The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  I nodded.

  “If you’d just put them back in my closet afterward, that would be great. I have to leave early… Hey, are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” My voice quavered. “I’m just…trying to pull this together.”

  She set down the box and looked over my shoulder at the poster. I felt her hand against my upper arm, brisk comforting strokes. Sandy was touchy that way, and although people like that tended to make me uneasy, I knew she meant well. It was her way of showing love, like Bobbie’s way of giving out little presents. It helped if I thought about it in those terms.

  “You knew her a long time,” she observed.

  I nodded again and wiped beneath my eye with the heel of my hand.

  “You can talk to me about her, you know. You can’t hold that kind of grief in. It’ll gnaw and gnaw at you.”

  “It’s easier if I don’t talk about it. I’d be a basket case if I did.”

  “Not true. If you keep it inside, you’ll really be a basket case. Talking is cathartic. Keeping quiet will slowly drive you crazy. As the song says, ‘silence like a cancer grows.’”

  “What song is that?”

  “‘The Sounds of Silence.’”

  I gave an abrupt little laugh. “Simon and Garfunkel. Of course. Great stuff.”

  “For those of us old enough to remember them.”

  I laughed again, this time more sincerely, and also more hopelessly. I thought about my debate with Zach on the way home from Ohio and wondered which Mrs. Robinson I was to him right now: the temptress, or the lunatic. Certainly, they weren’t mutually exclusive.

  She pulled up a child’s chair and sat beside me. She put her arm around my back, and her hand cupped my far shoulder with a firm pressure. I knew she wanted me to lay my head on her shoulder, to speak, to cry, but I just couldn’t. It was as if the place that held my grief was so deep that no sign of it could make it to the surface. To cry on Sandy would be to usurp Bobbie’s role and hand it to her replacement. My loyalty to Bobbie was too great to let me properly mourn her, because mourning is the beginning of moving on.

  “Martinmas was her favorite festival here,” I said. “She loved the fall, and watching the little kids go on their nature walks, and the way the air smelled. She loved the excuse to pull out all those big crazy sweaters she used to make. I want to honor her tonight. Not to cry or even talk. Just to make this evening a recognition of what she means to us, and to the school. What she meant to us, I mean.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” said Sandy, and as she tightened her hug around my shoulders, I tried to pretend she wasn’t patronizing me.

  At dusk the children gathered in the school parking lot with homemade lanterns aglow, bundled up in thick wool sweaters and handknit mittens that reminded me, immediately, of Bobbie. My class had made their lanterns a few days before, gluing colored tissue to glass jelly jars and wrapping wire around the tops for a handle. With a tea light inside, the tissue—orange and yellow and red—glowed beautifully. The entire school community turned out each November to walk the few neighborhood blocks near the school, stopping at a few homes to offer a loaf of banana bread or a few cookies, before returning to the parking lot for cider and popcorn.

  I loved it with all my heart. It was peaceful and cozy and blessedly free of any commercial attachment whatsoever. Some years—not every year, but often enough—I would look over the gathering of happy faces and feel as though I were reaching back through time, thousands and thousands of years back, to connect with the most ancient meaning of the word tribe. I needed that this year more than ever, and not only because of Bobbie. I needed to forget all about the stupidity that was Russ and my own roiling heart and my fears for the future of the school. Martinmas was simple: fire, happy children, shared food. I would place myself fearlessly in the present moment and think nothing of the dark surrounding world.

  I held a lantern left over from when Scott was a child, and I walked. Neighbors, who had watched this procession for many years, came out on their porches to wave. The youngest children held their lanterns with gravely serious expressions, taking the adults at their word when they warned of the responsibility that came with carrying fire. The older children tried to make the light dance on the pavement in interesting ways. They looped around the block and made their way back to the parking lot, where a few of the teachers had set up an enormous kettle of cider on top of a charcoal grill. The scent of its embers rose wildly into the night air.

