The Kingdom of Childhood (8 page)

I hadn’t cared about the expense; in fact, I’d embraced it. My own parents, for their entire marriage, had slept in twin beds. Things hadn’t gone well for them. I loved the fact that when Russ and I climbed into the same bed together, we all but ate each other alive. Even Bobbie, whose disdain for Russ had been thinly concealed, envied us in that respect.
I need to find myself a man who looks at me the way he looks at you,
she told me more than once. The only wedding gift I wanted was a bed big enough for all he and I wanted to do in it, one magnificent enough to suggest the importance of its function.

But now Russ was a stranger. Half the time he seemed wound up tight as a spring; the other half, disinterested in anything but setting his feet up in front of the TV, or sleeping. The week before, I had come home to four messages on the answering machine from his boss and his teaching assistant trying to find him for the class he taught. When I pushed open the door to his home office I found him sprawled
facedown on his ragged old sofa, his arm dangling loosely, like a napping baby’s. The condensed glare of the desk light, hard and dense as a star’s, caught in the dull shine of his wedding band. For a moment I’d thought he was dead, and in those otherworldly seconds before his foot and fingers twitched in sleep, what I had felt was a rising wave of relief. I felt shamed by it, but weary, too. I couldn’t make sense of him anymore, this man who slept beside me, when he slept at all.

I looked over the quilts, a dozen of them, artfully arranged on the mattress, but didn’t have the heart to buy one. Beautiful as they were, to spread one over my bed would feel like draping a sheet over a dead body. I bought a doll blanket for my housekeeping corner, and drove back to the hotel.

At ten o’clock I left my room and parked myself at the midpoint of the hallway, sitting on the floor where I had a view of every door in both directions. Almost immediately, one door cracked open, then quickly pulled shut. I felt a cosmic irony at being appointed the Sex Police. When my generation had once declared all people over thirty to be hypocrites, we had been right.

As I sat guard, I worked a needle in and out of a square of velveteen, making a small dream pillow for one of my kindergartner’s birthdays. I was forever making these velveteen pillows, yet even after sewing hundreds I still enjoyed the process: focusing on a particular student, on who he or she might grow up to be, on the things that make the child an individual. Inevitably I loved the child a little more after making his or her birthday pillow. Today’s was for a little girl named Josephine, a curious little blonde who desperately wanted to learn to read. She often tied a blue playsilk around her shoulders, and liked most to play with the wooden fish and dolphins. She had one loose tooth, a sign she was on the brink of a jump in maturity, both physical and mental.

It was not difficult to work up fond feelings for Josephine. As I sewed, I became aware of a man coming out of the next room down and sitting on the floor as I did. Now and then I felt his gaze on me, surreptitious. Finally he asked, “What are you working on?”

“A pillow for one of my students.”

“Pretty small pillow.”

“It’s a dream pillow. I’ll fill it with lavender and barley. It’s to put under their sleeping pillow. A birthday gift.”

“Oh.” He looked up and down the hallway. I stole a glance at him: fortyish, solidly built but not fat, a hairline not yet in retreat. He wore khakis and loafers, and, seated on the floor with his knees up, long stretches of his white socks were visible.

I asked, “Are you a chaperone?”

“Yeah. My daughter’s here for a choir competition.”

“I figured. So is my son.”

“Oh, yeah?” He turned to look me full in the face. “So are you the lookout for sinful behavior?”

I chuckled. “Apparently so. I guess they assigned our kids to the same hallway.”

He twisted to stretch his right hand toward me. As he rebalanced his weight against his left hand, I caught a glimpse of his gold wedding ring. He said, “I’m Ted.”

I shook it. “Judy.”

“Nice to meet you, Judy. We’re from St. Scholastica.”

“Is that a Catholic school?”

“Yes. In Michigan.”

I nodded, but didn’t volunteer the details about my school. People always asked question after question, and it was an interview I didn’t feel like engaging. I went back to my pillow.

After a while Ted said, “Well, I don’t see a lot of action going on. I think they’ll stay put.”

