Punishment with Kisses Read online

  He cut her off. “That’s it. You’re out of the house. If you’re going to behave like a pig, you can move into the pool house. Let’s see how you like living in eight hundred square feet with no one to serve you.” Father made the pronouncement as though sentencing Ash to the confines of a small shed, not a vacation cabana with its own Olympic-size swimming pool. That’s the way things worked when you were the golden child. If these were criminal proceedings, Ashley Caulfield would have just been sent to a ritzy, resort-like white-collar minimum security prison. If the shoe was on the other foot, and it was me in that position, I’m certain the ruling would be completely different. I’d be sent straight to Sing Sing.

  Ash stared at him for a minute, as though pausing to catch up with what he was saying, or simply planning out her summer of fun. Then she turned and left, casting one last snide comment over her shoulder. “Oh, Father, don’t be silly. I won’t have any problem finding someone to service me.”

  *

  The next day half a dozen people arrived and began moving Ash’s belongings into the pool house. I was still pissed off at Ash for ruining my homecoming and for putting a kibosh on any chance of the two of us bonding before I headed to grad school or out into the real world—I wasn’t exactly sure yet which course I was going to take. Ash’s acts of selfish defiance also effectively eliminated any chance I could have the summer I’d dreamt of, lounging by the pool myself.

  With her banishment to the cabana Father established a no-fly zone, a walled East Berlin in the center of our property. To cross the border between our house and the pool would now be seen by Father as an act of treason, an announcement of my alliance with his sworn enemy. The retaliation would be swift and severe. And with the pool house already occupied by his favorite child, God knows what would happen to me. I imagined being kicked to the curb, sent away in a cab, never allowed to return.

  It was too dangerous to risk, even for a summer of deep tanning and refreshing dips in the cool blue-green water. But I was still pissed. This was my last summer at home and now I was stuck spending it all indoors, trapped inside with a pissed-off father and Tabitha, the stepmonster, who I’d never managed to get close to, even though we’re not that far apart in age.

  Within hours of Ash’s dramatic departure from the main house, there was a wild party raging by the pool. From the balcony of my second-floor room, I could not help but see all the beautiful people wandering in and out of the pool house, some drinking, others just sunning themselves. I didn’t need to find Ash in the crowd to know there would be people bunched around her, toadying all over her.

  I stepped back into my room and shut the sliding doors. Ash could have her little tantrums. I was going to ignore her and her escalating war with Father by thrusting myself into all the novels I’d brought home with me. Dorothy Allison, Jewel Gomez, and Michelle Tea. These authors were like good friends I could call on for all-night gab sessions. Their words gave me the kind of excitement I wasn’t finding at home and reminded me why I loved to be immersed in fiction instead of real life. A good novel is like a current that sweeps you up and carries you away from the real world to a magical land where you get to let yourself go and delve into the lives of people far more interesting than you.

  With Michelle Tea’s Valencia in hand, I stretched out across my four-poster bed, nestled in the down comforter that should be too hot for this time of year, but somehow felt cool beneath me, and let the story pull me into a fantasy world. For the first two days home I was so engrossed that I barely moved—occasionally rolling from my back to my stomach to prevent bedsores, and rising only for bathroom breaks or to go downstairs for the requisite meals.

  Loud voices and laughter wafting up from the pool house interrupted my reverie. I tried to ignore the noise, but I couldn’t shake my curiosity. Who was out there and what were they doing? It wouldn’t hurt to stretch my legs.

  Not wanting to damage the book’s spine, I carefully slid a piece of paper in to hold my place and set it on my bedside table. My legs were spongy with sleep, and when I put my weight down they caved under me. I grabbed on to one of the smooth, hand-carved posts and managed to stay upright. I used the furniture as crutches while I stumbled across the room, going from bed to desk and outside to the railing of the balcony.

