The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  “What’s that?”

  “That the stuff they taught us in science at Sylvania is utter bullshit.”

  I peered harder at her. “What?”

  “Utter bullshit,” she said, more loudly this time.

  I pondered this—both the supposition and the fact that it was the first time I’d ever heard Maggie say anything so aggressive or profane. Finally I said, “That’s a pretty broad statement to make.”

  “It’s true, though,” she replied stridently.

  I nodded. After a moment of silence, I said, “Well, I’ve always thought Waldorf was most ideal for the younger grades.”

  She gave a benign smile, her hands folded between her knees. The waiter plunked a pizza down between us. Then Maggie added, “Also, I’ve started going to church.”

  “What?”

  “You keep saying what,” she pointed out. “Is your hearing okay?”

  “What church?”

  “The Baptist church on campus.”

  “The Baptist church?”

  “That’s the one.”

  She had taken a slice of pizza and bitten off the end, but I couldn’t even think about eating. All around me was the clanging of silverware, the hum of conversation loud as road construction. In the kitchen, someone dropped a glass. Yellow light glared down, the sort that makes bugs die.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s a nice group of people,” she said, her voice already growing hoarse from the strain of speaking. “Really uplifting. We go out on Sundays, tracting.”

  “Tracting?”

  “See, you can hear,” she observed, nodding. “You keep repeating back everything I say.”

  “It’s because you’re speaking English,” I told her, “but not any English that makes any sense to me.”

  “That’s because you’re narrow-minded.”

  I reeled back against my chair. “Well, that’s the first time anyone’s ever lobbed that one at me.”

  “Probably because the only people you associate with are the same as you,” she noted helpfully.

  I took a slice of pizza and removed the greasy pepperoni before biting into it, to prevent myself from replying.

  “The thing is,” Maggie continued, “I’ve realized I spent eighteen years sheltered under all this nonsense, learning all this stuff that doesn’t matter, from people who are generally hypocrites…and then out in the real world, once I stopped fighting it, I realized the world doesn’t explode if you admit fairies don’t exist and you can’t dance your way to a higher consciousness. It’s a matter of being logical.”

  “I suppose that’s where the Baptist Church comes in.”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly and strung a long piece of mozzarella into the air. “Redemption is logical,” she said. “Compared to a lot of that crap I digested, it’s practically Newton’s Law.”

  I nodded. “So this is what rebellion looks like in one of my kids.”

  “I’m not rebelling. This is who I’ve been all my life. I just didn’t have the language to talk about it, since all they speak at Sylvania is New Age gobbledygook. I never fit in at that stupid school and you know it. All I ever wanted was to be a regular person in a normal American family. One where I can go to a barbecue on the Fourth of July that isn’t full of people telling their stories about how they got out of the Vietnam draft.” She smiled and leaned in. “But you asked about the dating scene.”

  “I did,” I said, overjoyed at the change of subject. “Anything new to report?”

  “Just one small thing,” she told me. “I’ve taken a Purity Pledge.”

  It was absurd, the degree to which Maggie was rebelling against her upbringing, but even as part of me laughed at it, part of me also mourned. I remembered looking down at her as she nursed at my breast, a tiny squashed creature clad in a white onesie and the pink hat Bobbie had crocheted for her, and gravely resolving in my heart that things would be different with her than they had been with my own mother. All through my childhood my mother had struggled for her sanity, and some years I observed she wasn’t struggling nearly hard enough. I picked at a thread tangled in the wool near the center of the hat and thought about what I had been in my mother’s life—a lumpy little defect in the middle of a regimentally ordered pattern—and that my children would never be made to feel that way. They were the center. They were the pattern. And despite it all, Maggie had grown to believe that I had placed the schema for childhood above the child herself. That I had strangled her with the safety net.

