Too many ironies,
thought Susan, drunkenly.
Too damn many ironies for one day.
She reached for the bottle on her desk, but her hand went where the bottle wasn't and only succeeded in knocking it into the wastebasket.
Hell with it.
She folded her arms on the desk and let her head fall heavily onto them as she began to weep again.
Too damn many ironies for one life...
First of all, the name: Susan B. Anthony.
Major
Susan B. Anthony, United States Army: combat-trained daughter of Quaker parents who were still reeling over her choice of career.
She often wondered whether the original Susan B. Anthony, pioneering feminist (and a distant ancestor of Susan's), would approve. As an agitator for women's rights she would certainly have cheered Susan's swift rise through the ranks of what had historically been an all-male preserve. But she had also been raised as a Quaker and therefore a pacifist, so there were no safe assumptions to be made. Susan liked to think that the feminist side would have won out, but she also understood the pain of divided loyalties all too well. Nevertheless, although she rarely revealed her middle initial to anyone, she always carried a Susan B. Anthony dollar as a talisman, and in times of stress would reach into her pocket and hold it, rubbing her thumb along its edge.
Second of all, her marriage: Military women, if they married at all, married military men—who else would understand and accept the sacrifices required by military duty?
Susan understood that as well as any of her fellow women officers. Lord knows they'd discussed it often enough over drinks, generally while complaining about the quality of the men available to them.
So why had Major Susan B. Anthony, career army-officer, married a college professor? A professor of philosophy, no less. She was sure the question came up on a regular basis around the base. She'd overheard the snide remarks about her "house-husband" and "pet liberal" and the insinuations that she enjoyed being "the man of the house."
If they only knew,
she'd thought more than once.
Morris ‘Morey' Hillier was in some ways everything ‘they' suspected: intellectual, politically liberal and by nature a gentle and considerate man. But as a philosopher he believed that aggression was part and parcel of the human condition, particularly among the male of the species, and that therefore an organized military was a necessary evil. So while he was enough of a liberal to be delighted when he learned Susan's full name, and to encourage her to keep it even after they were married, he was completely supportive of Susan's vocation—though occasionally irritated or bemused by some of the demands it made on her.
They had met when Morey was a guest lecturer for one of Susan's military-science courses, giving a basic overview of logic as applied to strategy. She had stayed after class one day to get a fuller explanation of a particularly knotty theory. Until then she had only found him vaguely attractive: slim but wiry in his customary polo shirt and jeans; a hint of Native American chromosomes in his coloring and high cheekbones and the longish, straight dark hair that kept falling from behind his ears.
But as they spoke she had found herself drawn, first by the glowing intellect she saw in the brown eyes behind his rimless spectacles, then by the increasing warmth she saw there, mirroring her own. The explanation had become a conversation; the conversation so engaging that it needed to be continued elsewhere... And the next thing Susan knew she was requesting permission to live off base; first in his cramped bachelor apartment and later a snug rented cottage situated roughly between the army base and the college campus.
Which was where a third irony was discovered: "Soldier Sue", as Morey sometimes called her, had somehow survived basic training with the slovenly habits of her adolescence intact. She knew how to make a bed so tightly that a quarter could be bounced off the sheet, for instance, and had done so as long as she'd had to, but after a few months of living with Morey she'd gradually become more perfunctory in her attention to domestic details. The bed sometimes went entirely unmade; dishes piled up in the sink; leftover food changed colors, and then shapes, in the refrigerator.
Morey, on the other hand was something of a neatnik. He required a certain amount of orderliness in his life and had been somewhat chagrined to discover that "Soldier Sue", of all people, didn't share his concern. This had led to the first crisis in their relationship.
And Irony Number Four.
At first, like any loving couple they had sat down together and discussed the issue, and the result had been a list of all the daily, weekly and occasional chores, divided between them in an equitable manner. And this had worked quite well for a while. But over time Susan, even with the best of intentions, began to let things slip—she'd overslept, or had pulled night duty or... And Morey had been patient and understanding...for a while.
But one day she had come home to find Morey sitting on a chair in the middle of the kitchen. There was a bucket of soapy water sitting on the floor nearby and Susan had suddenly remembered that it was her turn to mop the floor...she was supposed to have done it the previous weekend and it was all too obvious that she hadn't. She'd glanced around to see if he'd put out the mop as well—then noticed the long-handled wooden scrub-brush he was holding in one hand.
She'd barely had time to think,
Uh-oh
, before he'd seized her by the wrist and yanked her towards him, sending her sprawling across his lap.
