The Kingdom of Childhood

by Rebecca Coleman

  Now, as I watched my teenage charges touch and jostle each other as they filled their buffet plates with the building blocks of heart disease, laughing and joking, stacking on a third or fourth brownie. Now, as they bought magazines and bubblegum and showed up twenty minutes late with perfectly flat-ironed hair. Removed from the fairy-tale paradise of Waldorf school, they dove into American consumer culture as if it were a deep-water quarry on a hundred-degree day. Had I been more naïve, I would have found it disheartening. But, as I reminded myself while I examined quilts in a farmhouse shop, even the Amish allow their teens to go a little crazy with the confidence they’ll return to the fold. Rumspringa, they call it; and if the Plain People can tolerate smoking and drag racing, then I could overlook tabloids and corn syrup.

  Overlooking the way Zach shadowed Fairen’s every move, however—that was not so easy. Touching her shoulder, her ear, her waist. Adjusting himself covertly in his jeans. His desire for her was throwing itself against the walls of his body. I felt determined not to care.

  During my few free hours I drove down the tourist strip in search of crafts to bring home—pottery, wood carvings, textiles. Always, I was searching for new things for my classroom, a glazed bowl for the nature table or a toy sheep for a tableau. In the quilt shop I came upon a handsomely carved sleigh bed, mahogany like my own. Draped with hand-stitched merchandise, it looked cozy and darling. I ran my hand across the smooth wood and recalled the day Russ and I bought ours on a trip to Vermont. We were engaged then, weekending at a bed-and-breakfast, and found ourselves booked to a room that held one treasure after another—an apothecary cabinet, a pewter Revere bowl, a gorgeous bed. Russ laughed when he turned over the bowl and found a price tag. We soon discovered the whole room was for sale, a clever sales technique for romantic young couples. We wrote a check that accounted for both our bank accounts and my next paycheck, and had the bed shipped to his apartment.

  I hadn’t cared about the expense; in fact, I’d embraced it. My own parents, for their entire marriage, had slept in twin beds. Things hadn’t gone well for them. I loved the fact that when Russ and I climbed into the same bed together, we all but ate each other alive. Even Bobbie, whose disdain for Russ had been thinly concealed, envied us in that respect. I need to find myself a man who looks at me the way he looks at you, she told me more than once. The only wedding gift I wanted was a bed big enough for all he and I wanted to do in it, one magnificent enough to suggest the importance of its function.

  But now Russ was a stranger. Half the time he seemed wound up tight as a spring; the other half, disinterested in anything but setting his feet up in front of the TV, or sleeping. The week before, I had come home to four messages on the answering machine from his boss and his teaching assistant trying to find him for the class he taught. When I pushed open the door to his home office I found him sprawled facedown on his ragged old sofa, his arm dangling loosely, like a napping baby’s. The condensed glare of the desk light, hard and dense as a star’s, caught in the dull shine of his wedding band. For a moment I’d thought he was dead, and in those otherworldly seconds before his foot and fingers twitched in sleep, what I had felt was a rising wave of relief. I felt shamed by it, but weary, too. I couldn’t make sense of him anymore, this man who slept beside me, when he slept at all.

  I looked over the quilts, a dozen of them, artfully arranged on the mattress, but didn’t have the heart to buy one. Beautiful as they were, to spread one over my bed would feel like draping a sheet over a dead body. I bought a doll blanket for my housekeeping corner, and drove back to the hotel.

  At ten o’clock I left my room and parked myself at the midpoint of the hallway, sitting on the floor where I had a view of every door in both directions. Almost immediately, one door cracked open, then quickly pulled shut. I felt a cosmic irony at being appointed the Sex Police. When my generation had once declared all people over thirty to be hypocrites, we had been right.

