When I was growing up, I was occasionally spanked and always by my father. I often had to go upstairs with him when he came home from the News for lunch, and pull down my panties and lay myself obediently across his long bony knees, and then steel my emotions against the ritualistic whack of five or eight or even ten sharp taps from a wooden hairbrush. They were counted by my age, and by nine or ten he began to use his hand, in an expert upward slap that stung more than the hairbrush. I often cried a little, to prove that I had learned my lesson.

I knew that Rex disliked this duty very much, but that it was part of being Father. Mother could not or would not punish us. Instead, she always said, by agreement with him and only when she felt that things were serious enough to drag him into it, that she would have to speak with him about the ugly matter when he came home at noon.

It is almost certain that I stayed aloof and surly, often, in the next years with my parents. But I was never spanked again. And I know as surely as I do my given name that Rex no longer feared the chain of violence that had bound him when he was a boy. Perhaps it is as well that he hit me, the one time he found that it had not been broken for him.

I was growing very fast and was almost as tall as I am now, with small growing breasts. I looked straight at him, not crying, and got into the old position, all long skinny arms and legs, with my bottom bared to him. I felt insulted and full of fury. He gave me twelve expert upward stinging whacks. I did not even breathe fast, on purpose. The I stood up insolently, pulled up my sensible Munsingwear panties, and stared down at him as he sat on the edge of my bed.

She said that he had been beaten when he was a child and then as a growing boy, my age, younger, older. His father beat him, almost every Saturday, with a long leather belt. He beat all four of his boys until they were big enough to tell him that it was the last time. They were all of them tall strong people, and Mother said without and quivering in her voice that they were all about sixteen before they could make it clear that if it ever happened again, they would beat their father worse than he had ever done it to them.

Once Rex hit me. I deserved it, because I vented stupid petulance on my helpless little brother David. He was perhaps a year old, and I was twelve. We'd all left the lunch table for the living room and had left him sitting alone in his high chair, and Father spotted him through the big doors and asked me to get him down. I felt sulky about something, and angered, and I stamped back to the table and pulled up the wooden tray that held the baby in his chair, and dumped him out insolently on the floor. David did not even cry out, but Rex saw it and in a flash leapt across the living room toward the dining table and the empty high chair and gave me a slap across my head that sent me halfway across the room against the big old sideboard. He picked up David and stood staring at me. Mother ran in. A couple of cousins came, looking flustered and embarrassed at the sudden ugliness.

"Yes," I said. "And you hit me."

We talked for a long time. It was a day of spiritual purging, obviously. I have never been the same --- still stupid but never unthinking, because of the invisible chains that can be forged in all of us, without our knowing it. Rex knew of the c

Some common words found in the essay are:
That's Yes, Father Mother, , Finally Father, Whittier Laguna, chain violence, expert upward, father upstairs, helpless baby, told father, break chain, pull panties, helpless little,
Approximate Word count = 1690
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)