Chapter 3

Psychologists and miserable people that have sunk too deeply into the depravity of marketing and sales will tell you that the most important thing is to make a good first impression. People’s opinions of you, once set at about 1.6 seconds after meeting you, remain fixed. It’s hard to recover from a train-wreck once those first guiding wheels have already slid off of the track!

It could have been worse, I suppose. Jessica and I were both clothed and not screwing right on the frosty front lawn like two deranged weasels. We were both even dressed reasonably adequately, considering that my faux-wife had been helping fix dinner in an old worn out t-shirt and cut-off jean short shorts that mostly covered her ass. She had just changed out of her work suit and the huddled masses of her breasts had been yearning to breathe freely for hours. Unfortunately, the twins were rather casually attired in their new favorite evening attire, each wearing one of Jessica’s old cropped-off t’s advertising some South Beach slutty bar and rocking short-shorts of their own.

The temperature dropped right from the moment the girls opened the door to our premature visitor ... and not just from the near freezing air outside this evening either.

“Ah... , “ the gray-haired old auntie determined, “you two must be the twins. It’s quite unmistakable ... and you both certainly already do take after your mother, in each and every way.” Ok, then ... so Jessica might have perhaps had a checkered past back in her younger, and slightly more nubile college days, but slut-shaming my nieces right from the start was not perhaps the best way to win them over.

Reba, who was practically shameless, immediately managed a slight bow and curtsey, before squealing in mock delight and hugging the old biddie anyway. Scarlet, who had perhaps slightly less sense of the theatrical in her, just spun on her heels and flounced off to finish setting the dinner table, while rolling her eyes at us and then sticking out her tongue too, for good measure. Jessica didn’t quite know whether to laugh or cry, so she quickly hid her head inside the pantry, pretending to be hunting for something ... and showed no sign whatsoever that she was likely to emerge anytime at all soon. That left me then to attempt to recover the situation.

“And you must be Joshua, Jessica’s husband, she exclaimed in greeting with slightly more interest and enthusiasm. “Lucille, my sister ... Jessie’s mom, has told me quite a good deal about you, but I’m somewhat quite unsure as to just how much of this info was perhaps a bit exaggerated.”

“By exaggeration,” I grinned, “you mean of course that Jessie’s mom would just as soon rather lie than tell the unvarnished truth every day of the week, and fib twice-over on Sundays as well, so I’d prefer to just smile and nod politely ... unless, of course you’ve heard a fresh new hysterical rumor of our unspeakable, and vile debaucheries, in which case I’d be delighted to hear it and even take notes for future embellishments. Otherwise, I am entirely as you see before you.”

Jessica dropped a can loudly in the pantry, shocked at what I said to her aunt, but I shrugged and bent down to pick up the elderly lady’s pair of suitcases. Unlike her niece, this woman knew how to compactly pack for a trip!

I could feel Beverly’s eyes fixed to my ass the entire way up the stairs as I showed her to her guest bedroom. It used to be my study, but we’d cleared out most of the mess and added a guest bed and a new small dressing table. My former study closet had been cleaned and aired out as well, and would be more than adequate too. She gave it a small sniff of general approval, after taking her eyes off of my butt and biceps for a scant moment. Any moment now she was going to be squeezing them to test their firmness and texture.

“No,” she decided, right as I was about to tell her it would still be about fifteen or twenty minutes until dinner, “you are rather not entirely what I had been expecting ... and that’s already a point or two in your favor. A man married to a red-head needs a functionally creative mind of their very own, otherwise they’re liable to get steamrollered flat and walked all over. You’re right, entirely of course ... my younger sister couldn’t tell a straight story if Saint Peter himself demanded it of her at heaven’s gate! Our youngest sister, another red-head of course but now departed from us, was worse – if it’s at all possible, and I assume that your darling bride, my niece, whom I only caught the briefest glimpse of downstairs, naturally shares these inherited family traits?”

“By which you mean, of course, is she still a rampaging volcano always on the verge of eruption and would much rather tell a comforting creative alternation of the facts than tell the bald unhappy and unvarnished truth ... got it in one! But it’s something that I’m work hard to moderate with the girls. Red hair runs in alternate generations in my family too, so mixed in with the assorted tendencies towards insanity, we do ... well, most of us, do possess a slight modicum of common sense to help compensate.”