  I set my lantern on the ground beside the building and stood, my hands folded respectfully, as Dan moved to the center of the crowd and began his little speech about Bobbie. He had known her for less than a year, and his words had a generic ring to them, like a pastor speaking at the funeral of someone whose name he had memorized on the way in. I knew so much more about her than he could ever say, and as he spoke, my mind, and gaze, began to wander. As it did I caught a movement at the corner of my eye and knew immediately, without even fully seeing him, that it was Zach. I turned just enough to view him. He wore a black sweatshirt with its hood up and black jeans, and he was easing himself down to sit on a concrete barrier at the end of a parking space. In his hand was a paper cup of cider. Fairen stood nearby, talking to another girl, but at the moment he was alone.

  He nodded a greeting. In return, I waved hesitantly. I wondered whether his nod was meant to be curt or only covert. There was a sudden rush of arms rising into the air as Dan began to offer a toast to Bobbie, and Zach disappeared behind the waving limbs; I drank, then cut my gaze sideways again. Zach drained his cup, glanced around, then rose and walked toward me.

  “Hi, Teach,” he said.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But his smile was free of irony, and I said, “You seem to be in a good mood.”

  “So do you.”

  “I’m always glad to see you happy. You know that.”

  His smile broadened. “Speaking of which, what’s the difference between the president and the Titanic?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “They know how many people went down on the Titanic.”

  I grinned. “You’re awful.”

  He stuffed his hands into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. “Sorry. I’ll work on it.”

  Dan circled around a group and came toward me. I reined in my smile, and Zach moved past me, walking over to the curb where a group of his friends were playing Medieval Judo. He ducked an airborne kick and retaliated by lunging forward to grab his friend around the waist. I crouched down to meet Aidan, who approached me with his lantern held high and glowing with yellow candlelight, his father’s large hand firmly wrapped around his free one.

  “Did you show your father the beautiful job you did?” I asked.

  He nodded and twirled the lantern to show me the way the orange tissue transformed the simple fire into a warm inward glow. I admired his work before letting my gaze drift over his shoulder to Zach, still good-naturedly play-fighting with the other young men, all grace and lean muscle and hidden sexuality. And as I looked I felt the victorious joy, the intoxication of pure possession. For here was this beautiful creature whom others would look at and desire, and I was one of the few who knew him secretly, whom he had allowed to be intimate with him. Never had I felt so much power in a secret, and never had I guarded one so jealously.

  I rose to stand, lifting my lantern, and I thought: as surely as one of these lanterns can light the next, so has the fire in him rekindled the fire in me. Where once I had died down to nothing, I was alive again, and all was his doing. I was afire with him, and for once the thought was not terrible.

  When the gathering was over, I collected the lanterns into a box and carried it back to Sandy’s classroom, navigating down the hallway with my chin lifted above the height of the box. I joggled the doorknob with two fingers and, after the door swung open, carefully plunked the box onto the counter beside the craft closet. The room was dim; the gaps between the window blinds showed a few small lights distantly flick
ering, as children walked away from the school clutching a lantern in one fist, a parent’s hand in the other. To my right, above the blackboard, the legend unfurled: Man is both a fallen God and a God in the becoming.

  I swung open the doors of the supply cabinet and, quite unexpectedly, pulled in my breath. There on the top shelf were all of Bobbie’s things from her classroom, crammed in together without care or curation of any sort. At the front stood her coffee mug with the rainbow on the side, perched on a smiling cloud; wadded beside it, the lilac-colored cardigan that had often hung beneath the middle monkey. There was a ball of yarn with a crochet hook jammed into it, a few rows of work hanging loosely from its pink stalk, and her soft-edged copy of Steiner’s The Kingdom of Childhood, its bottom edge so well-thumbed that it rose like the edge of a wing.

