The Kingdom of Childhood (14 page)

He set his jaw and met her angry stare. “You owe me an apology. It’s one thing if you’re pissed, but you don’t
hit
me. Nobody hits me.”

“I
am
pissed.”

“That’s fine. If that’s how you want to be about it, I’m gone.”

“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” she countered. “Go. And rub it in my face while you’re at it, so I won’t be tempted next time you try to seduce me while I’m babysitting you. Go get in Fairen’s bed, since she’s obviously the one you really want. See if she puts up with your shit.”

That hit a nerve. He remembered Fairen’s cold eyes and angry words at the rest stop, the way his heart had lurched when she pulled her wrist from his grasp. He said, “Don’t be a bitch.”

She barked a laugh. “
I’m
a bitch. Imagine if that officer had done his job a little better. Found my car and ran the tags. Called your mother. I’d go to
jail
. My kids would never speak to me again, and my husband would divorce me. In twenty years I’d be living in some roachy little rented room and put ting on a hairnet to go to work. All because I gave you a blow job.”

He cast a narrowed glance in her direction. After a moment he said, “You’ve done a hell of a lot more than give me a blow job.”

“Yeah, you seem to be suffering for it.
That
punishment fits the crime, don’t you think?”

She threw the car into gear and turned the corner toward where her Volvo sat on the shoulder, not very distant at all. He rolled down the window and turned his face toward the wind, allowing his silence to be its own reply. When she pulled up behind the Volvo and cut the engine, he didn’t budge. He stared out at the trees and let the stillness gather.

“You still owe me an apology,” he said.

“Fine,” she replied. Her voice was breezy and hard at the same time. “I’m sorry I hit you. All right?”

He said nothing. Her tone made it clear she felt no remorse. He felt a sting at the corners of his eyes and thought glumly back to the previous night, when he had found himself toying with the idea that he and Judy were a sort of dirty Bonnie and Clyde and that it bonded them somehow, made them not just two mismatched people who hooked up when it was convenient, but a pair. Now he felt foolish in his delusion.

“Do you accept my apology?” she pressed.

He sighed. “Sure.”

Leaning back in her seat, she reached over and massaged him, the gesture conciliatory but her fingers pliant, confident.
He looked out the window carelessly and did not stop her. And that was the worst part: his desire for her, still intact. After all the fear and guilt and bullshit, he still wanted her.

The day of the Martinmas lantern walk had arrived, and after my last student left that afternoon I set out a sheet of poster board on the art table and spread around it every photo of Bobbie I had managed to hoard. The distraction, grim though it might be, was a welcome one. The momentary
pop
of my palm against Zach’s cheek had grown into a thunderclap that echoed across the days.
Nobody hits me.
Afterward he had no choice but to return to my house to drop off the car, but he had also come inside, set his back against the closed front door, and accepted my makeshift apology in grouchy silence. It was enough to assure me his silent treatment wouldn’t last long, but in the meantime I missed his company, in all its manifestations.

Since Dan’s request that I put together a little tribute for Bobbie, my colleagues had come to me with whatever pictures they could find of her. I had waited until the last minute in order to be sure no one’s photos were excluded from the display. Now came the difficult work of actually looking at them. Already I had painted the board in swirling pastels,
using the wet-on-wet watercolor technique that was a fixture of our trade, and written her name at the top in the noble and calligraphic Waldorf hand. Along the bottom now I attached one photo after another of Bobbie posing with her fellow teachers. In many, she was young and round-faced, with her smooth brown hair in the bob she had always worn; in the later pictures she was thinner, with a lavender bandanna tied around her head. As I set to work arranging the earliest photos toward the top, the task grew much harder. She had done her training a couple of years after me, having grown discontented with her experiences in other private schools and envious of my enthusiasm and sense of purpose. But as undergraduates our lives had been so intertwined almost to the point of codependency, and as I looked at those pictures I felt anxiety taxiing inside me like a plane down a runway, filling my mind with the shrilling thought of
the loss, the loss, the loss.