  Fortunately, my land legs returned, because the minute I stepped outside I was blinded by the light and instinctively raised a hand to shield my pupils from the excruciating brilliance of the midday sun. When my eyes finally adjusted to the brightness, I was not surprised to see Ash wearing nothing but bikini bottoms, floating on a giant inflatable bed in the middle of our pool. She wasn’t alone. A man wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and a woman with an old-fashioned one-piece suit were taking turns stroking Ash in the guise of applying sunscreen. Their movements rocked the raft and splashed water onto Ash, who shrieked theatrically. I looked around to see who was playing audience to her show. Our gardener, whose name I still couldn’t pronounce, was skulking behind the hedges, pretending to trim them while peering over at Ash and her strange friends floating in the aquamarine water. She was probably trying to give the old guy a heart attack.

  I was appalled at her complete lack of decorum, and angry with myself for falling for Ash’s exhibitionism. She was probably out there laughing louder and louder, calculating what decibel would bring Father or me to a window. Ash was like a child having a tantrum, stamping her foot and yelling, “Look at me, look at me,” to get attention.

  To hell with her. Valencia was waiting, full of the kind of clever prose I loved to read in literature classes but had never yet managed to write myself. Tea’s words saturated my mind like rain falling through slats on a barn roof. Sometimes I read lines aloud, letting the words linger on my tongue, rolling them around my mouth, tasting them with the different sensors—sweet, sour, salty. I adored her words, and I turned them over and over in my head as the day began to slip into evening, oblivious to the party still going on.

  A scream interrupted me. I spit out Tea’s words and tossed her book aside before racing out to the balcony again. Ash was out of the water but standing by the pool, now with a different duo: the woman from earlier today and a new man. I wanted to stare, to see what the hell they were up to that elicited the shriek I’d just heard. But I was afraid Ash would catch me at it, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d gotten my attention again. And knowing her, Ash would just call me a pervert and tell Father I was spying on her, just to get me in trouble.

  She was always doing things like that when we were younger. I remember one time when we were kids and Ash was in trouble for something—I don’t remember what, since usually it seemed like she could do no wrong. But I do remember Ash had been sent to her room alone. Even back then Ash couldn’t stand to be alone. She cracked open her door and stood there whispering my name until I came to see what the fuss was.

  Then Ash looked me right in the eyes and slammed her hand in the door. On purpose. She broke two of her fingers and had to go to the hospital. But her plaintive wails brought Father running and her lies convinced him I’d been responsible. Ash was released from solitary and I took her place in the doghouse, so it was a win-win situation all around for her.

  I didn’t want to give her that kind of satisfaction now, so instead I grabbed the pair of odd binocular-like sunglasses that were an expensive good-bye gift from Mark, who somehow thought bird watching might bring me solace in his post-graduation absence. I’d never watched a bird in my life, and I didn’t intend to start, but I had realized that the spectacles appeared to others as simply a pair of peculiar looking sunglasses. No one would notice me people watching from my room, though with these telescoping super-strength lenses I could practically see every pore, every hair on each person’s body.

  I could stoically relax on my balcony, sit in my reclining redwood patio lounge holding my novel, and peer over the pages at Ash and what I was beginning to suspect was a constant parade of lovers. I felt simu
ltaneously intrigued and repelled by the sight of so many of them fawning over my sister like she was an adorable but doomed SPCA puppy begging for a home. What did Ash offer that turned normally independent people into simpering fools? If I paid close attention, would I catch a glimpse of her secret ingredient? Was it something intrinsic to her soul or could I apply it like a glossy lipstick? Could it magically transform me externally, the way Tea’s words did in my mind?

  Ash had always enchanted other people. When we were young girls being trotted out at Father’s cocktail parties for show and tell, the partygoers would always gather around sweet, pig-tailed Ash. At one of Father’s office holiday parties, when Ash was maybe eight or nine, she got on stage while the band was on a break and announced that she had a special treat for the audience. She was dressed in a little red velvet pantsuit with white fur trim that my mother must have helped her pick out. I was still too terrified to speak to people unless forced, and so I stood there, slack jawed, as enamored of my sister as the rest of the audience. She was everything I wanted to be, back then and still now. Beautiful, smart, charming, and truly unafraid of anything. At the party, I kept hiding below the buffet table, stuffing my face and wondering how soon I could get out of there while Ash was charming the pants off of Father’s colleagues.