“Clearly you don’t know teenagers.”

He smiled. “Let ’em learn. They say virtue untested was never virtue at all.”

I knotted the thread and bit it off between my teeth. “That doesn’t sound like the Catholic-school approach to me.”

“Well, I’m not Catholic.”

“Is your wife?”

He paused, his tongue half in his cheek. “No. It’s a good school, is why we send her. But the academics are what we appreciate, not the conservative teachings.”

I tried to hide a smile, smoothing the velveteen against my thigh. “I’m not particularly conservative, myself.”

He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation he said, “So if I asked you if you’d join me for a drink, you might not feel too bad about abandoning your post.”

I considered that. “I don’t know,” I said. “It wouldn’t look good for another chaperone to see me downstairs when they know I’m supposed to be on duty.”

“I said ‘a drink,’” he pointed out. He waved his thumb toward the wall behind him. “They gave me a really good minifridge.”

“Did they really,” I mused. “Here in Amish country, of all places.”

He smiled in an earnest way. “Yeah, well, I’m not Amish, either.”

His mouth on my neck, my breasts, my belly; his hands beneath my thighs, hoisting my legs around his waist; all were eager, hungry, as though the long drive from Michigan had been a patient journey toward adultery that was finally, blessedly, over. His mouth tasted, beneath the fresh sting of Jack Daniel’s, of cigarette smoke. Beside his ear, his skin was minty with aftershave. He stepped on the toes of his socks to
peel them off before undoing his pants, a subtle stab at vanity that struck me as disarming.

Not that I had much time to be disarmed. Once he lifted my chin and found me willing, he moved quickly. I might have wondered if he made a practice of this, prowling for easy sex as the sideshow to his daughter’s choir travel, except that he seemed so grateful, so conventional. He said my name over and over,
oh Judy,
or
Judy Judy Judy,
as though we had an intimate history together. But somehow from his lips my name managed to sound isolated, alien—one he had just heard over a handshake and was repeating so as not to forget.

And so I was half old flame, half stranger. He screwed like any husband in his forties, well and skillfully, without any shadow of kink. So clean and plain he might have been my own.

But in the thick of it, after the initial shock of his mouth and hands but before his weight and breadth were over me, I forgot about him. When he grazed his lips down my stomach and—good Ted, experienced Ted—lifted my thighs over his shoulders, I closed my eyes and saw, like a broken and grainy filmstrip, someone else. All motion: dark hair swinging, the twitch of a cheek muscle, the shivery tensing of biceps. Zach. Zach above a faceless woman, all of him in dreamlike grays, traveling along a sensory arc in parallel with me. And it was not until Ted came up laughing, murmuring
shhhh, shhhh,
did I realize he was still here, and Zach elsewhere, someplace where the waves of my cries were tumbling to right now, like a sonic boom.

On their last day in Ohio, Zach and his friends got up early to sing in the final competition, taking second place, which pleased Zach tremendously. The grown-ups took them out to dinner at a Pennsylvania Dutch buffet in celebration, and
by eight they were back at the hotel. He watched TV with Temple for a while, then slipped out with a handful of change to get them each a soda from the vending machine at the end of the hallway.

As Temple’s root beer clunked down to the retrieval slot, Zach heard a whisper coming from the corridor. It was Kaitlyn, peeking out from the doorway around the corner. “Hey,” she said, low-voiced. “Is Temple asleep?”

“Nope. We’re watching TV.”

“I’m bored.”

Zach shrugged. “You can join us if you like. If you can dodge the chaperones.”

She smiled, signaled him with a double thumbs-up, and tiptoed down the hall in her frog-print pajama pants. He grinned and pushed the button to dispense his own soda, then stuck his head into the room, the door of which was still ajar. Fairen lay on her stomach on the far bed, reading. She looked up and said, “Come on in.”

“You want to come watch TV with us? Kaitlyn’s on her way.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t watch TV.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me they’ve brainwashed you
that
bad.”

“I’m not brainwashed. I just don’t care for it.”

