The Kingdom of Childhood

by Rebecca Coleman

  “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?”

  She peered at what she had collected. “Oh, that should be plenty. I’m so used to finding none that I didn’t realize we’d gathered so many. And you still have leftovers from the playhouse roof, don’t you?”

  “Some, yeah.”

  “Well, this should certainly do it.” She set her hands on her hips and surveyed the ground with a look of satisfaction. He took the last few acorns in his hand and, rapid-fire, chucked them at her back.

  “Hey, now,” she said. She picked up a few and threw them back at him. He retaliated with several more, and then, dodging hers, slipped a handful down the back of her jumper. When she chased after him he took off, diving behind a tree just a moment too late to avoid catching one on the forehead; and then, with mock indignation, grabbed her around the waist and hauled her, squealing, back in the direction of the car. She was so small, barely more than five feet tall it seemed, and a hundred pounds at most. But she could kick like a girl gangbanger in a street fight, and got him in the shin so hard he winced.

  “Damn,” he said, setting her down. “You’re strong for a midget.”

  She turned to face him and laughed. Her fingers were hooked in his belt loops—perhaps for balance, perhaps for the excuse to touch him, but either way, they were there. The sun, piercingly low in the sky, threw rays of light against her cheek. When he tipped his head and kissed her, he could not be sure who had instigated it. He knew only that her mouth felt as ardent beneath his as it had the first time, and his touch met with no resistance just as before, and when her hands slid down the back of his jeans he knew there was no one around who would knock at the door this time and put at end to it. The end rested wherever Judy determined it to be, because he certainly wasn’t going to stop her.

  Not a chance. Not when her mouth moved so quickly to his neck, his nipple, down the belly to—she wouldn’t, would she?—release him from his boxers into the liquid heat of her mouth. The sound that escaped his throat was somewhere between a groan and a whimper, and she raised her gaze to meet his. At the dark hunger in her eyes the pleasure zigzagged wildly through his nerves, and in deference to his wavering knees he leaned back against the tree behind him.

  “Lie down,” she whispered.

  He swallowed his gum and did as she asked. Leaves crackled beneath his head and heels. The aggressive sunlight needled through the trees. He laid his arm across his eyes, expecting her mouth again. But instead her palms plunked down beside each of his ears—one, two—and when he opened his eyes her hazel gaze locked with his, intent, calculating almost. Her dark hair blocked the sun like a tattered curtain.

  She said, “If you want to say no, now’s a good time.”

  He quickly recalibrated his expectations, wondering if his eyes betrayed his surprise. “I need to get a condom on,” he warned her, uncertain still of her intent.

  “Do you have one?”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled. “That answers my other question.”

  He wedged his fingers into his pocket. “What was it?”

  “Whether you’re a virgin.”

  “Nope.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that,” she told him dryly.

  He felt his face break into a grin. Her nose wrinkled with pleasure, eyes squeezing shut, as she eased herself onto him, and he let the back of his head relax into his palms so he could watch her. The submissiveness alone was exquisitely relaxing; her inwardly drawn face changed endlessly above him, and its small movements mesmerized him, offering a blessed distraction. The weight of her body pressing him against the earth felt snug and comforting. Only when her back arched in the way he knew, tension shuddering, did he reach for her hips and allow his thoughts to narrow down to the sea-warm inner space of her, everywhere rounded, everywhere rose, into a guiltless and freely offered climax he couldn’t have stopped if he tried. At the end of it he let his hands fall exhausted to his sides, savasana, and he laughed, looking up at her grinning face in sheer elation. He felt ready to conquer the whole fucking world.

  11

  1965

  Mainbach, West Germany

  Judy’s father was skilled at many things. He was fluent in Russian, German and French, and conversant in several languages of the smaller Soviet republics. He
knew everything about college basketball, played an excellent game of tennis, and could fold a square of paper into a little balloon that one could inflate with a puff of air. When they visited famous buildings he could point out the features of the architecture—dentil, fret, triglyph—and, when Judy grew tired of sightseeing, he could hoist her onto his back and carry her for seemingly infinite lengths of time, looping her knees over his arms that rested on each side of his trim waist. He could do anything, Judy was certain, that was of any importance.

