The Kingdom of Childhood Page 10

  “What did I do?”

  “Pulling on my hair like that. I wasn’t going anywhere, you know. There was no need to treat me like a freakin’ farm animal.”

  The crowds of people moving all around them seemed to exist in a different world. Zach was alone, with only Fairen standing across from him with her strange stony stare, barking words at him that made no sense. After the silence in which he struggled to gather his thoughts he asked, “Well, why didn’t you say anything then? Or after?”

  “Because I’m bigger than that. I’m not going to bitch you out and make it awkward. But it’s done now, all right? So give me space.”

  “I’m sorry.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and squinted at her, his head tipping, entreating her to forgive him. “Really, I’m sorry.”

  The sidelong look she offered failed to absolve him. She disappeared into the crowd of Madrigals gathered in front of the pizza stand. He stayed in place, his feet unwilling to move, his rumbling stomach unexpectedly silent. With pizza in hand she walked past him, back to the car she had been traveling in, without even acknowledging him. By the time he slammed the car door and handed Scott his soda, he felt bewildered almost to tears.

  Back on the highway, Judy turned on some crap ’70s music. He fished his CD player out of his backpack and put on the headphones, turning up the Goo Goo Dolls loud enough to drown out her purple hippie haze. By the time it reached the eleventh track, he had himself so worked up that the despondent lyrics of “Iris” were intolerable. He shut off the player, tore the headphones from his ears, and chucked the whole setup into his backpack.

  “You okay back there?” asked Judy.

  Temple was asleep, his head lolling against the window. Scott was still gazing out at the landscape through half-closed eyes, portable CD player spinning. In a grudging voice Zach replied, “Yeah.”

  “You’ve been very quiet.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “I think you ought to stay home tomorrow and sleep in. You can tell your teachers I told you to cut class.”

  He indulged her with a half smile. Keeping her eyes on the road, she reached back and patted him on the thigh. It was enough to remind him that he wasn’t repugnant to every woman on earth, only to one, and that lifted his spirits very slightly. He looked at Judy’s mild expression, her hands back at ten and two on the wheel, and considered how crazy it was that inside that Suzy Homemaker exterior was a woman who’d grab his ass while tongue-kissing him in a room where they could easily have been caught. Suddenly he laughed. He said, “Turn up the radio.”

  She twisted the dial. “Do you like this song?”

  “Like it? I love it. I love the Lemonheads.” Sometimes the radio seemed to be possessed. It could read his mind.

  She grinned. “It’s not the Lemonheads, it’s Simon and Garfunkel.”

  “It’s ‘Mrs. Robinson,’” he insisted. “It’s a Lemonheads song. I’m sure of it.”

  “Then they must have covered it, because this is Simon and Garfunkel. They’re not going to play the Lemonheads on an oldies rock station. And I remember this song from when I was your age.”

  He gave up the argument. She was probably right; what he had mistaken for an unfamiliar version of the CD track was starting to sound more folksy than live. Still, the coincidence was uncanny. He glanced at Temple and at Scott, and then, satisfied that they were too brain-dead to be listening, asked, “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “Sure I do. Do you?”

  He worked up his nerve and said, “It’s about an older woman who’s into younger guys.”

  She laughed. “Everyone thinks that, just because they played it in The Graduate. But that’s not it at all. That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “What do you think it’s about, then?”

  Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. She glanced at him in the rearview mirror and said, “It’s about a woman who’s going crazy. She’s trapped in the suburbs and in her crappy marriage and she’s losing it.”

  He nodded. Her interpretation wasn’t as interesting as his. He said, “Ah.”

  “Or rather, she’s lost it.”

  He looked at her, at the funny smile she had on her face, her eyes properly focused on the road. She laughed again and said, “Depressing, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I like my version better.”

  She rolled her window partially down. The sound of the wind crashed through the car, drowning out the music. She rested her elbow against the ledge and held her fingers up to the outside air, moving them as if to better feel the wind. “Maybe it’s both,” she said. “Would you blame her?”

