The Kingdom of Childhood (3 page)

“It’s in the Citizens Bank parking lot.”

He slammed his plate down on the table. “Oh, for Christ’s
sake,
Judy.”

“I’ll send Scott to fill it up later.”

He glared at me. Behind his glasses his eyes were a blazing blue. “Explain to me again why you can’t take your car to the gas station like a normal human being.”

“Because I’m not a normal human being. You know that.”

“What are you going to do when Scott is in college? What are you going to do then?”

I sat in silence. Realizing no answer would be forthcoming, he picked up his sandwich and stuffed it in his mouth. A bite of bread and cheese filled out his cheek like a sudden growth.

“I’ll have him do it tonight,” I repeated, after the silence
had derailed a bit of Russ’s momentum. “I assume we’re taking my car up to Fallon tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t go with you.”

“What?”
I felt my face crack from careful steadiness into a scowl of disbelief. “What do you mean you can’t go with me? It’s our anniversary trip. It’s been planned for weeks.”

“Our department chair went into the hospital with chest pains. I need to take his place at the conference this weekend.”

“What conference?”

“The one where he was supposed to be giving the presentation that I’ll be giving instead.”

“
Russ
. Can’t one of the full professors take it?”

“Sure, if I’d like to flush my career down the toilet.”

I stood and brushed by him, then snapped off the Crock-Pot. “There you go exaggerating. It can’t just be a good move or a bad move. It has to be a gigantic crisis.”

“This is what you don’t understand about careers,” he began, “due to all those years you’ve been sitting in a rocking chair singing ‘Kumbaya’ and handing out the fingerpaints. Other people’s jobs have this thing called
advancement.
And the way it works is, when something crops up, you don’t say, ‘oh, jeez, I have to go to the mountains with my wife this weekend.’ Because if you do, you get to be the Dean of Remedial Dumb-Shit Classes at the community college.”

I took a deep breath through my nose and closed my eyes for a moment. “All right, then. I’ll cancel the reservations and we’ll just go out next weekend. Maybe Saturday. We can get Chinese.” Chinese food was Russ’s weakness. We had eaten many a paper-boxed meal, back in college, on a bed with a raincoat spread between us for a picnic blanket. It had become something of a tradition that carried on into our marriage, for a few years at least.

He sat down across from me and shook a pile of chips
directly onto the table. “No can do. I need to work on my dissertation all weekend.”

I sighed. “Russ.”

“Judy,”
he fired back, matching my tone in a nasal pitch.

I met his eyes and tried not to let it turn into a glare. “Maybe one night during the week, then. I just thought Chinese would be nice.”

“Getting my damn Ph.D would be nice, too. And it’s hard to do that when you try to take over my schedule with your demands for entertainment.”

He shoveled a pile of chips into his mouth with his fingers. Behind him, Scott lifted the lid on the Crock-Pot, glanced at its contents, and set to work making himself a cheese sandwich. I rose from my chair and leaned toward Russ, resting my knuckles on the table. Scott, sensing danger in the quiet, turned just enough to cast a nervous gaze on me. In a hissing whisper I told Russ, “I HATE your Ph.D.”

“I don’t
have
a Ph.D,” he hissed back.

“And I hope they never give you one,” I spat. Voice rising, I added, “I hope you’re stuck in committee hell, talking about goddamned Iceland and its goddamned fisheries for the rest of your life. I hope you
die
revising the fucking thing.”

“Jesus, Mom,” said Scott.

Russ raised his eyebrows high and nodded adamantly. “That’s
nice
, Judy. Wow, I feel like celebrating our marriage all of a sudden. How about some
mu shu
pork?”

In the months that followed I felt bad about what I said. But you see, I only meant I hoped he would be revising his dissertation for the rest of his life, unrewarded. I didn’t mean it literally, that I hoped he would die.

The history teacher was hot. At five foot four or so, she was short enough to make Zach feel tall standing beside her, and she had a lot of loosely-curled hair the color of black coffee that bounced against her back as she moved across the classroom. When she turned to write on the board, her butt jiggled beneath her pencil skirt in such a way that Zach wasn’t gaining a great deal of knowledge about the Roman Empire.

