The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

After Rhianne packed up her instruments, Zach walked her to the door. He knew what was coming, because Rhianne pulled him aside after every visit. She considered it part of her job.

  “Your mother is very invested in believing you’re still a little boy,” said Rhianne, “but we both know that’s not true.”

  Zach shrugged. “She knows me pretty well. She’s just thinking like a mom.”

  “I’m sure she’s concerned about displacing you with the new baby.”

  “I don’t feel displaced.”

  “Do you have any concerns you’d like to talk about?”

  He shook his head. “I miss my old friends and stuff. But my new school’s okay.”

  She nodded. “Do you feel healthy?”

  He knew this was her way of asking the whole range of unaskables—whether he was using drugs, harboring suicidal thoughts, or living in terror that he would wake up one morning blind, with hair on his palms. But he had no such concerns. He said, “Yeah, I feel great.”

  She reached into her bag and took out a purple drawstring pouch. With a tug, she pulled it open and held it toward him. He gave her a bashful smile and took out two condoms.

  “Sure that’s all you need?” she asked.

  “I’m sure I don’t even need these,” he replied, “but they’re fun to have around.”

  “Someday you’ll find them useful.”

  He smirked. “So people keep telling me.”

  “You’re only sixteen,” she reminded him. “There’s no hurry. But when the time comes, make sure you have ’em handy. Because love comes and goes, but herpes is forever.”

  Zach grimaced. “Gotcha.”

  “And if you ever want to talk—” here she patted his shoulder “—you know where to find me.”

  “I know.”

  He let her out the door and retreated to his bedroom, where he dropped them in his underwear drawer with the others she had given him. They were useful, if only for experimenting with how long he could coast on the wave before losing control. He called it “Tantric Sex for One.”

  In the beginning with Russ, when he was a bespectacled undergraduate with a simmering anger I mistook for understated masculinity, I had the soaring feeling that together we were really something special. He was the pet of the college’s top marine biology professor, the student president of the fledgling Greenpeace group, a member of the rowing team. Lanky and tall and argumentative, he had a talent for the verbal dogfight and took pride in reducing others to silence. In our dorm building I had grown accustomed to hearing his voice, clipped and strident, as a fixture of late-night conversations in the lounge. When, during those debates, he began to defend the views I quietly voiced—including me as the second member of his Russ-against-the-world faction—I felt exalted. When we began dating, I felt chosen. In the exhilaration of falling in love, either with him or with the idea of being worthwhile, it was easy to overlook the hulking shadows of what his untethered youthful traits would become. I was, one might say, otherwise occupied.

  This is what I did see: visions of the two of us walking like overeducated angels into the urban squalor of New York City, him to clean up the Hudson River, me to educate the impoverished youth. With a baby on my hip, we would fly overseas and join the expatriate community in France while Russ devoted his expertise to cleaning up the Seine. After a few years we would move home to a nice brick Colonial and be the toast of our cadre of hip academic friends. There would be parties. There would be wine, and framed photos from a ski trip to Vermont, and a chocolate Lab with a red bandanna around his neck.

  Well, I had the house.

  But just as Russ had proven himself less brilliant than his professor suspected and downscaled his plans, my own vision of the Perfect Life had shifted. The passion I felt for the stories, the methods, the esoteric philosophies of Rudolf Steiner was all-enveloping; I threw myself into it with all the devotion a new convert has to offer. The Kingdom of Childhood, as Steiner called it, was like a magical forest we guarded with a human chain, in which young spirits unfolded like cabbage roses and children could explore with absolutely no fear. We draped their bassinets with pink silk so they would see the world, literally, through a rose-colored lens. We sliced their apples asymmetrically, so the idea of mass-produced form would not even enter their consciousness. What my friends found trivial, I embraced. God, or his philosophical equivalent, was in the details.

