Chapter 15

The waitress recognized Rachel and Anna immediately. I suppose they leave a lasting impression because of their bald heads and collars. Anna was wearing a choker necklace but standing next to her mother in a mini-skirt and skimpy blouse. They were an unmistakable pair when we were in public.

Anna’s nipples were already hard when they walked into the restaurant. The cold air blowing over the booth we were seated in only chilled them to the point that her blouse was tented.

“Great, another reason for people to stare at me,” Anna chuckled when she noticed an elderly man staring at her pokeys.

“As long as they are looking at your tits, they won’t notice your sour face,” her brother teased playfully.

“True,” Anna acknowledged with a little snicker. “It’s also a small price to pay to eat with silverware and sit at a table.”

“You get to sit at the lunch counter at school every day,” Rachel reminded her that was something to be grateful for.

I hadn’t seen them share a meal since the new rules went into effect at home. “You guys don’t even use silverware?”

“No, we sit on the floor at Brodie’s feet and eat with our fingers now,” Anna admitted. There was an occupied booth behind us. I was certain they could overhear our conversation. Anna either didn’t care or realize that, so she spoke at a normal volume as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing to talk about in public.

Rachel looked at the menu and then placed it flat down on the table. “How does this work now when we are in public? You pick our meals at home. Are you ordering for Anna and me?” she asked Brodie.

“Yeah, does Pepperoni pizza sound good to everyone?”

We all nodded. I was surprised at how breezy that decision was for Brodie to make. I could have never imagined deciding what my parents wanted to have for dinner. He could have been sadistic and ordered food they didn’t like. Instead, he chose something we could all agree upon.

“As long as it’s not pineapple on my pizza,” Anna shrugged off the loss of choice on what to eat.

“Ooh, Sardines. Those are yucky,” Rachel offered another disgusting ingredient, and her daughter agreed that would be miserable.

“I’ve seen you eat actual dog food before, and you turn your nose up at sardines?” Brodie commented on his surprise that his mother drew the line at sardines.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t eat sardines. I just think they are yucky,” Rachel admitted. “Your father and I were really into puppy play, so a big part of my life was living like a dog. You learn to appreciate good food when you suddenly have the privilege of choice taken from you and are forced to eat gruel and dog food.”

“You didn’t start to hate Dad for it?” Brodie said.

“No more than I hate you for forbidding me to sit on furniture at home. I like to serve, and I voluntarily agree to your rules. Your father didn’t debate or discuss after I committed to let him own me.”

“Yeah, but don’t you grow to resent it after a while? Watching us sit at the table and enjoy delicious fried chicken and mashed potatoes that you made from scratch, laughing and talking, and you were in a cage with your hands cuffed behind your back eating Alpo from a dog dish? You didn’t ever just want to join us?”

It was a good question, and I could tell from Rachel’s pause that she was considering her words and not going to brush the question off like a joke.

“Yeah, sometimes I felt sorry for you, Mom. You looked so miserable with dog food dripping off your chin,” Anna quivered at the very thought of the mental image.

“I am really sorry that I made you both feel that way. You laughed about it and fed me through the cages. I thought you were okay with it?” she asked.

“Sorry, I didn’t really put myself in your place and think about how it may have made you feel though,” Brodie admitted.

“I didn’t want either of you to do that. I wasn’t looking for pity. It is what it is. We don’t get the privilege of silverware at home. We can still eat – even soup; we just slurp the bowl,” Rachel admitted.

“I am not an ogre; I’d probably let you use a soup spoon if you begged,” Brodie snickered.

“Thank you, Brodie,” Rachel genuinely thanked her son for his generosity. “To answer your question, there were times that I did question the sanity of agreeing to live as a slave. My parents and some of my siblings definitely thought I was the cuckoo. It wasn’t easy, and I won’t make light of it because it took a lot of mental endurance not to gag over the smell of Alpo. I did enjoy watching you laugh and joke, even at my expense, just as I do now. I never once felt bad that you enjoyed a good meal that I made. I never resented your father for feeding me like that, either.”

The waitress came to take our order right after she finished explaining that there had been no hard feelings. Brodie ordered for the table, but instead of just ordering a large pepperoni, he ordered us two slices each.

He ordered a Pepsi for himself and water for the other girls. He ordered two slices of Pepperoni for himself and two slices of ham, pineapple, and extra sardines for Anna and Rachel. They groaned but in a sort of “no way!”! You didn’t really do that?” sort of way.

Brodie was serious, though, and reminded them it was much better than dog food.

“I’ll try it, but then I’ll try anything,” Anna admitted.

He asked me to order for myself. I was tempted in solidarity to have what Anna was having. I was way too chicken, though. I ordered a diet Coke and just a single slice of Pepperoni.

“You should have more than that,” Rachel’s first thought was not to complain about what had been ordered but whether or not I’d have enough dinner. I assured her that was all I usually ate.

The waitress took our order without comment on the unusual nature of the toppings.

