The Kingdom of Childhood (25 page)

I managed to stay out of the house all day on Sunday, coming home late to find Russ’s office door closed and the light glowing dimly beneath it. More and more these days he ended his late nights with a nap on his office sofa. When I awoke Monday morning and found him at the breakfast table reading the
Post
over a bowl of Familia, I felt my hands clench into a spasm so hard that my fingernails left eight red crescents in my palms. He was like Rasputin, the mad monk of Russia. A fairy-tale foe who would not die.

I took a large mug of coffee and a blueberry muffin, and left for school.

I arrived late. Sandy Valera was working in my classroom, directing the early arrivals to the coatrack, the bathroom, the play table. She shot me a searching look when I dropped my scarf on my chair and plunked the coffee on a windowsill, so I said, “Car trouble.”

She nodded. I had not noticed the other woman in the classroom, kneeling beside a child and unraveling an absurdly long hand-knitted scarf from around his neck. When the
woman rose Sandy said, “Judy, this is Rhianne Volker. She is considering Sylvania Waldorf for her children.”

Rhianne’s smile popped out immediately, then stayed stiffly in place. “Oh, Judy and I know each other,” she said.

I nodded.

“Well, now that you’re here, I’ll get back to my office,” said Sandy. As she brushed past me, Rhianne tucked her hands in the side pockets of her overalls and regarded me with a look even more searching than Sandy’s.

“Judy, I had no idea you taught here,” she said.

“Since Maggie was little.”

“Amazing. Small world. Small
community,
I suppose I should say, but surely you know that.” Her brows knitted beneath the close-fitting winter cap she still wore. “Surely.”

“It’s one of the things parents love about Sylvania,” I replied automatically.

“I’m sure. I’ve seen several familiar faces this morning.” She looked me up and down. “How is that prescription working out for you?”

“Fine,” I said. “So how old are your children?”

“Nine, six and four.” She turned to look over my romping students, then back toward me. “I have met all the other Lower School teachers but you this morning. A nice bunch.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “and very skilled.” But I remembered quite well that she had no children. She had told me herself. I felt a chill of fear, like a pearl of ice behind my ribs. It grew larger by the moment.

“One of my clients recommended this school to me,” she continued. “Vivienne Heath. Perhaps you know her.”

“I don’t think so,” I hedged. “How old is her son?”

She grinned. Her full mouth of teeth seemed to ooze poison. I realized my error as she took a step closer. With a curious tip of her head, she said, “He is only sixteen.”

I responded with a twitching shrug. “I only work with the young children.”

She replied, “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

Despite the blasting heat of the forge, Zach’s bare arms felt a chill as he moved around the workshop, gathering materials to work on his first blacksmithing project. The bottom of the long black apron flapped against his legs. Making a fireplace poker didn’t hold a lot of interest for him, but the opportunity to play with fire and red-hot metal cheered him. So did the fact that school would be over in an hour, heralding the beginning of Christmas break, and he’d be saying goodbye to this place until January. His classmates were all talking about the Wicker Man Festival that evening, and he felt glad to have been invited by Fairen; finally, it seemed, he was beginning to feel like part of the tribe. He missed New Hampshire less today than at any point since the move.

Putting on the gloves and mask, he turned toward the crackling forge and felt a tingle of anticipation. The instructor, his watchful gaze cast on a handful of students in various stages of metalwork, was being nice to allow them to fire up the forge so close to the end of school. Zach set the rod of metal with the tongs and thrust it into the fire, which spit and crackled, blindingly orange. With one hand still in the brace it was an awkward process, but the tools felt secure in his hands, and the fire was mesmerizing. An echo of Judy’s voice spoke in his mind:
I do think fire can be beautiful in a terrifying sort of way.

“Sure you got it?” his teacher asked, hands hovering around his as Zach removed the rod from the flame.

“I’m sure.”

He placed it on the anvil and, with another student holding it in place, used his good hand to give the rod four strong
whacks with the hammer. It was coming along respectably enough, for a one-handed first try. He geared up again for a second chance at the fire.