  I pulled each item toward the front, handling them, peering at them, in dreadful wonder at how Bobbie’s things had been so unceremoniously shoved into a closet and forgotten. Sandy had done this, perhaps, or Dan; and it made me angry, this evidence that for all of his clownish frowning, all of his somber words about our loss, he and others had so little regard for what was left of her. I held the ball of silver-flecked blue wool in my hands and stretched out the rows of crochet work, trying to figure out what she had been making, and for whom. That person should have this, so they could hold it and know that even as she was dying, Bobbie had been working this little web borne of her thoughts for them.

  And then I felt a hand sweeping my hair over my shoulder, followed, without hesitation, by lips touching my neck. I let out a small shriek and spun around, dropping the wool. Zach stood there grinning, his expression a little confused. “Sorry. I figured you heard me come in.”

  “No. What are you doing here? Go, before Ms. Valera comes in.”

  “She left. Nobody’s coming in.”

  I picked up the ball of yarn from the floor and, as I straightened up, caught him undoing his pants. My face contorted with anger. “Jesus, Zach. No. Of all the places to come up with that idea. Not now.”

  “Oh, c’mon. It’ll take, like, a minute. I’ll lock the door.”

  “No.” I turned my back on him and grabbed the box of lanterns, wedging it onto the empty shelf. In the act of pushing its edge into place, the crochet hook slipped out of the ball in my hand and fell against the tile with a clatter. I tugged the string to bring it back up, and all at once, Bobbie’s last few rows of crocheting came undone like a zipper pulling apart. This time my shriek was not small at all, but one of raw and ragged anguish.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Zach.

  I dropped to my knees and picked up the raveled pile of yarn. The long string was kinked at regular intervals, like an undone braid. I looked up at Zach and in a furious voice asked, “Why did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t come in here and scared the life out of me—”

  “I just thought you wanted to see me.” His voice was hard, curt; as were his eyes. He pulled up his zipper and reclasped his belt. “Chill the hell out. It’s yarn. Jesus.”

  He turned and left the room. The tile floor was cold even through my tights, and the slam of the door jarred me. And then I was alone in the familiar classroom, in its spacious silence, the shadows broken only by the hallway light that came through the small rectangular window on the door. I looked down at the loose pile of wool in my hands and, for the first time since the drive home after her funeral, cried in my grief for her.

  17

  The day after the Martinmas celebration, school was out for Veterans Day. Zach, having agreed to work for his dad for the day, awoke while it was still dark outside and groggily pulled on his clothes. As he nursed a commuter mug of green tea he stared out the window of the pickup truck at the abandoned Beltway, the white streetlights whizzing by in the darkness, the trees like thin, hard shadows behind them. His father, silent and nearly as tired as Zach, let the radio do the talking. Although he was the same age as Judy, his taste in music was better; he listened to the same stuff Zach liked, and Zach felt a fresh appreciation for it after weeks of tolerating Judy’s dentist’s-office radio station.

  They arrived at the embassy, where his father was installing a new library, and carried in the tools. The buzz and whir of the saws brought Zach out of his drowsy haze, and soon enough he was hard at work. This job, like most of his father’s, required precision, care and neatness; the entrance was draped in sheeting that locked them into a plastic cocoon, and Zach found himself doing as much vacuuming as carpentry.

  Crouched on the floor and waiting for instructions, Zach watched his father work. Like Zach, he wore safety goggles, a dust mask and a hard hat; only a few chunks of his Viking-blond hair peeked around the edges. His blond-lashed blue eyes were serious and sharp as he measured, making rapid calculations in pencil on the two-by-fours. When Zach was a child his father had seemed so big, and even now, at his adult height or nearly so, the man dwarfed him.

  His father glanced up, catching Zach looking at him. “I appreciate your help, son.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “It’s good to have some time with you before the baby gets here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The older man stood and crossed the room, reaching into a bucket for a hammer. Zach pulled his mask down and took a deep breath, then coughed at the dust. His father grinned and passed him a water bottle.

  “You’re quiet today,” he observed. “Something on your mind?”