  Lately, though, I had moved from a touch of malaise to the brink of a full-fledged burnout. I blamed it on a contagious case of Scott’s senioritis. With my youngest child about to complete his thirteenth year of schooling, I accepted that my personal investment in a philosophy so intense and consuming had just about run its course. But at forty-three I had more experience and commanded more respect than any other teacher at Sylvania, with twenty years of my working life still ahead of me. In the beginning I had fallen profoundly in love with the idea that if I could go back to a past that predated my own, touch the things that had existed since the dawn of time—wood, wool, stone—I could wipe clean the grime that had gathered on me in this corrupted world. And even now, every once in a while when I sat in the rocking chair and took in the cathedral silence of my empty classroom, with the afternoon sun slanting just so on the baskets of knitted elves and folded silk squares and lengths of gnarled wood, from the depths of my heart I thought: I believe.

  Driving home from a long day in that classroom, I let my hands rest lightly on the steering wheel and my thoughts drift to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was perceptive of Scott’s friend to note the relaxing effect their silhouette has on the mind. A calming vista was something my mind yearned for, and, truthfully, it yearned for many things. I had always been a small person—“an elf of a girl,” my father used to say—but lately I had begun to feel like a collapsing star, as though packed into my little frame was the weight of a full universe of unmet goals, unreconciled mistakes, and all the raw-boned loves of my girlhood. Some days I suspected nothing but a broad spectrum of psychiatric drugs and a skilled and compassionate therapist would help me. Other days, I figured a good orgasm would suffice.

  A dinging noise jarred me from my thoughts. The gas-indicator light had been red since morning, but this happened often, and from the odometer I had judged the car had enough gas to run a few nearby errands. I pulled into the right lane warily and kept driving, but soon the car began to sputter and I made a quick right turn into the parking lot of a bank, coasting into a parking space just as the Volvo exhausted the last few drops of gasoline. For a moment I sat, staring at the steering wheel as though the car might take pity on me and change its mind. But it did not and, gathering my purse and handwork bag, I climbed out with a heavy sigh. This was not the first time I had abandoned the car for this reason. Russ would not be pleased.

  My mother is a basket case, Scott sometimes said aloud to an invisible audience.

  But teenagers always do. What child has not, at some point, decided his or her mother is crazy? It’s a staple of American youth, sure as cotton candy and fireworks and that first jingling set of car keys.

  I walked on the shoulder in the uneven wind of the passing cars and mentally reassured myself I was not a basket case.

  I am adaptable.

  Not the type to make a crisis out of a small matter.

  And the house was not far, not so very far, in the scheme of the universe.

  It was nearly six before I made it home. My husband, miracle of miracles, was already there. As I walked in the door I caught the stinging smell of burnt toast. In the kitchen he stood before the skillet in a tense posture, spatula poised over a grilled cheese sandwich with its topside nearly black.

  “I have a roast going in the Crock-Pot,” I said.

  “I don’t have time for all that. I’ve got a class in thirty minutes and I had no idea where you were or when you’d be home.”

  I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat. My husband, Russell, who had once been attractive in an edgy and intellectua
l way, had the look of a man who was moments away from giving himself an aneurysm. This was nothing new. It had developed shortly after he began his Ph.D program three years before, and had gotten steadily worse ever since. For a while I worried that he was sitting on either a serious medical problem or an affair with a grad student. But no evidence ever turned up, and I found myself faced with the idea that his hair-trigger temper and contempt for me had nothing to do with complaints either physical or sexual. He had his good days and his bad, but overall, I was gradually resigning myself to the fact that my husband was becoming a cranky old asshole.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant to be home earlier.”

  “It’s just as well.” He slapped the sandwich onto a plate, turned off the burner, and glanced out the window. “All right. Where the hell is your car?”

  “It’s in the Citizens Bank parking lot.”

  He slammed his plate down on the table. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Judy.”

  “I’ll send Scott to fill it up later.”

  He glared at me. Behind his glasses his eyes were a blazing blue. “Explain to me again why you can’t take your car to the gas station like a normal human being.”

  “Because I’m not a normal human being. You know that.”

