The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  “Have you ever done it?”

  He grinned and rubbed the back of her calf. Still, she didn’t flinch. “No. Do you want me to try?”

  “Let’s not,” she said, but left her foot where it was.

  He ran his nail up the midline of her foot, and her toes curled. “Come on,” he pressed. “I won’t tell anyone if it works.”

  Her gaze drifted to the customers outside the Starbucks. He realized, with an electric thrill, that she was considering it. Teasingly he added, “I bet that’s what’s blocking your chi.”

  One of her eyebrows went up. “If it was, would it be any of your business?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want it to be?”

  She smiled, but it looked thin, even bitter. “You don’t pay much attention to the news, my friend,” she informed him, and the familiar phrase caught him by surprise. Quietly she continued, “And this is what I wanted to talk to you about. People go to jail for things like this, Zach. Women do. Teachers do. Somebody always finds out.”

  “They go to jail for getting their feet rubbed?”

  “No. They go to jail for getting involved with students. And only one party ever gets blamed, no matter who instigates it. Do you know which party that would be?”

  “You’re not involved with me, though.”

  Her cheeks lifted in the slightest hint of amusement. “You just propositioned my feet.”

  “They’re just feet.”

  “But that’s not the kind of foot rub you give your mother, now is it?”

  “No, but my mother doesn’t stick her tongue down my throat, either.”

  Her smile grew weary and she tugged her leg from his grasp. “I need to take you home. I don’t think your mother would want to have any role in this conversation.”

  “You might be surprised. She’s not as uptight as you think.”

  Judy slid her foot back into her shoe. “Well, I know a little more about mothers than you do.”

  The condescension in her tone made him feel small. He knew a thing or two about adults and their secrets, and he was tired of them—his own parents in particular—acting like he was too naïve to make even the most obvious connections. “You don’t know much about my mother,” he countered. “She’s not uptight at all. She cheated on my dad with one of her yoga students.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “She did. A guy who was in her Dynamics class.” Zach knew the man’s name, but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Ponytailed, with thin, hairy legs, he often came to class in a shirt printed with John Lennon’s face and the caption, “Long Live Dr. Winston O’Boogie.” Over time Zach came to think of him by a private nickname: Booger.

  “He wasn’t a kid or anything,” Zach continued. “He was probably like 28 or 29. I think that’s one of the reasons why she was so gung-ho about moving away from New Hampshire. He was still at her studio and I think she felt weird about being pregnant around him.”

  Judy nodded as though none of this surprised her, and her unimpressed reaction both disappointed and soothed him. Perhaps the act he had seen as a gross betrayal, a secret calamity, was normal enough in the world of adults; perhaps he had overreacted. She asked, “Is he the father of the baby?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure they broke it off awhile before that. I think.” He hoped. “We moved in June, and I hadn’t seen him at the studio since the fall. But I was doing judo after school most days, so I don’t know. I didn’t want to see anything I’d feel obligated to tell my dad about, so I kind of avoided the studio once I figured out what was going on.”

  Her laugh was full of grim understanding. “I did the same thing when I was young and realized my father was having an affair with our housekeeper. Oh, I was so angry. And I blamed her, really, not him. He could do no wrong, because he was my father. But her—oh, watch your back, sweetheart.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, same here. Hey. Give me your other foot.”

  She plunked it onto his lap. “How did you figure it out?”

  He shrugged and began to massage her sole. “I just knew. There wasn’t any one blazing moment where I caught them in the act or anything. It’s just that there’s a certain amount of touching that goes on between yoga teachers and their students. You get familiar with it, so you can tell when it goes beyond what’s normal. And it was definitely beyond normal.”

  “Maybe you did see it, and you blocked it out.”

  He worked his fingers down the middle of her foot, and frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe you did catch them in the act, and you just don’t remember. I think that happened to me. I remember coming home and finding the house empty, and turning the doorknob to my father’s room, and then running down the path, crying. After that I knew to stay out of the house when she was there. But I didn’t see a thing, not that I recall.” She drew an oval in the air in front of her forehead. “It’s as though, in the filmstrip of that sequence of events, that part of the film was exposed. Not that I’m complaining. If it was that traumatic, I’m sure it’s better if I don’t recall it. I’ve got enough odds and ends knocking around in there.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think that happened to me. I’d be pretty messed up if it did, and I don’t think I’m too messed up.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said, and he grinned. “I’ve never had to pull a student aside before to ask him to mind his manners with me. Can we come to an agreement about that, please? Because I’d rather shake hands on it now than have to do my Mussolini impression down the road.”

  “Maybe I’d like your Mussolini impression.”

  “Oh, stop it. Come on now.”

  It was like a judo match: find your opponent’s point of weakness, and exploit it. Judy’s was easy to identify: the words marching dutifully out of her mouth didn’t match the supple way her muscles responded to his touch. She had rested against his thigh a small model of what the rest of her body would do, were it not for the little problem of propriety.

  Her gaze was firm, and he met it easily, still smiling. He moved his hand slowly over her foot: ankle. Stretch. Thumbnail up the arch.