“When Tacitus visited Germania,” she told them, her voice bearing just a hint of a Spanish accent, “he called it ‘hideous and rude, dismal to behold.’ He found the people warlike, with a violent system for justice. Traitors were hung from trees. Adulterous wives had their hair cut off and were driven through the streets naked, by their husbands, with a whip. Cowards and those of loose morals were buried in bogs under mud and held down with willow branches. Tacitus wrote that this was because glaring offenses must be displayed as a warning, but pollution must be concealed. He said, ‘No pardon is ever granted, for no one turns vices to mirth here.’”

The girls around Zach sat with their pens poised, their expressions serious and a little offended. The guys grinned.

“I thought you guys would like that part,” their teacher said. A low titter made its way across the classroom. “Remember this as you write up your group reports. A written history doesn’t have to be boring.”

There was a squeal of chair legs against flooring as the students turned their seats around to break into small groups. Zach had partnered up with two other Madrigals: Temple, whose SAT score was somewhere around the hundred-and-fiftieth percentile, and Fairen, who was also bright but appealed to Zach because the sort of friendship he hoped to develop with her, in another era, might have gotten one of them buried in a bog. She was lovely in a fine-boned, slightly asymmetrical way, with a long white throat and multi-pierced ears that stuck out past her hair when it fell, white-blond, on both sides of her face. Zach found her pale, bejeweled ears fascinating. Scott called her “Dumbo.”

“A history of Maryland written in the style of Tacitus,” Temple read from the sheet in front of them. “We could hammer this out in a weekend. And it’s not due until right before Christmas break.”

Fairen rolled her eyes. “This is what happens when the real teacher dies in July and they have a month to fill the spot.”

Zach looked over the sheet and scowled. “We’re supposed to do a section on the ‘legends of Maryland.’ How does Maryland have any ‘legends’? It’s a frigging
state
.”

Temple patted the desk noisily with his palms and let his gaze drift toward the ceiling. “We could look up old Indian stories, I guess. Or urban legends. Crybaby Bridge, the Chesapeake sea monster, that sort of thing. The Bunny Man.”

“What’s the Bunny Man?”

“A guy in a rabbit suit who runs around with an axe,
chopping up people who get onto his property. People claim he hangs out at the old hospital complex off Pine Road. It’s abandoned now, but it used to be a tuberculosis hospital.”

“I know that place,” said Fairen. “I’ve driven past it a bunch of times. Scott said it was a mental hospital.”

“Scott’s a moron. But it doesn’t matter. We can put that part in as a legend, too, since everyone believes it even though it’s bullshit.”

She folded her hands like a model student and looked down at the list of requirements. “It says we need to have five illustrations. Maybe we can go down there and take some photos. It’d be really cool if we wait until the project is almost due and the trees are all bare and wintery looking.”

Temple shook his head. “It’s a five-hundred-dollar trespassing fine if you get caught. Plus there’s all kinds of druggies and skinheads and runaways who hide out there.”

Fairen smiled. “Zach here’s a black belt in judo. He can take ’em on. Or we can ask Scott to come with us. He’s pretty scrappy.”

Temple groaned. “
Don’t
ask Scott. He’ll be dragging us down there every weekend just because he knows his folks would flip out if they knew he was doing it. I don’t care that he’s like that, but he’s not going to pull me down with him.”

Zach looked at Fairen to see what she would say. He had known these people for only a couple of months, since he had moved to town and started participating in the summer Madrigals concerts at senior centers and music camps. He felt comfortable with Temple and Fairen and her fairly obnoxious friend Kaitlyn, but Scott remained something of a mystery to him. He carried himself like the silverback gorilla of the pack, and perhaps his mother being a teacher was the reason why; on the first day of school, it had taken only minutes for Zach to infer that Scott’s ass was the one to kiss if he had any intention
of fitting in. Scott was a senior, and had been at this school all his life; yet in his Abercrombie khakis and rugby shirts, he looked more like he had been airlifted in from a prep school than raised on brown rice and folk tales. Even so, Zach liked the guy well enough. Not that disliking him seemed to be an option.

“Listen,” she said, “I just want to take a few photos. If you don’t want to go, fine. Zach and I will go, and I’m sure Scott will be happy to come along.”

Temple looked to Zach for help.

“I think it’d be pretty cool,” said Zach. “It’s supposed to be based on
Germania,
after all. It says in there that they offered human sacrifice. Maybe if we make it real creepy, she’ll think it’s genius.”