  “What are you going to do when Scott is in college? What are you going to do then?”

  I sat in silence. Realizing no answer would be forthcoming, he picked up his sandwich and stuffed it in his mouth. A bite of bread and cheese filled out his cheek like a sudden growth.

  “I’ll have him do it tonight,” I repeated, after the silence had derailed a bit of Russ’s momentum. “I assume we’re taking my car up to Fallon tomorrow.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t go with you.”

  “What?” I felt my face crack from careful steadiness into a scowl of disbelief. “What do you mean you can’t go with me? It’s our anniversary trip. It’s been planned for weeks.”

  “Our department chair went into the hospital with chest pains. I need to take his place at the conference this weekend.”

  “What conference?”

  “The one where he was supposed to be giving the presentation that I’ll be giving instead.”

  “Russ. Can’t one of the full professors take it?”

  “Sure, if I’d like to flush my career down the toilet.”

  I stood and brushed by him, then snapped off the Crock-Pot. “There you go exaggerating. It can’t just be a good move or a bad move. It has to be a gigantic crisis.”

  “This is what you don’t understand about careers,” he began, “due to all those years you’ve been sitting in a rocking chair singing ‘Kumbaya’ and handing out the fingerpaints. Other people’s jobs have this thing called advancement. And the way it works is, when something crops up, you don’t say, ‘oh, jeez, I have to go to the mountains with my wife this weekend.’ Because if you do, you get to be the Dean of Remedial Dumb-Shit Classes at the community college.”

  I took a deep breath through my nose and closed my eyes for a moment. “All right, then. I’ll cancel the reservations and we’ll just go out next weekend. Maybe Saturday. We can get Chinese.” Chinese food was Russ’s weakness. We had eaten many a paper-boxed meal, back in college, on a bed with a raincoat spread between us for a picnic blanket. It had become something of a tradition that carried on into our marriage, for a few years at least.

  He sat down across from me and shook a pile of chips directly onto the table. “No can do. I need to work on my dissertation all weekend.”

  I sighed. “Russ.”

  “Judy,” he fired back, matching my tone in a nasal pitch.

  I met his eyes and tried not to let it turn into a glare. “Maybe one night during the week, then. I just thought Chinese would be nice.”

  “Getting my damn Ph.D would be nice, too. And it’s hard to do that when you try to take over my schedule with your demands for entertainment.”

  He shoveled a pile of chips into his mouth with his fingers. Behind him, Scott lifted the lid on the Crock-Pot, glanced at its contents, and set to work making himself a cheese sandwich. I rose from my chair and leaned toward Russ, resting my knuckles on the table. Scott, sensing danger in the quiet, turned just enough to cast a nervous gaze on me. In a hissing whisper I told Russ, “I HATE your Ph.D.”

  “I don’t have a Ph.D,” he hissed back.

  “And I hope they never give you one,” I spat. Voice rising, I added, “I hope you’re stuck in committee hell, talking about goddamned Iceland and its goddamned fisheries for the rest of your life. I hope you die revising the fucking thing.”

  “Jesus, Mom,” said Scott.

  Russ raised his eyebrows high and nodded adamantly. “That’s nice, Judy. Wow, I feel like celebrating our marriage all of a sudden. How about some mu shu pork?”

  In the months that followed I felt bad about what I said. But you see, I only meant I hoped he would be revising his dissertation for the rest of his life, unrewarded. I didn’t mean it literally, that I hoped he would die.

  3

  The history teacher was hot. At five foot four or so, she was short enough to make Zach feel tall standing beside her, and she had a lot of loosely-curled hair the color of black coffee that bounced against her back as she moved across the classroom. When she turned to write on the board, her butt jiggled beneath her pencil skirt in such a way that Zach wasn’t gaining a great deal of knowledge about the Roman Empire.