  She stretched her toes in a fan, and smirked.

  Repeat.

  Repeat.

  She lifted her foot from its resting place on his leg. Slowly, she ran it along his inner thigh. It came to rest at the front of his jeans, and only when she nestled it against him did he pull his breath in through his teeth. His hand flew to caress the part that caressed him. He tried, and failed, to control the urge to arch against the counterpressure. In the moment of blinding arousal his head tipped back against the closed window and, faintly, hurt.

  “Stop screwing with me, Zach,” she said, her voice low but infused with a wavering note that was almost like fear. “I mean it. It’s not cute and it’s not funny. It’s my fucking job. It’s my reputation. I’m not going to throw it all away so you can play seduce-the-teacher. Because you wouldn’t know what to do with me even if it worked.”

  Her foot retreated, and she pushed it down into its shoe. He shifted back into his seat and combed his hair over his eyes. As the engine turned over, he said, “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” she said, and crazily, her voice was light and pleasant. “So. There’s a box of woolen sheep in my closet that need price stickers. You can come by and get them tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Come by your classroom, you mean?”

  “Sure.” She turned her face toward him and smiled, as though nothing had transpired. “I don’t see why not.”

  10

  During our second year of college, long before either Bobbie or I had heard about a thing called Waldorf school or realized we would make a little life together teaching in one, we shared a dormitory room decorated with my Last Tango in Paris poster and her collection of monkeys of all kinds—plush, balsa wood, jade, coconut shell, cartoon. Her late mother had sewed her two matching twin-sized quilts covered in tiny rosettes of calico, and thes
e we spread on our beds on opposite sides of the little room. The year before, our schedules had been nearly identical—we were both elementary education majors. Sophomore year we had no classes together, but shared two of the same professors, one of whom had something of a reputation.

  “He’s a lech,” Bobbie warned me early in the spring. “One of my friends had him last year. He’ll try to make you buy your A.”

  “With what?”

  “Blankets and beads. What do you think? If you go to talk to him, keep a good distance.” She gestured a wide arc around her body. “Room for the Holy Ghost, as the nuns used to say. Or else he tries to do that trick on you like your mother probably did with the cantaloupe.”

  My mother had never done that trick with the cantaloupe, but I had an idea of what she meant. “What if he scoots in and does it anyway?” I asked. “He’s the professor,” I added, because at that point in my life I had not yet attended enough Women’s Lib rallies to understand I was a little behind the times.

  “Kick him in the balls,” she suggested.

  I laughed rather hysterically. “I could never do that,” I told her. It was not that I didn’t understand revenge. I did, and quite well; perhaps too well. The type that came easily to me was that which was quiet, which comes from the side, which might seem, through squinted eyes, like an act of God. What I could not imagine was the sort of violence where one looks another person in the eye and watches him suffer. It seemed barbaric, and more importantly, not my style.

  I had thought about that when Zach stroked my foot as it rested on his thigh, massaging its inside arch between his thumb and index finger like my breast in that professor’s hand. I hadn’t kicked that man as Bobbie instructed. But I was older now, and I knew there existed more interesting varieties of pain than a knee planted in the groin. There was the kind that shut down all pleasure, and the kind that came folded in with it.

  By the time I returned home from our Starbucks trip I felt confident and a little victorious. With Scott out with his girlfriend and Russ still at the office, I ascended the stairs to my room, dragging behind me the suitcase from Ohio that had been sitting in the dining room since my return. In a month or so Russ would be flying to Iceland for a research trip, and as much as I avoided his office at all costs, I would be considerate enough to finally reunite it with the others in the set so he wouldn’t have to hunt for the right size. The door creaked on its hinges and I shied back, as if he were home to hear me. Straight back was the old sofa, sagging in the center of each cushion; beside it sat a pile of professional journals marked with yellow sticky notes. Against the windowless wall stood a battered desk the color of milky coffee, his computer in the center like a one-eyed heathen god perched on its shrine. While his office at the university offered a bit of décor that suggested a higher purpose for the work therein—photos of rugged crab fishermen earning a living, the beauty of nature along the fragile Arctic coast—his home office dispensed with such fripperies. I crossed the dingy carpet to the closet and tugged the largest black suitcase from its spot beneath a copy-paper box and a pile of sweaters.

  As I dropped it on its side, it hit the floor with a noisy rattle like a child’s toy instrument. Strange. Unzipping it, I found a plastic grocery bag with the handles all tied together; inside were a jumble of white medication bottles. I tried to remember where they could have come from. Russ’s root canal earlier this year? Or perhaps they had belonged to my mother before her death several years ago, and someone had stuffed them in here after we cleaned out her house? It seemed odd that they were not amber prescription bottles, but the type which sit on a pharmacist’s shelf, large and labeled only with the drug information.

  Valium. Xanax. Dexedrine. Nembutal.

  I looked up at Russ’s computer, then at the Xanax bottle in my hand. For a moment I just stood there, reading the labels in confusion. Then it slowly dawned on me that these bottles had not been set aside and forgotten. They had been hidden.

