The Kingdom of Childhood Page 2
“Then please act like it. I don’t mind giving you a ride home, but I will if you all act like a bunch of wild animals.”
“Green light,” said Scott. As I turned around he mumbled, “Zach, you wild animal, you.”
“That’s what your mom said,” Zach retorted, sotto voce. As they convulsed with suppressed giggles, I propped my elbow against the window ledge, rested my head in my hand, and sighed deeply. In addition to the pile of duvets, a glass of wine might be nice. Or two.
My erotic dreams about my boss began not long after he arrived on the job from a large, flourishing Waldorf school in the Bay Area. With an overgrown mop of thick dishwater-blond hair and icicle-blue eyes like a husky’s, he was reasonably good-looking, if young, and not a bad candidate for a subconscious fantasy. But Dan Beckett was only one of many. Since my husband had exchanged his libido for entrance into his Ph.D program three years before—or so it seemed—I’d begun dreaming about random men in bizarre situations, as though my mind, in its deprived state, grabbed whatever scattered ideas were available and smashed them together. This was comical when it involved my neighbor’s landscaping guy or my former physics professor, but problematic when my coworkers or a kindergartner’s father stepped in—or both, as in the case of Dan, whose son Aidan was in my class. Facing these men afterward, I couldn’t help feeling as though we were all conspiring to keep the affair under wraps. Dreams had this effect on me: I knew where they ended and reality began, but they tended to bring ideas into an area where the circles overlapped, making the absurd seem more feasible.
And so after a glass of red wine and a chin-deep hot bath foaming with Weleda’s lavender bathing milk, I had drifted off into a slumber that ended in an awkward, boss-induced dream hangover. At least this time I had managed a full night’s sleep. Sometimes the incubus awoke me, memorably but in conveniently, at 3:00 a.m.
As I went off to work the next morning, I made a mental note to avoid the front office. With luck, I would make it all the way until dismissal time without encountering Dan.
“Oh ho ho, what do I see?” I sang to the small people clustered at my sides. “Has a gnome come looking for me?”
The children peered at the classroom before them. A moment ago they had been outdoors, digging in the sand and playing on the cooperative swing, racing along a line of tree stumps. Now they had returned to find an amber playsilk square strewn on the floor and a piece of driftwood from the nature table upset beside it. Disorder was always the work of gnomes.
“Oh ho ho, they come and go,” the children sang back, “quickly as the wind does blow.”
I smiled and sank to my haunches to speak to the children at eye level. “In a few moments our mothers and fathers will be here. Let’s clean up the mess this naughty gnome has made and then have our puppet play.”
The children got to work. I felt anxious to draw the workday to a close, for it was Friday and the weekend held great promise. My husband and I would be celebrating our anniversary at Fallon, a bed-and-breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains which we’d first visited long ago, before even Maggie had been born. Given that I’d barely seen the man since he began his doctoral dissertation on sustainable aquaculture, and despite the fact he’d been hopelessly surly since then, I anticipated the trip as if it were a first date. I needed this weekend with Russ, if only to refocus my mind from the ever-growing list of men my subconscious was plundering.
But until then, I had work to do. I led the puppet play and the afternoon verse, rang the small brass bell three times, and sent the children off one by one with their parents. Each time the classroom door opened, I caught a glimpse of an unfamiliar black-haired woman, unquestionably pregnant, standing in the hallway chatting with the headmaster. Most likely she was the mother of a prospective student, and my romantic weekend would need to be put on hold for a few more minutes while I schmoozed her.
After all the children but Aidan were gone, I shook her hand in the hallway and invited her into my classroom. She wore a scarf stylishly tied in her long hair and the sort of kid-leather Mary Janes popular with the yoga crowd. I guessed her age to be in the middle thirties, possibly younger, but her muted Asian features threw off my guesswork. Dan sidled up beside her, his face plastered with his beatific pastor smile. I blinked away a snapshot memory of him sneering and dripping with sweat, stark naked.
“Judy, this is Vivienne Heath,” he said, and I imitated his smile. “She’s volunteered her son to help you with the Christmas bazaar. He needs to earn some service hours, so I thought, why not give Judy a hand?”
Indeed. The last thing I needed was a Boy Scout to supervise while I attended to my annual frenzy of unappreciated volunteer work for my employer. In an exulting voice I said, “Wonderful.”
“We just moved here from New Hampshire,” she explained. “He’s building a playhouse to auction as a project for his woodworking class, but he’ll need more hours than that. He’s very creative. I’m sure he’ll work hard for you, although he might need a little refresher about some of the crafts.”
I nodded and tried to mask my surprise. Woodworking was an eleventh-grade subject. I realized she must be considerably older than I had guessed. Yet here she was, about to have another baby. Better her than me, I thought. I was ready for a second shot at a lot of things in life, but mothering a newborn was not one of them.
“If you want to talk crafts, Judy’s your woman,” Dan told her, and patted me on the shoulder. I stiffened. “She can probably spin straw into gold.”
Vivienne grinned. “Is that a course at the Steiner teachers’ college?”
