The Kingdom of Childhood (9 page)

“I don’t think this is the right place to discuss this,” I told him. “Do you mind if we finish this conversation somewhere else?”

“Depends,” he parried. “Are you going to buy me coffee?”

In Judy’s car he slid the seat back, ostensibly to make more legroom, but really so he could watch her in a covert way. Thinking about Fairen, about Ohio, brought on a gloomy, cloudy feeling, yet a quick segue to the memory of his return-trip conversation with Judy lightened his mind. In the days that followed he had spent a fair amount of time teasing out the subtext of their “Mrs. Robinson” conversation, weighing it against his memories of her response in the playhouse, and concluding that, for all her uptight frowning and prissy apologies, she didn’t regret it at all and would eagerly do it again given the opportunity. The concept was, at once, both dangerous and delectable. It was a rush.

At Starbucks he leaned against the rounded counter of the service area, watching Judy as she paid, and tried to gain some measure of how his theories might find root in reality. Not for the first time, he felt doubtful. Her face—wide at the cheekbones, tapering to a small childlike chin—had a youthful quality to its shape, but around her eyes and forehead she was unmistakably forty-something, unimpressed with the world and a little tired. Her long dark hair was interspersed
with coarser gray strands. She was not the sort of middle-aged woman with bleached hair and a push-up bra, staking out the pool boy in a loose towel. And yet there was something about her—in her slim body, perhaps, or the tight mouselike way she moved—that spoke of a keyed-up part of her, a hair trigger that, by chance, hadn’t been knocked in a while.

He wondered, in an idle way, how many lovers she had had. How long it had been for her, or, for that matter, how recently.

All the tables were crammed with teens recently released from the public high school; Zach knew there was no chance they could sit and talk, as Judy had planned. The barista handed him his coffee, and Judy, in her efficient way, took hers as she walked past and moved straight out the door.

As they climbed back into her car she shook her hair back and said, “Do I need to just take you home, then? That took longer than I expected.”

“Nah. It’s better if I drink this first. My mom doesn’t like it when I drink coffee. She says the caffeine is bad for my bone development.”

She smiled. “That doesn’t surprise me, after what you said about my fridge.”

“Yeah. My parents are really big on that stuff. I was a vegetarian until I was fourteen. My folks still are. But once I hit puberty I started craving meat, even though I’d never had it. So I took that as a sign.” He sipped his coffee. “I’ll probably go back to it once I stop growing, though. It’s, like, ingrained.”

“The nutrition part, or the cruelty-to-animals part?”

“Both.” They were parked perpendicular to the storefront, and he watched the people walking in and out, focused only on caffeine. “My parents are major pacifists. They had a hard time with it when I was five and I desperately wanted to take karate. We compromised on judo because the principle is to
use your opponent’s force against them. They were okay with that.” He set his knee against the dashboard. “My mom tried to get me into yoga instead, but it didn’t really take. She’s a yoga teacher, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. She’s been taking me with her to her classes since I was born. I’m good at it, it’s just not my thing. But even she’s not doing it right now, since the midwife put her on bed rest.”

Judy nodded. “How’s she feeling these days, your mom?”

“Tired of being pregnant. She’s going stir-crazy. The mid wife warned her if she doesn’t settle down she’ll hurt herself and won’t be able to have the baby at home, and that kind of freaked her out. She doesn’t want to go to a hospital.”

“I can understand that. Maggie and Scott were both born at home.”

“I was, too. So she wants that, but she also believes in wellness over illness and she says being in bed all day is terrible for her circulation. She’s always talking my dad into giving her foot rubs to get her
chi
moving.”

Judy sighed and leaned back, both hands around her coffee. “I wish someone would do that for me. The only time I sit down all day is for storytelling. It’s like being a waitress.”

“I can rub them,” he offered.

She laughed. “I don’t think so. The point of this coffee run is to lay out some professional boundaries, not to get my feet massaged by you.”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it. I give them to my mom all the time. I know reflexology. My dad taught me.”

