The Kingdom of Childhood (18 page)

“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 the window at the spare rural landscape, the red barns that dotted the dying fields, like chambered hearts in the midst of nothing.

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.

They turned onto a smaller road and came to a very old church. Her father parked not far from it and opened the trunk to retrieve his walking stick—a shining length of knotty wood covered in the small souvenir medallions collected by German hiking enthusiasts. They set out in the direction of the church and then hiked into the woods, where the thin
trees grew straight and dense toward the sun, some burdened with lush bands of clinging ivy. Ahead of her Kirsten walked in her boxy, methodical way, skirt swinging like a cowbell. The fabric, white and sprigged with flowers in Easter-egg colors, was the same as the dress her friend had been wearing in the barn. Kirsten wore an apron over hers, knotted demurely on the left side, to indicate she was single.

“Here we are,” her father said, as they arrived at a large block of granite covered in moss. “This marks where the castle used to be.”

Judy screwed up her face. “You mean there’s no castle?”

“Hasn’t been since the year 1209. But this is where the foundation was. Don’t pick at the moss, Judy.”

“Why’d they take it down?”

“Because Count Otto murdered King Philip of Swabia,” he told her, and Kirsten nodded. “Then Count Otto tore it apart and used the stone for other things. Probably to build his own castle someplace else. Or to throw over the walls at people who liked King Philip better.”

She ran her fingers over the German script carved into the stone. Behind the rock sprouted a crowded assortment of trees, their trunks fanning out at angles, all vying for the light. Other than the marker, there was no sign that this place had ever been anything but woods. In a way it was a gravestone, no different from the ones she and Rudi had played among the past winter, but for a place instead of a person. A gravestone for a home.

“Well, I guess we ought to go take a look at the church,” he said. His walking stick thumped against the dirt. “Another day, another plaster Virgin Mary. Lead the way, kiddo.”

“We can skip it. I don’t care about it.”

Her father shot her a disbelieving look. “Are you kidding? You love that stuff.”

She shook her head. She would never be able to explain it in a way that made sense. Lately, during meals, her father had begun to make optimistic small talk about her mother’s condition, how much better she would likely do once she was moved to a civilian hospital back in the States, how glad she would be to know Judy was being well taken care of.
Kirsten, now, she has been invaluable,
he would say then. And thus would begin a long segue into Kirsten’s virtues, his voice enthused, verb tenses muddied enough that Judy understood he had no intention of leaving the girl behind. At one point she might have confided her fears to Rudi, but now to approach the barn was as daunting as her own home. She had muttered a shy, stammering
Ave Maria,
and the universe had only twisted the blade.

“Well,
I
want to see it,” he said. “How can you choose to skip a four-hundred-year-old church? You know you’ve been in Europe too long when
those
have gotten routine.”

He started toward the church, with Kirsten falling in line behind him and Judy, in turn, behind her. As they walked Judy picked red currants from the bushes along the path, and Kirsten gazed up at the trees, pointing out birds and naming them for Judy.
Rotkehlchen. Spatz. Krähe.
Her wandering reminded Judy of the story in her schoolbook about the little boy who walked around with his nose in the air, never paying attention to where he was going until he fell into the river.
Das ist ein schlechter Spaß,
warned the book.
That is a bad game.
The illustration showed the half-drowned child being dragged from the water with poles, mocked by a trio of fish.
Merry Rhymes and Funny Pictures.

“You’d better pay attention to what you’re doing,” Judy warned her in rudimentary German. “If you don’t, you might have an accident.”

The girl cast a nervous glance at her and hurried ahead
to where Judy’s father strode onward, walking stick pressing him steadily forward through the forest. The word for
accident
was so simple in German:
Unglück.
The opposite of luck, the kind that nobody wished for you in pink icing. It could mean
accident
, but it could also mean
curse
. Or
catastrophe
.

“Come on, kiddo,” called Judy’s father. “Pick up the pace.”

Kirsten looked over her shoulder at Judy, and Judy smiled. Three at a time she popped the red currants into her mouth. She was the cavechild, eating the food the primeval garden offered her, following the tribal king. Speaking the language that winnowed words down to their simplest terms, forcing them into meanings that were foggy yet dense, like the morning.

The girl Rudi liked so much couldn’t stay there forever. The following week Judy returned to the barn, because she harbored a dogged hope that things might return to normal, but also because time was getting away from her and she wanted to cherish what remained with Rudi. At the gate that marked the edge of his yard she turned and caught a glimpse of her own home. It stood in the near distance at the rise of the hill, cheerful and half-timbered with geraniums in the window boxes, the lovely cottage which Kirsten had turned into a jack-in-the-box of primal fear. It was Judy’s mother’s tidy domain, but while she sat by the window in a sanitary room and waited for her senses to come back to her, the natives back home were throwing a party. To her father, the topography of Germany was a thin surface of charming, sportsmanlike, well-organized modern life laid over the deep crackling roots of a barbarian land. The hardy knots of the old ways still broke through, and must be negotiated: the peasant good cheer of their festivals, the pagan earthiness of
their Christianity, the temptation to cradle the cheek of a subservient virgin and see whether she would dare say no.