  “When Tacitus visited Germania,” she told them, her voice bearing just a hint of a Spanish accent, “he called it ‘hideous and rude, dismal to behold.’ He found the people warlike, with a violent system for justice. Traitors were hung from trees. Adulterous wives had their hair cut off and were driven through the streets naked, by their husbands, with a whip. Cowards and those of loose morals were buried in bogs under mud and held down with willow branches. Tacitus wrote that this was because glaring offenses must be displayed as a warning, but pollution must be concealed. He said, ‘No pardon is ever granted, for no one turns vices to mirth here.’”

  The girls around Zach sat with their pens poised, their expressions serious and a little offended. The guys grinned.

  “I thought you guys would like that part,” their teacher said. A low titter made its way across the classroom. “Remember this as you write up your group reports. A written history doesn’t have to be boring.”

  There was a squeal of chair legs against flooring as the students turned their seats around to break into small groups. Zach had partnered up with two other Madrigals: Temple, whose SAT score was somewhere around the hundred-and-fiftieth percentile, and Fairen, who was also bright but appealed to Zach because the sort of friendship he hoped to develop with her, in another era, might have gotten one of them buried in a bog. She was lovely in a fine-boned, slightly asymmetrical way, with a long white throat and multi-pierced ears that stuck out past her hair when it fell, white-blond, on both sides of her face. Zach found her pale, bejeweled ears fascinating. Scott called her “Dumbo.”

  “A history of Maryland written in the style of Tacitus,” Temple read from the sheet in front of them. “We could hammer this out in a weekend. And it’s not due until right before Christmas break.”

  Fairen rolled her eyes. “This is what happens when the real teacher dies in July and they have a month to fill the spot.”

  Zach looked over the sheet and scowled. “We’re supposed to do a section on the ‘legends of Maryland.’ How does Maryland have any ‘legends’? It’s a frigging state.”

  Temple patted the desk noisily with his palms and let his gaze drift toward the ceiling. “We could look up old Indian stories, I guess. Or urban legends. Crybaby Bridge, the Chesapeake sea monster, that sort of thing. The Bunny Man.”

  “What’s the Bunny Man?”

  “A guy in a rabbit suit who runs around with an axe, chopping up people who get onto his property. People claim he hangs out at the old hospital complex off Pine Road. It’s abandoned now, but
it used to be a tuberculosis hospital.”

  “I know that place,” said Fairen. “I’ve driven past it a bunch of times. Scott said it was a mental hospital.”

  “Scott’s a moron. But it doesn’t matter. We can put that part in as a legend, too, since everyone believes it even though it’s bullshit.”

  She folded her hands like a model student and looked down at the list of requirements. “It says we need to have five illustrations. Maybe we can go down there and take some photos. It’d be really cool if we wait until the project is almost due and the trees are all bare and wintery looking.”

  Temple shook his head. “It’s a five-hundred-dollar trespassing fine if you get caught. Plus there’s all kinds of druggies and skinheads and runaways who hide out there.”

  Fairen smiled. “Zach here’s a black belt in judo. He can take ’em on. Or we can ask Scott to come with us. He’s pretty scrappy.”

  Temple groaned. “Don’t ask Scott. He’ll be dragging us down there every weekend just because he knows his folks would flip out if they knew he was doing it. I don’t care that he’s like that, but he’s not going to pull me down with him.”

  Zach looked at Fairen to see what she would say. He had known these people for only a couple of months, since he had moved to town and started participating in the summer Madrigals concerts at senior centers and music camps. He felt comfortable with Temple and Fairen and her fairly obnoxious friend Kaitlyn, but Scott remained something of a mystery to him. He carried himself like the silverback gorilla of the pack, and perhaps his mother being a teacher was the reason why; on the first day of school, it had taken only minutes for Zach to infer that Scott’s ass was the one to kiss if he had any intention of fitting in. Scott was a senior, and had been at this school all his life; yet in his Abercrombie khakis and rugby shirts, he looked more like he had been airlifted in from a prep school than raised on brown rice and folk tales. Even so, Zach liked the guy well enough. Not that disliking him seemed to be an option.