There we were: two twenty-year-olds in brief white running shorts and emerald-green knee socks, standing in the field of the inter-dormitory softball game and smiling as though this were something we truly enjoyed. Her arm rested over my shoulders; she balanced her weight on one foot in a jaunty way, while I, short in stature and bird-boned, stood with my hands folded beneath my sternum as though caught in the act of prayer. Her smile was openhearted. Mine was nervous, and with good reason. The semester before, I had lost nearly everything in a fire at our previous dorm building. Bobbie had, too, of course—she was my roommate—but unlike me, Bobbie didn’t carry her whole life off to college with her out of fear that her family would dissolve in her absence and scatter her possessions to the four winds. And also unlike me, Bobbie had not been dating the man who had caused the fire by getting drunk and falling asleep while
smoking in bed. I felt responsible, in a way, because I had known of Marty’s bad habits but did nothing to report or repair them. He drank when he was angry, which was often. On the night of the fire he and I had slept together; afterward, as I lay with my head on his chest watching the smoke from his cigarette curl toward the ceiling, a girl called. He had asked me to step out of the room so he could talk to her, and we argued. I had gone back to my own room feeling put out, and even months later my sense lingered that if I hadn’t been quite so sensitive, several dozen people would have been spared the heartache and difficulty of losing all their things. And of course, Marty would still be alive.
You can’t blame yourself,
Bobbie had told me, and set to work making our new room as cheerful as possible to distract me from my gloominess. It was she who bought me a new
Last Tango in Paris
poster, pointing out that Marlon Brando could take anyone’s mind off anything at all, and gave me a glass ball swirled with purple that hung in the window and captured the light, sending it off in little rays around our room. Even now it hung in my kitchen window, and like everything that bore the stamp of Bobbie’s love, I treasured it as though it were the relic of a saint.

I taped the photo near the top center of the board, running a hand over it to smooth it down. As I did, my door thumped open and Sandy came in, carrying a rattling box of lanterns made of tall Mason jars covered in tissue-paper stars slicked down with white glue.

“I found these in my supply closet,” she said. “Thought you might be able to use them for the younger siblings who show up without one. Will they do for that?”

I nodded.

“If you’d just put them back in my closet afterward, that would be great. I have to leave early… Hey, are you okay?”

“Yeah.” My voice quavered. “I’m just…trying to pull this together.”

She set down the box and looked over my shoulder at the poster. I felt her hand against my upper arm, brisk comforting strokes. Sandy was touchy that way, and although people like that tended to make me uneasy, I knew she meant well. It was her way of showing love, like Bobbie’s way of giving out little presents. It helped if I thought about it in those terms.

“You knew her a long time,” she observed.

I nodded again and wiped beneath my eye with the heel of my hand.

“You can talk to me about her, you know. You can’t hold that kind of grief in. It’ll gnaw and gnaw at you.”

“It’s easier if I don’t talk about it. I’d be a basket case if I did.”

“Not true. If you keep it inside, you’ll really be a basket case. Talking is cathartic. Keeping quiet will slowly drive you crazy. As the song says, ‘silence like a cancer grows.’”

“What song is that?”

“‘The Sounds of Silence.’”

I gave an abrupt little laugh. “Simon and Garfunkel. Of course. Great stuff.”

“For those of us old enough to remember them.”

I laughed again, this time more sincerely, and also more hopelessly. I thought about my debate with Zach on the way home from Ohio and wondered which Mrs. Robinson I was to him right now: the temptress, or the lunatic. Certainly, they weren’t mutually exclusive.

She pulled up a child’s chair and sat beside me. She put her arm around my back, and her hand cupped my far shoulder with a firm pressure. I knew she wanted me to lay my head on her shoulder, to speak, to cry, but I just couldn’t. It was as if the place that held my grief was so deep that no sign of
it could make it to the surface. To cry on Sandy would be to usurp Bobbie’s role and hand it to her replacement. My loyalty to Bobbie was too great to let me properly mourn her, because mourning is the beginning of moving on.

“Martinmas was her favorite festival here,” I said. “She loved the fall, and watching the little kids go on their nature walks, and the way the air smelled. She loved the excuse to pull out all those big crazy sweaters she used to make. I want to honor her tonight. Not to cry or even talk. Just to make this evening a recognition of what she means to us, and to the school. What she
meant
to us, I mean.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Sandy, and as she tightened her hug around my shoulders, I tried to pretend she wasn’t patronizing me.

At dusk the children gathered in the school parking lot with homemade lanterns aglow, bundled up in thick wool sweaters and handknit mittens that reminded me, immediately, of Bobbie. My class had made their lanterns a few days before, gluing colored tissue to glass jelly jars and wrapping wire around the tops for a handle. With a tea light inside, the tissue—orange and yellow and red—glowed beautifully. The entire school community turned out each November to walk the few neighborhood blocks near the school, stopping at a few homes to offer a loaf of banana bread or a few cookies, before returning to the parking lot for cider and popcorn.

I loved it with all my heart. It was peaceful and cozy and blessedly free of any commercial attachment whatsoever. Some years—not every year, but often enough—I would look over the gathering of happy faces and feel as though I were reaching back through time, thousands and thousands of years back, to connect with the most ancient meaning of the word
tribe
. I needed that this year more than ever, and not only because
of Bobbie. I needed to forget all about the stupidity that was Russ and my own roiling heart and my fears for the future of the school. Martinmas was simple: fire, happy children, shared food. I would place myself fearlessly in the present moment and think nothing of the dark surrounding world.