  It was not conceivable that he might do something which was terribly wrong. Kirsten, however, was a human like any other, and so onto her Judy projected a double helping of mute rage. The girl had always been kind to her, but now grew openly solicitous, asking in simple German whether Judy preferred ham or salami butterbrot for lunch with a look of rabbit-eyed fear. Her father never addressed what she had seen, and the events of that afternoon—the empty kitchen, the muffled squeaking, the violent shattering of her vision like a flashbulb in reverse—never repeated themselves; Judy might have finally shrugged it away as a bad dream had it not been for that look. The fear acknowledged the crime, and the crime made Judy writhe inwardly with her own unspeakable terrors: that her father would choose to return to the U.S. and abandon her mother, nodding and inert, to her small room at the military hospital. That he was not the father she knew at all, but a seething mess of primitive urges leaking out around the seams of his tennis whites. That Rudi’s family would discover what their girl was up to and send the men over in a rage to match Judy’s, pitting against each other the men she loved most.

  Not that she had seen a great deal of Rudi that season. When she caught up with him in the barn he was as friendly as ever, but he did his chores expediently now. Not anymore did he linger to stroke the cow’s nose or to show Judy how to fashion a few pieces of straw and a length of wool into a small star, telling her, as he turned it in his hands, the fairy tale about the generous girl who was showered with stars from heaven that turned into coins as they fell. She missed him awfully. One day when the air was warm and breezy she took the long way home from school, following the gray and winding road to the church behind which she and Rudi had gone sledding the winter before. Her two French braids, plaited by Kirsten that morning, still pulled tight against the skin of her temples; her folded socks were the whitest they had ever been. As she approached the church she could see, jutting from the ground at odd angles behind it, the tombstones of the old cemetery: lozenge and cross-shaped, decaying at the edges, flecked with moss. Between these she and Rudi had dragged their toboggan, moving among the dead as if through a crowd at the market. She remembered the weight of his body when they took a curve too tightly and tumbled into the snow. His gloved hand, grasping hers to pull her to her feet, was so strong. In her belly the ache set in. There would be no second winter with Rudi. By then Judy’s family would be long gone.

  For the first time, looking out over the cemetery, she noticed the grave markers at the base of the hill that lay flat against the ground. During the winter they had been covered in snow. The realization alarmed her for a moment before she shoved it aside in her mind. Human beings, after all—for this was the lesson she had gained from months of taking dictation from Struwwelpeter—got what was coming to them. One’s fate was the consequence of one’s actions, and the poorer the choices, the poorer the results. The dead had ended up there for a reason. And she was not to feel guilty if she and Rudi had treated their resting place as a playground, for it was the task of the living to look with a cool eye over the cautionary tales they represented, and shrug, and remember to eat one’s soup and not play with matches or go out in rainstorms.

  At the side of the church was a little stone chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Judy leaned against the entryway and looked around inside. The little room was cool and quiet. On one side stood a black iron stand filled with flickering candles; straight ahead, two short pews offered visitors a place to sit or kneel. At the very back stood the statue of the Virgin, its stone pure white and soft-looking, like chalk. Beneath one of her feet was a crescent moon; beneath the other, a serpent. A crown of dull metal stars circled her head. Several times since the early spring Judy had made this journey, never crossing the threshold but simply looking in—not quite with the detachment her father showed toward such things, but not quite with the belief of her classmates, either. Like an infant she had begun to form the most primitive impressions of these human icons, based formlessly on blind need. In the barn there was Christ, under whom thrived warmth and friendliness and raw gentle life. In this low stone building there stood Mary, who commanded peace and quiet, who was a mother but never trembled or stumbled or violated or was violated. The human tribe owed its people one or two who were beyond reprimand. One or two—and that was all—not subject to the vagaries of the body or the mind, through whom the light could slip as it does between immovable stones. Such people, if they could be relied upon, would be the beginning and end of everything. They would look down from heaven upon a selfless girl, one who stood nearly naked beneath the stars, and shower her with blessings. For the world was fair.

  From the doorway, she whispered the Ave Maria her teacher had taught her.

  Then she hiked her rucksack higher on her shoulders and walked home.