  As I sat guard, I worked a needle in and out of a square of velveteen, making a small dream pillow for one of my kindergartner’s birthdays. I was forever making these velveteen pillows, yet even after sewing hundreds I still enjoyed the process: focusing on a particular student, on who he or she might grow up to be, on the things that make the child an individual. Inevitably I loved the child a little more after making his or her birthday pillow. Today’s was for a little girl named Josephine, a curious little blonde who desperately wanted to learn to read. She often tied a blue playsilk around her shoulders, and liked most to play with the wooden fish and dolphins. She had one loose tooth, a sign she was on the brink of a jump in maturity, both physical and mental.

  It was not difficult to work up fond feelings for Josephine. As I sewed, I became aware of a man coming out of the next room down and sitting on the floor as I did. Now and then I felt his gaze on me, surreptitious. Finally he asked, “What are you working on?”

  “A pillow for one of my students.”

  “Pretty small pillow.”

  “It’s a dream pillow. I’ll fill it with lavender and barley. It’s to put under their sleeping pillow. A birthday gift.”

  “Oh.” He looked up and down the hallway. I stole a glance at him: fortyish, solidly built but not fat, a hairline not yet in retreat. He wore khakis and loafers, and, seated on the floor with his knees up, long stretches of his white socks were visible.

  I asked, “Are you a chaperone?”

  “Yeah. My daughter’s here for a choir competition.”

  “I figured. So is my son.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He turned to look me full in the face. “So are you the lookout for sinful behavior?”

  I chuckled. “Apparently so. I guess they assigned our kids to the same hallway.”

  He twisted to stretch his right hand toward me. As he rebalanced his weight against his left hand, I caught a glimpse of his gold wedding ring. He said, “I’m Ted.”

  I shook it. “Judy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Judy. We’re from St. Scholastica.”

  “Is that a Catholic school?”

  “Yes. In Michigan.”

  I nodded, but didn’t volunteer the details about my school. People always asked question after question, and it was an interview I didn’t feel like engaging. I went back to my pillow.

  After a while Ted said, “Well, I don’t see a lot of action going on. I think they’ll stay put.”

  “Clearly you don’t know teenagers.”

  He smiled. “Let ’em learn. They say virtue untested was never virtue at all.”

  I knotted the thread and bit it off between my teeth. “That doesn’t sound like the Catholic-school approach to me.”

  “Well, I’m not Catholic.”

  “Is your wife?”

  He paused, his tongue half in his cheek. “No. It’s a good school, is why we send her. But the academics are what we appreciate, not the conservative teachings.”

  I tried to hide a smile, smoothing the velveteen against my thigh. “I’m not particularly conservative, myself.”

  He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation he said, “So if I asked you if you’d join me for a drink, you might not feel too bad about abandoning your post.”

  I considered that. “I don’t know,” I said. “It wouldn’t look good for another chaperone to see me downstairs when they know I’m supposed to be on duty.”

  “I said ‘a drink,’” he pointed out. He waved his thumb toward the wall behind him. “They gave me a really good minifridge.”

  “Did they really,” I mused. “Here in Amish country, of all places.”

  He smiled in an earnest way. “Yeah, well, I’m not Amish, either.”

  His mouth on my neck, my breasts, my belly; his hands beneath my thighs, hoisting my legs around his waist; all were eager, hungry, as though the long drive from Michigan had been a patient journey toward adultery that was finally, blessedly, over. His mouth tasted, beneath the fresh sting of Jack Daniel’s, of cigarette smoke. Beside his ear, his skin was minty w
ith aftershave. He stepped on the toes of his socks to peel them off before undoing his pants, a subtle stab at vanity that struck me as disarming.

  Not that I had much time to be disarmed. Once he lifted my chin and found me willing, he moved quickly. I might have wondered if he made a practice of this, prowling for easy sex as the sideshow to his daughter’s choir travel, except that he seemed so grateful, so conventional. He said my name over and over, oh Judy, or Judy Judy Judy, as though we had an intimate history together. But somehow from his lips my name managed to sound isolated, alien—one he had just heard over a handshake and was repeating so as not to forget.

  And so I was half old flame, half stranger. He screwed like any husband in his forties, well and skillfully, without any shadow of kink. So clean and plain he might have been my own.