  On Monday afternoon Dan lingered in my classroom when he came to pick up Aidan. As the other children left, one by one, with their parents and caregivers, I regarded him with a combination of curiosity and dread.

  “How was the choir trip?” he asked.

  “Very nice. The kids took second place.”

  “Didn’t destroy any hotel rooms, did they?”

  I acknowledged this with a quick laugh. “Of course not. Model citizens, every one of them.”

  “I expect you had a better weekend than I did, then.” He glanced toward the hallway, then at his son, placidly playing with toy animals on the carpet. “The auditor from the Department of Health called me on Friday. She wants us to voluntarily close the school for a week until the measles infections subside. I told her no.”

  “Tell her yes,” I said immediately. “Whatever it takes to appease them.”

  “We can’t do that, Judy.” His tone disparaged my solution, making him sound, for the moment, much like Russ. “I’ll have fifty parents in here asking for prorated refunds of their tuition dollars. The kids who’ve had their shots aren’t at risk, and the others have probably been exposed already. A closure won’t make any difference at all.”

  I shrugged. “I think it’s a ridiculous situation, any way you look at it. The school has no control over whether parents vaccinate their children. All we can do is get our paperwork in order, and beyond that, no one can hold us accountable for the decisions of the parents.”

  “That doesn’t mean we won’t turn into the piñata for it anyway. And if our enrollment numbers are down next fall, we’re pretty screwed.”

  “We’re always pretty screwed. We get by.”

  The skin around his eyes creased with irritation. “Maybe your definition of screwed is different from mine. I mean the kind where we don’t get by.”

  I laughed. “How are those class ring sales going, by the way?”

  “Don’t take a dig at me. I’m doing all I can. But I need your help. We have two events coming up.”

  “The Martinmas lantern walk and the bazaar.”

  “Yes. I understand Bobbie Garrison was usually the one to handle the lantern walk, and that you sometimes assisted—”

  “Always assisted. She and I have worked together on projects since college. Had worked. Whichever.” I waved a hand to dismiss my jumbling of tenses. It was a common problem in speaking of Bobbie, the way I shuffled and crunched through words like leaves in various stages of decay.

  “Yes, well, obviously we need extra hands to take care of it this year, since she’s not around to do it.”

  “She’s not, indeed,” I said coolly. “She’s unavailable.”

  He held my gaze with an expression of superhuman patience. “And I know the faculty feels her loss very deeply. If you can take over the planning, that would be a huge help. Make it a tribute to her. I think everybody would appreciate that.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “And this year it’s very important that we put the event out to the community. Call the local newspapers and see if they’ll send photographers. Advertise the bazaar everyplace that makes sense. And for the lantern walk, we need to try to get as many kids to show up as humanly possible. I’m worried that the school is starting to look undesirable. That will be death for us next year unless we turn it around.”

  I
nodded. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  His words were slow, carefully chosen. “I recognize…that your kindergarten is what compels most of our parents to enroll their kids in Sylvania Waldorf. It comes recommended, then exceeds their expectations. I don’t always agree with you about the direction of the school—”

  “You don’t often agree with me,” I corrected.

  He laughed uneasily. “True. But I do recognize that the strength of a Waldorf kindergarten will make or break the school. And so I…honor what you offer us.”

  “Thank you.” Behind him, the door opened and Zach sauntered in, wearing a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt printed with an image of Icarus arching toward the sky. He hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and approached me, smiling.

  “Howdy, Teach,” he greeted me.

  “Mr. Patterson,” replied Dan with enthusiasm. “How goes school?”

  “Fine. Good.”

  “Are you getting a lot done on the bazaar?”

  Zach nodded. His hair slipped into his eyes. “It’s going better than usual this year,” I interjected. “We have quite a few donations from the community. Massage certificates, doll-making, things like that. And the crafts are starting to come in. The third grade made some beautiful beeswax candles.”

