The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  I turned my attention back to the escape from D.C.

  That night I had a dream.

  In it I was a child, walking out to the garden to pick blueberries. The trees on either side of the path were green and full; straight ahead, the fallow field unfurled like a moonscape of brown earth. At the blueberry bush I squatted and began plucking berries from the bottom branches, where they ripened first, eating greedily. The juice left purple splotches on my fingertips and the hem of my dress.

  Suddenly I heard a voice, a man’s voice speaking German in a friendly way. I looked up and there stood Zach Patterson on the other side of the bush, smiling and talking to me. I understood him perfectly, and even as I dreamed some small part of my mind marveled at my understanding. Instead of answering I kept eating, gorging myself on berries, letting the overripe ones fall onto the toes of my sandals.

  You’re getting very messy, Judy, he said, a teasing reproof, still speaking in German.

  I glanced at him carelessly and said nothing.

  He came around the bush and crouched beside me. He wore the clothes of a farm boy—boots and stonewashed jeans, a ratty green T-shirt. When I felt his fingers beneath my chin, I swallowed. He brought his face to mine and kissed me on the mouth, soft-lipped, sensuously. But I was only a child.

  I squatted still, let him kiss me like a man kisses a woman, and felt the doom of knowing I would be in trouble. Beside him I felt so small.

  He parted my lips with his tongue. I understood English and, miraculously, German, but I had no word for this feeling in my belly, the hidden warmth in hidden cells awakening, this current coming to life along a skipping path. And yet, fused with the warmth was a pattering fear. Fear that crammed down into my stomach just above where the current swirled and roiled. Fear that trembled my mouth but did not close it, welcoming the surety and heat that his brought, the way his hard jaw steadied mine.

  To taste another’s mouth is to enter their body.

  And so into my belly he went, where the blueberries lay hidden away: the cavechild fruit, made by nature, devoured by fantasy.

  6

  On Sunday I brought a stack of my students’ old watercolor paintings and worked alone for an hour, cutting them down to greeting-card size and folding them in two, before Zach turned up. Annoyed, I was prepared to offer him a few choice words for wasting my time, but one look at his face silenced me. His headphones were already on, aggressive music buzzing through, and he wore the same jeans and T-shirt from the previous day, now much worse for wear. He nodded an acknowledgment and got to work fitting the trim onto the structure, wielding the screw gun as though he might also use it on the first person who dared get in his personal space.

  I felt safer at the table, cutting out cards. It was just as well; I found it difficult to look at him without superimposing dream-Zach onto real-Zach, and standing face-to-face with the kid would surely be stranger still. When he squatted down to drill a piece of trim into place, I was struck by how accurate my mind’s calculation of his body had been. The proportions of his shoulders and arms, the tapering of back to waist, even the almost springlike ease with which he fell to his haunches and rose again: the dream seemed to rest over him like a transparency, and as he moved, his body fell perfectly into place behind the memory. I remembered my sudden, irrational unease at Dan Beckett’s imploring gaze, and wondered at my mind’s penchant for collecting the hidden beauty of obnoxious men.

  I reached into my canvas school bag for twine and scissors just as the screw gun let out a high-pitched whine that indicated it had slipped. I looked up in alarm to see Zach throw it out the window of the structure, then roll onto his back and clutch his face with both hands.

  “Mother fucking fucker,” he said, loudly but in a level voice.

  I ventured toward the house. “Is everything all right?”

  “No. I just spent an hour putting this shit on backwards.” He slid out of the house and ripped off his headphones. They hung around his neck as he sat up, his knees against his chest, and rubbed his eyes. “And I got sawdust in my contacts.”

  “You didn’t have your safety glasses on?”

  “No,” he snapped. “I was too occupied with messing shit up to remember them.”

