The Kingdom of Childhood

In the bathroom he found the drawer where Scott stored a selection of hair products that would make any girl proud. He flipped through the oldest photo albums, tuning out Russ’s face and analyzing the looks of a much more youthful Judy. She had been cute back then, although no more his type then than she was now. He preferred blond and elegant to dark-haired and elfin, but, of course, Judy’s looks had little to do with why he felt drawn to her. Her foot on his erection when he’d thought he was the one running the show: that’s why he was with her. Because he could swim down into her desire as long as his breath would hold, and never find the bottom. And yet, at the top, the pool shimmered glassy and still. It was sexy as hell.

Avoiding Scott’s room and Russ’s office, he made his way around the top floor to the bedroom, where he crouched down and viewed the tattered cardboard boxes and dust bunnies under the bed. The night table drawer held a plastic comb, a few hair elastics and a copy of Anais Nin’s Little Birds.

“Look at you, getting all up in my business,” she teased from the doorway. A wineglass, nearly empty, dangled in her hand.

He turned around and grinned, only slightly embarrassed. “You’ve hardly got anything interesting in here.”

“You just haven’t been looking in the right places.”

“And none of the normal stuff.”

“Normal stuf?” Her brows knitted. “Like what?”

He stood up and hiked himself onto the bed. “Birth control. Candles. Those strips that go on your nose to stop you from snoring.”

She laughed. “Neither Russ nor I snore. I keep my birth control pills in my purse so Russ doesn’t find out about them. And I’m not a candle girl.”

“Why not? I thought every girl was.”

“Not me.” She sat beside him on the duvet. “When I was little I had to read a book about a girl who plays with a match and sets herself on fire. The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches, it was called. I can still remember nearly the whole thing.” Her gaze shifted to the wine swirling in her glass. In a singsong voice she chanted, “‘It’s very, very wrong, you know. You will be burnt if you do so.’”

“That’s a children’s book?” He grinned. “Nice.”

“Oh, yes. It’s from the one I told you about in the woods that day.” She swallowed the last of her wine. “At the end there’s nothing left of her but a pile of ashes and her little red shoes, and only the cats mourn her. It gave me nightmares for weeks. It seemed like the most horrible thing in the world, the worst death. Because of it I’ve never been much a fan of fire.”

“That’s weird. They use candles at school all the time.”

“Sure, and I’m okay with it as long as it’s contained. I do think fire can be beautiful in a terrifying sort of way. I just wouldn’t choose to put it around my house when I’m trying to relax.” She threw him a tight smile. “Or where it might get knocked over. I’d find that inhibiting, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

She nodded and looked thoughtful. “I imagine it’s where people got the idea of God. Something beautiful and warm that you feel drawn to, but powerful enough to devour you. It’s human nature to identify the natural world with ourselves, and vice versa. We imagine that if a human could channel the powers of nature, then there’s someone to whom we can plead our case, who could contain a disaster. But I’ve never seen that work very well.” She hopped down from the bed. “I’m going to take a shower. There’s plenty of food in the kitchen if you’re hungry. All the additives and high-fructose corn syrup you could ever want.”

He grinned. “I’ll be all right.”

He stepped out the back door, killing time as he waited for her, into the yard bordered by a wooden privacy fence and plenty of trees. A few wrought-iron armchairs were scattered near a table that had once held an umbrella; he sat, polishing off a Coke from her refrigerator. Nothing was stopping him from getting into her wine, but he had considered and discarded the idea quickly. He still felt paranoid that Scott would turn up, and that fight stood a better chance of being fair if Zach was sober.

At one end of the yard stood a little playhouse, dilapidated and festooned with chipped paint and a few scraggly vines. He supposed it had once been the property of Scott’s sister. The one he had built was far more elaborate and better constructed. He thought back to the challenges of the joinery, the pain-in-the-ass of replacing all the gingerbread after he’d put it on backwards. He thought back to the kiss. The instant before she moved, he knew she would, and then it happened all at once: her body rising, her hands on his face, and then her mouth astonishingly on his own: this teacher, this mother, this minor flirtation like a tavern puzzle he’d been toying with at a party. Weeks later, in the woods, there had been no way to decipher who was seducing whom; but in the playhouse, he knew perfectly well.

Not that it mattered now. He put a foot up on another chair and slouched down to look at the sky: Orion hanging above the treetops, Ursa Major, Venus’ pale blue glow. The absence of mountains still bothered him. Without their buffer the Earth seemed too close to the sky, arching toward it like a slavering dog on a leash, nudging impolitely into the territory of God.

From inside the house he heard the squeal of pipes. He glanced up at the second story, the light in the bathroom window broken by her intermittent shadow as she walked back and forth. By the time she got to him her combed wet hair would be curling slowly as it dried; her skin would smell of strawberry lotion, her mouth of wine. It was a mystery to him why Russ left her alone. His best guess was that Russ was having an affair of his own, which helped Zach assuage the guilt that nudged at him. Lying to his parents, on the other hand: try as he might, he couldn’t quite stop feeling like shit about that. But as he rose up through the deep of childhood and into the shallows of adulthood, it seemed that on the surface these shiny lies swirled like gasoline and, sooner or later, stuck to everyone. He pictured his younger self barefoot in his rolled-up jeans, hopping from rock to rock across the slow Saco River in the shadow of his mother’s studio. The trees drooped an extravagance of green summer leaves high above his small dark head, the silver water swirled past stones rounded as toys, and somewhere not far past the singing insects and waving grass she was lying and lying, lying to his father, to him, lying with another man on a mat beneath her chalk-written quote from the Bhagavad Gita that read, Observe your discipline, and arise.

Even her.

He twisted off the tab of his Coke can and plunked it into the opening. Inwardly, he reprimanded himself for the melodrama of his thoughts. In truth, by the time his mother started screwing around with Booger, he was at least fourteen and spending his time on less innocent pursuits than catching minnows in the Saco. The problem with vague knowledge such as his own was that it caused her affair to stretch back infinitely far and infinitely forward, allowing every memory of being booted from the studio to take on a sinister sheen, forcing him to wonder whether