  Soon all eyes were on Ash as a band member handed her a microphone and she started belting out a perfect rendition of “Santa Baby.” We’d been singing Christmas carols in front of the mirror in our underwear for weeks, karaoke style, so we both knew every single word. But watching Ash up there, I realized that she brought something to the song I never could. We weren’t even teenagers yet, but there was something faintly womanly about Ash, like a twenty-year-old trapped in a nine-year-old’s body. All eyes were on her as she winked and smiled and sang in a Betty Boop tone. When she finished, the crowd applauded and gushed and Father beamed with pride.

  For years afterward, I would think of that party, of how Ash could walk into any situation and charm people. She would sometimes take me under her wing, telling me how to make an entrance like she did, but just as often she’d mock me or push me aside when others were around. Always, we seemed to be competing for Father’s affection, and always, Ash won.

  Even in our family, I seemed to be on the outside of Ash’s world, looking on as everyone fluttered around her, flitting about and marveling.

  So that summer I pretended to be a birdwatcher looking for that endangered species. I pretended I was an anthropologist observing a foreign culture, longing to learn the sacred rituals of a society I could never truly enter.

  Chapter Two

  Hours of spying slipped into days, and I soon decided I was getting far more from observing Ash than I would ever garner from my novels and their make-believe worlds. I started bringing a notepad out to the balcony with me, jotting down random things I noticed, hoping somehow a pattern would emerge and I could unravel the secrets of this alien world. If nothing else, I told myself, this would enliven my own writing, help me infuse an element of realness that my English professors had always complained was lacking from my characters, which they criticized as being more caricatures than living, breathing, believable individuals.

  Watching Ash was like viewing my own private reality dating program. Each new day brought another surprising revelation. Father, an archconservative Republican, must have been having a fit, knowing what she was doing out there, and yet he never said anything to that effect, he never went out and shut her party down. Maybe he was able to pretend it wasn’t happening. Maybe going down there would have confronted him with the vulgar truth, that his little girl wasn’t a little girl any longer, that she was very much an adult, a sexually aggressive woman who was hanging around the pool with all manner of riffraff, drinking and smoking pot, lighting up casually, and passing spliffs as if they were simply sharing cigarettes.

  There were colorful drinks strewn about, drinks that could pass for punch, but I could tell from the way the girls giggled and tittered that there was booze in them for certain. Each new day, Ash seemed to ratchet up the poolside debauchery, as though challenging Father to step in, pushing his limits to see when he would break. Even I was surprised by his restraint. He seemed to be combating her by fighting a cold war, trying to freeze her out by utterly ignoring Ash’s increasing decadence. It couldn’t continue indefinitely. Eventually Ash would push him too far and Father would explode, raging as white hot as any atomic bomb. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people would end up getting hurt, casualties in their little war. Would it be worth it in the end? What did she hope to prove?

  I couldn’t see everything that was happening down there by the pool, but over the next few weeks I saw enough. Cocktails drunk, joints smoked, drugs passed, and pills popped, right there, directly under Father’s nose. The only solace was that Father’s increasing absences prevented him from witnessing every immoral spectacle. Somehow my homecoming and Ash’s hedonistic explosion had coincided with Father’s sudden disappearance. He was no longer home for dinner every night. In fact, some nights he didn’t come home at all.

  The stepmonster explained Father was staying overnight in town because of his work, and maybe that was true or maybe it was an excuse. What did I know? Father wasn’t talking to me. His phone calls were relayed secondhand through an untrustworthy conductor. Tabitha could have reason to lie. Maybe Father was cheating on her. Maybe now that Tabitha was closing in on thirty she had lost her appeal and he was trading her in for a younger model. Maybe he wasn’t that different from Ash after all. Maybe he was staying out late drinking or shacking up with another, younger version of Tabitha.