  That night I went to bed in a melancholy mood, tucking the hotel pillow beneath my head and musing on my thoughts of my daughter. Quit being so emo, Zach would say, using a slang term that had stumped me before he explained it meant overly emotional. Most likely he was at my house tonight, visiting with his friends, drinking my Coke. If I were there I would be offering him a ride home, taking a quick detour to the lake as we had two nights before, when he had clutched a hand in my hair and laughed when it was over and said, oh my god, that felt amazing. I had beamed beneath the praise as though a professor had declared me his very best pupil. As we doubled back toward his house, the radio station briefed us on the latest news of the impeachment proceedings. I wonder if he regrets what he did with her, I said to Zach, and he replied, are you kidding, it’s the sport of kings.

  I fell easily to sleep on the memory. My mind was glad to return to the midnight-dark interior of my car, the haste of unbuckling, the luxurious ease of his body submitting to my attention. He groaned, then laughed, then spoke, but his voice had changed; and so I looked up at him, his face pale amid the shadows, his short hair dirty blond, eyes a faceted blue. Even through the haze of dreaming I felt the shock of seeing his face, so unlike Zach’s, but it did nothing to deter me. When he reached for me he smelled of copper and soil, touching me with rough hands that did not spoil the pleasure that shivered through my belly, oblivious to the shame.

  13

  Zach stood in Judy’s kitchen, up to his elbows in sudsy water, felting balls of wool. The pastel spheres bobbed in the water: pink, blue and a minty green, all sized for a toddler’s hands. Assembly-line Waldorf crafts: his primary-school teacher would have groaned. But the bazaar was approaching. The toys had to be finished, to sell.

  Zach squeezed water from the green ball, agitated it between his hands, soaked it again. Across from him Judy plunked a yellow ball onto a tray lined with a towel: her fifth.

  “You’re way faster than me,” he said admiringly.

  “I do this all the time,” she replied, a rueful undertone to her voice. She squeezed the water from a lavender one, coaxed it into a spherical shape, and dunked it back into her basin. “I enjoy it. When I was young and we lived in Germany, after school I used to go to our neighbor’s barn and watch their son take care of the animals. He would hand me bits of wool from the sheep and I’d knead them into balls like this. I didn’t know a thing about felting, of course. It was just something to do.” Lifting the lavender ball from the water, she added, “The texture of it always takes me back to that place and time. And that boy. His name was Rudi.”

  “Rudi,” Zach repeated, rolling the r and drawing out the u in a mocking accent.

  Judy clicked her tongue. “He was very nice to me. It was so isolating living there. Having no friends. My father screwing the help.” At this Zach snickered. “That boy’s kindness meant the world to me then. You look like him, a little. Not in the coloring. He was very Aryan that way. But around the mouth, and something about your eyes every now and then. And your body.”

  He laughed openly. “My body. How old did you say you were, again?”

  She smiled. “I just mean how wiry you are. I suppose he was about your age, and that’s typical. Yet Scott, for example, is built solid, like Russ. Temple just looks skinny through and through. But Rudi—he looked like skin stretched over muscle. I had never seen anything like that before I knew him. And you’re that way, too.”

  The soapy water was beginning
to saturate his skin. For a moment he set down his work and wiped his hands with the bottom of his shirt. When she smiled at the gesture, he said, “Sounds like you were doing a lot of checking him out, for a six-year-old.”

  “Oh, no. I was about ten, but there was never anything like that. I always saw him as a—a safe harbor, I suppose. Never as a sex object. Not at all.” Another felted ball emerged from the water and into her hand, perfectly formed, as if by magic. Her smile shifted secretly. “Although, you know—I did have a dream about him the other night.”

  “About R-R-R-Rudi?”

  This time she laughed. “Yes. The night I visited Maggie. It was quite graphic. When I woke up, I found the whole thing very shocking. I didn’t like thinking of him that way. In my mind he’s almost a saint. Or a savior.”

  “Was it a bad dream, then?”

  She smiled again, tight-lipped. When she met his gaze, her eyes twinkled. “No.”