He stepped inside and shut the door behind him. She closed her book and rolled onto her side as he approached, and he sat on the bed beside her. “You’re reading
The Little Prince
in French?”

“I like
The Little Prince.
”

“I did, too, when I was seven.”

She poked him in the abs. “Where’s your shirt?”

“I just took a shower. Gonna go to bed in a little bit.”

“You don’t wear pajamas?”

He snickered. “No. I sleep in my underwear, unless it’s frickin’ freezing.”

“Boxers or briefs?”

“What do you think?”

She smirked and ran her finger under his waistband, behind the elastic. The touch excited him instantly. She tugged his boxers high enough that she could see them, then said, “That’s what I thought.”

“Are you sure?” he joked. “You want to double-check?”

To his surprise she popped open the snap of his jeans and tugged his zipper halfway down. Then she looked into his eyes and grinned. “I see you like this game. I’m flattered.”

“Yeah, feel free to ignore that.”

With her finger she drew two dots above his navel, poked him in its center, and drew a semicircle beneath it. “Happy face,” she said. Beside it she drew a downward arrow. “Right there.”

“Not very. Can you draw a ‘frustrated as hell’ face?”

“You and me both.”

“Oh, please. I don’t get why girls say that. Walk up to any guy on this trip and tap him on the shoulder and he’d be glad to help you out with that.”

She reached up and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Don’t tease,” he said. “It isn’t nice.”

She curled her whole hand around his waistband and tumbled him onto her. In the pure shock of it he pushed himself up on his arms, then looked into her face and kissed her without hesitation. As things escalated she began pressing his shoulders downward, then his head, and he wondered what strange wormhole the universe had opened up for him in which Fairen Ambrose was coaxing him to go down on her. But he was happy to roll with it. Ten minutes ago he had been getting a root beer for Temple; now the can sat on the night
table, gradually moving toward room temperature while Zach cast off most of what remained of his naïveté. As he worked he felt her body wind tighter, tighter, unbearably so; and then, just as he thought she might push him away, she collapsed in a fury of obvious and wild pleasure. He rose to his knees in awe of what he had just made happen. It felt like a superpower.

“Get back up here,” she said.

He crawled back up the bed and stretched his body over hers. She wrapped her legs around his, shrugging his loosened jeans even lower. As she tightened her grip he grew aware that the only thing stopping this from being sex was the presence of a single layer of cloth. He pressed his face into her neck and growled in frustration.

“Too bad we don’t have a condom,” she said.

“Oh, I’ve got one,” he replied. His voice was muffled by his lips against her throat.

“Seriously?”

He reached into his pocket to produce the one he always carried under strict orders from Rhianne, and held it up between two fingers.

“Oh, goody,” she said. “Put it on.”

He gladly obeyed. As he made the necessary preparations she turned onto her stomach and looked back over her shoulder at him kneeling behind her, and when he met her eye he felt himself seized by the sense that they were nothing but two animals rutting in the woods, driven to mate—without any higher purpose, without any sense of propriety or time. He started out as gently as he could, but he had been on edge before they even started, and as his control slipped away he grabbed her hair roughly into a ponytail and, teeth gritted, let his instincts overtake him.

The image that lingered—behind his closed lids and, later on, in his dreaming mind—was the look on her face when
he twisted his fist in her hair: nose wrinkled, canines bared. It was
sex
. She had looked that way for only him, because of him. No matter what else happened, that was his to keep.

Zach found it intoxicating, this discovery of what his body could do to a girl. He thought of nothing else during the first three-hour stretch of the drive back to Maryland. He had hoped to wrangle a seat in the car in which Fairen was riding, but after his disappointment ebbed, he decided it had been fortunate. It would be difficult to sit next to her, maintain an appearance of propriety, and not go insane. He had not seen her since he left her room the night before, and he knew this was in his best interest. If she could see the depth of his lust or the magnitude of his desire to be with her again—and again and again—she might feel put off. He knew little about the nature of girls, but one thing he did know was that nothing derailed a relationship faster than an imbalance of love—or any of its close relatives.