She gave him a doubtful look.

“Nobody’s watching,” he said. “C’mon.”

He turned in the seat to face her and held out his hands. With a sigh, she slipped her foot out of its shoe and set it on
his knee. He pulled it onto his lap and began with his thumbs beneath the first and second toes.

“The different areas correspond to different parts of the body,” he explained. He moved his thumbs around, demonstrating. “Lungs. Liver. Stomach. Massaging removes obstacles that block your
chi
.”

“There’s definitely something blocking my
chi
these days.”

“Maybe it’s your kidneys.” He rubbed a spot at the center of her foot. “The Chinese believe the kidneys hold massive amounts of
chi
. Do you feel anything?”

“I don’t know about my kidneys. It feels good, though.”

He worked his way down to her heel, then back up, rubbing between each toe. She relaxed against the door and closed her eyes, shoulders easing backward, and he grinned.

“See, it’s working,” he said. “You’re starting to melt.”

She laughed. “It must be my kidneys.”

Her foot arched in his hand; feeling the response of her body aroused him. He moved his fingers lightly up her Achilles tendon to her ankle, massaging around the small bones. She did not twitch or pull away; instead, she stretched her calf to give him more room to work.

“You know you can give a woman an orgasm if you rub a certain way?” he asked, and her eyes opened, following her rising brows. He walked his fingers around her foot in the pattern he had read about. “It’s like, ankle, stretch, thumbnail up the arch. Repeat.”

“Have you ever done it?”

He grinned and rubbed the back of her calf. Still, she didn’t flinch. “No. Do you want me to try?”

“Let’s not,” she said, but left her foot where it was.

He ran his nail up the midline of her foot, and her toes curled. “Come on,” he pressed. “I won’t tell anyone if it works.”

Her gaze drifted to the customers outside the Starbucks. He realized, with an electric thrill, that she was considering it. Teasingly he added, “I bet that’s what’s blocking your
chi
.”

One of her eyebrows went up. “If it was, would it be any of your business?”

“I don’t know. Do you want it to be?”

She smiled, but it looked thin, even bitter. “You don’t pay much attention to the news, my friend,” she informed him, and the familiar phrase caught him by surprise. Quietly she continued, “And this is what I wanted to talk to you about. People go to jail for things like this, Zach. Women do. Teachers do. Somebody always finds out.”

“They go to jail for getting their feet rubbed?”

“No. They go to jail for getting involved with students. And only one party ever gets blamed, no matter who instigates it. Do you know which party that would be?”

“You’re not involved with me, though.”

Her cheeks lifted in the slightest hint of amusement. “You just propositioned my feet.”

“They’re just feet.”

“But that’s not the kind of foot rub you give your mother, now is it?”

“No, but my mother doesn’t stick her tongue down my throat, either.”

Her smile grew weary and she tugged her leg from his grasp. “I need to take you home. I don’t think your mother would want to have any role in this conversation.”

“You might be surprised. She’s not as uptight as you think.”

Judy slid her foot back into her shoe. “Well, I know a little more about mothers than you do.”

The condescension in her tone made him feel small. He knew a thing or two about adults and their secrets, and he was tired of them—his own parents in particular—acting like he
was too naïve to make even the most obvious connections. “You don’t know much about
my
mother,” he countered. “She’s not uptight at all. She cheated on my dad with one of her yoga students.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“She did. A guy who was in her Dynamics class.” Zach knew the man’s name, but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Ponytailed, with thin, hairy legs, he often came to class in a shirt printed with John Lennon’s face and the caption, “Long Live Dr. Winston O’Boogie.” Over time Zach came to think of him by a private nickname: Booger.

“He wasn’t a kid or anything,” Zach continued. “He was probably like 28 or 29. I think that’s one of the reasons why she was so gung-ho about moving away from New Hampshire. He was still at her studio and I think she felt weird about being pregnant around him.”

