The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  “She’s determined to do things her own way,” I replied. “Come hell or high water.”

  “Ah, the folly of youth. Maybe we pushed it all too hard. Crammed our views down their little throats. But Scott doesn’t seem to be any worse for wear. Just Maggie.”

  I didn’t answer right away. After a minute I said, “Scott doesn’t care one whit about anybody.”

  “It’s just his age. They’re all self-centered at that age. Give him a few years and he’ll probably become a civil-rights lawyer.”

  I grunted in reply.

  He offered a mild scowl I could see only at the edge of my vision. “You take everything too personally, Judy. If somebody gives you a negative answer, for whatever reason, it’s like from your gut you react as if it must be about you. If Scott’s unfriendly, it doesn’t mean he hates you and everything you stand for. It probably just means all the room in his brain is taken up with cars and boobs. To look at it any other way, it’s narcissistic.”

  I snorted a laugh at that one. “I’m a narcissist,” I said in a mocking tone. “I’m a narcissist.”

  “And there you go, right there,” he continued. “A little constructive criticism, and you’re giving me that slit-eyed glare like you’re going to set me on fire.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  He shifted in his seat. “It wasn’t intended to be.”

  When we arrived at the police station, I hung back and allowed Russ to do the dirty work. Maggie, sullen and uninterested in communicating either explanation or apology, stepped out from the cell when the guard unlocked it but said little to either of us. On the drive back to her dorm Russ regaled her with stories of his own jail stints for civil disobedience, but she only stared out the window and toyed with the necklace she wore, a gold cross smaller than a pinky nail.

  After a while I cut him off. “You’re not exactly encouraging her to avoid this situation in the future,” I chided. “How about telling her what a criminal record will do for her job prospects?”

  “At least she’s standing up for what she believes in,” he replied. “And no employer’s going to turn her down because she got arrested for protesting. That’s a rock-solid American tradition right there. Thomas Jefferson would heartily approve.”

  I heard Maggie shift in her seat. Turning to Russ, I asked, “Are you planning to ask Thomas Jefferson for a loan to pay for her lawyers?”

  “You don’t need lawyers if you can sweet-talk the cops into not charging you in the first place. Why don’t you offer a little of your motherly wisdom on that one?”

  I offered him an icy glare before I turned away. Behind me Maggie asked, “Mom, did you get arrested for protesting, too?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Several times.”

  Once Maggie had been safely returned to her dormitory, Russ and I drove down the main strip until we found a motel that catered mainly to alumni who were rabid college-sports fans. Team paraphernalia decorated the lobby, along with a display of brochures for caves, natural bridges, old-fashioned train rides and outlet shopping centers. I thought of Zach and his friends back home in Sylvania setting up the bazaar without me, the darkened and nearly-empty school thickening the camaraderie between them, the temptation to exploit the school’s shadowy corners with the adults in short supply. I thought of the way Fairen Ambrose, my wry little kindergartner grown up into a fair-haired and foul-mouthed swan, seemed always to have her gaze turned the same way mine did. Eventually she would quit holding back, and that worried me. Zach was neither particularly discerning nor difficult to please.

  Russ accepted the key cards, and I followed him down the sidewalk to a room with a dull green door. Inside I set my overnight bag on the luggage rack and locked myself in the bathroom to take a shower. We would need to set off early the next day to make it back to Sylvania in time for the bazaar, which began at eleven. Already it was past midnight, and after only a few hours of sleep the driving would probably fall again to me, because Russ would likely still be conked out on Nembutal. Not that he had told me this—I had picked up a prescription drug guide to figure out what exactly my husband was doing to himself. Whether the dosages applied to drugs purchased over the internet from Mexico, I had no idea.

  I undressed and leaned into the mirror to evaluate the depth of the dark circles beneath my eyes. That was when I noticed a fan of fingertip-shaped bruises a little above my left breast. I looked at the right and saw an identical set of marks. Reflexively my hands lifted to touch them. They were unmistakable: eight purplish prints and, nestled in my cleavage, a lighter, smaller one for each thumb.