  Dan smiled. “And we have that playhouse you built for us, Zach. That’ll bring in some excellent bids. It’s a wonderful job you did.”

  “Thanks. My dad’s a carpenter. I’ve been doing that stuff, like, forever.”

  Dan nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. “Very good. Keep up the good work.”

  He departed, leaving my classroom door ajar. As soon as he was out of earshot I turned to Zach and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He widened his eyes and grimaced, shoulders twitching uneasily, the body language teenagers always use to let an adult know she’s crazy. “Asking you for my next job,” he told me.

  “I told you I was going to sign off on all your service hours.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think you meant it. You can’t give me a free pass on a graduation requirement just because you made out with me.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to gather my flagging patience. “Zachary, I thought we agreed we were going to forget all about that.”

  He shrugged. “That’s fine. But, like, if I expected you to sign off on me when I didn’t do all the work, then I wouldn’t be forgetting about it, right? I really would be whoring myself out.”

  “Zach.”

  “I’m just saying.” He caught my pleading gaze and shrugged again. “I’m showing character and integrity.”

  I sighed. “Don’t come to my classroom, all right? I’ll give you the work, but you can come by my house to talk to me about it. When you come waltzing in here when Dr. Beckett’s speaking with me, it looks suspicious.”

  His laughter mocked me. “And me coming over to your house wouldn’t? C’mon. He knows I’m working with you. He’s the one who set the whole thing up. Don’t be paranoid.”

  I considered his reasoning for only a second, then shook my head. “Sorry. I don’t feel very reassured.”

  “That’s because you’re paranoid.”

  He looked at me from under those shaggy bangs, and the impishness in his gaze was the same as the first time I’d looked at him in my rearview mirror, chastising him for his dirty joke. Now I took in the irreverence in his eyes, the mild humor in his smile, and considered the curious nature of his draw to me. In Ohio, secure at the end of Fairen’s invisible leash, he had seemed so young that I wondered at my sanity for ever having engaged with him. But there would come the moments, as now, when his eyes would snap sharply, knowingly, or he would stretch his lean body with that peculiar confident grace, that conscious grace—and I could feel the rumbling thunder of the man he would become, and the urge to reach for it like a soap bubble I knew would be destroyed in the grabbing. It was something I needed to resolve.

  “I don’t think this is the right place to discuss this,” I told him. “Do you mind if we finish this conversation somewhere else?”

  “Depends,” he parried. “Are you going to buy me coffee?”

  In Judy’s car he slid the seat back, ostensibly to make more legroom, but really so he could watch her in a covert way. Thinking about Fairen, about Ohio, brought on a gloomy, cloudy feeling, yet a quick segue to the memory of his return-trip conversation with Judy lightened his mind. In the days that followed he had spent a fair amount of time teasing out the subtext of their “Mrs. Robinson” conversation, weighing it against his memories of her response in the playhouse, and concluding that, for all her uptight frowning and prissy apologies, she didn’t regret it at all and would eagerly do it again given the opportunity. The concept was, at once, both dangerous and delectable. It was a rush.

  At Starbucks he leaned against the rounded counter of the service area, watching Judy as she paid, and tried to gain some measure of how his theories might find root in reality. Not for the first time, he felt doubtful. Her face—wide at the cheekbones, tapering to a small childlike chin—had a youthful quality to its shape, but around her eyes and forehead she was unmistakably forty-something, unimpressed with the world and a little tired. Her long dark hair was interspersed with coarser gray strands. She was not the sort of middle-aged woman with bleached hair and a push-up bra, staking out the pool boy in a loose towel. And yet there was something about her—in her slim body, perhaps, or the tight mouselike way she moved—that spoke of a keyed-up part of her, a hair trigger that, by chance, hadn’t been knocked in a while.

  He wondered, in an idle way, how many lovers she had had. How long it had been for her, or, for that matter, how recently.