The old green station wagon belonging to Rudi’s family was missing from their gravel driveway; they all appeared to be gone except for Kirsten, who was at the Chandlers’, but Judy checked the barn anyway. Rudi’s black rubber boots rested beside the pile of hay bales. The cow, large-eyed and full-uddered, swished her tail at Judy. The barn was dim in the late-afternoon light, smelling more strongly than usual of manure. She looked up at the crucifix on the back wall, witness to numerous sins. She thought about the puffs of crinoline on either side of Rudi’s hips, how he must have pulled the girl against him to make them flare wide open like flowers in a time-lapse filmstrip. The barn had that effect on people.
They stay warm by their own body heat,
he had told her, his back to the counter and his rough hands resting against it on either side. In embarrassment her gaze had fallen to his suspenders loose at his waist, his navel that seemed an odd reminder of infancy on his grown male body.
You can eat it for a cookie, and there is no sin.

She walked through their yard to the shed, as she still occasionally did, to look in on the family of hedgehogs. The gasoline fumes gave her a mild headache, but it was worth it to play with these little animals Rudi agreed were precious. Yet now they were gone; where they had been there was only a fluff of dry grass interspersed with brittle brown leaves. She crouched on the hard-packed soil beside it and poked with the end of a trowel, but it was useless. The family had disappeared, and she could not guess where they might have gone.

She stood and set her hands on her hips, digging the toe of her saddle shoe into the ground. The shed was small and close. The tractor fit into it but left little space for anything else. Along the far wall rested a cluster of tools, hoes and
spades and a rake with rusted tines; beside it sat a pile of rotting baskets and a stack of milk pans. A sack of fertilizer sat near the door, its top gaping open. She turned a basket upside-down and sat on it, then took from her skirt pocket the little stack of matches she had been hoarding from the box in the kitchen. They were so much larger than the small ones people used to light cigarettes, and the strike-anywhere feature still amazed her. When she moved too skittishly, either the match snapped in half or nothing happened at all. But when she snapped it decisively, nearly every surface became a runway for the most forbidden thrill she had yet encountered.
Snap:
the split-willow side of the basket became a co-conspirator.
Snap:
the sole of her saddle shoe brought a second flame roaring to life.
Snap. Snap.
She let each burn down almost to her fingers, then dropped it on the dirt floor. The humid ground offered no fuel to the fire, and every match burned itself out. A little pile of wood ash formed beside her, and she thought of the illustrations in the story about the girl who played with matches, the cats’ tears pouring like an open spigot beside the little volcano of ash that had once been Pauline.

But there was no concern for that. Pauline
jumped for joy and ran about,
while Judy sat still. When she dropped her last match onto the ground, she fed the small flame with a leaf from the hedgehogs’ nest. It fluttered and rose to a high peak, and the effect pleased her enough that she sprinkled it with a bit of grass from the nest; next, a broken bit of twig from a basket. Now she had a very small campfire, a doll-sized one, suitable for her imaginary journeys into the land of the cavechildren. Onto it she dropped another tuft of grass, then looked around for steadier fuel. The bag of fertilizer gaped beside the door; she took a handful of the gray granules and fed one to the little campfire.
Snap:
but instead of a flame, it popped and gave off a flash of light. She fed it a second one, then a third.

The shed door creaked open, and Judy swung her head around in alarm. She quickly dropped the fertilizer onto the ground and stood, setting the basket like a cap over both the fuel and the small fire. Standing at the door was Kirsten, her blond braids crossed demurely over the part in her hair, her green flowered apron neat at her waist and Rudi’s big boots on her feet. She took a step inside and said,
“Oh. Hallo, Judy. Was machst du?”

“Playing,” she replied in English. She saw the incomprehension in Kirsten’s eyes, and she stood taller and straightened her skirt. The girl looked nervous, as though she meant to inquire further but lacked both the nerve and the English skills to do so. Judy moved toward the door, and Kirsten’s gaze followed her. There was that look again: the one of a girl with her pockets turned inside out. The mute plea. When Judy reached the doorway, Kirsten squeezed past her and headed toward the milk pans at the back of the shed. She stopped halfway and looked around, raising her face as though detecting, now, that whatever she had suspected was wrong was indeed very wrong. Observing this, Judy felt a twist of fear. She did not want to be caught and reported, banned from Rudi’s property. And she did not want to see her father and Kirsten taking sides together against her. That could not be borne.

And so she did a simple thing. She banged down the latch, and she backed slowly away.

A chicken behind her heel squawked and fluttered. She turned, then hurried back toward her house. Closing her eyes, she tucked her hands into the small pockets of her skirt and walked into the burgeoning wind, to where the house awaited, calm and empty, to where the thistles were beginning to bloom.