  He laughed. Blood surged in a sudden rush through his veins. He kept expecting her to discard the whole idea of having him as a lover, and coming up astonished when it persisted. And it persisted all over the place: in her classroom, the workshop, her Volvo parked by the lake, and, of course, the woods. When he balked at the timing or setting, she sank to her knees and unzipped him and from there he could hardly argue. On those occasions she seemed perfectly content, and while it made no sense to him he simply accepted his good fortune and admired her efficiency. Thus far the crafting session had been perfectly chaste, but Judy had a way of going from teacher to succubus in the time it took to slam a car door, and as the dinner hour approached he wondered which one would drive him home.

  Before he could consider the matter too deeply, the door burst open and Scott walked in, his coat open and his back pack over one shoulder. “Hey, Mom,” he said as he entered the kitchen; a moment later, to Zach, “Hey, dude.” He glanced at the toys lined up on the towel and added, “Nice balls.”

  The expected response jumped to mind immediately: That’s what your mom said. But this time, Zach thought better of it.

  “Would you like to help out?” Judy asked Scott.

  “I’m coming and going,” he replied. He grabbed a plastic container from the refrigerator, grimaced at its contents, and took an apple instead.

  Judy asked, “Going out with Tally?”

  Scott grunted a reply and bit into the apple. He fished around in a cabinet and, coming up empty, made a growling noise, swiped a pile of papers from a counter, and stalked out.

  “Make yourself a sandwich,” Judy shouted.

  “That bread is disgusting,” Scott yelled back. “There’s seeds in it and shit.”

  Judy sighed and offered Zach an apologetic smile as the door slammed. “Welcome to our happy home.”

  “Does he always talk to you like that?”

  “Oh, yes, when he talks at all. Most days after school Tally comes swinging into my driveway in her little BMW, lets herself in the door and off they go to his room or to the den to ‘watch TV.’” With her fingers she gestured quotes around the phrase. “It astonishes me, the way he’ll do things for no reason other than to upset me. There’s no reason for him to be carrying on in that den with her. The last thing I want to be thinking about, while I’m watching TV, is what my son was doing on that sofa.”

  Zach snickered. “Temple said something about that. How he does things just because he knows they’ll make you mad. I think it’s weird. I argue with my folks sometimes, but I always feel like shit when I truly piss one of them off.”

  She tipped her head and looked him in the eye. “So why are you friends with him?”

  “I dunno. Because he’s friends with my friends.”

  “You don’t seem very similar to him at all.”

  “I’m not. But I’m a lot like the other people he hangs out with, like Temple. And Fairen.”

  At the mention of Fairen’s name her mouth pursed. She said, “Tell me about New Hampshire.”

  “About New Hampshire? What about it?”

  “What it was like. What you miss. Your school, your friends. Tell me about them.”

  It was a question as large as his entire life—his life up until this past June, at least. Stepping outside in the mornings, he still felt his heart sink, often, to see the mountainless horizon and realize he wasn’t there anymore. It was too warm here. The leaves were dull, the forests paltry, the highways too broad and lined with too many chain restaurants cranking out food products matched to an assembly chart. Nobody, in the months since he had moved here, had asked him about his hometown. The truth was he ached to talk about New Hampshire, but knew nothing was more tedious than a new kid who won’t shut up about how much better the old place was. And in any case, nobody cared. He was here now.

  He smiled and shook his head, ruminating. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  She rose and opened the refrigerator, rummaged around, and found a can of Coke. She cracked it open and handed it to him. “We have all afternoon,” she said. “Nobody’s here.”

  He set down the last ball of wool and took the soda. She nodded to a chair, and he sat. The silence of the house felt expansive around him, but private and still. He realized, in the emptiness, that he craved a listening ear more than anything else right now. He wanted no other Judy more than the one seated at the kitchen table just now, patiently waiting to hear him talk about home.

  “It was like the forest in a fairy tale,” he began.

