The Kingdom of Childhood

“Do you accept my apology?” she pressed.

He sighed. “Sure.”

Leaning back in her seat, she reached over and massaged him, the gesture conciliatory but her fingers pliant, confident. He looked out the window carelessly and did not stop her. And that was the worst part: his desire for her, still intact. After all the fear and guilt and bullshit, he still wanted her.

16

The day of the Martinmas lantern walk had arrived, and after my last student left that afternoon I set out a sheet of poster board on the art table and spread around it every photo of Bobbie I had managed to hoard. The distraction, grim though it might be, was a welcome one. The momentary pop of my palm against Zach’s cheek had grown into a thunderclap that echoed across the days. Nobody hits me. Afterward he had no choice but to return to my house to drop off the car, but he had also come inside, set his back against the closed front door, and accepted my makeshift apology in grouchy silence. It was enough to assure me his silent treatment wouldn’t last long, but in the meantime I missed his company, in all its manifestations.

Since Dan’s request that I put together a little tribute for Bobbie, my colleagues had come to me with whatever pictures they could find of her. I had waited until the last minute in order to be sure no one’s photos were excluded from the display. Now came the difficult work of actually looking at them. Already I had painted the board in swirling pastels, using the wet-on-wet watercolor technique that was a fixture of our trade, and written her name at the top in the noble and calligraphic Waldorf hand. Along the bottom now I attached one photo after another of Bobbie posing with her fellow teachers. In many, she was young and round-faced, with her smooth brown hair in the bob she had always worn; in the later pictures she was thinner, with a lavender bandanna tied around her head. As I set to work arranging the earliest photos toward the top, the task grew much harder. She had done her training a couple of years after me, having grown discontented with her experiences in other private schools and envious of my enthusiasm and sense of purpose. But as undergraduates our lives had been so intertwined almost to the point of codependency, and as I looked at those pictures I felt anxiety taxiing inside me like a plane down a runway, filling my mind with the shrilling thought of the loss, the loss, the loss.

There we were: two twenty-year-olds in brief white running shorts and emerald-green knee socks, standing in the field of the inter-dormitory softball game and smiling as though this were something we truly enjoyed. Her arm rested over my shoulders; she balanced her weight on one foot in a jaunty way, while I, short in stature and bird- boned, stood with my hands folded beneath my sternum as though caught in the act of prayer. Her smile was openhearted. Mine was nervous, and with good reason. The semester before, I had lost nearly everything in a fire at our previous dorm building. Bobbie had, too, of course—she was my roommate—but unlike me, Bobbie didn’t carry her whole life off to college with her out of fear that her family would dissolve in her absence and scatter her possessions to the four winds. And also unlike me, Bobbie had not been dating the man who had caused the fire by getting drunk and falling asleep while smoking in bed. I felt responsible, in a way, because I had known of Marty’s bad habits but did nothing to report or repair them. He drank when he was angry, which was often. On the night of the fire he and I had slept together; afterward, as I lay with my head on his chest watching the smoke from his cigarette curl toward the ceiling, a girl called. He had asked me to step out of the room so he could talk to her, and we argued. I had gone back to my own room feeling put out, and even months later my sense lingered that if I hadn’t been quite so sensitive, several dozen people would have been spared the heartache and difficulty of losing all their things. And of course, Marty would still be alive. You can’t blame yourself, Bobbie had told me, and set to work making our new room as cheerful as possible to distract me from my gloominess. It was she who bought me a new Last Tango in Paris poster, pointing out that Marlon Brando could take anyone’s mind off anything at all, and gave me a glass ball swirled with purple that hung in the window and captured the light, sending it off in little rays around our room. Even now it hung in my kitchen window, and like everything that bore the stamp of Bobbie’s love, I treasured it as though it were the relic of a saint.

I taped the photo near the top center of the board, running a hand over it to smooth it down. As I did, my door thumped open and Sandy came in, carrying a rattling box of lanterns made of tall Mason jars covered in tissue- paper stars slicked down with white glue.

“I found these in my supply closet,” she said. “Thought you might be able to use them for the younger siblings who show up without one. Will they do for that?”

I nodded.

“If you’d just put them back in my closet afterward, that would be great. I have to leave early… Hey, are you okay?”

“Yeah.” My voice quavered. “I’m just…trying to pull this together.”

She set down the box and looked over my shoulder at the poster. I felt her hand against my upper arm, brisk comforting strokes. Sandy was touchy that way, and although people like that tended to make me uneasy, I knew she meant well. It was her way of showing love, like Bobbie’s way of giving out little presents. It helped if I thought about it in those terms.

“You knew her a long time,” she observed.

I nodded again and wiped beneath my eye with the heel of my hand.

“You can talk to me about her, you know. You can’t hold that kind of grief in. It’ll gnaw and gnaw at you.”

“It’s easier if I don’t talk about it. I’d be a basket case if I did.”

“Not true. If you keep it inside, you’ll really be a basket case. Talking is cathartic. Keeping quiet will slowly drive you crazy. As the song says, ‘silence like a cancer grows.’”

“What song is that?”

“‘The Sounds of Silence.’”

I gave an abrupt little laugh. “Simon and Garfunkel. Of course. Great stuff.”

“For those of us old enough to remember them.”

I laughed again, this time more sincerely, and also more hopelessly. I thought about my debate with Zach on the way home from Ohio and wondered which Mrs. Robinson I was to him right now: the temptress, or the lunatic. Certainly, they weren’t mutually exclusive.

She pulled up a child’s chair and sat beside me. She put her arm around my back, and her hand cupped my far shoulder with a firm pressure. I knew she wanted me to lay my head on her shoulder, to speak, to cry, but I just couldn’t. It was as if the place that held my grief was so deep that no sign of it could make it to the surface. To cry on Sandy would be to usurp Bobbie’s role and hand it to her replacement. My loyalty to Bobbie was too great to let