  I sat cross-legged on the floor beside him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m just tired of this. I didn’t get enough sleep, and then I overslept, and my mom came in like the Wrath of Khan to get me up. I didn’t have breakfast.” He wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his forehead against them. I rubbed his back in a firm, comforting way, and he leaned his whole huddled form against me. His skin was drum-tight over those lanky bones of his, with not an ounce of fat for padding. “I’m starving,” he repeated. “I’m never going to make it ’til one. My mom’ll be picking up my corpse.”

  As if on cue, his stomach rumbled audibly. “Okay,” I said. I patted his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll get you fed.”

  He lifted his head and looked inordinately happy. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, we’ll run out to 7-Eleven. But then I’m off the hook for Starbucks. Come on.”

  At the store he trailed me silently inside, branching off to the Slurpee machine, where he took the largest cup they sold and filled it with layer upon layer of frozen slush in lurid colors. His snack selections were more conservative: two sticks of cheddar cheese, an apple, and a tube of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. Like most of my students, he probably considered those a decadent junk food. He had likely been trained from birth to consider the other items on offer, like gummy candies and Nestlé-brand chocolate bars, tantamount to ingesting drain cleaner.

  “That looks vile,” I informed him once we were back in the car, nodding to his Slurpee. “What would your mother say?”

  “Whatever. I’ve seen what’s in your fridge.”

  I strapped my seat belt and shot him a wry look. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Beg all you want. Anyway, it’s good.” He tipped the cup toward me. “Try it.”

  I gave a short laugh. “That’s okay.”

  “Go on. I don’t have cooties.”

  The purple straw practically touched my nose. I met his eyes, then took a drink. It felt like a quick slip through a rabbit hole of time, sharing a straw with a friend of sorts, as though I were a high-schooler myself. “It’s not bad,” I conceded.

  The cup retreated, and he offered a mild, satisfied grin. The straw went back into his own mouth, his knee wedged against the dash as if he owned the place. As I backed out of the parking space I asked, “What’s wrong with my fridge?”

  “You’ve got all sorts of crap food in there. Hot dogs and pepperoni and that cheese dip that comes in jars. You never run out of Coke.”

  “You drink it.”

  “Yeah, but not at home. My mom won’t buy that stuff, and the main reason is because you teachers tell her not to.”

  “Steiner said not to,” I corrected. “Nourishing foods and nourishing fluids. It’s our job to implement that within the school. We don’t have to practice all of it at home.”

  He shook his head and grinned around the straw. “Lie.”

  I glanced at him with some offense. “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. You’re supposed to do it all and you know it.” Tipping his head to face me, he added, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Not if it’ll get me fired.”

  “Is it true that you kindergarten teachers really believe in gnomes?”

  I snickered. “That’s a trade secret. Officially, we do.”

  “My grade-school teacher always swore up and down that she did. And I know Steiner said they really existed. But I always wondered if the teachers actually buy it.”

  I twisted my mouth to one side and considered how to answer. “I don’t believe in very much,” I explained, “and I certainly don’t believe in little fat men in pointed hats running around with rakes and spades. But I do believe in spirits in general, mischievous ones included. Wh
at Steiner said was that if you don’t make spiritual progress during your physical incarnations, you come back as a gnome. So maybe we all have a little bit of that gnome in us, that aspect that carries grudges or won’t forgive.” I shrugged. “It’s not an original idea, that the lesser spirits get banished to the wild. The ancient Irish believed spirits lived in bogs, you know. In Denmark they seem to find mummies in the peat all the time, sometimes with ropes around their necks. It usually seems to be connected with water, for some reason. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Ms. Valera talked about that type of thing. This Roman guy, Tacitus, he wrote that in Germany they used to put the prostitutes in the bogs. Then they wedged them in there with stakes. It was supposed to be so their souls couldn’t get up and wander around.”

  I chuckled. “Sounds very German, indeed.”

  “Yeah, we have to write a group report based on it. Except ours has to be on Maryland, and I’m in charge of the crime and punishment section, and it’s nowhere near as interesting.”