Judy nodded as though none of this surprised her, and her unimpressed reaction both disappointed and soothed him. Perhaps the act he had seen as a gross betrayal, a secret calamity, was normal enough in the world of adults; perhaps he had overreacted. She asked, “Is he the father of the baby?”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure they broke it off awhile before that. I think.” He hoped. “We moved in June, and I hadn’t seen him at the studio since the fall. But I was doing judo after school most days, so I don’t know. I didn’t want to see anything I’d feel obligated to tell my dad about, so I kind of avoided the studio once I figured out what was going on.”

Her laugh was full of grim understanding. “I did the same thing when I was young and realized my father was having an affair with our housekeeper. Oh, I was so angry. And I blamed
her,
really, not him. He could do no wrong, because he was my father. But
her
—oh, watch your back, sweetheart.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, same here. Hey. Give me your other foot.”

She plunked it onto his lap. “How did you figure it out?”

He shrugged and began to massage her sole. “I just knew. There wasn’t any one blazing moment where I caught them in the act or anything. It’s just that there’s a certain amount of touching that goes on between yoga teachers and their students. You get familiar with it, so you can tell when it goes beyond what’s normal. And it was definitely beyond normal.”

“Maybe you did see it, and you blocked it out.”

He worked his fingers down the middle of her foot, and frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean maybe you
did
catch them in the act, and you just don’t remember. I think that happened to me. I remember coming home and finding the house empty, and turning the doorknob to my father’s room, and then running down the path, crying. After that I knew to stay out of the house when she was there. But I didn’t see a thing, not that I recall.” She drew an oval in the air in front of her forehead. “It’s as though, in the filmstrip of that sequence of events, that part of the film was exposed. Not that I’m complaining. If it was that traumatic, I’m sure it’s better if I don’t recall it. I’ve got enough odds and ends knocking around in there.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that happened to me. I’d be pretty messed up if it did, and I don’t think I’m too messed up.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, and he grinned. “I’ve never had to pull a student aside before to ask him to mind his manners with me. Can we come to an agreement about that, please? Because I’d rather shake hands on it now than have to do my Mussolini impression down the road.”

“Maybe I’d like your Mussolini impression.”

“Oh, stop it. Come on now.”

It was like a judo match: find your opponent’s point of weakness, and exploit it. Judy’s was easy to identify: the words marching dutifully out of her mouth didn’t match the supple way her muscles responded to his touch. She had rested against his thigh a small model of what the rest of her body would do, were it not for the little problem of propriety.

Her gaze was firm, and he met it easily, still smiling. He moved his hand slowly over her foot:
ankle. Stretch. Thumbnail up the arch.

She stretched her toes in a fan, and smirked.

Repeat.

Repeat.

She lifted her foot from its resting place on his leg. Slowly, she ran it along his inner thigh. It came to rest at the front of his jeans, and only when she nestled it against him did he pull his breath in through his teeth. His hand flew to caress the part that caressed him. He tried, and failed, to control the urge to arch against the counterpressure. In the moment of blinding arousal his head tipped back against the closed window and, faintly, hurt.

“Stop screwing with me, Zach,” she said, her voice low but infused with a wavering note that was almost like fear. “I mean it. It’s not cute and it’s not funny. It’s my fucking
job
. It’s my reputation. I’m not going to throw it all away so you can play seduce-the-teacher. Because you wouldn’t know what to do with me even if it worked.”

Her foot retreated, and she pushed it down into its shoe. He shifted back into his seat and combed his hair over his eyes. As the engine turned over, he said, “Sorry.”

“No problem,” she said, and crazily, her voice was light and pleasant. “So. There’s a box of woolen sheep in my closet that need price stickers. You can come by and get them tomorrow afternoon.”

“Come by your classroom, you mean?”

“Sure.” She turned her face toward him and smiled, as though nothing had transpired. “I don’t see why not.”

