The Kingdom of Childhood

“Probably because the only people you associate with are the same as you,” she noted helpfully.

I took a slice of pizza and removed the greasy pepperoni before biting into it, to prevent myself from replying.

“The thing is,” Maggie continued, “I’ve realized I spent eighteen years sheltered under all this nonsense, learning all this stuff that doesn’t matter, from people who are generally hypocrites…and then out in the real world, once I stopped fighting it, I realized the world doesn’t explode if you admit fairies don’t exist and you can’t dance your way to a higher consciousness. It’s a matter of being logical.”

“I suppose that’s where the Baptist Church comes in.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly and strung a long piece of mozzarella into the air. “Redemption is logical,” she said. “Compared to a lot of that crap I digested, it’s practically Newton’s Law.”

I nodded. “So this is what rebellion looks like in one of my kids.”

“I’m not rebelling. This is who I’ve been all my life. I just didn’t have the language to talk about it, since all they speak at Sylvania is New Age gobbledygook. I never fit in at that stupid school and you know it. All I ever wanted was to be a regular person in a normal American family. One where I can go to a barbecue on the Fourth of July that isn’t full of people telling their stories about how they got out of the Vietnam draft.” She smiled and leaned in. “But you asked about the dating scene.”

“I did,” I said, overjoyed at the change of subject. “Anything new to report?”

“Just one small thing,” she told me. “I’ve taken a Purity Pledge.”

It was absurd, the degree to which Maggie was rebelling against her upbringing, but even as part of me laughed at it, part of me also mourned. I remembered looking down at her as she nursed at my breast, a tiny squashed creature clad in a white onesie and the pink hat Bobbie had crocheted for her, and gravely resolving in my heart that things would be different with her than they had been with my own mother. All through my childhood my mother had struggled for her sanity, and some years I observed she wasn’t struggling nearly hard enough. I picked at a thread tangled in the wool near the center of the hat and thought about what I had been in my mother’s life—a lumpy little defect in the middle of a regimentally ordered pattern—and that my children would never be made to feel that way. They were the center. They were the pattern. And despite it all, Maggie had grown to believe that I had placed the schema for childhood above the child herself. That I had strangled her with the safety net.

That night I went to bed in a melancholy mood, tucking the hotel pillow beneath my head and musing on my thoughts of my daughter. Quit being so emo, Zach would say, using a slang term that had stumped me before he explained it meant overly emotional. Most likely he was at my house tonight, visiting with his friends, drinking my Coke. If I were there I would be offering him a ride home, taking a quick detour to the lake as we had two nights before, when he had clutched a hand in my hair and laughed when it was over and said, oh my god, that felt amazing. I had beamed beneath the praise as though a professor had declared me his very best pupil. As we doubled back toward his house, the radio station briefed us on the latest news of the impeachment proceedings. I wonder if he regrets what he did with her, I said to Zach, and he replied, are you kidding, it’s the sport of kings.

I fell easily to sleep on the memory. My mind was glad to return to the midnight-dark interior of my car, the haste of unbuckling, the luxurious ease of his body submitting to my attention. He groaned, then laughed, then spoke, but his voice had changed; and so I looked up at him, his face pale amid the shadows, his short hair dirty blond, eyes a faceted blue. Even through the haze of dreaming I felt the shock of seeing his face, so unlike Zach’s, but it did nothing to deter me. When he reached for me he smelled of copper and soil, touching me with rough hands that did not spoil the pleasure that shivered through my belly, oblivious to the shame.

13

Zach stood in Judy’s kitchen, up to his elbows in sudsy water, felting balls of wool. The pastel spheres bobbed in the water: pink, blue and a minty green, all sized for a toddler’s hands. Assembly-line Waldorf crafts: his primary-school teacher would have groaned. But the bazaar was approaching. The toys had to be finished, to sell.

Zach squeezed water from the green ball, agitated it between his hands, soaked it again. Across from him Judy plunked a yellow ball onto a tray lined with a towel: her fifth.

“You’re way faster than me,” he said admiringly.

“I do this all the time,” she replied, a rueful undertone to her voice. She squeezed the water from a lavender one, coaxed it into a spherical shape, and dunked it back into her basin. “I enjoy it. When I was young and we lived in Germany, after school I used to go to our neighbor’s barn and watch their son take care of the animals. He would hand me bits of wool from the sheep and I’d knead them into balls like this. I didn’t know a thing about felting, of course. It was just something to do.” Lifting the lavender ball from the water, she added, “The texture of it always takes me back to that place and time. And that boy. His name was Rudi.”

“Rudi,” Zach repeated, rolling the r and drawing out the u in a mocking accent.

Judy clicked her tongue. “He was very nice to me. It was so isolating living there. Having no friends. My father screwing the help.” At this Zach snickered. “That boy’s kindness meant the world to me then. You look like him, a little. Not in the coloring. He was very Aryan that way. But around the mouth, and something about your eyes every now and then. And your body.”

He laughed openly. “My body. How old did you say you were, again?”

She smiled. “I just mean how wiry you are. I suppose he was about your age, and that’s typical. Yet Scott, for example, is built solid, like Russ. Temple just looks skinny through and through. But Rudi—he looked like skin stretched over muscle. I had never seen anything like that before I knew him. And you’re that way, too.”

The soapy water was beginning to saturate his skin. For a moment he set down his work and wiped his hands with the bottom of his shirt. When she smiled at the gesture, he said, “Sounds like you were doing a lot of checking him out, for a six-year-old.”

“Oh, no. I was about ten, but there was never anything like that. I always saw him as a—a safe harbor, I suppose. Never as a sex object. Not at all.” Another felted ball emerged from the water and into her hand, perfectly formed, as if by magic. Her smile shifted secretly. “Although, you know—I did have a dream about him the other night.”

“About R-R-R-Rudi?”

This time she laughed. “Yes. The night I visited Maggie. It was quite graphic. When I woke up, I found the