“I’ll learn to keep my preferences to myself in the future,” Anna joked.

“I wasn’t going to contradict you in front of the waitress, Brodie, but we agreed to let you decide what we would eat at meals on the understanding that we’d all eat the same food,” Rachel said politely.

“I was thinking about what you said about eating something gross, making you appreciate when you get good food,” Brodie said.

“No, you were thinking about making us eat dog food, and this was the closest thing you could find,” Rachel grinned and accepted that her son had a bit of a sadistic streak. “It’s fine, but if we can’t finish our portions, what is the correction?”

“Same as at home,” Brodie shrugged. One of the conditions of the new rules was that not only did Brodie have the right to choose their diet, but they had to finish and not waste what he chose for them.

“We’ve eaten all of our food so far, and usually, your corrections involve bruising our asses. I am just asking as a courtesy to know whether you are going to disrupt these people’s dinner, making us waddle and quack like ducks while you throw things at us or spank our asses in the dining room.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Brodie assured her.

“I know, as long as it’s at home, that’s fine. I’ll do my best to finish what I am provided,” Rachel said with a tone that suggested she was trying to remind Anna to do the same.

The family laughed and talked, and when the food came, it was piping hot. The sardines looked so disgusting. They were tiny black fish all lined up and cooked into the cheese over the pineapple and ham.

On Anna’s first bite, she nearly dry-heaved onto her plate. “Oh god, the pineapple is the only thing that kills the fish flavor.”

“You like eating pussy; I thought you would love Sardines, Sis,” Brodie chuckled.

The waitress and a few people sitting nearby noticed us and stared, but nobody said anything to us. We did get a lot of odd stairs, and people often made remarks about the girls. They brushed it off and ignored it for the most part.

There was one particular brash guy. He had a paunch belly and a beard and looked like he was loud everywhere he went. “Looks like female Kojak and Sign-Aid O’Conner,” he said to his wife and kids. The chubby wife laughed.

“Go back to your trailer park and play sit and spin with your cousin-wife,” Anna whispered under her breath. “It’s not like I haven’t been called those names before, and it’s Sinead O’Connor, not Sign-Aid.”

“It’s okay to tease me and your brother, but I won’t have you denigrate people in public,” Rachel told her daughter firmly.

“Sorry, Mom, I just get tired of people who clearly have no room to mock anyone for their appearance ripping for mine,” Anna said.

“If you let me punish you guys, then I’d march her over to the hillbilly family and admit what she said about them and ask if they want to watch me spank her ass,” Brodie promised.

“I don’t think they’d appreciate that around their kids but thank you for the sentiment, Brodie. I didn’t have a problem with you sending me outside to ask Mr. Johnson what correction I should get because he’s seen us doing things like that, and he wasn’t shocked. Even if I agreed that your sister should be corrected for making a comment at the table in front of her house guest, I don’t think it’s fair to involve vanilla outsiders in our discipline routines.”

Anna excused herself from the table without asking permission and walked over to the family. “Pardon me,” she said. The fat couple and their bratty pig-faced kids stopped filling their faces with pizza long enough to acknowledge her.

“I couldn’t help but overhear you call me and my mother Kojak and Sinead O’Conner,” Anna spoke calmly and pronounced the name of the Irish singer correctly.

“You should mind your damn business,” the wife held a slice of pizza in her hands.

“I said something derogatory about you both that I am ashamed of, and I just wanted to apologize.”

“Well, who gives a shit?” the man said.

Anna walked back to our booth with her shoulders slumped and a defeated look on her face.

“Did apologizing make you feel better?” Rachel asked.

“No,” Rachel admitted.

“Exactly. They were oblivious to the offense that you committed. I think you wanted to passive-aggressively go over there and let them know you heard them so you could make them feel bad. Did it work?”

“No,” Anna didn’t argue with that observation.

“You should have apologized to THIS table for your behavior, and even though it’s low protocol, a courtesy request to leave the table to Brodie and Anna would have been expected,” Rachel explained.

I was surprised how Rachel used moments like that to teach her daughter how to be a proper submissive. She made her daughter feel like she was an attention seeker, and that was surprising.

“This is a good learning experience for us to eat out and talk about. Can we agree on a rule that even in low protocol, we have to ask permission to leave the table?” Rachel asked her family.

“What if Anna is with us, and we do not agree?” Brodie asked.

“I do not think that’s a realistic scenario. Could you give me a hypothetical where you imagine that happening?” Rachel asked.

“I asked to go to the bathroom; Susan said yes because she is nice, and Brodie is trying to teach me a lesson and make me do the pee-pee dance and squirm in my chair,’ Anna suggested.

“Okay, I do not want there to be a hierarchy, but I think in that situation, you let them work it out and trust that your brother has the sense to let you go before you squirt your Gatorade all over the booth and we end up being banned from Gino’s?”

We laughed at that scenario.

No one else had a “counteroffer,” so Rachel made a note on her phone to add it when they got home.