RetroXotique

When I was in a private girls' high school a few years ago (this was in Southern Ontario , by the way) there was a very attractive biology teacher in her late thirties or so named Ms. Knox who was generally regarded as a bitch. I think the reason she was so unpopular was not only her very authoritative attitude (authoritative even for a strict girls' school) but because we were envious of how attractive she looked. Her clothing was always very tasteful, but also very sexy: far sexier than what you would expect from such a generally frumpy institution were the female teachers tended to wear baggy skirt suits, or long schoolmarmish skirts and sweaters. The men weren't worth mentioning (and I didn't much care, being (at that time, secretly) a lesbian). The girls' uniform was a boring pleated plaid skirt, with the school tartan on it, and a full white shirt and tie. Ms. Knox, on the other hand, tended towards tight skirts and Chanel-like suits.

It was tightness that seemed to be her way around the female teachers' dress code, which forbade them to wear pants entirely, and skirts of less than a certain length. Long tight skirts and sometimes tight tops were Ms. Knox's trademark. There was even a rumour that she wore a girdle, but few believed it because girdles were regarded as hopelessly uncool - and however much you disliked Ms. Knox, you had to admit she was very cool, in every sense of the word. As well, no one seemed to remember as I had that one time in a history lecture she gave while filling in for Miss Arnaud, Ms. Knox had briefly gotten onto the topic of women's fashions in the twentieth century; I distinctly remember her making some sort of disparaging comment about girdles in the 1950s which implied that women would never have worn them had they not been forced to. I used to debate within myself, therefore, whether Ms. Knox wore pantyhose, or (and this struck me as the most attractive possibility) stockings and a garter belt. I always hoped it was the latter because I have a thing for garter belts, but came to the conclusion that a woman who clearly despised girdles as much as the rest of us did would probably spurn any kind of retro underwear.

I found her the most attractive woman I had ever seen. She was thin but large-breasted, and seemed to wear very strong super-support bras in keeping with her classy demeanor. She had very red lipstick, long red nails, and black hair done in a very sharp looking cleopatra cut. She was highly intelligent and looked it too, especially with her big round dark-rimmed glasses. We girls envied her because our own dress code was just too rigid for us to bend it in the direction of stylishness or individuality. Whenever I was walking down a hallway, if Ms. Knox happened to be in front of me I would follow her for as long as I could for the view, being very careful not to follow too closely and thereby arouse suspicion. However, I always felt a desperate wish to follow more closely, to observe in detail every move of her hips beneath her tight skirt.

One day I think I must have followed her a little too long and incautiously. As she turned a corner into the library, she glanced over her shoulder at me and said, "goodness Cunningham, with your grades in biology I'm sure you have better things to do than follow me around." I was momentarily terrified. Did she know what I was up to? I wanted no one to suspect my unorthodox sexuality (I have since come out by the way, with no regrets), least of all her! But my terrified heart slowed down its pounding when she added dismissively, "if it's your mark from the last test you want from me, it was a fifty-two." I stammered a "thank you, ma'am," and rushed away, breathing a sigh of relief.

While following Ms. Knox I always hoped I would luckily catch her bending over in one of her tight skirts. Once I even rushed to biology class very early (highly unusual behavior for me) before anyone else was there and took all the chalk off the chalkboard ledges and put it on the floor beneath the chalkboard. I hoped that Ms. Knox would come in, see the chalk she needed all over the floor, make some comment about irresponsible people leaving things lying about, (there was no way, I hoped, she could guess who had done it and why) and then BEND OVER to pick the chalk up. That would be a sight, I thought, my heart racing, but that goody two-shoes Janet Feld arrived before the teacher and picked up all the chalk like the idiotically responsible citizen she was.

I remember another occasion very clearly. I can remember it in better detail than the other incidents of skirt-watching because it was more unusual. Again, I was following Ms. Knox, from a very safe distance, to the biology class I took with her and about fifteen other students. She was particularly gorgeous that day - all in black, and that was definitely her best colour. She was wearing an open, short-waisted jacket (the kind that is actually too small to close, a bolero jacket I think you would call it) with a tight three-quarter sleeve. She had on underneath that a long-sleeved, high-necked black T-shirt that fit tightly. She was also wearing black high-heeled pumps, black nylons, and likely the tightest skirt she had worn ever: it was made of thin, stretchy black leather and came down to just above the knee. Not only was it very tight at the waist, bottom, and hips, but it was so tight even down towards the knee that she could only walk in very short steps, which exaggerated the sway of her tightly zipped womanly backside quite well. I followed her as she minced up the stairway carefully, stretching the rubbery black leather with every step. Tock tock tock went her heels into the classroom, with me behind her. I sat down near the front by the lugubrious Prissy Czernowitz, who also, I think, had a thing for Ms. Knox though she never admitted it and always criticized her (behind her back, of course).