The one exception to Susan's generally lackadaisical attitude toward cleanliness was concern for her appearance. She understood the importance of a crisp, clean look for an officer and took a great deal of trouble to make sure that there was never a spot on her shoes, a wrinkle anywhere in her uniform, a single honey-blonde hair out of place beneath her cap or the slightest hint of body odor about her person.
So her first thought, when she'd felt her skirt being jerked up over her hips, was that now she'd have to iron it all over again...
...Which quickly became the least of her concerns as the back of the scrub-brush landed on her behind.
She had never been spanked in her life--her parents were Quakers, after all—so it was the shock of that first blow as much as the searing pain of it that had made her scream out loud. ...And then whimper and cry and kick her feet helplessly in the air like a little girl as he administered nine more just like it, waiting just long enough between each blow to allow the pain to be fully appreciated.
He'd said not a single word the entire time. And when he'd finished spanking her he'd simply pushed her off his lap and onto the floor, then stood and dropped the scrub-brush clattering to the linoleum beside her and pointed to the bucket.
And he'd remained silent as he made her scrub the entire kitchen floor on her hands and knees. In her uniform. With her skirt still rucked up over her hips.
He'd stood over her the entire time, arms folded except to reach down and give her an open-handed slap on the behind if he thought she wasn't working hard or fast enough. She had sobbed and sniffled and mumbled apologies as she scrubbed, to no avail.
Not until the floor was spotless and gleaming was she allowed to stop. And even then she had remained on all fours, the scrub-brush dropping from her numb fingers as she continued to sob quietly. She had taken mournful stock of her appearance, from her wet and scuffed shoes to her hopelessly wrinkled, soap and sweat-stained uniform, to her bedraggled hair and the cap hanging pathetically on one side of her head.
She had just been considering whether or not her pantyhose could be salvaged when she felt them being seized from behind...and then ripped apart at the seam. Morey had then dropped to his knees behind her and forced her legs apart with his hands...then, still without uttering a single word, had jerked the crotch of her panties aside and taken her from behind, right there on the floor. Used her for his own pleasure as if she were some slut he'd picked up in a bar—and when he'd finished had simply stood up and walked out of the kitchen, straightening his clothes as he went.
And
that
was Irony Number Four: Major Susan B. Anthony—who knew six ways to kill an enemy with her bare hands, who had completed two hazardous tours of duty overseas, who had led troops into battle and still had a tiny piece of shrapnel in her hip to prove it—had absolutely loved it. All of it.
She had remained on all fours for a few seconds more, quivering with lust—more aroused than she had been in her entire life. Then she had staggered to her feet, chased her husband down in the living room and tackled him.
By the time they were through her uniform was pretty much a total loss.
Up until that moment their sex life had been adequate, in a vanilla sort of way. They had experimented a little bit, of course, but neither of them had showed a whole lot of imagination and eventually they had pretty much settled into the statistical average: two, maybe three times a week at most.
But now...!
If Morey had hoped to improve Susan's attention to her share of the chores by this method he had made a serious miscalculation: Before, she had let things slide through carelessness. Now she was doing it on purpose.
The change didn't happen all at once, of course. They never discussed what had happened, and after the kitchen-floor incident Susan had actually done a lot better, at first. But she often found herself daydreaming about what he'd done to her that day; what he'd made her do. And over time, unconsciously at first, small transgressions began to occur.
The first was when she absent-mindedly left a few dishes in the sink overnight. Morey, always an early riser, had discovered them, then stomped upstairs and dragged her out of bed and down to the kitchen. There he had bent her over the sink—again without saying a word—then lifted the back of the extra-large t-shirt she wore as a nightgown and given her a hard slap on her naked behind for every dish she had left there.
Susan was decidedly
not
a morning person; she tended to stay in bed until the last possible moment, and therefore breakfast was a meal they rarely shared. But
that
morning she found herself wide-awake. Morey stood behind her while she cleaned the dishes...
close
behind her, insinuating himself between her cheeks and rubbing slowly up and down while his hands reached up under her shirt to pinch her nipples.
She was practically swooning by the time she was done. She had to force herself to stack the plates neatly in the drainer, then rinse and wring out the sponge and put it back in its holder—she had learned that much, at least—before turning to face Morey.
Morey had slowly peeled the t-shirt up and over her head, leaving her naked. Then--being Morey—he'd let her stand there like that, panting, while he folded her shirt and hung it over the back of a chair, a process that seemed to Susan to go on for hours. But at last he turned back to her...looked her coolly up and down, enjoying her arousal...