And so he stared out the window at the stubbled cornfields and called up, over and over, the shape of her body. The flare of her shoulders above her shoulder blades, shapely as wings; her small round navel between angular hipbones; the scooping shadows between her belly and thighs. He thought of her face,
the fine twin points of her top lip above the curvaceous lower one, her knowing eyes and fine brown lashes, the way her silver earrings climbed the edges of her pale ears like filigree.

He was in no mood for conversation, but it didn’t seem to matter. Scott gazed out the other window, headphones in place, probably wading around in similar thoughts about his own girlfriend, Tally. Exhausted from the night before, he fell asleep against the window and dreamed of her. Then the car’s purring motor unexpectedly fell silent and he awoke with a start, disoriented and blinking at the sudden light.

They were at a rest station along the highway. Judy slammed her door, followed by Temple, who had been in the passenger seat beside her. Scott rested his head against the window, eyes closed, music in a fog around him. Zach smacked his arm lightly, and Scott opened his eyes.

“Rest stop,” Zach said.

Scott shrugged. “I’ll stay here. Get me a Coke, will you?”

Zach unfolded his stiff muscles and headed into the building. He made his way to the bathroom, then washed his hands and caught up with the rest of the group. The whole caravan of Madrigals kids was gathered by the pizza shop in the food-court area. When he saw Fairen looking at the menu above the cash registers, he approached her from behind and poked her in the waist with both index fingers.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Okay. Tired.”

“You and me both.” He glanced around to be sure no one was paying attention to their conversation, then said in a low voice, “I keep thinking about last night.”

She smiled, but her smile seemed thin. “Yeah, pretty crazy.”

“Yep. Not in a bad way.”

Abruptly, she turned and began to walk away. He pursued her and, catching up, grabbed her wrist to get her attention.
She jerked it from his grasp and when she turned her hard eyes on him he gazed back full of dismay.

“Give me some space, will you?” she snapped. “It wasn’t very nice, what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“Pulling on my hair like that. I wasn’t going anywhere, you know. There was no need to treat me like a freakin’ farm animal.”

The crowds of people moving all around them seemed to exist in a different world. Zach was alone, with only Fairen standing across from him with her strange stony stare, barking words at him that made no sense. After the silence in which he struggled to gather his thoughts he asked, “Well, why didn’t you say anything then? Or after?”

“Because I’m bigger than that. I’m not going to bitch you out and make it awkward. But it’s done now, all right? So give me
space
.”

“I’m sorry.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and squinted at her, his head tipping, entreating her to forgive him. “Really, I’m sorry.”

The sidelong look she offered failed to absolve him. She disappeared into the crowd of Madrigals gathered in front of the pizza stand. He stayed in place, his feet unwilling to move, his rumbling stomach unexpectedly silent. With pizza in hand she walked past him, back to the car she had been traveling in, without even acknowledging him. By the time he slammed the car door and handed Scott his soda, he felt bewildered almost to tears.

Back on the highway, Judy turned on some crap ’70s music. He fished his CD player out of his backpack and put on the headphones, turning up the Goo Goo Dolls loud enough to drown out her purple hippie haze. By the time it reached the eleventh track, he had himself so worked up that the
despondent lyrics of “Iris” were intolerable. He shut off the player, tore the headphones from his ears, and chucked the whole setup into his backpack.

“You okay back there?” asked Judy.

Temple was asleep, his head lolling against the window. Scott was still gazing out at the landscape through half-closed eyes, portable CD player spinning. In a grudging voice Zach replied, “Yeah.”

“You’ve been very quiet.”

“I’m tired.”

“I think you ought to stay home tomorrow and sleep in. You can tell your teachers I told you to cut class.”

He indulged her with a half smile. Keeping her eyes on the road, she reached back and patted him on the thigh. It was enough to remind him that he wasn’t repugnant to every woman on earth, only to one, and that lifted his spirits very slightly. He looked at Judy’s mild expression, her hands back at ten and two on the wheel, and considered how crazy it was that inside that Suzy Homemaker exterior was a woman who’d grab his ass while tongue-kissing him in a room where they could easily have been caught. Suddenly he laughed. He said, “Turn up the radio.”