“Glad to hear that,” she laughed, “There’s not really an excess of that flowing in ours. Myself as a younger lady, quite included. With age and experience, though, does eventually come a bit of wisdom.”

“Age and treachery usually does trump youth and inexperience, as Jessica’s father used to remind me. He was a kind man, and I was rather fond of the old fellow and he taught me a lot about the plumbing business ... but he spent way too many hours in that office and not really enough hours at home guiding his daughter as she grew up. He pushed her to excel, but never once hinted to her that there needs to be times to just stop and smell the roses. It’s never dull ... but life with her can be exasperating.” That was a more than safe enough and very honest opinion.”

No ... you’re entirely not what I had been expecting at all. You don’t have a single tattoo on open display and you’re most definitely not a dim pretty boy ... one of the usual sorts of beach-boy bulls that the women of our family, both past and present, tend to prefer for our dalliance material. If those books on the wall are any indication, it appears you’ve actually got a mind ... so apparently Jessica hasn’t selected you entirely on your suitability for night-work. Call me doubly impressed then ... but why then the preposterous story about you two being married with twins?”

She laughed and I had to laugh along with her for a minute or two until I could manage to keep my face straight enough to give her a digest version of the truth. I supposed that Jessica had not wanted to call her mother out for the original lie, but also didn’t want to hurt her aunt’s feelings either, so she took the path of least resistance. Getting the facts established, early, right from the start, likely wouldn’t screw up Jessica’s real chances of getting that loan – once directly asked for ... but that was her business, and I kept mum about that little bit of impending misfortune.

Besides, as Aunt Beverly giggled with a smile, “I’m going to enjoy this week mightily! I’m going make her squirm and see how many new lies she’ll now have to make up just to keep her ridiculous story going ... and I’m going to love every minute of watching her wriggle out of this!”

Yeah ... me too!

The circus got off to an excellent start at dinner time, as Aunt Beverly pushed and pressed for every detail about how we (Jessica and her ‘husband’) had met, and where, and what did we dine on, and so forth, unto the nth degree. It was just delicious, watching Jessica fidget and trying to think of another story to cover her lying ass. My darling bride kept trying to change the conversation ... but none of us were going to let her get away from it.

“Ooo, tell us more about how you met dad,” Reba squealed, and then she displayed the logo on the old crop-top shirt that she was wearing and added, “weren’t you dancing at this night club when you met him ... and not wearing a stitch of clothing either?” Ouch ... now that was vicious!

“No silly!” Scarlet interjected, “I’m pretty sure she said it was at this club. And then you got arrested that same night too, you told me, for solicitation of prostitution. You propositioned an off-duty police officer, but our dad talked him out of taking you in. He told them that you were underaged, just fifteen, and that this would be your third arrest as a whore ... but that your family was planning to send you back to the Betty Ford Clinic, again, to get you cleaned up ... if he’d let you go ... or was it instead that you had to give him a blow job? No ... I think that was a different time with another cop!”

Oh my ... if looks could have killed, my nieces would have been buried six feet under! That was enough abuse for Jessica for one evening, and she excused herself from the table and fled nearly running up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door behind her. Well ... it wasn’t entirely undeserved.

The dinner topic now changed for good – once all of the girls and women at the table had stopped laughing.

“The girls are in private school, or so Jessica tells me.” Aunt Beverly asked, with enough of a quizzical look that suggested that she didn’t entirely trust anything coming from her niece’s mouth either, unverified.

“They are,” I confirmed, “but they had been in the local public middle school up until two years ago. There were issues at that school, both with some inner-city gangs and with a few of their teachers. They’re going to a private school now; it’s a church school, Episcopalian, but they were the top-rated local school for academics, especially STEM classes for girls ... and they don’t bible-thump too much. If we can afford it, I’d like them to continue next year into their high school as well. Expensive ... really too much so, but their graduates have a really good success rate getting into Ivy League schools or really top tech colleges like M.I.T. or Stanford. Wherever the girls decide they want to go.”

“Public schools are good for letting children socialize with different sorts of kids, more disadvantaged families and such, but if there were issues ... well, whatever is best for the girls. In retrospect, Jessica perhaps shouldn’t have gone to private schools for her entire education. She never really learned how to interact with others very well, and a bit more social give-and-take might have been good for her.”

Both girls raised up their hands and danced in their seats as if an urgent bathroom appointment was critically necessary. Tales to tell ... they certainly had a few.