  I zipped the smaller suitcase inside the larger one and put them properly away. Then I lifted the grocery bag and took the whole mess downstairs, feeling nothing more than a bit of curiosity and a small, germinating seed of anger.

  Russ came home just past nine-thirty. He looked surprised to find me seated in the rocking chair by the fireplace, watching the door. Tiny rectangles of light glinted off his glasses as he tipped his head to peer at me over them—progressive lenses were just around the corner for him—but then he dropped his black shoulder bag onto the floor and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Russ,” I said, and the dark, syrupy note to my voice caused him to stop and turn.

  “I was putting a suitcase away in your office today,” I began, “and I found some things in the closet I think might be yours.”

  His reply was hostile. “What were you doing in my office?”

  “Putting away a suitcase. I just said that.”

  “It’s my office. You shouldn’t be in there.”

  “I pay the mortgage, too, dear.”

  “Not much of it.”

  I hefted the bag from the floor beside me and set it on the coffee table. It had occurred to me that the medications might, in fact, be Scott’s. He was a clever enough kid to hide things in plain sight, and enterprising enough to try it as a business venture. But it could have been either of them, for what did I know of this type of drug use? When I was Scott’s age, drugs didn’t come from a lab. They grew on farms, or in my case, in a series of buckets under Gro-Lites in the root cellar of a house around the corner from the deli.

  “That’s not yours,” he said.

  “I realize that.”

  “God, Judy,” he said, explosive all of a sudden, his face wrenched, arms flying out at his sides. “I get home from a long day at work and you dump this shit on me. Get a fucking hobby, why don’t you. I work like a dog all day. I don’t need this.”

  “So they’re yours, then? Not Scott’s?”

  He half turned toward the hallway again and curled his lip at me. “As if you’d be in a position to judge Scott or anybody else. The Queen Stoner herself. Our Lady of Recreational Pharmaceuticals.”

  I regarded him with an indifferent glare, and he snatched the bag from the table. “Stay out of my office,” he ordered.

  “Better hope you don’t get caught driving on that stuff,” I warned. “I won’t be bailing you out. You can sit and rot for all I care.”

  “I wouldn’t call you. Why would I? You haven’t given two shits about me in years. I’d call my lawyer.”

  He hustled up the stairs with his stash, and I rocked my chair gently. A year ago this conversation would have gone very differently—screaming, begging, tears. But my eyes felt utterly dry. Something inside me felt ready for war.

  Eight months, I thought. Only that long until Scott graduated from Sylvania. A year from now I could be anywhere in the world. I would be free.

  I feared I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  Monday wasn’t going well for Zach. At the top of his chemistry test was a red-penned note: See me. Fairen was ignoring him, flirting with a guy from the swim team. He couldn’t even go straight home that afternoon, obligated as he was to stop by Judy’s classroom to pick up some bazaar-related advertising sign he was supposed to repaint. And although he had grown to like Parzival, the previous English unit, Dante’s Inferno was doing nothing for him. He didn’t get it.

  The concept of Hell bored him. He didn’t care if Dante’s view was progressive for its time or deeply personal or raised questions about society. He just didn’t give a shit. Also, he didn’t like having to examine Francesca’s adultery and how her lust for Paolo showed a “weakness of will.” He preferred to think about lust on the following terms: you wanted someone, and they said yes or no. Francesca’s miserable sham of a marriage made it even less explicable why she and her lover ended up in anyone’s version of Hell. Zach believed to his core that the world was ultimately fair. With the obvious exception of his father, he belie
ved if some other guy was balling your wife, odds were on some level you deserved it.

  He endured the afternoon. He endured Dante. As soon as class was dismissed he chucked his backpack onto his shoulder and brushed past his classmates. He pushed through the door of the Lower School and made his way to Judy’s classroom, where she was bidding farewell to a little kid whose nanny had to be at least twenty minutes late.

  He leaned against the wall and waited for the nanny to quit arguing with Judy and leave. Russian accent, long unfashionable braid, chunky ass in shorts with legs cut too wide to look normal on a woman in her twenties: she didn’t pay the tuition bill, and Judy’s curt reminders about the schedule betrayed that she was aware of this. He controlled a smile and bounced his heel against the floor impatiently. Finally the woman left.

  “And you,” Judy sighed, turning to face him. “Zachary Xiang. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m supposed to pick up a sign.”

  She blinked and shook her head in irritated confusion. “Sign. What sign?”

  “Some wooden sign that goes by the side of the road to tell people when the bazaar is. That lady in charge told me I have to repaint it.”

  “Am I supposed to have this item in my possession?”

  He shrugged loosely. “She said you had it in a closet or something.”

  “Oh, God.” She turned and walked toward the back of the classroom, where a closet door stood ajar. Her hair, dark brown and trailing all the way to her waist, looked ratty at the ends and in need of brushing. She stepped into the shallow closet, moved a couple of baskets, pushed aside the faded spare dress-up robes that hung on hooks on the wall, and said, “I have no idea where it is. Check back tomorrow and maybe I’ll have found it. Maybe. If I get around to it.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “The matter with me? I’ve had the weekend from hell. Would you like to hear about it?”