I twitched my shoulder out from his grasp. “If it was, he’d have me locked in the workshop right about now.”
He laughed, and I watched Vivienne Heath’s gaze shift from me to my boss and back again. Dan always upped his show of goodwill and camaraderie around me to compensate for the fact that we hated each other. Upon his arrival the previous year, it had quickly become clear that he thought I was a dinosaur excavated from Woodstock; I disdained him for being a bourgeois bohemian. The ideological tension ran deep even before I began having vivid dreams of coupling with him. Whatever uptight vibe Vivienne was observing could have come from either source.
“Speaking of the workshop,” said Dan, “he’s in there working right now. Perhaps you can drop in and say hello before you leave.”
“Of course.” I shouldered my purse and gave my classroom a final glance. “I’ll head over right now.”
“Thanks so much. I’m sure this will be a wonderful experience for him.” Vivienne turned her head and smiled at me. “Have you met my son? Zach Patterson?”
It dawned on me suddenly. The black hair and eyes. The faded, peachy tan. Barring the pregnant belly, the slender and neatly toned frame. I suppressed a groan.
“I have, as a matter of fact,” I said, impressed by my own composure. “He and my son are in the madrigal choir together. I brought him home the other day.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “He didn’t tell one of his Lewinsky jokes, did he?”
“He did.”
A sigh of disgust escaped her lips. “I apologize for that. If it’s the joke I think it is, he’s been telling it to his father’s employees, his uncles and even his grandfather. Quite the comedian, that one. He’s probably getting revenge on us for listening to too much NPR.”
“Maybe he finds it upsetting,” I suggested. “Losing faith in one’s leaders and all that. Maybe it’s his way of relieving the stress.”
She smirked and responded with a snorting little laugh. “You don’t know my son. He doesn’t have stress. He just wants to use dirty words in front of adults. It gives him a thrill.”
Beside me Dan shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, well,” I quickly added, “I’m pretty experienced with teenagers. I’m sure I’ll be able to keep him in line.”
I said goodbye to Dan and Vivienne and headed out in the direction of the workshop, taking the long route to avoid walking past Bobbie’s history classroom,
now occupied by a young teacher who bore no resemblance to Bobbie in either looks or spirit. On the first day of school I had made the foolish decision to drop by and peek in. The sight of all those teenagers chatting and working and laughing, going on as though she had never been there, sent me into a spiral of depression so confounding that I spent all afternoon emptying dropperfuls of Bach’s homeopathic Rescue Remedy into my coffee. Since then I employed the methods of avoidance and repression to deal with my grief, and while I knew the conventional wisdom declared that this was a poor idea, it had always worked fine for me.
The bedraggled workshop building sat behind the school, an oversize shed in need of some serious love and exterior latex paint. Amish craftsmen had been contracted to build it ten years before; it had been trimmed and painted by the school’s juniors and seniors, and left unheated except for a wood stove they fed with scraps from student projects. That much I knew, because the underwriters had canceled the insurance on that building three years before unless we agreed to put in a heating system that complied with building code. The funds didn’t exist, and so the building survived on vigilance and hope.
I heard Zach Patterson before I saw him, crouched on the floor of the workshop beside a very loud saw. With safety glasses over his eyes and his shaggy black hair shielding his face, I would not have been certain it was him were it not for the backpack lying on the table, the initials ZXP drawn in big bold letters on the front pocket with a black marker. I wondered what the X stood for.
“Hi, Zach,” I yelled over the din of the saw, trying to start the partnership on a friendly note.
He looked up at me through a haze of sawdust and shut off the power. When he stood, he pushed the glasses onto his forehead, offering me a first good look beneath that mop of hair: unruly skin and inexpertly tended facial hair, rounded out by eyes a bit too large in proportion to the lean angles of his cheeks and jaw. What mothers call “the awkward stage” was slow in letting go of Zachary Patterson.
He extended his hand. “Thanks for the ride the other day, Mrs. McFarland.”
“You’re welcome. Your mother just dropped by to tell me I’ll be working with you on the bazaar. I didn’t make the connection between the two of you until our conversation was almost over.”
“That’s because she looks more Chinese than I do,” he said bluntly. “It throws everybody off.”
“I think it was the last name that threw me. I’ve seen your name on the Madrigals roster, so when she said she was a Heath, I didn’t put together that you were hers.”
He nodded. “It gets more confusing when you meet my dad. He’s blond and really tall, so nobody ever thinks I’m his kid, even though I’ve got his last name. Then they expect my mom to have a Chinese-sounding name and think my dad must be the Heath. It happens all the time.”
I smiled politely. “That’s the modern family for you, I guess.”
He returned my smile with a grin of his own. “Yep. The obscuring of ancient wisdom.”
“What do you mean?”
I had taken the bait. “Steiner said the mixing of the races obscures the ancient wisdom. You can blame my parents for that.”
I closed my eyes for a long moment. “Steiner never said that.”
“He did, but it’s okay. He was a product of his time. And so am I.” Pulling his glasses back down, he rearranged the plank of wood in his hands and asked, “Did you need me for something?”