During our second year of college, long before either Bobbie or I had heard about a thing called Waldorf school or realized we would make a little life together teaching in one, we shared a dormitory room decorated with my
Last Tango in Paris
poster and her collection of monkeys of all kinds—plush, balsa wood, jade, coconut shell, cartoon. Her late mother had sewed her two matching twin-sized quilts covered in tiny rosettes of calico, and these we spread on our beds on opposite sides of the little room. The year before, our schedules had been nearly identical—we were both elementary education majors. Sophomore year we had no classes together, but shared two of the same professors, one of whom had something of a reputation.

“He’s a lech,” Bobbie warned me early in the spring. “One of my friends had him last year. He’ll try to make you buy your A.”

“With what?”

“Blankets and beads. What do you think? If you go to talk to him, keep a good distance.” She gestured a wide arc around
her body. “Room for the Holy Ghost, as the nuns used to say. Or else he tries to do that trick on you like your mother probably did with the cantaloupe.”

My mother had never done that trick with the cantaloupe, but I had an idea of what she meant. “What if he scoots in and does it anyway?” I asked. “He’s the professor,” I added, because at that point in my life I had not yet attended enough Women’s Lib rallies to understand I was a little behind the times.

“Kick him in the balls,” she suggested.

I laughed rather hysterically. “I could
never
do that,” I told her. It was not that I didn’t understand revenge. I did, and quite well; perhaps
too
well. The type that came easily to me was that which was quiet, which comes from the side, which might seem, through squinted eyes, like an act of God. What I could not imagine was the sort of violence where one looks another person in the eye and watches him suffer. It seemed barbaric, and more importantly, not my style.

I had thought about that when Zach stroked my foot as it rested on his thigh, massaging its inside arch between his thumb and index finger like my breast in that professor’s hand. I hadn’t kicked that man as Bobbie instructed. But I was older now, and I knew there existed more interesting varieties of pain than a knee planted in the groin. There was the kind that shut down all pleasure, and the kind that came folded in with it.

By the time I returned home from our Starbucks trip I felt confident and a little victorious. With Scott out with his girlfriend and Russ still at the office, I ascended the stairs to my room, dragging behind me the suitcase from Ohio that had been sitting in the dining room since my return. In a month or so Russ would be flying to Iceland for a research trip, and as much as I avoided his office at all costs, I would
be considerate enough to finally reunite it with the others in the set so he wouldn’t have to hunt for the right size. The door creaked on its hinges and I shied back, as if he were home to hear me. Straight back was the old sofa, sagging in the center of each cushion; beside it sat a pile of professional journals marked with yellow sticky notes. Against the windowless wall stood a battered desk the color of milky coffee, his computer in the center like a one-eyed heathen god perched on its shrine. While his office at the university offered a bit of décor that suggested a higher purpose for the work therein—photos of rugged crab fishermen earning a living, the beauty of nature along the fragile Arctic coast—his home office dispensed with such fripperies. I crossed the dingy carpet to the closet and tugged the largest black suitcase from its spot beneath a copy-paper box and a pile of sweaters.

As I dropped it on its side, it hit the floor with a noisy rattle like a child’s toy instrument. Strange. Unzipping it, I found a plastic grocery bag with the handles all tied together; inside were a jumble of white medication bottles. I tried to remember where they could have come from. Russ’s root canal earlier this year? Or perhaps they had belonged to my mother before her death several years ago, and someone had stuffed them in here after we cleaned out her house? It seemed odd that they were not amber prescription bottles, but the type which sit on a pharmacist’s shelf, large and labeled only with the drug information.

Valium. Xanax. Dexedrine. Nembutal.

I looked up at Russ’s computer, then at the Xanax bottle in my hand. For a moment I just stood there, reading the labels in confusion. Then it slowly dawned on me that these bottles had not been set aside and forgotten. They had been hidden.

I zipped the smaller suitcase inside the larger one and put them properly away. Then I lifted the grocery bag and took
the whole mess downstairs, feeling nothing more than a bit of curiosity and a small, germinating seed of anger.

Russ came home just past nine-thirty. He looked surprised to find me seated in the rocking chair by the fireplace, watching the door. Tiny rectangles of light glinted off his glasses as he tipped his head to peer at me over them—progressive lenses were just around the corner for him—but then he dropped his black shoulder bag onto the floor and headed toward the kitchen.