Temple folded his arms against the desk and dropped his head onto them in resignation. Above it, Fairen smiled at Zach. It wasn’t that Zach believed Fairen’s idea was better. On the contrary, he thought it was risky and dangerous, and not in a fun way. But he felt compelled to support her anyway, based on a bit of wisdom taught to him by his dad: never side against a strong woman, because it never ends well.

1964
Mainbach, West Germany

They lived in a tidy half-timbered home at the end of a country road, there in the rural reaches of Bavaria. Five days a week, sometimes six, Judy’s father climbed into his navy-blue Mercedes sedan and drove to Augsburg Air Base, twenty minutes away by Autobahn. Although he was a civilian, he could have elected for his family to live on base, to have Judy attend the fifth grade at the American school, but John Chandler spurned these things. His daughter was no military brat. He was an expert on the cultures of the Soviet republics, and no expert on culture would wall up his family in cinder-block Americana for two years while the heart of West Germany beat just outside the guard towers.

The rented house came fully furnished and appointed, with a lovingly tended garden out back and views of farmlands and a distant steeple. Sonic booms from American aircraft thundered frequently overhead. At John’s urging, the family
cultivated the habits of the Bavarian people. Every morning at half past eight Judy’s mother hung the featherbeds out the windows to air. On weekends they ate their largest meal at noon, often after a brisk hike at Jägerkamp or Miesing. Around the supper table John frequently enthused about the fine healthy practices of the Germans, such as playing sports well into adulthood and not being nosy about their neighbors.

When they first moved into the home, the garden was in full bloom: bright red poppies, the purple globes of thistle, delicate and poisonous cups of foxglove, bleeding heart blossoms hanging on a stalk like a string of predictions. Blueberries burst ripe on the bushes, and Judy liked to eat them as she played, imagining herself to be a caveman’s child traveling through a wild land never before seen by human beings. Her own Eden, a child’s Eden with no lurking specter of defilement, no serpent watching her; she slipped the slender cups of foxglove over her fingers, licked the backs of poppy and nasturtium petals to make designs on her bare legs. Her sandals slouched in the dirt beside the hens-and-chicks that lined the rock garden, the plants swollen with rain and primeval as her fantasies.

At breakfast her mother served her a hard roll from the market and a soft-boiled egg in a leaf-green eggcup. She hung out the featherbeds and lined the birdcage with page four of the
Stars and Stripes.
She tapped the cat’s bowl five times on the back porch and then walked Judy to the bus stop one mile away.

At the new school nothing was familiar. Judy could not write in the impeccably tidy rounded hand with its looping
G
’s and calligraphic
H
’s. She spoke no German, could not read music, knew no prayers. At reading time the class read moral tales from
Der Struwwelpeter,
a large flat book on whose cover a pigeon-chested boy stared outward with a hollow
expression, his fingernails grown to hideous claws, his yellow hair like steel wool. A billowing red shirt and green tights clad his stumpy body. She could not understand the poem about him, and was glad.

As cooler weather crept in, the blueberry bushes turned a flaming red. The bleeding hearts shriveled, and the remaining plants revealed their skeletons: the dry rattling husks of the poppies, the fragile mother-of-pearl leaves of the bony beige
Silbertaschen.
Only the chrysanthemums remained, their slim white petals bursting like fireworks from a tight little but ton of a head, the last flower before winter. Judy was largely bored, and so often her mother sent her to play at the home of a German girl, Daniela, their nearest neighbor a few lots away.

They didn’t speak the same language. That was part of the problem, although Judy doubted she and Daniela would have been friends in any tongue. The girl was overbearing and precociously athletic, while Judy frequently missed any ball rolled to her in kickball and felt her bladder seize at the very thought of climbing a rope. Daniela’s idea of fun was to demonstrate a gymnastic trick and encourage Judy to try it, and then, when she failed, to jeer at her in the universal language of mockery. She was the baby of her family, with an older sister and brother who rolled their eyes at her outbursts in a way Judy could not. By October Judy had given up on Daniela and, when forced to play at her house, walked straight around back to the barn and hung out with the girl’s older brother, Rudi, who spoke serviceable English. Sometimes she did her homework in the barn, and as she worked he helped her untangle the incomprehensible words before her.