  A rat-a-tat sound emerged from her house, faint at a distance, while Judy was still as far away as Rudi’s place. The noise ceased as she started up the walk that wound to the back door. She pushed it open, and there on her mother’s coffee table stood a young woman of about Kirsten’s age, gathering her skirt while Kirsten knelt on the floor beside her with a mouthful of pins. Kirsten barely looked up. “Guten Tag, Judy,” she murmured through her closed lips, and continued pinning up the hem.

  “So that’s his daughter,” said the other girl, in German. “She’s small.”

  “She can understand you,” Kirsten replied in a warning tone. To Judy she said, “This is Eva. She’s a friend of mine.”

  Judy offered no greeting, letting her rucksack slip from her shoulders and thump to the floor beside the radiator. She had lately taken to leaving messes for Kirsten to clean up—harmless disorder for the most part, with occasional minor catastrophes for which Kirsten would be blamed. On the dining table sat a sewing machine, the one from the storage room, which Judy’s mother had never used. Large scraps of cloth, eggshell white and sprigged with tiny pastel flowers, lay in heaps on the table. A pair of pinking shears sprawled open, like the gaping mouth of a wolf in a fairy tale. The rounds of its handles looked to Judy like cartoon eyes. She ran a finger across the line of triangles along the blade.

  “Don’t touch that, Mausi,” said Kirsten, using the nickname Judy had lately come to hate. Where once it had seemed so fond, it now seemed calculated to emphasize her insignificance.

  She looked up at the girl who stood on her coffee table, bare-shouldered in the half-finished sundress. The girl’s dark hair was neatly rolled and arranged. Her features were strong, with a shapely jaw and brows that made her eyes look daunting, but her bow-shaped mouth was almost petulant. She looked down at Kirsten’s pinning and said, “I think you should make it shorter.”

  Kirsten gave a scandalized little cry. “Eva. Wouldn’t be ladylike.”

  “Rudi would like it.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Rudi.” With a few smacks at the base of the skirt to shake out the wrinkles, she added, “There. All straight now. Take it off.”

  Eva shrugged out of the dress, which Kirsten caught as it fell. Judy watched the young woman, clad only in her bra and girdle, as she stepped down off the table and lit a cigarette. She shook out the match and raised an eyebrow at Judy.

  The sewing machine clattered on. Judy turned and walked into the kitchen, which smelled, in a way that tingled in the back of her throat, like sauerbraten. Very quietly she turned off the burner beneath the Dutch oven, watching the small blue flame diminish and then disappear. But that was too obvious. Kirsten would know she had tu
rned it off to be spiteful. It would be better if she turned the gas back on but left the burner unlit, so it would look like a problem with the stove. Kirsten would know better, but have no proof.

  She turned the dial back to its previous setting, hearing the very quiet hiss grow ever so faintly louder.

  “Mausi.”

  She looked at Kirsten, whose gaze was locked on the rattling machine.

  “Bring me the basket from the storage room. The one that has the thread in it.”

  Judy stared at her impassively. “Ich verstehe nicht.”

  Kirsten looked up. “Yes, you do. You know what thread is.” She tapped the spool at the top of the machine.

  With a reluctant shift of her shoulders through the doorway, Judy headed down the hall to the storage room. The basket, frilled at the top in calico, sat on the shelf directly ahead. She passed it and turned the corner of the small, L-shaped room. She kicked at an old typewriter sitting on the floor, then ran her hand along the winter coats hanging from the rod: her father’s khaki trench coat, her mother’s camel’s-hair coat that fell to her ankles and was now certainly too small, and her own green wool coat with the deep cuffs. She pressed her face into it and hoped to smell winter.

  “Judy!” called Kirsten.

  There was a murmuring of conversation. The other girl’s voice rose, and Judy heard the creak of footsteps moving across the floor. A moment later she heard a shriek.

  Kirsten sounded alarmed. “What is it?”

  “The gas is on, but the burner isn’t lit. My God.”

  Judy stepped between the coats and, although hers hung mostly above her head, wrapped herself in its bottom. A moth fluttered out. She ducked against its gray, flapping wings, and then thought, of course. Her mother had not been in a state to put it in mothballs. By next winter it would be full of holes.

  “Judy!” shouted Kirsten, this time with far greater urgency.

  She spun around in the coat as if it were a cocoon, pulling until it came down from its hanger and wrapped around her torso. Below it her summer skirt lifted from her spinning, floating in a circle, like a dancer’s.