  But in the thick of it, after the initial shock of his mouth and hands but before his weight and breadth were over me, I forgot about him. When he grazed his lips down my stomach and—good Ted, experienced Ted—lifted my thighs over his shoulders, I closed my eyes and saw, like a broken and grainy filmstrip, someone else. All motion: dark hair swinging, the twitch of a cheek muscle, the shivery tensing of biceps. Zach. Zach above a faceless woman, all of him in dreamlike grays, traveling along a sensory arc in parallel with me. And it was not until Ted came up laughing, murmuring shhhh, shhhh, did I realize he was still here, and Zach elsewhere, someplace where the waves of my cries were tumbling to right now, like a sonic boom.

  On their last day in Ohio, Zach and his friends got up early to sing in the final competition, taking second place, which pleased Zach tremendously. The grown-ups took them out to dinner at a Pennsylvania Dutch buffet in celebration, and by eight they were back at the hotel. He watched TV with Temple for a while, then slipped out with a handful of change to get them each a soda from the vending machine at the end of the hallway.

  As Temple’s root beer clunked down to the retrieval slot, Zach heard a whisper coming from the corridor. It was Kaitlyn, peeking out from the doorway around the corner. “Hey,” she said, low-voiced. “Is Temple asleep?”

  “Nope. We’re watching TV.”

  “I’m bored.”

  Zach shrugged. “You can join us if you like. If you can dodge the chaperones.”

  She smiled, signaled him with a double thumbs-up, and tiptoed down the hall in her frog-print pajama pants. He grinned and pushed the button to dispense his own soda, then stuck his head into the room, the door of which was still ajar. Fairen lay on her stomach on the far bed, reading. She looked up and said, “Come on in.”

  “You want to come watch TV with us? Kaitlyn’s on her way.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t watch TV.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me they’ve brainwashed you that bad.”

  “I’m not brainwashed. I just don’t care for it.”

  He stepped inside and shut the door behind him. She closed her book and rolled onto her side as he approached, and he sat on the bed beside her. “You’re reading The Little Prince in French?”

  “I like The Little Prince.”

  “I did, too, when I was seven.”

  She poked him in the abs. “Where’s your shirt?”

  “I just took a shower. Gonna go to bed in a little bit.”

  “You don’t wear pajamas?”

  He snickered. “No. I sleep in my underwear, unless it’s frickin’ freezing.”

  “Boxers or briefs?”

  “What do you think?”

  She smirked and ran her finger under his waistband, behind the elastic. The touch excited him instantly. She tugged his boxers high enough that she could see them, then said, “That’s what I thought.”

  “Are you sure?” he joked. “You want to double-check?”

  To his surprise she popped open the snap of his jeans and tugged his zipper halfway down. Then she looked into his eyes and grinned. “I see you like this game. I’m flattered.”

  “Yeah, feel free to ignore that.”

  With her finger she drew two dots above his navel, poked him in its center, and drew a semicircle beneath it. “Happy face,” she said. Beside it she drew a downward arrow. “Right there.”

  “Not very. Can you draw a ‘frustrated as hell’ face?”

  “You and me both.”

  “Oh, please. I don’t get why girls say that. Walk up to any guy on this trip and tap him on the shoulder and he’d be glad to help you out with that.”

  She reached up and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t tease,” he said. “It isn’t nice.”

  She curled her whole hand around his waistband and tumbled him onto her. In the pure shock of it he pushed himself up on his arms, then looked into her face and kissed her without hesitation. As things escalated she began pressing his shoulders downward, then his head, and he wondered what strange wormhole the universe had opened up for him in which Fairen Ambrose was coaxing him to go down on her. But he was happy to roll with it. Ten minutes ago he had been getting a root beer for Temple; now the can sat on the night table, gradually moving toward room temperature while Zach cast off most of what remained of his naïveté. As he worked he felt her body wind tighter, tighter, unbearably so; and then, just as he thought she might push him away, she collapsed in a fury of obvious and wild pleasure. He rose to his knees in awe of what he had just made happen. It felt like a superpower.