“Russ,” I said, and the dark, syrupy note to my voice caused him to stop and turn.

“I was putting a suitcase away in your office today,” I began, “and I found some things in the closet I think might be yours.”

His reply was hostile. “What were you doing in my office?”

“Putting away a suitcase. I just said that.”

“It’s
my
office. You shouldn’t be in there.”

“I pay the mortgage, too, dear.”

“Not much of it.”

I hefted the bag from the floor beside me and set it on the coffee table. It had occurred to me that the medications might, in fact, be Scott’s. He was a clever enough kid to hide things in plain sight, and enterprising enough to try it as a business venture. But it could have been either of them, for what did I know of this type of drug use? When I was Scott’s age, drugs didn’t come from a lab. They grew on farms, or in my case, in a series of buckets under Gro-Lites in the root cellar of a house around the corner from the deli.

“That’s not yours,” he said.

“I realize that.”

“
God,
Judy,” he said, explosive all of a sudden, his face wrenched, arms flying out at his sides. “I get home from a
long day at work and you
dump
this shit on me. Get a fucking
hobby,
why don’t you. I work like a dog all day. I don’t need this.”

“So they’re yours, then? Not Scott’s?”

He half turned toward the hallway again and curled his lip at me. “As if you’d be in a position to judge Scott or anybody else. The Queen Stoner herself. Our Lady of Recreational Pharmaceuticals.”

I regarded him with an indifferent glare, and he snatched the bag from the table. “Stay out of my office,” he ordered.

“Better hope you don’t get caught driving on that stuff,” I warned. “I won’t be bailing you out. You can sit and rot for all I care.”

“I wouldn’t call you. Why would I? You haven’t given two shits about me in years. I’d call my lawyer.”

He hustled up the stairs with his stash, and I rocked my chair gently. A year ago this conversation would have gone very differently—screaming, begging, tears. But my eyes felt utterly dry. Something inside me felt ready for war.

Eight months,
I thought. Only that long until Scott graduated from Sylvania. A year from now I could be anywhere in the world. I would be free.

I feared I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Monday wasn’t going well for Zach. At the top of his chemistry test was a red-penned note:
See me.
Fairen was ignoring him, flirting with a guy from the swim team. He couldn’t even go straight home that afternoon, obligated as he was to stop by Judy’s classroom to pick up some bazaar-related advertising sign he was supposed to repaint. And although he had grown to like
Parzival,
the previous English unit,
Dante’s Inferno
was doing nothing for him. He didn’t get it.

The concept of Hell bored him. He didn’t care if Dante’s
view was progressive for its time or deeply personal or raised questions about society. He just didn’t give a shit. Also, he didn’t like having to examine Francesca’s adultery and how her lust for Paolo showed a “weakness of will.” He preferred to think about lust on the following terms: you wanted someone, and they said yes or no. Francesca’s miserable sham of a marriage made it even less explicable why she and her lover ended up in anyone’s version of Hell. Zach believed to his core that the world was ultimately fair. With the obvious exception of his father, he believed if some other guy was balling your wife, odds were on some level you deserved it.

He endured the afternoon. He endured Dante. As soon as class was dismissed he chucked his backpack onto his shoulder and brushed past his classmates. He pushed through the door of the Lower School and made his way to Judy’s classroom, where she was bidding farewell to a little kid whose nanny had to be at least twenty minutes late.

He leaned against the wall and waited for the nanny to quit arguing with Judy and leave. Russian accent, long unfashionable braid, chunky ass in shorts with legs cut too wide to look normal on a woman in her twenties: she didn’t pay the tuition bill, and Judy’s curt reminders about the schedule betrayed that she was aware of this. He controlled a smile and bounced his heel against the floor impatiently. Finally the woman left.

“And you,” Judy sighed, turning to face him. “Zachary Xiang. What can I do for you?”

“I’m supposed to pick up a sign.”