“I just wanted to discuss the expectations for your service hour credits. I’m not sure if you’ll fill all thirty hours, but I can find as much work for the bazaar as you’re willing to do. Painting, assembling booths, pricing crafts, you name it.”
“Got it,” he said. He sank back to his haunches and aligned the board in front of the sawblade. “Whore myself out until the school says I’m done. I can handle it.”
I glowered at his back. He was like a mouthier, less easily punished version of Scott. I hitched my purse onto my shoulder and said, “Well, I’ll be away for the weekend, but let me know if you need any assistance.”
“Where are you going?”
The personal question took me aback. “To the Blue Ridge Mountains with my husband for our anniversary.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “I like the mountains. It’s weird to live in a place that doesn’t have them. When you look outside it’s like your eyes don’t know where to rest. There’s no anchor. It’s just emptiness. It sucks.”
He was right. Maybe that explained why I felt the way I did. Lately the sense nagged at me that a nascent dark thing was coming, and that, as my midwife had once said, there was no way out of this thing but through it. But perhaps it was simpler than all that. A matter of finding an easy place to rest one’s eyes, and with them, one’s thoughts.
I smiled at him, and, in an abashed, close-lipped way, he smiled back.
2
In his earliest memory, Zach is nestled snug in bed with his mother, back to breast, skin to skin. His father is there as well, his back broad and winter-pale, his spine curled in sleep. It must have been February, because Zach is secretly sucking a pink strawberry candy of the type sent by Grandma Moo, his Chinese grandmother, every Chinese New Year. Most likely, this being New Hampshire, there would have been snow on the ground as tall as himself. And yet there he is, warm beneath the featherbed and his parents’ indigo batik quilt, nursing his hoarded candy. Sucking slowly, so she won’t notice. This is what he remembers—the drowsy heat, the angled sunlight, the solid sweetness in the middle of his tongue; and the way his heart palpitated when his mother suddenly asked, “Zach, is that candy I smell?”
That was all. Some of the details, in retrospect, stood to reason: for example, his mother had slept shirtless for years, having slipped into the habit during the several years in which she nursed him. And Grandma Moo—so called because she was his mother’s mother, her mu—had sent those pink candies in their crinkly strawberry wrappers every year of his life. Gung hey fat choi, the red greeting card always read; and his mother often murmured “emphasis on the fat” as she unpacked the small boxes of white chocolate pretzels, spongecake petits fours, popcorn balls and sugared almonds. Forbidden like poison, they were the sorts of foods she tolerated only once a year and only for a taste, before dumping the boxes into the trash and force-feeding Zach a quart of vanilla kefir as an antidote.
Yet stripped of reason, the memory is purely sensual. There is nothing before it, but much after; the quiet room, the cave-like warmth forming the Big Bang from which his consciousness unfurled. It occurred to him that he would have no recollection of that pleasure, had he not been caught in the act of disobedience.
But Zach knew that this consciousness, as he understood it, was nothing more than an island in the great stirring sea of his mind, that formless dark which informed everything. In it were his dreams, some remembered, most not; there lingered all the moments of pain and fear and pleasure his childmind had failed to process. But also there lived the ancient shapes his teachers called, altogether, the collective subconscious: the witch, the white knight, the princess in the tower, the devil. A body of archetypes, a language of symbols passed down through time, birth by birth, like the code for the shape of an eye, the blueprint of the human heart. A racial memory.
The room was different now—painted sky-blue rather than mint-green, and relocated to Maryland—but the bed was the same, a Colonial four-poster built by his dad, and the quilt was the same, although faded by wash after wash. And the child curled at his mother’s belly was not him but his sister, the not-yet-born. She carried a Christmas due date, and as the months wore on Zach found himself anticipating the birth with surprising eagerness. His friends, for the most part, expressed a sort of repulsion on his behalf, centering around the evidence that his parents were still having sex. Without exception Zach found these remarks amusing. Were their parents just really good at keeping it quiet and sneaking around? Wasn’t that the point of being an adult, that you could screw with impunity?
“Do you want to listen, Zach?” Rhianne asked him.
He shook his head. “I heard it last time.”
“I can feel an elbow,” she said. His mother laughed, and Rhianne waved Zach over. “Feel it.”
He moved to the edge of the bed beside his mother’s legs and allowed Rhianne to position his hands on the giant expanse of belly. “Elbow,” she said, and then with her right hand over Zach’s, “spine, and her little tuckus.”
“That’s cool,” he said. His mother beamed at him.
“Have you started buying things yet?” asked Rhianne of his mother. “Sling, diapers, bassinet?”
“Here and there,” she replied. “We won’t be needing a bassinet. She’ll just sleep with us, like Zach did. Although hopefully not until she’s seven.” She shot him a look of loving reprimand.
“Wasn’t my idea,” said Zach.
“Every time we tried to put you in your own bed, you snuck back into ours.”
“So, you should have beaten my ass.”
The women both laughed. “Listen to the child,” said his mother.
“He’s hardly a child,” said Rhianne. “You’ve got one almost-newborn and one almost-man.”
“He’s still a child yet,” insisted his mother. “Take a look at his bedroom and you’ll see what I mean.”