Today was a "Board of Directors Day," one of those periodic days in our school when several bigshots, mostly men, would visit a classroom or two just to see how things were going. There were several such people seated at the back of our class today, whom Ms. Knox made a point of introducing before beginning her lecture on, well, I think it was saprophytes or something.

The remnants of the previous biology class and their professor, a Mr. Caldwell, were just filing out, after having been a little slow in putting away their day's experiments: dissected frogs. That was to be our assignment next week, and I felt sorry for the still living little fellows I now saw inhabiting an aquarium at the back of the room until such time as they would be killed by Mr. Caldwell (who took care of some of the darker aspects of biology at our school) and presented to us for analysis.

Ms. Knox gave her short lecture on saprophytes and sent us to the lab tables and microscopes arranged around three of the four walls of the room. The fourth wall at the front was covered with the blackboard and had a large slightly raised lecture platform on which Ms. Knox now stood, ignoring us and busily writing things on the board to tell us about when we had finished preparing and observing microscope slides. The various bigshots wandered around here and there, trying to feign interest or knowledge, peering into student's microscopes and asking irrelevant questions.

I was sitting by myself on a high stool at a lab table, trying to see something in my microscope, when I heard a kind of wettish "kershlop" sound behind me. I turned and looked down. It was an escaped frog on the floor, and apparently no one else had noticed. He jumped a couple more times, towards the front of the room, and sat there bug-eyed, as frogs do.

Then he took another spring, right onto the lecture platform where he landed, still unnoticed, not an inch behind Ms. Knox's feet. I caught my breath. One step backwards and she would squish him horribly under her spikey heel. I am a rather shy person, even now, and hated the idea of shouting out loud for the whole class to hear, "Ms. Knox, don't step back, there's a frog behind you!" so I hesitated. But that poor froggie, I thought to myself, he's so close to being killed you really ought to do something. But I couldn't help hesitating some more. Then I thought, to hell with it, I'll just have to . . . Leaning sideways slightly to finish a sentence on the board, Ms. Knox had spread her knees about as far apart as they could go in that straining skirt: which must have been, really, just a few inches. Apparently, it was just enough. It was right up that narrow hot tunnel of leather, nylon, and self-assured sexuality that the frog sprang. My heart stopped. Ms. Knox dropped her chalk and took the deepest, quickest inhaled breath I have ever known a human being to take. She tottered back from the blackboard a couple of steps, and then her legs clamped together like a living steel vice. She stood there, back towards us and a little knock-kneed, as her hands groped wildly around the outside of the skirt: hips, buttocks, lower belly. She groped herself desperately, like a fifteen year old male gropes his first date in the back of a car.

She began to emit these half-suppressed, very soft, very high pitched squealing noises: "Eeeeee. Ooooo. Eeeee," though still, miraculously, no one but myself seemed to notice. Then she put her hands firmly on each hip. She yanked her hips to the left with incredible violence. A couple of students happened to look up from their work. She yanked her hips again in the same way, but to the right. One of the bigshots now seemed to notice, though I don't think anyone but myself understood what was going on.

Ms. Knox tottered and turned on her heels as she performed these highly unorthodox maneuvers and she was now facing us. Her face was scarlet red and she was biting her lower lip something fierce. She now cranked her hips forward as far as her abdominal muscles could strain them and then fired her ass back in a lightning movement, wiggling it frantically at the end of her stroke. Then forward again, and wham! back went her butt like a rocket. Forward, wham! wiggle-wiggle; forward, wham! wiggle-wiggle. You could see by how far she arched back that she really had amazing flexibility for a woman almost forty. Knock-kneed, hands still on hips, she kept up these involuntary mechanical thrusts like an out-of-control robot burlesquing a strip-tease, managing to punctuate each thrust with choked-out words like "something . . . skirt . . . can't . . . out!" Then she let out a shriek, grabbed the hem of her skirt, and desperately tried to haul it up as far as it would go..