  Our place in Lake Oswego was less than an hour outside Portland, but Father kept an apartment in the city, a condo in the Pearl District for nights he had to work late. I’d never been there, but he used to stay there a lot before Mother died. That all changed when he married Tabitha. Maybe it was because she was just nineteen and he didn’t want to leave her alone, or didn’t dare. Maybe he thought someone else—a neighbor, the pool boy, the UPS guy—would catch her eye if he wasn’t there to keep her company. Whatever the cause, in the years since Mother’s death, Father had come home nearly every single night. I guess that’s what happens when middle-aged men marry teenagers, they have to watch their women a lot harder to make sure no Fabio-wannabe tennis instructor steals them away. It was also probably why Father hired our gardener, whose name I’d finally learned was Gualterio, even though Father insisted we call him Bob. He was about sixty years old, in the U.S. without papers, and probably poor as dirt, which I guess made Father feel comfortable Tabitha wouldn’t run away with him.

  Poor Bob, though, because he had to put up with Father’s racist condescension and Ash’s Caligula-style partying while he was just trying to keep the lawn mowed and shrubbery trimmed. Only that summer, I noticed that the grass seemed a little longer than usual and the topiary wasn’t maintaining its customary definition. And every time I peeked out at Ash’s wild poolside parties, I could see Bob lingering in the shadows, watching. I wondered what he was getting out of it, staring at all those young, supple bodies, watching the depraved debauchery playing out in the summer heat. I hoped he had someone to go home and share his hard-on with and he didn’t just have to resort to beating off alone in the tool shed.

  I stole another peek at the boys by the pool and noticed something surprising. The guys who’d been hanging around Ash all week weren’t guys at all. They were women. Very masculine gals, to be sure, but girls, nonetheless. Having grown up in the Northwest, where even the straight women were utilitarian and capable of tossing eighty-pound bales of hay one-handed, it said a lot if someone’s masculinity so overshadowed all visual cues to the contrary that I couldn’t tell they were female-bodied.

  But there they were, young women sporting swim trunks and T-shirts and the occasional ball cap. Of course, there were more feminine girls too, girls like Ash and a retro Bettie Page girl wearing a one piece, and a girl with glasses
who wore surf shorts and stayed out of the water, lounging poolside with a fruity cocktail. Another girl wore a different color thong bikini every day, and a short girl with piercings in her lip, nose, belly button, and God knows where else, seemed to like having the details of her many tattoos slowly outlined by Ash’s stray fingers.

  Just like the men who preceded them, these women seemed to fawn over Ash, vying with each other to be the one to touch her, even casually. I watched the way their fingers brushed Ash’s when they handed her a drink, the way they hoisted her on their shoulders for a game of chicken, or took their time rubbing sunscreen lotion on her legs, chest, belly.

  It was odd to watch them compete for her attention. Ash seemed to choose a winner after a while, allowing only one girl to bring her drinks, pour sun-warmed pool water over her bronzed body, or light her cigarettes. But her fancy never lasted long. A few hours and the games began again, the competition for Ash’s favor. Some brought her gifts. Others did dangerous dives, risking head injury in shallow water, or picked fights with each other. It was like watching Wild Kingdom during rutting season when the young bucks crashed their antlers together in a display of virility and an effort to court single does. Were humans driven by the same base instincts? Were the tens of thousands of years of evolution, the accomplishments of brilliant minds like Socrates and Shakespeare and Madame Curie thrown out the window when it came to sexual impulses and dating rituals?

  A few of Ash’s suitors seemed to rise above and differentiate themselves from the masses. One girl brought along a guitar and serenaded Ash with songs. I couldn’t make out the words from my balcony, and I’ve never mastered lip reading, but it was pretty clear the singer was professing her undying love. Ash looked bemused. She received each of her subjects’ pathetic adorations like her Royal Highness, sitting on her throne, deigning to bestow the slightest smirk to those that pleased her with their antics.