  The memory rushed back to me in a jumble of images: myself lolling in euphoria, and Zach above me, freed from the constraints of patience, allowing all his subdued frenetic energy to surge into his muscles at once. Anger, still lingering, gave his passion an edge that was a little selfish, a little sadistic; I didn’t mind. Once he had dutifully attended to me he seemed to disappear into himself, black bangs swinging, breathing heavily through his mouth. His bottom teeth were exposed by his grimacing lower lip. At the time, the grip of his fingers hadn’t hurt at all. The endorphins pumping through my veins were to thank for that.

  I checked the lock on the door and got into the shower. When I came out of the bathroom, I expected to find Russ knocked out in one of the full-size beds. He was in his pajamas and on the bed, all right, but with his glasses on, watching the news on the small TV.

  “Poor Bill,” he said. “They caught you red-handed, sucker.”

  I took a container of hand lotion from my overnight bag and smoothed a dollop onto my hands. When I folded down the coverlet on the other bed, Russ asked, “What are you doing over there?”

  “Going to sleep.”

  “In that bed?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He held out his arms to indicate the breadth of the bed in which he sat. He had already removed the bedspread, of course; hotel bedspreads, to Russ, were flower-print petri dishes. “You never sleep in a different bed at home.”

  “We have a king. These are full-size.”

  “Ah, so what? Don’t be a stranger.”

  Unintentionally, I snorted a laugh. “Russ, really.”

  He pushed himself down the bed on the heels of his hands, then spun sideways to face me. He rubbed a knuckle against my knee and said, “In college we used to make do with a twin.”

  “I’d never want to do that again.”

  “By that measurement, a full is luxurious.”

  I peeled down the blanket and top sheet. “What’s luxurious is a full night of sleep, which I’m not going to get anyway. And I have a full day tomorrow, with the bazaar.”

  “Hell, I’ll come by and give you a hand. You make the sacrifice, I will, too. Call it teamwork. How does that sound?”

  “Fantastic,” I said dryly. “What a way to recruit volunteers. Mind getting the light?”

  “Not at all.”

  He got up to hit the switch, and I climbed under the stiff covers and rolled onto my side. Light from the security lamps in the parking lot glowed around the curtain, but I felt so exhausted it would hardly bother me. I rearranged the pillow and closed my eyes. Then Russ climbed in beside me.

  I didn’t move. I felt too surprised to react. When was the last time he had tried to have sex—had it been this year, or the previous one? Despite the conversation, I had assumed he was making a nominal attempt to come on to his wife so he could tell himself it was her fault he wasn’t getting laid, in service to his ego. Never mind his complete disinterest in the act itself.

  But he didn’t seem disinterested now. He tried to roll me onto my back, but I wadded the blanket into my hands and refused to budge. In response, he nuzzled my neck and pulled up the back of my nightgown.

  “No, Russ,” I said, and elbowed him away.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I need sleep.”

  “But we’ve got a hotel room all to ourselves.”

  “Russ—we alw
ays have a whole bedroom all to ourselves.”

  “Yeah, but at home I’m always wrapped up in the dissertation.” He rubbed my arm. “I’ll be quick if you want me to be. Or slow if you prefer.”

  “No. Leave me alone.”

  I writhed away from him, but he grabbed my elbow and pulled me back. As I tried to jerk my arm away, I wriggled onto my stomach, but he held on and moved as I did. His weight on my back, with my face against the scratchy sheet, made me feel half-suffocated. He must have heard my struggled breathing, because he rose up on one arm to make room for me to stretch my neck.

  “Now, Judy,” he said, his voice placating but his fingers still tight above my elbow, “you know I’d never make you do anything.”

  I took several deep breaths and swallowed.

  “So I’m asking you to be nice to me. Because I work my ass off, and you’re my wife, and it would be awfully damn considerate if you’d allow me the privilege of having sex with you on the rare occasion my schedule permits.”

