I could tell two things about my fiancé Valerie as she ran down the descending walkway to my car. One, she'd dressed hurriedly—she was pressing her little purse to her abdomen as if the key to holding her virginal white ensemble together; and two, she'd been crying. In fact she still was.
"What's the matter, darling?" I asked, as she climbed inside.
"Just drive," she sniffed.
I waiting until we were outside the familiar confines of her parents' subdivision to try again. At a red light I reached over and put my hand on her bare arm. She was blubbering again.
"What happened, darling?"
"Oh, you know..."
Traffic was moving again. "I don't know. Tell me."
Valerie exhaled, audibly. Straightened her back inside seatbelt's crosswise confines, wiped her eyes a last time and said, "Daddy found my birth control. He found my hiding spot."
"So?"
"So," giving me a look. "You know how he feels about those things."
I knew a lot about my future father-in-law. I knew, for instance, that Dr. Spence resided somewhere in the mythical 1950's—Ozzie and Harriet Land. I knew that he thought a woman's place was in the home and that he opposed both sex before marriage and all forms of birth control. That he was a deacon in his fundamentalist church and that he stood adamantly opposed to just about every social advance, from civil rights to women's rights to gay rights, that had occurred over the past 50 years. All you had to do was look at him—what with his close-cropped white hair and stony, self-righteous, puritanical blue stare—to know everything about the man.
I knew one other thing about Dr. Spence: he detested me. I was, to him, an inferior species. That's the reason, whenever I picked Valerie up, I remained in my car. Her father didn't want me on his doorstep, let alone in his vestibule. Nor did I want to be there. Dr. Spence and his timid wife didn't even know Valerie and I were engaged. It was a secret. Our plans were to soon run off and get married in a simple civil ceremony and then present "the deacon" with a fait accompli. Fuck him.
How such a creep had produced such a lovely, modern, (secretly) liberated daughter was a mystery to me. It certainly wasn't due to his genes.
"What did he do when he found 'em?" I asked Valerie.
"Oh, you don't want to know. I don't want to talk about it."
I reached out to my fiancé again. Tears were welling. Again. "Tell me."
Valerie raised her window. The male driver of the car next to us at the light was looking over at her. "Can you put the air on?"
"Sure," I said, raising my own window. Was the man staring at Valerie because of her simple beauty or, out of curiosity, because of her tears? The Crying Woman. I pressed the A/C button. It wasn't hot outside today but it wasn't cool either. It was borderline. "What did Mark do to you?"
Mark Spence. Future father-in-law. DOCTOR Mark Spence. Though what he'd done to earn a doctorate beat me. Probably received it from the Bible College he attended back in the day. I could only guess what his thesis had been about. The chemistry of turning water into wine? Creationism? Man and dinosaur—a harmonious coexistence?
Valerie was looking at me through her tears. She seemed surprised. In person, of course, I only ever addressed her father as "Dr. Spence."
"It's good to see you again, Dr. Spence."
"Hope you've been well, Dr. Spence."
"Congratulations on you and the missus on your anniversary, Dr. Spence."
"How can I please you, Dr. Spence?"
Valerie, secure inside my car's raised and tinted windows, sniffed. "He put me over his knee and spanked me," she said.
I did a doubletake. I pretended outrage. "Spanked you?"
Valerie nodded. "It's been a long time since the last time. Nearly a year, I think. Before I met you. Or right when I met you. He only ever does it in extreme circumstances..."
I was still doing doubletakes as I attempted to keep my car in its narrow lane. "Christ, Valerie, you're 24!"
Another nod. "I know. Tell me about it. But I'm still his daughter and I still live under his roof."
"We're about to change that," I said defiantly.
"I know. And he hates that. Hates it!"
"Hates me."
Valerie didn't deny it. Why bother with the obvious?