Heart Song Anthology by Carolyn Faulkner (summer reads txt) 📗

men they love to watch football until their eyeballs roll back in their heads, and wear baseball caps backward even though it makes them look like half-witted eighth graders.

But men, for some reason, are constitutionally incapable of letting women go about things the way Nature obviously intended. Case in point: Every woman who’s ever lived through a cold winter knows that thermostats are neither accurate, nor truthful. It’s my theory that all household thermostats come directly from the factory defective, causing otherwise contented couples to nearly come to blows. It’s like a test of your devotion and patience. Witness the conversation below, between my husband and myself. A conversation that took place in our chilly living room, on a winter’s evening shortly before this story begins.

My husband, Neil: (Tinkering with wall thermostat, and looking annoyed.) “Would you do me a favor and for God’s sake quit monkeying around with the damned thermostat, Beth? You’ve got it all screwed up, again.”

Me: (Reclining on couch in flannel pajamas, under two blankets, watching the thirty-eighth rerun of something or other about the Bermuda Triangle.) “I wasn’t monkeying with it. I was trying to keep my body temperature above thirty-two degrees. I’ve got goosebumps on my goosebumps, and I can’t feel my toes.”

Cranky husband makes a big production of studying the thermostat, like he’s checking a bank of high-tech, top-secret gauges at a super-secret nuclear facility. Thousands of lives are apparently hanging in the balance as he peers closely at the thing, and then taps the plastic cover on the plastic dial with his finger, like the world famous nuclear scientist he thinks he is. “It’s seventy-two degrees in here,” he says, in his official, scientific expert voice.

“The hell it is,” I say, just a tad grumpily. “It’s sixty-two – maybe. That’s when my nose gets red and begins running. I start turning blue at fifty-five, in case you’re interested.”

He shakes his head, obviously disgusted at my appalling ignorance of things electrical. “That is a state of the art German instrument, for your information, brand new four months ago, and it says it’s seventy-two.”

“I don’t care if it’s made in the Black Forest, by gnomes,” say I, haughtily. “Your state of the art German instrument is wrong.”

“Why would it be wrong?”

“Because it’s a piece of plastic crap, that’s why. Ask your children about the durability of plastic. They’ve destroyed probably three hundred dollars worth of brand new plastic crap since Christmas.” (Neil and I now have two enchanting little ones – eight-year old Michael and his younger sister, Amy. Our children’s primary pastime, at this tender stage in their lives, appears to be smashing one another over the head with the few toys they haven’t already demolished.)

“Okay,” he said, grimly. “Let’s try this another way. Keep your hands off the thermostat – period. This is the second one you’ve wrecked, and we can’t afford another visit from the furnace guy. I’m beginning to think the two of you have something going.”

Just beneath the joking, Neil’s voice had begun to develop a slight edge – a very familiar edge that should have warned me the temperature in the room was, indeed, on its way up, and to back off before it got hotter than I liked. But I wasn’t about to surrender to a little husbandly bullying, so like the mature and intelligent adult that I am, I stuck out my tongue and gave him the finger.

“Jawohl, Herr Hitler. Anything you say. I’ll just lie here and quietly freeze to death.”

Before I saw it coming, Neil had flipped me over on my stomach, yanked down my pajama bottoms, and delivered a couple of medium-serious swats to my chilled, naked butt. I responded with a yelp of complaint, and tried to turn over, but he had me pinned down.

“Promise me,” he said. “And mean it.”

So, I giggled.

Whacks three and four were a lot more serious, and my response was more on the order of a howl of pain. Neil was definitely losing his sense of humor.

“One more time,” he said grimly. “Give me your promise, or...”

“What if I do?” I grumbled. “It won’t mean anything under torture – or stand up in court, either. I know about police brutality.” I suspected that he was bluffing, so I pushed my luck a little further. “Besides, we both know perfectly well you’re not going to spank me when I’m right and when you’re so obviously wrong. Why can’t you stop being so fucking pigheaded, and just admit that the damned thing is busted?”

Neil is always pretty good at listening to reason, and I can’t remember ever getting really spanked for simply arguing with him. It may have been turning around and whacking him in the eye with the TV guide that did it.

Seconds later, I was across his knee, with my hair in my eyes, my pajama bottoms in a puddle at my feet, and my bare ass starting to feel the consequences of my folly.

“Ow-w-w! Stop that, dammit! &#($*^@) Fucking (_*0&()_((& fucking *$@&´&$#*” This last part was a big mistake, because Neil has a policeman’s attitudes about profanity – meaning he and his fellow cops can swear like drunken longshoremen, whereas I am allowed only one or two serious obscenities per week, and even then only under duress. Without missing a beat, Neil shifted me slightly and trapped both my kicking legs beneath one of his. I was helpless, and at his mercy – never a good place to be when you’ve just whacked your husband in the eye and used the F-word multiple times. Moments later, with my previously chilly rear end beginning to catch fire, I very thoughtfully stuffed a sofa pillow in my mouth. There were, after all, innocent children asleep upstairs.

Oh, yes. I realize that I may have forgotten to explain, here, about the “spanking thing.” I’ll call it that for lack of a better term. “Domestic Discipline” sounds a little formal for what happens between my hubby and me. Anyway, it happened