  Zach shook his head, but as was usual these days, he was lying. Alone with his dad, in the privacy of the shuttered room, he felt the uneasy urge to start a conversation he knew would lead to much more than he was prepared to discuss. If Judy were an ordinary girl, he would have a dozen questions for his father about relationships that moved too fast, and how to say no when it was what you meant deep down, and whether it was common for all the shimmer to burn off a relationship and leave only the sex. But he had grown to identify so strongly, and so uncomfortably, with his mother and Booger, that he was afraid anything he disclosed to his father would lead to him disclosing that. At one point he had wondered if he was wrong about his mother, if he was perhaps making too much of a simple flirtation; but now, older and wiser, he knew hiding an affair was so brutally simple that what he had witnessed was, at best, a poorly concealed one. He was glad he had not realized this while they were still in New Hampshire, or he doubted he could have restrained the urge to corner Booger on the path to the yoga studio and smash him into the pavement.

  What a shit that guy was, Zach thought with a flare of anger. Walking right past Zach, and sometimes his dad as well, with his rolled-up mat under his arm, all serious about his advanced asanas. Zach suspected the furnace closet, with its collection of spare mats and the jutting towel-folding table of peeling linoleum. What kind of person had it in himself to do that—to politely ignore the kid and the husband while getting off with the wife-and-mother in between yoga sessions? What kind of guy would do that to someone as decent as his dad?

  He hugged his knees to his chest and rocked on his feet, and his father said, “Sheesh, kiddo, are you ever flexible.”

  Zach stood up and vacuumed the floor, again.

  That night he lay in bed with his hands behind his head, exhausted from the day’s work, listening to the murmuring on the other side of the wall. His mother’s voice was nearly inaudible; only his father’s baritone vibrated noticeably through the drywall. He closed his eyes and tried to take advantage of the sound. When he was a child he had found it easier to fall asleep when he could listen to the meandering drone of his father’s voice. But shortly he heard his mother laugh; the bed creaked, and before long the sounds grew different, more rhythmic in some ways, more random in others.

  He turned over on his stomach and pulled the pillow over his head.

  It had never bothered him before, but tonight it did. It was too easy to visualize now. Like learning a new language, the sounds didn�
��t all run together like they used to—what each represented, he immediately recognized. It was gross, all of a sudden; but also, it gave him a feeling of dread. His mom was on bed rest. Rhianne had a long list of things she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and this was one of them. He hated the thought that she was giving in to it anyway, driven by the same monster that he couldn’t control, the same weakness that had driven her to Booger. She was pregnant. She was a mother. She needed to be better than that.

  He pressed the pillow against his ears with his fists and waited until it was over.

  At the funeral, back in July, Bobbie’s grave had been a neat rectangle sliced into the turf. Its edges were so sudden and stark against the healthy grass that it might have been drawn by a child, Harold and his purple crayon, sketching an incongruous shape right here; because goodness knows none of us was quite sure how it came to be there. The rich gardening smell that rose up from it, good loamy soil, seemed like an affront to her, something to be ignored. Now, in the chill November air, everything was more correct. The yellow grass crunched harshly beneath my thin-soled shoes; the wind carried the smell of drying leaves, and where there had once been a gaping wound in the earth, there was now only a hard ridge, barely visible, like a scab.

  I approached her headstone in my pea coat, flowerless and empty-handed. Prayers were not on my agenda; she and God could hash out her needs between themselves, and I knew I wouldn’t be doing her any favors by offering myself as a reference. I stuffed my hands into the sleeves of my coat and spoke aloud to her, haltingly.

  “Bobbie,” I began, “I’m sorry about what happened in your classroom the other day. I know you would think I’m horrible for what I’ve been doing. Believe me, I think about that often. You aren’t the kind of teacher who would ever have—done anything wrong with a student. I didn’t intend to make you the host of anything like that.” I took a long, shuddering breath. “I’m very sorry.”