  I relaxed a little, and in turn, he eased his grip. When I turned onto my side he curled up behind me, and after that I didn’t protest any further. I stared at the band of light around the window and tried to ignore Russ, who didn’t seem to notice, or care.

  The streetlights still shone halos of yellow against the charcoal sky when we climbed into the car the next morning, groggy and unsettled, as if the previous night’s events had embarrassingly revealed just how far gone our marriage was. Perhaps it was only my own perception; Russ, loaded up on medications, could no longer be depended on to display a reaction that meant anything. This time he took the driver’s seat, and I did not complain. My exhaustion was probably as debilitating as whatever state he was in, and he could throw back his black coffee much faster than I could.

  Neither of us spoke for the first thirty minutes or so, allowing National Public Radio to hold up its end of the conversation unassisted. Two Congressmen, one Democrat and one Republican, argued over the impeachment proceedings, and for once I thought Russ’s jazz CDs might be welcome. I thought back to Zach’s opinion of the whole thing—that the president had been betrayed, his private business hung out so his enemies could make an example of him, that it was frivolous and absurd. Zach’s interpretation was simplistic, but naturally I appreciated his take that privacy trumps all else. I slowly sipped my coffee and gazed out the window at the low blue hills, hazily beautiful against the yellowing grass of autumn.

  “So when are you going to stage an intervention?” asked Russ.

  I turned in surprise to look at him, and then, finding his small smile unreadable, stared back out at the road. “Your business is none of mine,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Sure it is. I pay the bills. I stay at this damn job so our kids can get tuition remission.” He let go of the wheel long enough to hold up his left hand. “I keep the ring on.”

  “How kind of you.”

  For a moment he met my eye and scowled. “I’ve never known you not to have an opinion about something. I keep waiting to come home and find you and Scott and my boss and whoever else sitting around in a circle ready to haul me off to rehab.”

  “Do you want me to?” I asked, cool-voiced. “Because to this point I was under the impression that Scott and your boss were the last people you would want me to tell.”

  “They are. I’m just surprised you haven’t done it anyway.”

  “You sell me short,” I told him. “You always have.”

  His mouth pulled into a slow, thin line. “I married you,” he reminded me. “In spite of everything.”

  “In spite of nothing. I rest my case.”

  “Bullshit,” he countered. “Marty didn’t fare so well. Did I hold that against you? No. And damn well I should have.”

  “What happened to Marty was an accident.”

  “Like hell it was. And it damn near took out the entire dormitory. People who pass out drunk don’t spill vodka over their entire bed. They also don’t light cigarettes after they’ve passed out. I gave you benefit of the doubt then, because I knew you wouldn’t stage something that evil. But I wonder now and then.”

  “You wish now and then,” I corrected. “I was innocent when I had what you wanted, and twenty years later, when I’m entitled to half your retirement, I’m guilty. Drunks do things like that all the time, and Marty was one of them. It was terrible what happened to him, but I can’t say I’m sorry. He was abusive.”

  “You think everyone is abusive. You think I’m abusive.”

  “I beg your pardon. You strong-armed me into bed last night and nothing burned down. I wouldn’t consent to you abusing me. I’m above that.”

  “Lucky me. Did you enjoy it?”

  “No.”

  He snickered. “I would have stuck around for you if you’d asked.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  His expression, focused distantly on the road, was placid. “You’re probably having an affair. Even when you’re pissed as hell, it’s not like you to turn down an orgasm.”

  “Maybe I’m done with both opinions and orgasms.”

  He grinned. “Not you. You’re certainly hitting the wine these days, though. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  “With which part?”

  “Either. I’m willing to bet it’s either chilling you out or warming you up. Our recycling bin looks like the day after a faculty party every night of the week. Maybe we both need rehab.”

  “I don’t. If you do, feel free to go. I’ll hold down the fort.”

  He glanced at me. “I bet. I think the difference between you and me is that you’re still in the denial stage, and I’m starting to move past it.”

  “Oh, not at all,” I said. “I didn’t deny a thing.”

