The Kingdom of Childhood (2 page)

It dawned on me suddenly. The black hair and eyes. The faded, peachy tan. Barring the pregnant belly, the slender and neatly toned frame. I suppressed a groan.

“I have, as a matter of fact,” I said, impressed by my own composure. “He and my son are in the madrigal choir together. I brought him home the other day.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “He didn’t tell one of his Lewinsky jokes, did he?”

“He did.”

A sigh of disgust escaped her lips. “I apologize for that. If it’s the joke I think it is, he’s been telling it to his father’s
employees, his uncles and even his grandfather. Quite the comedian, that one. He’s probably getting revenge on us for listening to too much NPR.”

“Maybe he finds it upsetting,” I suggested. “Losing faith in one’s leaders and all that. Maybe it’s his way of relieving the stress.”

She smirked and responded with a snorting little laugh. “You don’t know my son. He doesn’t have stress. He just wants to use dirty words in front of adults. It gives him a thrill.”

Beside me Dan shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, well,” I quickly added, “I’m pretty experienced with teenagers. I’m sure I’ll be able to keep him in line.”

I said goodbye to Dan and Vivienne and headed out in the direction of the workshop, taking the long route to avoid walking past Bobbie’s history classroom, now occupied by a young teacher who bore no resemblance to Bobbie in either looks or spirit. On the first day of school I had made the foolish decision to drop by and peek in. The sight of all those teenagers chatting and working and laughing, going on as though she had never been there, sent me into a spiral of depression so confounding that I spent all afternoon emptying dropperfuls of Bach’s homeopathic Rescue Remedy into my coffee. Since then I employed the methods of avoidance and repression to deal with my grief, and while I knew the conventional wisdom declared that this was a poor idea, it had always worked fine for me.

The bedraggled workshop building sat behind the school, an oversize shed in need of some serious love and exterior latex paint. Amish craftsmen had been contracted to build it ten years before; it had been trimmed and painted by the school’s juniors and seniors, and left unheated except for a wood stove they fed with scraps from student projects. That
much I knew, because the underwriters had canceled the insurance on that building three years before unless we agreed to put in a heating system that complied with building code. The funds didn’t exist, and so the building survived on vigilance and hope.

I heard Zach Patterson before I saw him, crouched on the floor of the workshop beside a very loud saw. With safety glasses over his eyes and his shaggy black hair shielding his face, I would not have been certain it was him were it not for the backpack lying on the table, the initials ZXP drawn in big bold letters on the front pocket with a black marker. I wondered what the X stood for.

“Hi, Zach,” I yelled over the din of the saw, trying to start the partnership on a friendly note.

He looked up at me through a haze of sawdust and shut off the power. When he stood, he pushed the glasses onto his forehead, offering me a first good look beneath that mop of hair: unruly skin and inexpertly tended facial hair, rounded out by eyes a bit too large in proportion to the lean angles of his cheeks and jaw. What mothers call “the awkward stage” was slow in letting go of Zachary Patterson.

He extended his hand. “Thanks for the ride the other day, Mrs. McFarland.”

“You’re welcome. Your mother just dropped by to tell me I’ll be working with you on the bazaar. I didn’t make the connection between the two of you until our conversation was almost over.”

“That’s because she looks more Chinese than I do,” he said bluntly. “It throws everybody off.”

“I think it was the last name that threw me. I’ve seen your name on the Madrigals roster, so when she said she was a Heath, I didn’t put together that you were hers.”

He nodded. “It gets more confusing when you meet my
dad. He’s blond and really tall, so nobody ever thinks I’m his kid, even though I’ve got his last name. Then they expect my mom to have a Chinese-sounding name and think my dad must be the Heath. It happens all the time.”

I smiled politely. “That’s the modern family for you, I guess.”

He returned my smile with a grin of his own. “Yep. The obscuring of ancient wisdom.”

“What do you mean?”

I had taken the bait. “Steiner said the mixing of the races obscures the ancient wisdom. You can blame my parents for that.”

I closed my eyes for a long moment. “Steiner never said that.”

“He did, but it’s okay. He was a product of his time. And so am I.” Pulling his glasses back down, he rearranged the plank of wood in his hands and asked, “Did you need me for something?”

“I just wanted to discuss the expectations for your service hour credits. I’m not sure if you’ll fill all thirty hours, but I can find as much work for the bazaar as you’re willing to do. Painting, assembling booths, pricing crafts, you name it.”

“Got it,” he said. He sank back to his haunches and aligned the board in front of the sawblade. “Whore myself out until the school says I’m done. I can handle it.”

I glowered at his back. He was like a mouthier, less easily punished version of Scott. I hitched my purse onto my shoulder and said, “Well, I’ll be away for the weekend, but let me know if you need any assistance.”

“Where are you going?”

The personal question took me aback. “To the Blue Ridge Mountains with my husband for our anniversary.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like the mountains. It’s weird to
live in a place that doesn’t have them. When you look outside it’s like your eyes don’t know where to rest. There’s no anchor. It’s just emptiness. It sucks.”