  The endless tree canopy is what he remembered first, whenever he thought of home. The way the light came through the leaves in darts and dashes, the way the dark felt so absolute, so complete, in the heart of the woods. In his neighborhood the roots rumbled up from underground, crumbling the sidewalks, twisting across the lawns. Nature curved above and below him. Nature did not deign to be ruled.

  The yoga studio rose on stilts beside a small road, its shingled sides faded by snow upon snow. The stilts gave it a treehouse look, but were necessary: it was built on a flood-plain. Behind it ran a shallow stretch of the Saco River, stone-dotted and barely deep enough to twirl around his ankles, but in the snowmelt it could become a torrent. Slim silver fish, disoriented, would slip by his feet as he played. The glacial rocks that bordered it were feathered white and pale green with lichen.

  Upstairs in the studio, visible through the sliding glass doors, his mother moved through the asanas. She was an exotic bird in their small town, lithe and small with her swinging black ponytail, managing at once to be outgoing and above it all. People were always surprised to discover her husband was the big blond carpenter, and that the little boy with the bare wet feet belonged to her. She looked like the type of woman who could drop everything in a moment and jump on a plane for a backpacking trip through some remote country. And she would, were it not for the blond carpenter and the small boy.

  He wondered if her restlessness was what had caused the problem. If she felt the need for an adventure, which he could understand. He wished he knew when her affair had ended, although he tried not to think about it, really. Because the child’s looks, somewhere along the sliding scale between Chinese and Caucasian, would keep the secret; and in any case he would love her, because he already did.

  Despite his effort not to, he thought about this as he scraped the dishes and loaded them into the washer, wiped down the counters, and heated water for her cup of tea. While it steeped he took the fruit peels and coffee grounds out to the compost heap and picked the last few late tomatoes from the garden. When he brought her the mug he found her sitting up in bed reading Loving Hands: The Traditional Art of Baby Massage.

  “How old is that book?” he asked.

  She gave him a sly smile and wrapped her hands around the mug. “Oh, about sixteen years, give or take.”

  “You never got rid of it?”

  “I couldn’t bear to. The pictures are so pretty.” She looked wistfully at the cover and took a sip of tea. “I guess I always hoped I’d have another one, deep down.”r />
  “You got your wish.”

  She drank deeply and handed him the mug. With a sigh, she lay back against the pillows, her hand on her belly. Her tank top hiked up above her navel, exposing a wide band of skin. He watched as something beneath the surface, a foot perhaps, drew a path across her abdomen. Laying his palm against the opposite side, he waited until the bony little nub bumped against his hand.

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  She laughed. They sat in silence for a few moments, Zach poking at the baby’s foot, studiously ignoring his mother’s loving gaze. Finally she asked, “How’s Fairen?”

  He chuckled with embarrassment at the question. “She’s fine, I guess.”

  “I haven’t asked you much about your life lately.”

  “It’s cool.”

  “Are you involved with her?”

  Involved with her. So that was how mothers asked the question. He tried to get the baby to move again and said, “No.”

  “Were you?”

  He felt his face start to burn. Letting his hand retreat, he stared down at the quilt and answered, “Yeah.”

  Her smile was spontaneous. “Well,” she said. “I’m sorry I missed asking about all that while it was going on.”

  “There wasn’t much to tell.”

  “Are you brokenhearted?”

  He shook his head.

  “Am I embarrassing you?”

  “Kinda.”

  She patted his cheek. “Do you remember, when you were little, how I used to carry you around on my back like a little spider monkey?”

  “Not really.”

  “They have some nice slings now for that,” she said vaguely. “But back then you just climbed up and I put my arms under your little tush and I carried you everywhere. You were the most affectionate child ever there was. I hope this baby will be like that.”

  “I just hope it sleeps.”

  “Well, then, she’d be nothing like you,” she said, and he laughed. She asked, “Where are you off to tonight?”

  “Scott’s having some people over.”