  For a long moment he considered that in silence. Finally he said, “Judy…it could be better than this. I think they’re going to clear me to graduate in the spring. After that I’ll take the summer off, we’ll clean up, get the last kid out of the house, take a vacation. Maybe you can get some counseling, deal with how low you’ve been since Bobbie died. We’ll both get better. Put all this crap behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.”

  His words sounded sincere, but I knew Russ better than this. His first loyalty was to his ambition, and if at the moment he was turning it back toward me, it was only because he didn’t yet know to whom he would need to pay obeisance in order to resume the climb. In the vacuum of authority he could let his eyes rest for a moment on his small wife, and make me feel cruel to harden myself against the gentleness I knew from experience would not last long. Regardless of his sincerity, our dreams had diverged so completely that I could not imagine how we could share a life much longer. Russ wanted to move forward into an accomplished and respected advanced adulthood, while I yearned to fall back and back, recapturing all I had lost along the way to this place. Because I have learned that all anyone ever wants is to feel at peace with the sadness and love they have cobbled together into a life, with opportunities missed and those misguidedly taken, and for Russ that peace stretched like a ribbon between two posts lodged at a point in the future. My peace, that paltry ball of tangled wool, lay abandoned on a straw bale somewhere in a past that shifted each time I reached for it; and of all I remembered from that room full of shit and salvation, nothing had lasted except a love that was almost pure.

  “I’ve already put this crap behind me,” I told Russ. “I’m already getting on with my life.”

  He sighed deeply. The corner of his mouth tugged toward his ear. “Let’s not say it for now, all right?”

  “Say what?”

  “The D word.” I frowned, and in an exasperated voice he added, “The one that means a marriage is over.”

  “That’s two D words,” I corrected. “Doctoral dissertation.”

  He laughed loudly and raised a hand from the steering wheel to rub his weary eyes. “Oh, Judy,” he said. “God, how I’ve fucked it up.”

  I turned and gazed out th
e window at the spare rural landscape, the red barns that dotted the dying fields, like chambered hearts in the midst of nothing.

  21

  1965

  Mainbach, West Germany

  Through the window, the barn looked little different from the houses around it: plastered white and half-timbered, with a sloping tangerine roof set with metal brackets to hold the snow. Past the dust of the barnyard, green hayfields waved all around it. She leaned her forehead against the glass and sighed. Two weeks had passed since she had last tried to visit. She passed the long days in her bedroom for the most part, lying on the floor in front of the whirring fan her father had bought for her at the PX, reading her worn copies of The Blue Fairy Book and The Secret Garden and two Bobbsey Twins mysteries. Now and then she took out Struwwelpeter and turned its pages slowly, translating in her mind as she mouthed the German words, mulling over its subtitle: Merry Rhymes and Funny Pictures. And then, when her father was home, Kirsten would knock on her door and send her out to the garden to play. Except for today, when he had decided they would all go on one of his cultural excursions together, with Kirsten joining them to provide “context.”

  “Off we go, sport,” said her father. “Ready for an adventure?”

  She let the curtain drop and followed him and Kirsten out to the Mercedes. Judy climbed into the back; Kirsten took the front passenger seat. Judy scowled and curled against the opposite door, keeping her gaze on the landscape as the car rumbled off toward the village of Aichach.

  They were visiting Burg Wittelsbach, a site outside the main village which Judy understood, from its name, to be a castle. Along the way her father rolled down the windows, letting in the rush of the wind, which battered Judy’s face with the scents of grass and fertilizer. The town rose up alongside the road, the staggered medieval buildings at its center flanked by modern ones. And then the land opened again into its summer splendor: ragged and stretching stalks of feed corn, lacy columns of hops climbing their trellises, combed fallow fields the color of coffee grounds. In the very middle of one of these stood a wooden crucifix as tall as a man. Its Christ suffered beneath a small peaked roof that protected him from the elements. The base of the cross stuck deep in the rich, crumbling soil, amidst the long mounds ready for the planting of cabbages. She would miss this place. All of it: the mountains and the snow, the smells of field pollens and manure, the windows thrown wide open to the air, the imposition of nature. The imposition of God.