  “Maybe you should talk about our laws against interracial marriage,” I suggested, edging my tone with humor. I slowed for a red light and added, “It was still illegal here when I was a girl. I hear it obscures the ancient wisdom, or something like that.”

  “That’s me,” he joked. “I like to complicate things for you white people. If it wasn’t for me, you would believe in gnomes. But I sit down in your car, and wham.” He spread his arms wide, whacking me in the arm with his Slurpee cup. “You’re off the path. No longer drinking the Kool-Aid.”

  “My coworkers will find out, and I’ll lose my job.”

  “Oh, I won’t tell on you. I’ll just use the information for blackmail.”

  “Is that the worst you can find on me?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, is it?”

  I smiled privately.

  “Ooh,” he said. “Maybe it’s not. I’ll have to find out all the dirt on you.”

  “Dig away, kiddo.”

  He jabbed me in the arm again, then in the waist, again and again until I laughed out loud. And for a moment, for the first time in perhaps my entire life, the things I guarded made me feel mysterious instead of dreadful.

  With Zach’s belly full of apple, cheese and various food dyes, he seemed to be in much better spirits. Hours of work stretched ahead. With a glance toward the parking lot that was empty except for my car, I told Zach I would be back later that afternoon, then crossed my fingers and hoped no injuries or fires would occur in the meantime.

  “I can handle it,” he said, his voice edged with glee.

  I ran my errands, stopping by Russ’s college to pick up stacks of brochures for Sylvania School’s College Fair the following week, then took myself to the dining hall and picked up a sandwich that came with a handful of brittle, inedible potato chips. On my way around the circuit I paused at the bakery counter and ordered two cookies: one chocolate chunk, one black-and-white.

  The weather was lovely, crisp but not yet cold, and so I carried my foam container up the hill to the benches that surrounded the reflecting pool. As I ate I watched the skate-boarders coast up and down the concrete terracing, grinding on the giant sundial, all bold energy and stumbling grace. A few looked old enough to be college students, but most did not. They all wore close-fitting T-shirts and baggy jeans hitched even lower on their hips than Zach’s. Their bodies looked solid as stones. Nothing moved but muscle and sinew; and they seemed so careless about it, as if it were nothing to move through life in a package so neat and dense and perfect. I ate my cookie and smiled forgivingly when a skateboard ran up against my ankle, and one of them, a young man with a headful of wavy golden hair, jogged over and said, “Sorry, ma’am.”

  After a while I collected my trash and left. Something in side my chest felt pinched, bunched up and tied with a tight string. I think it was the place in my heart where the joy of youth had once been: a phantom pain.

  Zach met me at the entrance to the workshop. His thumbs were hooked in the pockets of his jeans, and he was smiling. Before I had even fully crossed the parking lot, he called, “It’s done.”

  “You finished it?”

  He grinned and nodded. “I did. Finally.”

  I held out the paper sack. “And here I thought you’d need sustenance to get through the last stretch.”

  “Hey, I don’t mind.” He took out the cookie and ate a quarter of it in a single bite. “Black-and-white,” he said approvingly, spitting crumbs. “You came through after all.”

  “So let’s see what you’ve got.”

  I followed him through the door, past the tables scattered with tools and the hulking shapes of metal saws. The air smelled of clean, fresh wood, and motes of sawdust danced in beams of light near the windows. In the very back it sat, at the very midpoint of the back wall, Lilliputian but still so large it amazed me that Zach had built it on his own. Gingerbread trim scalloped the roof’s edges and the flowerbox below the front window. All around its base was fiberglass stone, rolling so naturally that it appeared stacked by hand. The artificial tree that he had attached to its back, arching above the acorn-covered roof to shade it with leafy branches, made it look even more impressive. I flipped open the topmost Dutch door and peeked inside at the tightly joined corners, the fairy-sized wooden box attached beneath a window to hold secret treasures.