  All the tables were crammed with teens recently released from the public high school; Zach knew there was no chance they could sit and talk, as Judy had planned. The barista handed him his coffee, and Judy, in her efficient way, took hers as she walked past and moved straight out the door.

  As they climbed back into her car she shook her hair back and said, “Do I need to just take you home, then? That took longer than I expected.”

  “Nah. It’s better if I drink this first. My mom doesn’t like it when I drink coffee. She says the caffeine is bad for my bone development.”

  She smiled. “That doesn’t surprise me, after what you said about my fridge.”

  “Yeah. My parents are really big on that stuff. I was a vegetarian until I was fourteen. My folks still are. But once I hit puberty I started craving meat, even though I’d never had it. So I took that as a sign.” He sipped his coffee. “I’ll probably go back to it once I stop growing, though. It’s, like, ingrained.”

  “The nutrition part, or the cruelty-to-animals part?”

  “Both.” They were parked perpendicular to the storefront, and he watched the people walking in and out, focused only on caffeine. “My parents are major pacifists. They had a hard time with it when I was five and I desperately wanted to take karate. We compromised on judo because the principle is to use your opponent’s force against them. They were okay with that.” He set his knee against the dashboard. “My mom tried to get me into yoga instead, but it didn’t really take. She’s a yoga teacher, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah. She’s been taking me with her to her classes since I was born. I’m good at it, it’s just not my thing. But even she’s not doing it right now, since the midwife put her on bed rest.”

  Judy nodded. “How’s she feeling these days, your mom?”

  “Tired of being pregnant. She’s going stir-crazy. The mid wife warned her if she doesn’t settle down she’ll hurt herself and won’t be able to have the baby at home, and that kind of freaked her out. She doesn’t want to go to a hospital.”

  “I can understand that. Maggie and Scott were both born at home.”

  “I was, too. So she wants that, but she also believes in wellness over illness and she says being in bed all day is terrible for her circulatio
n. She’s always talking my dad into giving her foot rubs to get her chi moving.”

  Judy sighed and leaned back, both hands around her coffee. “I wish someone would do that for me. The only time I sit down all day is for storytelling. It’s like being a waitress.”

  “I can rub them,” he offered.

  She laughed. “I don’t think so. The point of this coffee run is to lay out some professional boundaries, not to get my feet massaged by you.”

  “Don’t make a big deal out of it. I give them to my mom all the time. I know reflexology. My dad taught me.”

  She gave him a doubtful look.

  “Nobody’s watching,” he said. “C’mon.”

  He turned in the seat to face her and held out his hands. With a sigh, she slipped her foot out of its shoe and set it on his knee. He pulled it onto his lap and began with his thumbs beneath the first and second toes.

  “The different areas correspond to different parts of the body,” he explained. He moved his thumbs around, demonstrating. “Lungs. Liver. Stomach. Massaging removes obstacles that block your chi.”

  “There’s definitely something blocking my chi these days.”

  “Maybe it’s your kidneys.” He rubbed a spot at the center of her foot. “The Chinese believe the kidneys hold massive amounts of chi. Do you feel anything?”

  “I don’t know about my kidneys. It feels good, though.”

  He worked his way down to her heel, then back up, rubbing between each toe. She relaxed against the door and closed her eyes, shoulders easing backward, and he grinned.

  “See, it’s working,” he said. “You’re starting to melt.”

  She laughed. “It must be my kidneys.”

  Her foot arched in his hand; feeling the response of her body aroused him. He moved his fingers lightly up her Achilles tendon to her ankle, massaging around the small bones. She did not twitch or pull away; instead, she stretched her calf to give him more room to work.

  “You know you can give a woman an orgasm if you rub a certain way?” he asked, and her eyes opened, following her rising brows. He walked his fingers around her foot in the pattern he had read about. “It’s like, ankle, stretch, thumbnail up the arch. Repeat.”