A draft blew toward him, and he looked up just in time to see Judy entering the room, a small figure in the cavernous space, her movements deliberate among the narrowly organized chaos. She made her way between the worktables, her arms crossed, rubbing her forearms as though cold. Her khaki jumper dress was like a lunch sack, but her long dark hair looked unnaturally smooth, combed precisely. She blinked at the heat of the forge and asked in a low voice, “Can I talk to you a minute?”

“Sure,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. There was no point in play-acting as though he expected the conversation to take place right here. He lifted the mask and set it on the table, slipped off the gloves beside it. His instructor met his eye, but only by way of accounting for his safety; nice to see someone at this school paying attention to that, for once.

She stood beside the door that led outside, her hand on the push bar. It was brazen of her to corner him like this, long after the bazaar was over, with no conceivable excuse for pulling him out of class. He hadn’t spoken to her since their ill-conceived rendezvous the week before; and earlier that day he had, in the courtyard, succumbed to the urge to kiss Fairen, to the approving whoops of the few present to see it. It would not surprise him to learn that Judy had been spying on him. It had to be the most tedious part of sleeping with somebody’s mother: no matter what you did with her, she was still a mom, and the eyes on the back of her head seemed to have twice the range when she was creepily obsessed with your body.

He dropped the apron on a stool and followed her out the door, bracing himself against the rush of frigid air and a flurry
of small icy snowflakes. She made her way toward the corner of the parking lot that bordered woods, but he stopped where the asphalt did and refused to step into the brush. Something felt off about her. He knew she felt hurt and possibly angry and, undoubtedly, full of anxiety, but he sensed a harder edge that made him cautious. Not that Judy posed a danger to him—she was barely over five feet tall, for Pete’s sake—but there was a bobcat energy to her that he didn’t care to incite.

She turned at the tree line, giving up on luring him further, and tucked her hands in her sleeves. She had looked relatively normal when she came into the workshop, but already her face was blotchy with tears. He felt taken aback by how foolhardy she was, out here where anyone could see them. He wasn’t going to entertain this very long. She could take a hit for it, but he had no intention of doing so.

“You’re
done,
” she accused.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I am.”

“You’ve taken up with Fairen.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she spat. “You wanted her all along.”

He felt his lip curl. “Who cares whether I did or not? And since when do
you
give a shit about what I want? I say no, and what do you do? You blockade the goddamn door.”

She pushed the heels of her hands across her cheeks. Shaking her head, blinking down at the ground, she said in a hopeless voice, “I ought to turn you in for what you did to me that day. I never…
invited
you to do anything that…
violent
.”

He bristled and felt something inside him turn. “You go ahead and do that,” he retorted. “You’re going to do—what? Accuse me of rape?”

“Maybe I will.”

Snorting a laugh, he recoiled, taking a step backward. “Go
for it. Get right on it. Bet you they’ll find evidence for it all over the fucking place. Bet Russ is sleeping in some of it right now.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’ll turn
myself
in. Would that simplify it for you?”

She lifted her face in a delighted smile, as if he’d just told a great joke, her eyes bright. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Damn, you’re big with the threats all of a sudden. Why can’t you just let it frickin’ lie? It ran its course. Get over it, move on.”

Her shoulders heaved with an enormous sigh, and she took two steps forward to lean against a tree. She looked exhausted. He almost felt sorry for her.

“Couldn’t we just be together one more time,” she proposed in an even voice, “so the time in the den doesn’t have to be the last memory?”

When pushed, pull.
He shook his head. “No.”

She shifted her gaze sideways, toward the line of cars. “Maybe we can drive someplace after school, just discuss it?”

“No.” She wanted to blow him, anybody could have guessed that. He wasn’t even the smallest bit tempted. It wasn’t out of the question that he’d find his orgasm interrupted by an icepick in his chest, like in the movies. Not a turn-on.

She nodded, resigned. “Can I hug you goodbye, at least?”