He was right. Maybe that explained why I felt the way I did. Lately the sense nagged at me that a nascent dark thing was coming, and that, as my midwife had once said, there was no way out of this thing but through it. But perhaps it was simpler than all that. A matter of finding an easy place to rest one’s eyes, and with them, one’s thoughts.

I smiled at him, and, in an abashed, close-lipped way, he smiled back.

In his earliest memory, Zach is nestled snug in bed with his mother, back to breast, skin to skin. His father is there as well, his back broad and winter-pale, his spine curled in sleep. It must have been February, because Zach is secretly sucking a pink strawberry candy of the type sent by Grandma Moo, his Chinese grandmother, every Chinese New Year. Most likely, this being New Hampshire, there would have been snow on the ground as tall as himself. And yet there he is, warm beneath the featherbed and his parents’ indigo batik quilt, nursing his hoarded candy. Sucking slowly, so she won’t notice. This is what he remembers—the drowsy heat, the angled sunlight, the solid sweetness in the middle of his tongue; and the way his heart palpitated when his mother suddenly asked, “Zach, is that candy I smell?”

That was all. Some of the details, in retrospect, stood to reason: for example, his mother had slept shirtless for years, having slipped into the habit during the several years in which she nursed him. And Grandma Moo—so called because she was his mother’s mother, her
mu
—had sent those pink candies
in their crinkly strawberry wrappers every year of his life.
Gung hey fat choi,
the red greeting card always read; and his mother often murmured “emphasis on the fat” as she unpacked the small boxes of white chocolate pretzels, spongecake petits fours, popcorn balls and sugared almonds. Forbidden like poison, they were the sorts of foods she tolerated only once a year and only for a taste, before dumping the boxes into the trash and force-feeding Zach a quart of vanilla kefir as an antidote.

Yet stripped of reason, the memory is purely sensual. There is nothing before it, but much after; the quiet room, the cave-like warmth forming the Big Bang from which his consciousness unfurled. It occurred to him that he would have no recollection of that pleasure, had he not been caught in the act of disobedience.

But Zach knew that this consciousness, as he understood it, was nothing more than an island in the great stirring sea of his mind, that formless dark which informed everything. In it were his dreams, some remembered, most not; there lingered all the moments of pain and fear and pleasure his childmind had failed to process. But also there lived the ancient shapes his teachers called, altogether, the collective subconscious: the witch, the white knight, the princess in the tower, the devil. A body of archetypes, a language of symbols passed down through time, birth by birth, like the code for the shape of an eye, the blueprint of the human heart. A racial memory.

The room was different now—painted sky-blue rather than mint-green, and relocated to Maryland—but the bed was the same, a Colonial four-poster built by his dad, and the quilt was the same, although faded by wash after wash. And the child curled at his mother’s belly was not him but his sister, the not-yet-born. She carried a Christmas due date, and as the months wore on Zach found himself anticipating the birth
with surprising eagerness. His friends, for the most part, expressed a sort of repulsion on his behalf, centering around the evidence that his parents were still having sex. Without exception Zach found these remarks amusing. Were their parents just really good at keeping it quiet and sneaking around? Wasn’t that the point of being an adult, that you could screw with impunity?

On this day, after his mother finished volunteering him to work with Scott’s bitchy mother on the holiday bazaar, she received a visit from the midwife, which redeemed the day somewhat. Zach liked the midwife. Her name was Rhianne, she was somewhere between his age and his mother’s, and every time she arrived at the Pattersons’ she appeared dressed for gardening. Faded blue jeans, rubber-toed boots from L.L. Bean, a flannel shirt with the sleeves folded up. Zach sat in a chair near the far wall of his parents’ bedroom while she examined his mother with a stethoscope, listening for the baby’s heartbeat. His mother’s belly, golden-pale above the indigo bedspread, looked like the moon.

“Do you want to listen, Zach?” Rhianne asked him.

He shook his head. “I heard it last time.”

“I can feel an elbow,” she said. His mother laughed, and Rhianne waved Zach over. “Feel it.”

He moved to the edge of the bed beside his mother’s legs and allowed Rhianne to position his hands on the giant expanse of belly. “Elbow,” she said, and then with her right hand over Zach’s, “spine, and her little tuckus.”

“That’s cool,” he said. His mother beamed at him.

“Have you started buying things yet?” asked Rhianne of his mother. “Sling, diapers, bassinet?”

“Here and there,” she replied. “We won’t be needing a bassinet. She’ll just sleep with us, like Zach did. Although
hopefully not until she’s seven.” She shot him a look of loving reprimand.

“Wasn’t my idea,” said Zach.

“Every time we tried to put you in your own bed, you snuck back into ours.”

“So, you should have beaten my ass.”

The women both laughed. “Listen to the child,” said his mother.

“He’s hardly a child,” said Rhianne. “You’ve got one almost-newborn and one almost-man.”

“He’s still a child yet,” insisted his mother. “Take a look at his bedroom and you’ll see what I mean.”

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 intellectual 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?”