“Der Struwwelpeter!”
Rudi exclaimed one day, when she pulled out the text and her copybook. “A terrible book!”

Judy smiled broadly with relief. So she wasn’t alone in detesting the thing. “Did you have to read it?”

“Of course. It’s to frighten children. To make you behave and have bad dreams at night.” He sat beside her on the bale of straw and flipped it open to a story about a girl who played with matches. He read with enthusiasm:

“Doch Minz und Maunz, die Katzen,

Erheben ihre Tatzen.

Sie drohen mit den Pfoten:

‘Die Mutter hat’s verboten!’”

Judy said, “I don’t know what any of that means.”

Rudi rolled his hand in the air, suggesting a broad translation. “It means that when Pauline lit her match, the cats Minz and Maunz put out their claws, and cried, and said, ‘Your mother has forbidden it!’”

Judy nodded. “And then she burns to death and turns into a pile of ashes.”

“Yes,” affirmed Rudi. The humorous creases at the corners of his eyes belied his serious tone. Quoting from the book, he said, “‘It’s very, very wrong, you know. You will be burnt if you do so.’”

“You made it rhyme in English.”

“I did not even realize. You should not read these things. Look at
der Struwwelpeter
on the front. Your hair is not like this. Your nails are short and neat.” He lifted her hand in his own rough one and examined her fingernails, then briskly rubbed her fingers with a clasp of his thumb. “You see? No reason to read this. You are a good little girl, not a bad one. You should read a happy book.”

“My teacher says I have to read this one.”

The bale shifted beneath his weight as he leaned toward her. His smiling face came close enough that she could see the blond shadow on his jaw, the midnight-blue ring around
his cornflower irises. In his low, conspiratorial voice he said, “Sometimes teachers are wrong.”

The blasphemy was so absolute that she laughed. His eyelashes batted once at her laughing breath. He sat up, his grin still fixed in place, and rubbed her back in broad, firm circles, the way he stroked the cow before he milked her.

By December even the dead garden was gone. Night fell quickly and left her no time to be bullied by Daniela or watch Rudi care for the sheep and muck out the barn. There was only her home, where her mother had taken to daily plucking imperfect leaves from the houseplants and arranging the kitchen tools in order by shade of black. And there was school.

On the first day of Advent her class made windows of colored tissue and Popsicle sticks, covered in squares of black construction paper split down the middle. The teacher hung their creations on the long wall of glass windows, regimentally neat as Judy’s mother’s spatula drawer. But each day a child would fold back the construction paper to reveal the bold fractured rainbow inside. They practiced songs for the
Weihnachtskonzert
to be held just before Christmas and rolled salt dough into kings and shepherds for nativity scenes. Every Friday their teacher laid an evergreen wreath, set with candles, on a desk, then took out her guitar and dimmed the lights. Together as a class, in the dark and accompanied by the plaintive guitar, they sang a quiet and meditative Advent hymn. Then the teacher struck a match and lit one candle, then two, then three, as Christmas drew closer and closer.

It was like undressing together, this frankness about spirituality. To John Chandler, Christianity was a tourist attraction that came in the form of holiday street festivals and medieval churches. He took his family along as though on safari, looking upon the holiday goods as though these were relics of a
primitive tribe which viewed volcanic eruption as evidence of the Sun God’s anger. Judy guessed he didn’t know about the overt Catholicism of the Bavarian public schools, and that if he had, he would have assumed her intelligent enough to pay it no mind. But in the snowy darkness of the German winter, singing in unison in the candlelight, Judy was starting to suspect she might love Jesus.

She made a salt dough shepherd and named it Rudi. She opened her tissue window and counted eight remaining. She sang the rough German hymns that sounded to her ears like the original language of humanity, like cavechildren gathered on a solstice dawn waiting for a razor of light to appear between two tall stones. Because who could say there wasn’t a Sun God? Who could call it primitive to believe, long ago, one man might have brought light into a dark world?

The effect of it all—the numbered translucent windows, the nativities with empty cradles prepared, the three lit candles and a fourth awaiting—was a feeling that time was welling beneath her feet, about to burst forth into light and fate and fury, shedding the darkness—for better or for worse—like a husk. It was the feeling that
something was about to happen.

And it did.