, and it was a most bittersweet despair. He had loved her, and she had lost that love. She had loved him, and he would never know the aching of her heart.
Such was the bottom of Nina Andersson's life. She found forgiveness - too late for her father ...but was it too late for her? After her loss, there were no miraculous recoveries, no new paths leading to salvation, but she decided she would make sure to visit her mother at least a few times a year. She even learned to tolerate the man she would never call stepfather--there were times when he wasn't being a macho jerk that reminded her too closely of so many of her ex-boyfriends. She still did little to take good care of herself, but did eventually manage to quit smoking and cut back on her drinking. By the year 2000, she had acquired secretarial skills, was working in an office building in downtown Denver, and had found a comfortable apartment in the north part of the city where she lived alone and without any great urgency to change her status.
Little did she know that her job-related training would have such an impact on her personal life. Having become both familiar and comfortable with a computer, it was not long before she owned one herself. It was while seated at her Mac that she discovered a world full of people whose attention could be grabbed, whose pulse could be quickened, by the word spanking.
At that time, she had had only one spanking experience as an adult. She remembered a pleasantly warm summer evening in Fort Collins, but she had been very low on cash and lower on vodka. Twenty years old, restless and roaming the neighborhood, she spotted a guy who looked like he had money, was old enough to buy, and possibly horny enough to want to get drunk with her. It turned out they shared a shyness and an attraction, and with few words between them, ended up in her apartment with a liter of Stolichnaya. Since Johnny had left, alcohol was the only thing that ever made her feel pretty. Her inhibitions loosened and ardor steepened, she decided she wanted something from this stranger that she had never asked for from anyone.
He was seated in the chair by what passed for her desk; she had stripped to her underwear and was straddling him, their hungry mouths busy as they inhaled the spirits in each other's breath. Her panties had been breached; his fingers exploring her from behind, he had found everything from her stem to her stern. Between the thrusts and parries of their tongues she whispered that she had been a bad girl and that she wanted him to punish her. He smiled, played along, but really did not understand what she wanted. All she took from the experience were a few light smacks on her panties and the memory of the confused look in his eyes. It was a new kind of humiliation, but one of the few she would reject with conviction.
On Clairmont Avenue in The Highlands, inside a single-story house blanketed by a crisp black sky, Nina lay naked in her bed with wet eyes and runny nose. It had been awhile since she had traveled in her mind over the twisted terrain of her life. She noticed the ticking of her clock and the nightlight in the corner - one protecting her from the terrible silence, the other always there so she would not wake up in the dark without knowing which direction was which. She thought back to another night months ago...in her apartment... same clock ticking, same light glowing, not being able to sleep. She knew she'd be toast for work but got up anyway to prowl the net.
It was that sleepless night at her computer when she spotted the personal ad she could not treat as simply another stimulating possibility. The few words spoke to her, encapsulating her desires, while putting a form to a design for the possible rehabilitation of her life. It was audacious. Was she an adult woman who needed a legal guardian? Did she lack direction and self-esteem? He would provide loving discipline ...not looking for a romantic relationship. It was listed under Denver Personals.