She blinked and shook her head in irritated confusion. “Sign. What sign?”

“Some wooden sign that goes by the side of the road to tell people when the bazaar is. That lady in charge told me I have to repaint it.”

“Am I supposed to have this item in my possession?”

He shrugged loosely. “She said you had it in a closet or something.”

“Oh, God.” She turned and walked toward the back of the classroom, where a closet door stood ajar. Her hair, dark brown and trailing all the way to her waist, looked ratty at the ends and in need of brushing. She stepped into the shallow closet, moved a couple of baskets, pushed aside the faded spare dress-up robes that hung on hooks on the wall, and said, “I have no idea where it is. Check back tomorrow and maybe I’ll have found it. Maybe. If I get around to it.”

“What’s the matter with
you?
”

“The matter with
me?
I’ve had the weekend from hell. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Not really. I’m reading
Dante’s
fucking
Inferno
. I doubt you can top that.”

“Dante’s Fucking Inferno,”
she repeated. “Sounds like they’ve updated it since I was a girl.”

In spite of himself, he broke into a grin. “Bad teacher. Some example you’re setting. First the gnomes and now this.”

She raised her eyebrows high and, with a comical wide-eyed glare, latched the closet door. “Fuck the gnomes,” she replied.

“Listen to you,” he marveled. “Your
chi
is
messed up.
”

“So,” she said crisply. “Tell me where this happy hunting ground is that you’ve found for acorns. Because I need to get this craft project underway, and I’d like to drive out there this afternoon while I have time.”

“These woods behind a town house development. It’s not far.”

“Where is it?”

“Off Pine Road. By the abandoned hospital.”

“What abandoned hospital?”

He sighed and glanced out the window at the sun still
relatively high in the sky. “I can’t explain it exactly. I guess I can ride along and show you if you want. If you count it toward my hours.”

She hoisted her purse onto her shoulder and hooked a sweater over her arm. “I count everything toward your hours. You know that.”

He snorted a laugh. “You told me to stop making jokes about that.”

“Well, I’m in a mood.” Her thin slippers slapped the floor as she made her brisk walk out the door. “Follow me. I’m parked around the side.”

The air was still summer-warm, at least what would qualify as summer-warm in New Hampshire. As she drove, she hummed along with Joan Baez on the radio; he popped a piece of gum in his mouth and endured the music. When the roads grew smaller he offered directions, guiding her through the subdivision. They parked at the edge of the lot, not far from the metal gate that stood between the end of the road and the woodland path. He slid the books out of his backpack and shouldered it so they would have a means to collect whatever they found.

“Up this way,” he told her. He hiked up a steep embankment into the woods and heard her footsteps behind him. As they wound their way between the trees, he added, “They say there’s a guy in a rabbit suit who haunts all around here. They call him the Bunny Man.”

“The things people come up with,” she said. “It sounds like a German children’s book character. When I was a girl they would have put him in a story to warn us about the perils of sleeping with stuffed animals for too long, or eating too much Easter candy, or something.”

Zach laughed. “It’s definitely not for kids. He’s supposed to carry around an axe.”

“All the better. The one we had in the book I read as a child was a boy with claws and ghoul eyes. ‘
Der Struwwelpeter,
here he stands, with his dirty hair and hands.’” She wrinkled her nose at him in a jesting sneer and raised her tensed hands. “Don’t forget to cut your fingernails, boys and girls. If you don’t, you’ll turn into a monster.”

“That’s messed up.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said, but her voice was light. “I think it scarred me for life.”

Zach replied with a broad grin. They had crested the hill and had to brace themselves for a descent toward a creek in the distance. The trees became farther apart, the brush thinning to almost nothing. When the land leveled off, Zach slowed and indicated the ground with a wave of his hand. “Here you go. All over the place.”

She made a sound of delight and set to work scooping acorns into her palms. He set his backpack against a tree and crouched to help her. Before long the pack was half-filled, and Judy, now on her knees, still avidly swept acorns into her hands. He asked, “How many do we need, anyway?”