  “It looks perfect, Zach,” I told him. “You did a top-notch job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The school should get a lot of money for it. You ought to be proud.” I walked around the sides, admiring his work. “It’s actually worth all the grief and misery I put up with.”

  He shot me a cheesy, achingly innocent grin. In a singsong voice he said, “Thank you, Mrs. McFarland.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Aren’t you going to look inside?”

  I regarded the small space with amusement. “I’m a little big for it, don’t you think?”

  “Naw. You’re pretty little for an adult. And it’s bigger on the inside. You’ll see.” He crouched down and crawled inside. Squatting on one side, he stuck his head out the door and said, “See, I fit. And I’m about a foot taller than you.”

  “Not even close, shorty.”

  “Whatever. Come on in.”

  I got onto my hands and knees and squeezed into the doorway. He was right—once inside, the height of the roof afforded a bit more room, and I could kneel comfortably. Still, it was sized for five-year-olds. I felt a bit claustrophobic.

  “Fee fi fo fum,” said Zach.

  “This must be what Snow White felt like among the dwarves,” I said.

  “Are you calling me short?”

  “Not in here. In here, you’re huge.”

  “Why, thank you. My reputation precedes me.”

  I giggled. He grinned at his own joke. I shifted my weight forward, accommodating my aching knees, and suddenly Zach’s hands were on my upper arms, and his face was moving very close to mine, his lips parted, eyes half-closed.

  I did not resist. What I felt was not surprise, not repugnance, but a sense of déjà vu: conjured to life was the image of him in my dream, kissing my child-self as if I were a woman. Even the first touch of his lips felt familiar; but then the kiss deepened, and his tongue touched mine, and everything changed. The warmth in my hips was liquid and instant and I welcomed it like an old friend. I twisted my fingers in his belt loops and pulled him to me. His groan of approval set my mind afire with a singular thought: follow this through, as far as it takes you. What I had mistaken for idle attraction now revealed its face: I wanted all of him, and monstrously so.

  His mouth moved down my neck, and as I tipped my face upward to allow him, he slid his hands under my shirt and lowered his face to my breasts. Sawdust speckled his black hair, dusting my hands as they meandered to his shoulders and arms. When he rose to meet my mouth again his eyes were hazy and unfocused. The taste of his mouth, the smoothness of his taut wiry body beneath my hands, the scent of his ski
n—all thrilled me with their unfamiliarity, their sudden intimacy. I circled my thumbs into the waistband of his jeans and cursed the playhouse for being too small to afford space to lie down.

  And then the door rattled. A woman’s voice called, “Zach?”

  He tore away from me and in an instant was standing beside the worktable, hands folded over his face, rubbing as if to force himself awake. I followed more slowly, my shaking hands and legs providing unsteady support. The high and open space around me seemed foggy at the corners, surreal. I asked, “Who’s that?”

  “My mom.” Turning toward the door, he called, “Hold on a sec, I’ll be right there.” He sank onto a stool and, setting his elbows against the table, dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Picking me up. She’s right on time.” With a deep sigh, he rummaged in his backpack, pulled out his thermal shirt, and tied it around his waist. Then he clawed his hand back through his hair and uttered a grunt of disgust.

  I stood a good distance away, out of sight from the door’s rectangular window. My arms, crossed tightly over my chest, shook steadily. I felt sick with gratitude that I had not bothered to unlock the door from the inside. Gratitude to whom, I had no idea.

  For the first time since the noise at the door, Zach looked at me. Inwardly I winced at the frankness of his large eyes, his gaze still a little uneven. He gave a short laugh and said, “Seeya.”

  “’Bye.”

  He shouldered his backpack and hopped down off the stool, his posture a bit bent under the weight. He pulled open the door and, with a muttered greeting to his mother, was gone.

  I forced my quivering knees to guide me over to the stool where he had been, and, teeth chattering, carefully sat in the imaginary haze of his warmth. I looked at the tools still strewn around, then at the playhouse, where the sawdust on the floor swirled into whorls where our knees had been.