Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— Put your shirt on right now, dammit, her mother said. Put your clothes on.

Beside them, between herself and her mom, Wendy could see the door to the guest room swing back — less than an inch. She could feel the worry that collected on the other side of it. In the meantime, though, she got hold of herself. She padded into Sandy’s room. She was ready to deal with what was going down. She was sullen and erotically slothful. She scattered her turtleneck and her sweater and her poncho on Sandy’s bed as though she were laying out a bounteous harvest. She took her time. She had goose bumps. She hugged herself with crossed arms. Her mother followed her into the bedroom.

— What are you doing here? Wendy asked.

— What business is it of yours? Elena Hood said. I might ask you the same question, young lady. It’s my business to ask the questions. Did you spend the whole night here? And who gave you permission to do so? And where exactly did you spend the night? Where in this house?

Her mother’s attention darted around the room as Wendy dressed, lit upon the doll swinging from the noose above Sandy’s closet, didn’t take it in. Then, peering out into the hall, Elena saw the guest room and understood. She called out Jim Williams’s name, called down the hall, Jim!, and seized the doorknob — behind which Sandy stood in the dark, clutching his pajamas right at the crotch — ambushing the youngest Williams boy, with his dad not far behind her.

— What have you two been doing in here? Oh, dammit. Jim. Oh, shoot.

And so forth. With the imposing, yellow flashlight he bore — as long as his own forearm — Jim Williams and Wendy’s mother examined the room, as though this entrapment didn’t tell the story itself. They peeled back the bedding that Sandy had so laboriously organized; they turned over the pillows like archaeologists sifting through the dust. Finally they pulled the covers and the fitted sheet off the bed and searched the mattress itself, where there was an old dried menstrual stain. The pad on that bed — it was like some bloody shroud. Then, Elena Hood began to focus her attention upon the empty vodka bottle. Wendy and Sandy lingered guiltily behind their parents. The time for punishment was upon them.

— You drank this, bub? Williams said to his son, as Elena brandished the bottle. You realize the trouble this can get you into? Do you know anything about alcohol poisoning? Do you know what to do if someone suffers from alcohol poisoning? Have you ever heard of people choking on their own insides? From this stuff right here? Can you imagine what that’s like, son?

Elena dragged Wendy out into the corridor to give her the same dressing-down. A long, familiar disquisition. She had watched so many people in her family destroyed by this and she couldn’t watch it again. It was just too painful. Because of the way it ran in families, she or Paul could easily…. If you could have seen your grandmother….

Your uncle and his sadness and failures and all that suffering…. And don’t forget about your dad… and mental illness, and death. Young lady. Death.

— Are you listening to me?

— All ears, Mom.

The next act of parental justice, the meting out of corporal punishment, arose swiftly from the lecturing, like a flash flood or act of God. Wendy had a sense that the scale of punishment that morning was a little out of whack, but she didn’t know why at first. There was some adult thing going on that she didn’t yet understand. Where was Sandy’s mom, for example? Where was her dad? Then it began to register. She permitted herself to be led down the stairs as though to an execution. She permitted herself to be swallowed. Into the continuity of police logic. Pigs.

And there was a history to corporal punishment among the Hoods. There was a locus for punishment. It started with Paul. Paul was often a sickly child, out most of his kindergarten year at East School, with various infections and ailments — a case of strep throat and double ear infection, measles, whooping cough. Paul howled in the earliest morning hours, calling into question his own short life, in shrill, desperate shrieks that kept his parents awake, cries that in their desolation seemed to reach into his mother’s heart and wrestle with her competence as a parent. This much was family lore. Elena had developed the habit, during this period, of taking Paul’s temperature anally — because of his throat problems. It was one of those lovely, glass thermometers that was immersed in a glass case full of alcohol, the sort that seemed to foretell good by its very seriousness and simplicity. This practice persisted, until Paul came to see his mother’s approach — the mysterious darkness into which she plunged her medical instrument — as the cure itself, bringing with it a legitimation of his distress.

This practice carried over to Wendy Hood, who also came to appreciate these ministrations given in silence, given with the dispassionate, preoccupied air of a jeweler or orthodontist. In silence, wreathed in isopropyl incense, the thermometer would tickle her hidden pink aperture, and she would be cured.

This, however, was not the only attention visited upon her ass in the Hood household. For the ass-spanking was a regular thing there. These occasions were grandly stylized, full of careful and loving ritual. Wendy’s first spanking was the great organizing event of her early memory, though the crime that precipitated it was long forgotten. Her father carried her into her parents’ bedroom. Her mother stood by, wordlessly. She refused to take down her pants. Her father humiliated her with language until she did so — called her a slut and a hooker and a princess. It wasn’t difficult to degrade her with language — she was four. She took down her pants of her own free will. He then set her across his lap, and her mother presented the hairbrush — in the lore of the family, the bristle side was occasionally used — and, after pausing to contemplate the blank innocence of her hindquarters, her father drove the blunt side of the brush down upon her ass. What was her mother doing? Her nails?

Wendy recognized these diverse attentions on her ass, and they had become in some way indistinguishable, one from the other. They had become the Gestalt of her body. Which came first — the good-natured nursing of her mother, or the stern, but thoughtful, beatings of her father — was now unclear. It was all wound up together. What she ate, how she dressed, whether she ventured into the crass world of facial makeup, these seemed unimportant compared to how she attended to that site of medicinal and patriarchal attentions. She was mom and dad’s little piece of ass.

So the trip down into the Williamses’ living room had one purpose only. She could hear Sandy crying upstairs now and she could hear Mr. Williams’s escalating monologue. These words had a mumbled, cabalistic sound. Hindu sutras. T.M. Elena Hood gripped her daughter’s wrist tightly. The stark and pristine order of the Williamses’ house surrounded them. In the living room, Elena commanded her to take down her pants. Wendy would have suffered this abuse — it seemed inevitable, almost natural — even though she was fourteen years old, because she had other things on her mind, because it had been a long twenty-four hours. But then she remembered that Mike’s soiled garter belt was still tucked down there, tucked into her ski pants, and this was the one secret she wasn’t going to part with. She refused.

— I said take down your pants, please, Elena Hood said.

— I’m too old. What are you going to do, Mom, spank me at the prom? Come find me in college so you can spank me?

— There’s not going to be a negotiation here.

— Why, Mom, what are you going to do, fuck me?