She twisted the dial. “Do you like this song?”

“Like it? I love it. I love the Lemonheads.” Sometimes the radio seemed to be possessed. It could read his mind.

She grinned. “It’s not the Lemonheads, it’s Simon and Garfunkel.”

“It’s ‘Mrs. Robinson,’” he insisted. “It’s a Lemonheads song. I’m sure of it.”

“Then they must have covered it, because this is Simon and Garfunkel. They’re not going to play the Lemonheads on an oldies rock station. And I remember this song from when I was your age.”

He gave up the argument. She was probably right; what he had mistaken for an unfamiliar version of the CD track was starting to sound more folksy than live. Still, the coincidence was uncanny. He glanced at Temple and at Scott, and then, satisfied that they were too brain-dead to be listening, asked, “Do you know what it’s about?”

“Sure I do. Do you?”

He worked up his nerve and said, “It’s about an older woman who’s into younger guys.”

She laughed. “Everyone thinks that, just because they played it in
The Graduate.
But that’s not it at all. That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“What do you think it’s about, then?”

Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. She glanced at him in the rearview mirror and said, “It’s about a woman who’s going crazy. She’s trapped in the suburbs and in her crappy marriage and she’s losing it.”

He nodded. Her interpretation wasn’t as interesting as his. He said, “Ah.”

“Or rather, she’s lost it.”

He looked at her, at the funny smile she had on her face, her eyes properly focused on the road. She laughed again and said, “Depressing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I like my version better.”

She rolled her window partially down. The sound of the wind crashed through the car, drowning out the music. She rested her elbow against the ledge and held her fingers up to the outside air, moving them as if to better feel the wind. “Maybe it’s both,” she said. “Would you blame her?”

On Monday afternoon Dan lingered in my classroom when he came to pick up Aidan. As the other children left, one by
one, with their parents and caregivers, I regarded him with a combination of curiosity and dread.

“How was the choir trip?” he asked.

“Very nice. The kids took second place.”

“Didn’t destroy any hotel rooms, did they?”

I acknowledged this with a quick laugh. “Of course not. Model citizens, every one of them.”

“I expect you had a better weekend than I did, then.” He glanced toward the hallway, then at his son, placidly playing with toy animals on the carpet. “The auditor from the Department of Health called me on Friday. She wants us to voluntarily close the school for a week until the measles infections subside. I told her no.”

“Tell her yes,” I said immediately. “Whatever it takes to appease them.”

“We can’t do that, Judy.” His tone disparaged my solution, making him sound, for the moment, much like Russ. “I’ll have fifty parents in here asking for prorated refunds of their tuition dollars. The kids who’ve had their shots aren’t at risk, and the others have probably been exposed already. A closure won’t make any difference at all.”

I shrugged. “I think it’s a ridiculous situation, any way you look at it. The school has no control over whether parents vaccinate their children. All we can do is get our paperwork in order, and beyond that, no one can hold us accountable for the decisions of the parents.”

“That doesn’t mean we won’t turn into the piñata for it anyway. And if our enrollment numbers are down next fall, we’re pretty screwed.”

“We’re always pretty screwed. We get by.”

The skin around his eyes creased with irritation. “Maybe your definition of screwed is different from mine. I mean the kind where we
don’t
get by.”

I laughed. “How are those class ring sales going, by the way?”

“Don’t take a dig at me. I’m doing all I can. But I need your help. We have two events coming up.”

“The Martinmas lantern walk and the bazaar.”

“Yes. I understand Bobbie Garrison was usually the one to handle the lantern walk, and that you sometimes assisted—”

“
Always
assisted. She and I have worked together on projects since college.
Had
worked. Whichever.” I waved a hand to dismiss my jumbling of tenses. It was a common problem in speaking of Bobbie, the way I shuffled and crunched through words like leaves in various stages of decay.