I held a lantern left over from when Scott was a child, and I walked. Neighbors, who had watched this procession for many years, came out on their porches to wave. The youngest children held their lanterns with gravely serious expressions, taking the adults at their word when they warned of the responsibility that came with carrying fire. The older children tried to make the light dance on the pavement in interesting ways. They looped around the block and made their way back to the parking lot, where a few of the teachers had set up an enormous kettle of cider on top of a charcoal grill. The scent of its embers rose wildly into the night air.

I set my lantern on the ground beside the building and stood, my hands folded respectfully, as Dan moved to the center of the crowd and began his little speech about Bobbie. He had known her for less than a year, and his words had a generic ring to them, like a pastor speaking at the funeral of someone whose name he had memorized on the way in. I knew so much more about her than he could ever say, and as he spoke, my mind, and gaze, began to wander. As it did I caught a movement at the corner of my eye and knew immediately, without even fully seeing him, that it was Zach. I turned just enough to view him. He wore a black sweatshirt with its hood up and black jeans, and he was easing himself down to sit on a concrete barrier at the end of a parking space. In his hand was a paper cup of cider. Fairen stood nearby, talking to another girl, but at the moment he was alone.

He nodded a greeting. In return, I waved hesitantly. I wondered whether his nod was meant to be curt or only covert.
There was a sudden rush of arms rising into the air as Dan began to offer a toast to Bobbie, and Zach disappeared behind the waving limbs; I drank, then cut my gaze sideways again. Zach drained his cup, glanced around, then rose and walked toward me.

“Hi, Teach,” he said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But his smile was free of irony, and I said, “You seem to be in a good mood.”

“So do you.”

“I’m always glad to see you happy. You know that.”

His smile broadened. “Speaking of which, what’s the difference between the president and the
Titanic?
”

I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“They know how many people went down on the
Titanic
.”

I grinned. “You’re awful.”

He stuffed his hands into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. “Sorry. I’ll work on it.”

Dan circled around a group and came toward me. I reined in my smile, and Zach moved past me, walking over to the curb where a group of his friends were playing Medieval Judo. He ducked an airborne kick and retaliated by lunging forward to grab his friend around the waist. I crouched down to meet Aidan, who approached me with his lantern held high and glowing with yellow candlelight, his father’s large hand firmly wrapped around his free one.

“Did you show your father the beautiful job you did?” I asked.

He nodded and twirled the lantern to show me the way the orange tissue transformed the simple fire into a warm inward glow. I admired his work before letting my gaze drift over his shoulder to Zach, still good-naturedly play-fighting with the other young men, all grace and lean muscle and hidden sexuality. And as I looked I felt the victorious joy, the intoxication
of pure possession. For here was this beautiful creature whom others would look at and desire, and I was one of the few who knew him secretly, whom he had allowed to be intimate with him. Never had I felt so much power in a secret, and never had I guarded one so jealously.

I rose to stand, lifting my lantern, and I thought:
as surely as one of these lanterns can light the next, so has the fire in him rekindled the fire in me.
Where once I had died down to nothing, I was alive again, and all was his doing. I was afire with him, and for once the thought was not terrible.

When the gathering was over, I collected the lanterns into a box and carried it back to Sandy’s classroom, navigating down the hallway with my chin lifted above the height of the box. I joggled the doorknob with two fingers and, after the door swung open, carefully plunked the box onto the counter beside the craft closet. The room was dim; the gaps between the window blinds showed a few small lights distantly flickering, as children walked away from the school clutching a lantern in one fist, a parent’s hand in the other. To my right, above the blackboard, the legend unfurled:
Man is both a fallen God and a God in the becoming.

I swung open the doors of the supply cabinet and, quite unexpectedly, pulled in my breath. There on the top shelf were all of Bobbie’s things from her classroom, crammed in together without care or curation of any sort. At the front stood her coffee mug with the rainbow on the side, perched on a smiling cloud; wadded beside it, the lilac-colored cardigan that had often hung beneath the middle monkey. There was a ball of yarn with a crochet hook jammed into it, a few rows of work hanging loosely from its pink stalk, and her soft-edged copy of Steiner’s
The Kingdom of Childhood,
its bottom edge so well-thumbed that it rose like the edge of a wing.

I pulled each item toward the front, handling them, peering at them, in dreadful wonder at how Bobbie’s things had been so unceremoniously shoved into a closet and forgotten. Sandy had done this, perhaps, or Dan; and it made me angry, this evidence that for all of his clownish frowning, all of his somber words about
our loss,
he and others had so little regard for what was left of her. I held the ball of silver-flecked blue wool in my hands and stretched out the rows of crochet work, trying to figure out what she had been making, and for whom. That person should have this, so they could hold it and know that even as she was dying, Bobbie had been working this little web borne of her thoughts for them.