“No,” he said a third time, but she was already coming toward him, arms outstretched, and there hadn’t been a great distance between them to begin with. Stiffly he allowed him self to be hugged, and with a quick economy of movement she slipped her retreating hand into the front of his pants. He grabbed her by the wrist.

“I said
no,
” he told her.

Her smile was brittle. She’d only managed to get her hand between his jeans and boxers, and with his hand clenching
the tendons in her wrist, her cold fingers flailed like a mouse caught by the tail.

“I hope she enjoys it,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”

She retreated and walked past him into the school, her body small beside the hulking frame of the workshop. Zach turned toward the building, looking around guardedly for faces in the windows; finding none, he ran a hand through his hair, the snowflakes melting at his touch into pinpoint cold. With a low grumble in his throat he made his way back toward the workshop, hiking his jeans higher on his hips, to face the forge.

Rhianne had said nothing further before she left me that morning. She didn’t need to. She had said enough.

After she left my classroom to tend to her three imaginary children I retreated to the bathroom, where I threw up three times. Coffee splattered on the rim of the toilet bowl, on the tile, on my jumper. I rested my forehead against the cool tile wall until I heard a knock and a small voice saying, “Mrs. McFarland, I have to go pee.”

I called in the music teacher to watch my children for the day. Then, except for a detour to the workshop, I went home, where I retired to the floor of a bathroom reserved for my own use. And there I stayed, my hands sweaty on the porcelain, staring into the water.

The water in the sink floated with my mother’s underwear, broad polyester panels that undulated like jellyfish between the dollops of Fels-Naptha foam. Next to it, shucked aside at a careless angle, sat the box of matches. The old wooden radio, elegant and well-dusted, blared out a melody at high volume:
baby don’t leave me ooh please don’t leave me all by myself.
The matches smelled of sulfur. The flame, in its small way, held
the whole spectrum of color.
It’s very, very wrong, you know,
said the rhyme in my schoolbook, and even at ten my nerves tingled at the thought of it, perhaps because I was my father’s daughter.

Each doorknob was cold bronze. Turn, turn; and then again, turn. The irony: I knew before I opened it what I would see, and instead I saw nothing. But it burned into my mind anyway, skipping right over the part I could reach and embedding itself in the deepest recess, a stone falling into a pool so fast and so smoothly that the surface records barely a ripple. And now, having dived much too deep into that part of the water lately, I could brush against it without meaning to. There it was: two adults nude and sweating, Kirsten’s head hanging off the edge of the bed, her braids loosened and flopping against the mattress, a sloppy metronome. My mother’s pillow wedged beneath her back, my father’s face snarled like that of a barbarian from a warlike tribe, hideous and rude and dismal to behold. The smell of it was thick in the air, her arousal and his, entirely foreign to my senses. And if the language of that nation sounded to me like the original speech of humanity, then here was that which came before language—the voice at the core of every human in the world, when the breath moves in concert with the drive to continue the species.

Forget about it. Banish it. God help you that you should look upon such a scene and realize that someday you will want it, too.

I thought the horror was in what I saw, but I was wrong. The horror came as I realized that, for what he had done, the child in me was right to blame him entirely, and the adult in me blamed him not at all.

Russ stayed in his upstairs office the entire evening, and for once I did not resent his absence.

Once my stomach ran out of things to throw up I sat down at the table with a cup of weak chamomile tea dribbled with honey and Rescue Remedy. I thought about the day Zach and I had felted balls for the craft sale, standing at this same table, apart in body but our desires, no doubt, the same. I had felt powerful then, exalted by him, an object of mystery. I had the power to grant any wish he might dare to utter. Now I was garbage to him. The kind that smelled.

There was a hard knock on the door, and I rose to answer. I felt relatively sure of who it would be, and was not surprised.

She said, “I’m not done talking to you.”

I stepped aside to let her in.

She entered my kitchen and stood beside the stove, her arms crossed over the front of her overalls. Her russet hair was ponytailed back. I looked past her to the teakettle on the back burner and checked to see if the gas was on.