“Yes, well, obviously we need extra hands to take care of it this year, since she’s not around to do it.”

“She’s not, indeed,” I said coolly. “She’s unavailable.”

He held my gaze with an expression of superhuman patience. “And I know the faculty feels her loss very deeply. If you can take over the planning, that would be a huge help. Make it a tribute to her. I think everybody would appreciate that.”

“I’d like that.”

“And this year it’s very important that we put the event out to the community. Call the local newspapers and see if they’ll send photographers. Advertise the bazaar everyplace that makes sense. And for the lantern walk, we need to try to get as many kids to show up as humanly possible. I’m worried that the school is starting to look undesirable. That will be death for us next year unless we turn it around.”

I nodded. “I’ll do everything I can.”

His words were slow, carefully chosen. “I recognize…that your kindergarten is what compels most of our parents to enroll their kids in Sylvania Waldorf. It comes recommended,
then exceeds their expectations. I don’t always agree with you about the direction of the school—”

“You don’t
often
agree with me,” I corrected.

He laughed uneasily. “True. But I do recognize that the strength of a Waldorf kindergarten will make or break the school. And so I…
honor
what you offer us.”

“Thank you.” Behind him, the door opened and Zach sauntered in, wearing a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt printed with an image of Icarus arching toward the sky. He hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and approached me, smiling.

“Howdy, Teach,” he greeted me.

“Mr. Patterson,” replied Dan with enthusiasm. “How goes school?”

“Fine. Good.”

“Are you getting a lot done on the bazaar?”

Zach nodded. His hair slipped into his eyes. “It’s going better than usual this year,” I interjected. “We have quite a few donations from the community. Massage certificates, doll-making, things like that. And the crafts are starting to come in. The third grade made some beautiful beeswax candles.”

Dan smiled. “And we have that playhouse you built for us, Zach. That’ll bring in some excellent bids. It’s a wonderful job you did.”

“Thanks. My dad’s a carpenter. I’ve been doing that stuff, like, forever.”

Dan nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. “Very good. Keep up the good work.”

He departed, leaving my classroom door ajar. As soon as he was out of earshot I turned to Zach and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

He widened his eyes and grimaced, shoulders twitching uneasily, the body language teenagers always use to let an
adult know she’s crazy. “Asking you for my next job,” he told me.

“I told you I was going to sign off on all your service hours.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you
meant
it. You can’t give me a free pass on a graduation requirement just because you made out with me.”

I closed my eyes and tried to gather my flagging patience. “Zachary, I thought we agreed we were going to forget all about that.”

He shrugged. “That’s fine. But, like, if I expected you to sign off on me when I didn’t do all the work, then I wouldn’t be forgetting about it, right? I really would be whoring myself out.”

“Zach.”

“I’m just saying.” He caught my pleading gaze and shrugged again. “I’m showing character and integrity.”

I sighed. “Don’t come to my classroom, all right? I’ll give you the work, but you can come by my house to talk to me about it. When you come waltzing in here when Dr. Beckett’s speaking with me, it looks suspicious.”

His laughter mocked me. “And me coming over to your house wouldn’t? C’mon. He knows I’m working with you. He’s the one who set the whole thing up. Don’t be paranoid.”

I considered his reasoning for only a second, then shook my head. “Sorry. I don’t feel very reassured.”

“That’s because you’re paranoid.”

He looked at me from under those shaggy bangs, and the impishness in his gaze was the same as the first time I’d looked at him in my rearview mirror, chastising him for his dirty joke. Now I took in the irreverence in his eyes, the mild humor in his smile, and considered the curious nature of his draw to me. In Ohio, secure at the end of Fairen’s invisible
leash, he had seemed so young that I wondered at my sanity for ever having engaged with him. But there would come the moments, as now, when his eyes would snap sharply, knowingly, or he would stretch his lean body with that peculiar confident grace, that
conscious
grace—and I could feel the rumbling thunder of the man he would become, and the urge to reach for it like a soap bubble I knew would be destroyed in the grabbing. It was something I needed to resolve.