“Well,” Reba immediately volunteered, “I think the stupidest incident was with our 8^th grade science teacher. She was a crazy social justice loon, complete with mostly green dyed hair, that refused to believe that there were only two biological sexes. She kept pushing us to ‘self-identify’, whatever the fuck that meant ... and no, we couldn’t choose to be just plain heterosexual females either. She just kept pushing until I told her that I sexually identified as an attack helicopter!”

“Yeah,” Scarlet added, “and then I told her that I wanted to be an A-10 Warthog! Let me sing you the song of my people, I cried out to her, and loudly went Brrrrrrrrrrrrp and threw paperclips and erasers at everyone in the classroom.”

“It was just... glorious...” Reba sighed, “but wow was that crazy bitch out of it!”

“That was sort of the last straw with that school,” I laughed, “and the principal sort of recommended that private school to me, in the interest of preserving his own limited remaining mental health. He was mostly on our side, concerning most of the numerous issues the girls had with some students and also a few of the more socially progressive teachers. And yes, their red hair in a 70% overall minority student body there was turning into a constant recurring issue that the school administration frankly showed no inclination towards correcting.”

“Nope,” Scarlet muttered, banging her fork onto her dinner plate in anger. “One year, our social studies teacher wanted to rub both of our noses into ‘diversity and inclusivity’, week after fucking week, nonstop like a broken record!”

“One Monday morning, she declared it was ‘Kick a Blonde’ week, because we had two blond girls, so all of the black and brown kids got to verbally abuse them all week with utter impunity. Then, it was our turn – Kick a Ginger. Like fucking hell that was going to happen!” Reba stated. “So, I walked right up to the front of the class and asked when gas a Jew week was going to be?”

“Yeah,” Scarlet snarled, “or what about Noogie a Nigerian day, or Wedgie a Walloon? I still think that Phlegm on the Flemish would have been a lot of fun! So, I then wrote ‘GINGER’ in big letters across the board and asked the class to rearrange a couple of letters and mentally replace the word ginger with black. It was a very easy anagram, so even the stupider kids in the class got it.”

“And the shit totally hit the fan,” I agreed, “so I marched in the principal’s office and raised seven flavors of fresh hell! The hilarious part was that the teacher kept defending her actions as ‘necessary social education’ and then doubled-down saying that if the girls didn’t want to get bullied, then they should dye their hair to some other color. I then suggested, if that was the case, then why didn’t she, the teacher, bleach her skin white as well? She went apeshit and threatened to sue us for emotional abuse and we, in turn, complained about her in a public meeting of the school board and told them that the teacher was a bigoted piece of shaite that needed some ‘social education’ of her own so she wouldn’t say any more stupid things to children without thinking. They ended up eventually firing her ... but really that whole business was entirely way more hassle than the girls needed and it didn’t make them any friends with the other teachers at that school.”

“Fuck them,” the twins muttered just about in perfect unison.

“I’m pretty sure that a couple of them still have nightmares about us,” Reba giggled, “and warn their students to be good little obedient drones and conform, submit, agree to anything the teacher says. Don’t stand out in any way or you will be punished ... just like those gingers. Don’t say (or think) anything that’s out of line with what we say or you will face consequences. Our cameras are watching your every move. Love is Hate. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength!”

“I’m just glad that we’re gone, and at our new school, “Scarlet agreed, “because pretty soon teachers will have an “Independent Thought Alarm” in public school classrooms, just like in the Simpsons. And they’ll keep wondering why most of the dumb twats in our class are going to end up selling drugs, killed in some gang war, or dancing in titty bars.”

“My dears,” Aunt Beverly laughed, my own grandmother came over to America from Ireland, and her hair was at least as red as yours. She said to me once when I was a little girl, when I asked her why all of the other children picked on me for being a ginger. She said that ‘In Ireland, a country with no blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or Jews, bigots will improvise ... and that stupidity can travel the world at least twice before common sense ever gets up to put its boots on.”

“True,” I agreed as I started to collect the dishes from the table, “and if you and I didn’t suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, generations of gingers that come after us are just going to get murdered in pre-school because they won’t have any survival skills ... or more likely, be the ones doing the murdering.

It was frankly the best and mostly lively week leading up to Christmas Eve that I could remember. Aunt Beverly was still enjoying her game of catching Jessica in the act of compounding lies with yet more lies, and never giving a clue that she’d been wise to the game from the start.