I was breathless with disbelief at what I was seeing. It was too much like a cartoon or an old slapstick movie to really happen, but it did.

It must have been a hell of a strong skirt, because instead of tearing it simply bunched up about halfway up her thighs and stuck there. She had succeeded only in foolishly locking her thighs together as the hem came up -- presumably the last thing she had intended. She had also succeeded in solving for me the the pantyhose/garter belt controversy: she wore neither. What I saw, what we all saw that is, was the bottom edge of a sleek, bright white, open-ended type girdle with garter tabs holding up her black stockings. "Ms." Knox had been keeping a distinctly unfeminist secret.

She was going hysterical, which was a frightening thing to see. Everyone stared open-mouthed, not knowing what to do. Ms. Knox's hands flew behind her and with the desperation born of panic she tried to unbutton and unzip herself.

"OUT! Get it OUT!" She shrieked. Then the skirt was open and she began hauling down.

I would think that it being such a tight skirt to begin with, she probably would have had to do a great deal of wiggling to get into or out of it even at the best of times. What she did now looked like a fast motion take on the same procedure. She wiggled her hips like a snake burning on a hot driveway.

Finally, the skirt dropped down around her ankles.

No sign of the frog.

Please no, God, may it not be in her girdle, I thought. I never liked this woman but please, not that. I looked around the floor, hoping to see that the frog had in fact escaped.

While some of the more quick-thinking girls gathered their wits and began propelling the males out of the room, no one yet approached Ms. Knox with any actual help in this absurdly humiliating ordeal. Whenever I have looked back on this incident, I have sometimes asked myself whether this was like one of those terrible times where somebody commits a violent crime in full sight of many witnesses and nobody does anything. I don't think so. How do you bring yourself to undress your feared and respected (however disliked) schoolteacher in public? On the other hand, how do you just walk away and leave her in her terrible state? Also, most of the people in the room probably had no idea at that point what the hell was happening.

In her struggle to get out of her skirt her shirt had ridden up to reveal most of the rest of her amazingly tight longline girdle, which ended just below the bra and had a sturdy zipper at the side. With all the twisting and turning Ms. Knox's girdled backside was now towards me again.

Gasping, I could see the frog was underneath the girdle alright.

Everyone in that room who saw what I did probably experienced the same involuntary muscular contraction.

Craning her neck to look backwards, Ms. Knox trembled in abstract, round-eyed terror and asked softly through her big red lips, "where? . . ." as her blood-red nails fluttered over her foundation garment towards her behind. God only knows she must have known where better than anyone in that room. She simply couldn't believe it.

Then she fainted. She was caught by Prissy and Janet who were standing nearby. I leaped forward to help too. The rest of the girls either ran in terror or took off to get a nurse, or smelling salts, or whatever it was they were thinking of. The three of us left took it upon ourselves to extricate the offending animal from its poor victims' girdle as quickly as possible.

Which was not quick at all, of course. To this day I have no idea how this woman got into and out of such a girdle by herself; or how the frog did it, for that matter. The frog, by the way, was unharmed - another miracle.

Of course, Ms. Knox could never teach at that school again. After what had happened, how could she maintain the respect of her students? She moved to a private girls' school in Quebec where no one had heard of the incident. From what I heard from my reliable source at that school she did recover from her trauma, amazingly enough, to become the same bitch she had always been, though she did have to take time off to recover and receive a lot of counselling. Predictably, back in my school, there were jokes (you can imagine) about " Fort Knox " and such. The girls in my year developed a saying after that. Whenever someone was in serious trouble, we'd say, "well, there's a frog in her girdle!"

Ms. Knox did go back to her same classy, sexy clothing style from what I hear from my contact in Quebec . A couple of things, however, did change, and it makes you think about how a bad incident in a person's life can make a permanent impression on her. The last I heard, Ms. Knox was still keeping a personal rule she had established after her misfortune. School regulations be damned - whenever there are to be frogs in the biology lab Ms. Knox wears PANTS: pants of sturdy denim or leather and very tight so that nothing, but NOTHING can get into them but Ms. Knox herself, and that just barely. I also have it from my reliable source who must remain nameless that Ms. Knox has another personal, if more secret rule which she holds to religiously and hides beneath her skirt every time she wears one: it's called the panty-girdle.