  “Get back up here,” she said.

  He crawled back up the bed and stretched his body over hers. She wrapped her legs around his, shrugging his loosened jeans even lower. As she tightened her grip he grew aware that the only thing stopping this from being sex was the presence of a single layer of cloth. He pressed his face into her neck and growled in frustration.

  “Too bad we don’t have a condom,” she said.

  “Oh, I’ve got one,” he replied. His voice was muffled by his lips against her throat.

  “Seriously?”

  He reached into his pocket to produce the one he always carried under strict orders from Rhianne, and held it up between two fingers.

  “Oh, goody,” she said. “Put it on.”

  He gladly obeyed. As he made the necessary preparations she turned onto her stomach and looked back over her shoulder at him kneeling behind her, and when he met her eye he felt himself seized by the sense that they were nothing but two animals rutting in the woods, driven to mate—without any higher purpose, without any sense of propriety or time. He started out as gently as he could, but he had been on edge before they even started, and as his control slipped away he grabbed her hair roughly into a ponytail and, teeth gritted, let his instincts overtake him.

  The image that lingered—behind his closed lids and, later on, in his dreaming mind—was the look on her face when he twisted his fist in her hair: nose wrinkled, canines bared. It was sex. She had looked that way for only him, because of him. No matter what else happened, that was his to keep.

  9

  Zach found it intoxicating, this discovery of what his body could do to a girl. He thought of nothing else during the first three-hour stretch of the drive back to Maryland. He had hoped to wrangle a seat in the car in which Fairen was riding, but after his disappointment ebbed, he decided it had been fortunate. It would be difficult to sit next to her, maintain an appearance of propriety, and not go insane. He had not seen her since he left her room the night before, and he knew this was in his best interest. If she could see the depth of his lust or the magnitude of his desire to be with her again—and again and again—she might feel put off. He knew little about the nature of girls, but one thing he did know was that nothing derailed a relationship faster than an imbalance of love—or any of its close relatives.

  And so he stared out the window at the stubbled cornfields and called up, over and over, the shape of her body. The flare of her shoulders above her shoulder blades, shapely as wings; her small round navel between angular hipbones; the scooping shadows between her belly and thighs. He thought of her face
, the fine twin points of her top lip above the curvaceous lower one, her knowing eyes and fine brown lashes, the way her silver earrings climbed the edges of her pale ears like filigree.

  He was in no mood for conversation, but it didn’t seem to matter. Scott gazed out the other window, headphones in place, probably wading around in similar thoughts about his own girlfriend, Tally. Exhausted from the night before, he fell asleep against the window and dreamed of her. Then the car’s purring motor unexpectedly fell silent and he awoke with a start, disoriented and blinking at the sudden light.

  They were at a rest station along the highway. Judy slammed her door, followed by Temple, who had been in the passenger seat beside her. Scott rested his head against the window, eyes closed, music in a fog around him. Zach smacked his arm lightly, and Scott opened his eyes.

  “Rest stop,” Zach said.

  Scott shrugged. “I’ll stay here. Get me a Coke, will you?”

  Zach unfolded his stiff muscles and headed into the building. He made his way to the bathroom, then washed his hands and caught up with the rest of the group. The whole caravan of Madrigals kids was gathered by the pizza shop in the food-court area. When he saw Fairen looking at the menu above the cash registers, he approached her from behind and poked her in the waist with both index fingers.

  “How’re you doing?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Okay. Tired.”

  “You and me both.” He glanced around to be sure no one was paying attention to their conversation, then said in a low voice, “I keep thinking about last night.”

  She smiled, but her smile seemed thin. “Yeah, pretty crazy.”

  “Yep. Not in a bad way.”

  Abruptly, she turned and began to walk away. He pursued her and, catching up, grabbed her wrist to get her attention. She jerked it from his grasp and when she turned her hard eyes on him he gazed back full of dismay.

  “Give me some space, will you?” she snapped. “It wasn’t very nice, what you did.”